Month: December 2018

As promised, I’ve written my thoughts on Alvin Toffler’s outstanding futurist book, The Third Wave. I finished it in November, but was delayed writing this due to travel.

First, I think Toffler’s vision of the future was mostly correct, but that his timetable for his predictions was too optimistic. Of note is the fact that I’ve long said the same thing about Ray Kurzweil, who is another famous futurist. It now occurs to me that Toffler’s ideas could have in fact influenced Kurzweil’s, as both of them were well-known American futurists from the same part of the country. I’ll keep this mind when I read Kurzweil’s first futurist book, The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), which was published just ten years after The Third Wave.

Another similarity between the two men is their prediction that undeveloped countries could skip the “Industrial Era” phase of economic, social, and political development and go directly to the “Postmodern Era” characterized by economies based on services, information and science, and cultures centered around personal freedom decentralized government. While it’s a hopeful vision and may someday provide a pathway to real prosperity for poor countries, I think it has failed to materialize so far: some poor countries with underdeveloped manufacturing sectors such as India have gotten richer recently thanks to growth in information jobs and service sector jobs–like telemarketing and computer services–but it’s far too early to say if enough positions will ever be created in those positions to employ most adults or to have a truly “transformative” effect on the nature or size of their economies. Additionally, India has been rapidly urbanizing and will continue doing to for decades, bucking Toffler’s prediction that it might avoid such a population transfer (a development pathway he called “Gandhi with satellites”).

To the contrary, the greatest economic growth miracle of the last 40 years happened in China thanks to a government-led strategy to rapidly industrialize and build enormous numbers of factories. China didn’t skip the Industrial Era (aka “The Second Wave”), it aggressively embraced it, and today, it’s the world’s largest manufacturer of goods. China’s success also presents a rival model of national development to Toffler’s “Third Wave”: a competent, efficient, technocratic dictatorship that provides prosperity but limited freedom. Of note, the recent book How Democracy Ends explores the possible decline of liberal democracy theorizes the rise of a benevolent AI dictatorship that humans accept because it is simply better than any other system (could that be “The Fourth Wave”?).

It’s interesting to examine the minority of Toffler’s predictions that have already failed or seem likely to fail, and to consider the reasons why. For starters, Toffler predicted that fossil fuel supplies would steadily dwindle into the future, exacerbating the civil strife that he thought would accompany the transition to the Third Wave, and accelerating the development of clean energy technologies. At the time he wrote Future Shock, inflation-adjusted oil prices were the highest they had been in the 20th century thanks to the Arab Oil Embargo and to disruptions to Iranian oil exports owing to that country’s Islamic Revolution. However, by the mid-80s, oil prices crashed for a number of reasons, and fears that the world would run out of oil eased.

Toffler lacked expertise about the energy sector (which is a big no-no for forecasting), and was making his Third Wave forecasts during an unusually bleak time characterized by rapidly rising fuel prices and dwindling U.S. reserves. It’s easy to see how those two factors, coupled with the inherent unpredictability of fossil fuel prices (a person able to consistently predict oil prices could quickly become a billionaire by trading in the futures market), led Toffler to make such an erroneously pessimistic prediction. 

Toffler’s predictions about the rise of telecommuting were basically right, with some important caveats. First, the practice hasn’t grown as quickly as he predicted. Second, full-time telecommuting has proven surprisingly unpopular, for reasons Toffler can’t be blamed for having foreseen. Given the choice, many workers would opt to be in the office at least some of the time to maintain personal and professional relationships that they’ve discovered require face-to-face interaction. Working from home alone can also be isolating and stressful, especially to extroverts. Some people also find it unproductive or negative in some other way to blur the boundaries between their professional and personal lives by working from home. Others prefer going to the office because it gives them an excuse to escape stressful domestic environments. (Note that Alvin Toffler worked with his wife for decades, and she co-wrote many of his books. I think he probably failed to appreciate how odd this arrangement was, and as a result he projected it onto his assumptions about average peoples’ preferences, and then it made its way into his predictions about the future of work. To a large extent, I think Ray Kurzweil’s fascination with speech interfaces replacing text and keyboards is also an example of a futurist failing to fully distinguish between his own preferences and those of typical people.) 

