Second Singularity Inquiry Essay

Here's my second Singularity essay, focusing on the book Future Shock.  I hope you enjoy it!

Gustavo Guerrero
March 14, 2011
English 4
Stephanie Lytle

Inquiry Essay 2

The future holds many secrets, and only time will reveal them.  That sentiment, however, has not stopped a slew of people from thinking about what the future holds.  When starting this inquiry project, a group of peers and I were involved in studying the theory of The Singularity, where in the future technological growth becomes extremely progressive.  From studies of that, we have delved into different theories and studies about what the future could hold.  We based our inquiry project on the question of “What do futurists predict about our future?”  We started our study with the book that we were already studying, The Singularity is Near.  After that book, we have dove into a book called Future Shock, written by Alvin Toffler.  Future Shock is a book about how the rate of change is affecting people worldwide – in 1970.  This immediately attracted my attention – the book was written in the 70’s, yet it holds many similar ideas as the books released in the past decade.  Future Shock deals with a phenomenon that Toffler calls Future Shock – what he terms as “the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in a short a time” (Toffler 2).  Inside the book, Toffler explores how the rapid rate of change is affecting the world and the impact of global events and how the rapid rate of change is transforming technology forever.

Toffler brings the example of how rapid globalism has broken our boundaries, especially compared with the past.  With the advent of such technologies such as the radio, the world suddenly gets much smaller.  Toffler explains how events that, in the past the impact of a war was mostly contained to the country in which it occurred, now, it has a ripple effect across the globe.  When he wrote the book in 1970, he spoke about Vietnam, saying that “A war in Vietnam alters basic political alignments in Peking, Moscow, and Washington, touches off protests in Stockholm, affects financial transactions in Zurich, triggers secret diplomatic moves in Algiers” (Toffler 16).  He also notes that in addition to current events affecting us; past events that changed a country’s ideas affect the modern world in small ways.  This observation does not directly answer about what will happen in the future today.  However, Toffler predicts that the world is only going to get more and more interwoven, from the viewpoint of a man in 1970.  Looking at the world today, especially with context to the recent upheaval in the Middle East and the direct impact of that on the stock market, it becomes clear that Toffler’s predictions in that sense have come true.  His predictions seem like they still apply today as well – with the advent of social networking, the world is more interwoven than ever before.  This is not the only example of Alvin Toffler’s ideas passing on into the next age, however.  Toffler also explores what sounds similar to Raymond Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, where technology becomes exponentially cheaper and powerful as time progresses.

In Toffler’s words, “Technology feeds on itself” (Toffler 26).  Toffler goes into what he thinks the future will bring in the form of technology, much like Kurzweil does 30-some years later.  Toffler makes several notes throughout the book about how technology has slowly advanced until the Industrial Revolution, where it began increasing exponentially.  Toffler focuses on the example of transportation when he talks about what he calls “Accelerative Thrust”.  He compares the breaking of the 100 mph barrier in 1880, then states that “it took fifty-eight years, however, to quadruple the limit….man was cracking the 400-mph line” (Toffler 26).  Toffler’s ideas about this recurs throughout the book, and I think it’s important to note the similarities that this theory has to current ones, and that his ideas still are in full function today.

Future Shock has been a great help to my studies on the future.  It has provided viewpoints of a time not too long ago by years, but ages technology-wise.  Future Shock has presented many ideas that still hold firm, even though it was published over 30 years ago.  With the ideas of Future Shock combined with the more data-rich studies found in The Singularity is Near, I am getting a better idea of what technology in the future will look like, or at  least what path it will follow.  Future Shock complements The Singularity is Near by providing even more proof that The Law of Accelerating Returns is fact, showing that technology gets more powerful every year.  With the knowledge of these two books in hand, I should be able to read my last book and develop an extremely well-rounded idea of what the future should bring.  Then, I can reflect on this in five, ten, twenty years and see what’s actually happened.