In July 1970, Future Shock was published before the personal computer was even a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye. 
The book was astonishingly prescient, notably that “future shock,” defined as the “disease of change,” would afflict the world. The Tofflers were right then, and they are correct now. The disease’s symptoms have not only spread, but have metastasized into a pandemic that is levelling everything from personal and societal values to organizations and political structures. It will worsen, and the Tofflers’ book provides an essential diagnosis as to what will happen in the next 50 years.
In broad-brush terms, humanity falls into two categories. There are those who still live medieval existences—nasty, brutish, and short. And there are those who live in a world of plenty and economic progress who are exposed to the “disease of change.” Toffler warned that all people will be bombarded by new products, people, policies, professions, organizations, movements, and values, all delivered at warp speed. They will be required to adopt new and multiple roles, and to navigate through unprecedented choices about everything from lifestyles to allegiances or values. Future shock, they posited, marked the “death of permanence,” a fact that is both exhilarating and threatening.
Fifty years later, technologies have redrawn the world’s economies and societies. Facebook, Tinder, and the mobile phone have profoundly redefined relationships, while the internet has reconfigured work, fame, entertainment, business, organizations, opportunities, and politics. Technological advances have enabled some poor countries to overtake rich countries economically. But rich or poor, millions of citizens in all countries have been left behind and have succumbed to future shock. Unable to cope, they descend into maladaptive behavior, depression, denialism, nihilism, revisionism, dogmatism, or extremism.
To me, as a journalist and activist, the biggest unrecognized casualty today is the assault of change on civil society itself. The world, nation-states, regions, tribes, and families are being atomized into warring factions, ideologies, new religions, movements, ethics, tribes, cults, cabals, allegiances, web-sites, or social media factions. In this respect, the disease, as Toffler suggested, has also destroyed consensus and social cohesion.
The result is that division and polarization afflict societies and democracies. Civil wars proliferate and non-state players form to mount terrorist attacks or to hack into corporations, governments, or power grids. Since 1970, the fault lines have widened and worsened and, as the Tofflers predicted, contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and future economic growth in the Asia-Pacific region.
While some outcomes have benefitted many people, the fallout is anarchic tendencies and social dissension. The practices of micro-advertising and targeted news feeds have splintered civil societies into millions of “filter bubbles” where people are fed information based on their unique set of biases. The result has been Brexit, divisive movements, tremors within the European Union, an increasingly dysfunctional United Nations, and secession or civil war worldwide. In the next 50 years, these trends will accelerate, making achieving unity or shared values more elusive than ever.
Unchecked, social and geopolitical fragmentation will continue to destabilize the European Union, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, NATO, and the United States. It’s not impossible to imagine that if the U.S. fails to find common ground among its people, California and others will secede. New England may follow, then New York, portions of the Midwest, and the Deep South, until what used to be the United States will be a loose confederation unable to exert geopolitical or military power.
Economically, the carnage is everywhere. The churn of corporations and governments has been breathtaking. Companies like Uber, Twitter, Airbnb, and Amazon have driven giant companies out of the market and eliminated millions of jobs. Every day, shopping centers, newspapers, factories, and enterprises are shuttered, and America’s biggest car, banking, and hotel chains are threatened with extinction. Unemployment and underemployment grow as those thrown out of work are unable to adapt or keep pace. Many give up, or avoid overstimulation by turning to drugs and distractions, or by reverting to narrowcast views of the world, conspiracy theories, religiosity, or a combination of all three.
In the next 50 years, advances in biology and genetics will revolutionize human life by creating new uber-humans through genetic engineering in the womb. Brain interfaces will alter minds, work, and attitudes. The unbridled creation of cyborgs or AIs with personalities and on two legs will lead to the further mutation of human existence, the physical world, and psychology as we currently understand it. Society, in a few decades, may come to resemble the Star War’s bar scene, populated with curious creatures of unknown origin or gender or motives.
Currently, there are no moral, ethical, or security frameworks to govern such transformative technologies, but there must be. In 1945, two nuclear bombs destroyed cities in Japan. Subsequently, the scientist Robert Oppenheimer, who ran the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb, realized that the spread of such weapons of mass destruction would destroy the world. He and others spent years lobbying world leaders, formulating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed in 1968 by dozens of nuclear and non-nuclear powers. The treaty has provided a framework of oversight and, thus far, saved mankind from limited or all-out nuclear war.
Likewise, the proliferation of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and other technologies must be controlled. So far, efforts are scattered and small, but hundreds of scientists and technologists have signed on to moral, ethical, and security frameworks for artificial intelligence and biotechnologies. The United Nations is working on getting its nation-state members to agree on a ban of autonomous weapons, or “killer robots.”
But currently, there is no global oversight system that will police the development and deployment of artificial intelligence, biological weapons, or the use of CRISPR and other techniques to create designer children, cyborgs, or human chimeras. This stark lack of a crucial oversight function is an example of the many reasons Future Shock remains one of the most important books ever written, and remains an important roadmap to understanding what lies ahead.
In the coming decade, mass unemployment through automation threatens to demolish society and capitalism. Economic brakes and backstops must be devised to mitigate damage, and institutions that can monitor the changes and intervene in salutary ways must be created. Remedies must be found. The rise of the “disease of change” and its dangerous consequences constitute the most important takeaway from the Tofflers’ seminal work, one to which mankind must pay heed.
Diane Francis is an author of ten books, an entrepreneur, Editor at Large with the National Post in Canada, Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Institute in Washington DC, columnist with American Interest in Washington, DC, and the Kyiv Post, and Distinguished Professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, Faculty Member of Singularity University. She is also on the boards of the Hudson Institute’s Kleptocracy Initiative and the Canada-US Law Institute.