Additionally, being in the office carries important productivity-boosting benefits, like being able to physically handle office papers, and to quickly arrange face-to-face meetings with colleagues to efficiently discuss things rather than communicating through time-delayed emails. In predicting the rise of full-time telecommuting, I think Toffler ran afoul of what futurist Michio Kaku later (in 2011) identified as “The Caveman Principle.” The Principle holds that human nature was shaped by nomadic, tribal, low-tech, resource-scarce lifestyles that we had during the first 95% of our species’ existence; that human nature has not changed even though we are now several generations removed from that type of existence; and that predictions about future technologies and future lifestyles should be doubted if they conflict with inbuilt human instincts. I agree the Kaku’s insight is right, and it poses a major stumbling block to telecommuting.

Human beings are, by nature, social animals who like to see and be seen, and we are also tactile and like interacting with physical objects like papers and photos, and like being able to spread them out on a desk in any arrangement. Clearly, spending eight hours a day sitting alone at home, viewing abstracted images of things through a small, glowing portal, and navigating virtual file cabinets and directories clashes with some innate human preferences. While telecommuting also has important advantages (e.g. – no time wasted commuting to work; ability to work for distant organizations without relocating your home), the Caveman Principle and the other factors I listed have proven to be important counterweights to its expansion, and will continue to be. 

Moreover, I think the Caveman Principle poses a major challenge to Toffler’s prediction that cities would become obsolete and depopulate, and to the predictions made by others more recently that shopping malls are becoming obsolete. Since The Third Wave was published, the U.S. and all other Western countries have only urbanized more, and there are no signs the trend will letup. In particular, many American cities have undergone a renaissance since then, and are vastly safer, cleaner, and more attractive to live in. Toffler was writing at a time when urban decay and white flight were near their worst in America, and it’s quite possible he let this influence his thinking about where cities were headed. 

Though the vast majority of metro areas in rich countries show no signs of depopulating, I can think of reasons it might happen in the distant future. Much better telecommuting/telepresence technologies–like full immersion virtual reality, augmented reality glasses, and holograms–might allow workers to stay in their homes while also genuinely feeling like they were physically in their offices, and for workers actually at offices to feel as if they could meet face-to-face with remote colleagues. If that were the case, 100% telecommuting would become more popular, and many workers would choose to move far from their work sites in order to save money (cities are expensive) or just be somewhere more pleasant. The array of technologies I’m describing could be available in as little as 15 years, will probably have roots in video gaming and remote warfare, and can be thought of as engendering a “new paradigm” of telecommuting that is qualitatively different from today’s practices. Additionally, it will vastly improve the distance learning experience, posing a challenge to the brick-and-mortar classroom model, and, presuming there are no protectionist legal obstacles, it could accelerate international job outsourcing.  

Mass unemployment, caused by machines and/or outsourcing, could also impel people to move out of cities in rich countries. Without jobs to keep them tethered in any one place, large numbers of people in metro areas would probably leave for more scenic locales, places with lower costs of living, and places with friendlier people. As I said in my travel blog about the Dakotas and Nebraska, uprooted people would congregate in certain types of places instead of dispersing evenly across the country. 

Also, bear in mind that the Caveman Principle stops influencing human behavior if 1) humans gain the ability to change their own nature, or 2) humans cease to exist. If humans use technology to radically alter our minds and instincts in the distant future, then we won’t be burdened with our Caveman instincts, and would be comfortable living our lives very differently. Tweak enough genes and create good enough virtual reality, and you might love spending your life in a coffin-sized pod plugged into the Matrix, in which case it wouldn’t make any difference whether your pod were in a city or the middle of a desert. Moving on to the second point, if the human race ceased to exist–either because another intelligent species destroyed us or we evolved into a radically different species–then concentrating people and infrastructure in specific places to make cities might be undesirable for any number of reasons.

