Alvin Toffler’s Warning – Do Not Trade Judgement for AI

Nothing is worth the loss of good judgment. Fifty-six years ago, Alvin Toffler wrote “Future Shock,”  suggesting we were at the edge of a sociological black hole, the event horizon of a new world. Change would come so fast that we would be disoriented by the acceleration and face “information overload.”

Two books later, he warned we were accelerating into a danger zone, one that might replace human affection and connection with reliance on data and computers. In 1998, he warned, “You cannot run the society on data and computers alone.” These days, his warnings have bite.

Like many futurists, Toffler warned us about ourselves – just as Stephen Hawking warned that AI could become oppressive and deadening, even if useful. Toffler: “Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who cannot read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn” – or think.

So, was Toffler right? The more time that passes, the more true his predictions seem. Schools push AI, effectively turning off critical thinking, eroding and discouraging originality and self-learning. Learning is redefined as conformity, conformity pressed as a social imperative.

If this concentration of power seems frighteningly accurate, so do some of his offsetting predictions: work from home, dominance of information as the currency of wealth, power, and military might. He foresaw attacks on old values, religion, national identity, and the nation-state.

In the end, whether his predictions turn out right or not, his central theme – that the pace of change in society is accelerating and disorienting, raising anxiety, uncertainty, and fear – seems to be true.

As information becomes the currency of power, even a currency itself, the physical world seems to recede. Children drift toward conformity and technology, their parents with them, and – since there is a cost to everything – lose their physical connection to the outside world, nature, and humans.

In effect, the speed of transition to the cyber world, social media, and things non-physical has deepened the intergenerational divide, but also the divide between those part of one generation, as well as separating them from the historically significant connection to the outside world and nature.

Where does all this lead? Toffler did not say, just as Hawking could not say, but what both knew was that we lose something important in our connection to each other, and control over our day-to-day lives, if we give away human contact for electronic absorption, if we lose nature for fake nature.

Not a futurist myself, but someone deeply devoted to strong interpersonal and natural relationships, the only observation one can offer at this point is: Beware the speed of change, the lure of that vortex, the idea that anything technological can ever replace what human or nature is.

From his book “Future Shock,” Toffler offers a warning: “You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.” Nothing is worth the loss of good judgment.