So, it remains to be seen whether Toffler’s prediction about the obsolescence of cities will come true. I doubt cities will ever completely disappear, since it will make sense from the standpoint of resource efficiency to move physical cargo by ship where possible, which will necessitate the existence of ports, which will in turn necessitate the existence of auxiliary structures like warehouses, and it’s easy to see how it could make further sense from a logistics standpoint to cluster other purpose-specific facilities (factories, power stations, etc.) near them until the aggregation gets city-sized. And while all of the work that happens in this hypothetical machine port city could be done remotely, by an AI located in a server warehouse 8,000 miles away, it might be more efficient to put it inside the city to reduce communications time lag (note that high-frequency stock trade companies put their computers in New York or New Jersey to minimize lag of their stock trade orders to the New York Stock Exchange). 

In fleshing out his theory of history, Toffler also makes very useful observations about the past, yielding a new perspective on the present. Many fundamental facets of modern life that we accept as normal–such as living in cities, living among large numbers of strangers who are also very different from us, spending little time outdoors, having jobs where we are subordinate to strangers and work fixed hours, having to spend large amounts of time away from family members each day, and being constantly overloaded with information, material abundance, and choices–are in fact recent advents. As I wrote earlier, human life was totally different for the first 95% of our species’ existence, and it should come as no surprise that our biology and instincts are honed for that kind of existence and not for today’s industrialized, diverse, high-tech world. This “mis-fit” has been causing miseries and problems that Toffler and many thinkers have examined and drawn connections between (though people like Gregory Clark say some groups have adapted to modern life better than others). Fortunately, I agree with Toffler’s view that coming changes to technology, culture, and politics (e.g. – the automation of drudge work, the spread of telecommuting and flexible work schedules, personal assistant AIs tailoring themselves to the needs of individual humans, an expanded welfare state) will break down some of the worst aspects of the current paradigm and let us return to lifestyles more in tune with our natures.

Toffler’s descriptions of the problems of the late 1970s are very enlightening since they remind us that, relatively recently, the Western world went through a period of upheaval and self-doubt like we have today, and not only survived but thrived. I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck while reading these sections of the book, since they could perfectly describe the problems of 2018: widespread job dissatisfaction, widespread frustration with a lack of purpose in life, a feeling of being overwhelmed with new and conflicting ideas and with the pace of technological change, unjustified popular fears of machines “taking over” in the near future, fears of international chaos, frustration with a deeply flawed U.S. President, seemingly insoluble political gridlock in democratic countries, upheaval from minorities demanding more rights, and the rise of highly visible and often-violent extremist political groups on the Far Right and Far Left.

I wasn’t born until the 1980s, and I haven’t read much about the 1970s, but Toffler makes me want to so I can put the present era into a better historical context. The fact that the West emerged from that dark era stronger and reinvigorated gives me hope for us today, and leaves me more convinced than ever that much of the dourness about the world today owes to the media presenting a distorted, negatively-tinted view of things, and to the public’s ignorance of history and thus of how much the world has improved.

I think Toffler’s prognosis that the U.S. Constitution has become outdated, and that the many of the U.S. government’s rules and practices are obsolete, is 100% right, and it’s remarkable that he grasped this in 1980. Contemporary governments throughout the West were designed for long-gone eras when the pace of change was slower, there were fewer issues for governments to contend with, citizens were less diverse and had lower expectations, and public opinion was more homogenous due to the small number of news sources. Consensus was easier to achieve.

One of this blog’s big rules is “No politics/partisanship,” so I’ll just say that I think a new Constitutional Convention–led by principled, smart people who put country before party–would be very healthy for America and would sharply reduce the amount of gridlock and acrimony we have. Sadly, I doubt such a thing is politically possible now, which dovetails with Toffler’s second observation that making fundamental changes to the government would only get harder as time passed. We’ll still muddle through, though at much greater cost and annoyance than is necessary.

So I strongly agree with Toffler in a broad sense about this, but I disagree with some of the specific solutions he proposes, such as making voting ballots more complex (he proposed ideas that went way beyond ranked choice voting) and tallying votes on some other basis than geographic divisions. Radical ideas like that might have a chance in countries with highly educated populations (e.g. – Switzerland or Singapore), but would backfire in the U.S. by sowing confusion.

But make no mistake, I think Toffler is the most accurate futurist I know of. In fact, his predictions in The Third Wave have proven so accurate thus far (as of 2018), that I think his unfulfilled-but-not-implausible predictions are a good guidepost to what is in store for us. Here they are: 

• Reusable spacecraft will dramatically lower the costs of getting people and cargo into space, and a self-sustaining, off-world industrial base will be created. 
• We will gain the ability to filter bits of precious metal from the seas. (Toffler specifies that genetically engineered bacteria will do this, though much better filters could also.)
• Genetically engineered humans will be made. (This may have just happened.)
• We will start making clones of human organs–each person will have “backup” organs made from their unique DNA stored somewhere. (This is essentially the plot of the film The Island.)
• Oil-free manufacture of plastic will become widespread. 
• We will discover ways to artificially synthesize organic materials like wood and wool. (I recently posted a science article about a wood substitute made of polymer resin and chitosan.) 
• Genetically modified food crops that need fewer fertilizers and pesticides and that can grow on poorer soils will be invented. This will benefit farmers in poor countries more than the Green Revolution’s earlier methods and technologies did. (This is developing slower than Toffler predicted, in part due to unexpected political resistance.)
• Speech will become the primary means of human-computer interface. As a result, people will read and write less, and illiterate people will be able to get good jobs. (I agree that verbal/auditory computer interfaces will become more dominant over time, but text won’t disappear, if anything because it protects user privacy better.  Also, being illiterate usually goes hand-in-hand with other deficiencies of skills and cognition, so highly advanced speech interfaces won’t level the job playing field for illiterate people.) 
• Once computers and sensors are embedded everywhere, the environment will become much more “interactive,” and human IQs might increase thanks to the added stimulation. (At the very least, having instant access to information, like a semi-intelligent AI that can answer your questions and walk you through unfamiliar tasks, would be kind of equivalent to having a higher IQ.)
• Before the invention of writing, the body of human knowledge was in a constant steady-state because things were always being forgotten and relearned. Mass literacy was a second inflection point in the growth of human knowledge. The third inflection point will owe to data being stored in computers and sensors being everywhere in the environment, recording all events. Our civilization will achieve “total recall.” (Futurist Kevin Kelly calls this “Globenet” and “Memorex.”)
• Computers will be programmed to think in unorthodox ways and to recombine existing knowledge in strange ways that humans would have never thought to do. This will lead to “a flood of new theories, ideas, ideologies, artistic insights, technical advances, economic and political innovations…” It will accelerate the pace of change in many domains, even if the computers lack “superhuman intelligence” as it is classically conceptualized.
• Transit networks will become less congested as the population decentralizes, more people telework, and asynchronous work schedules become common (e.g. – fewer people working 9 – 5 and clogging up the roads at the same times each work day).

Links:

1. https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/how-democracy-ends
2. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42135.pdf
3. http://time.com/4501670/bombings-of-america-burrough/
4. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-create-artificial-wood-that-is-water-and-fire-resistant/
5. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/10736960/High-frequency-trading-when-milliseconds-mean-millions.html
6. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8453941/Physics-of-the-Future-by-Michio-Kaku-review.html
7. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/us/remote-workers-work-from-home.html