Here's a 22 minute video of my favorite futurist team, the late Alvin Toffler, and his wife Heidi. Starting in the late 1950's, they brainstormed as a team about where society was headed, and what the actual future might be like. Alvin began writing articles, and several books, about the changes that human society was heading towards. His breakthrough book was Future Shock, published in 1970. Their biggest concept, I believe, was The Third Wave, published in 1980. Alvin's last book, Revolutionary Wealth, was published in 2006, and he died in 2016. Yet much of what he wrote and spoke of continues to play out today, 43 years after The Third Wave, and about 17 years after Revolutionary Wealth was published.
A futurist, as Alvin Toffler explains in the video above, is a person who spends a lot of time thinking about, and learning and researching the distant future. They explore what's happening now, and try to figure out who are the people who will build the next aspects of human society, in business and industry, socially, economically, and in our family structures and everyday life. Futurists often write books, sometimes are inventors, and sometimes consult with major corporations, business leaders, and politicians.
When Alvin and Heidi Toffler first began to explore where the future of human kind was headed, the United States early on in the post World War II boom of the Industrial Age. After graduating college, where Alvin and Heidi met, they both went to work in factories for several years, to test their theories about how the world works, to get real world experience, and learn about the world of industry, from the bottom up. In the video above, Alvin says it was the best kind of grad school possible. This experience ultimately helped him in his goal of becoming a working writer. Alvin and Heidi Toffler are my favorites, by far, of all the futurists around in the past few decades. I think they had a more grounded, and well rounded view of where things were headed than anyone else.
Futurists are not psychic mediums or visionaries, which have always existed in human society, from tribal shamans to the visionaries in many different societies, like the oracles at Delphi in ancient Greece. Futurists, as a group, are not the visionary novelists like H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and all science fiction, and other writers who have written what they thought may happen in some distant future. Some of these writers, in today's world, may be seen as, or see themselves as, futurists, as well as novelists. These writers, and the TV and film directors portraying the future in the past 100 years, have had a huge effect on exploring what might happen, and often what we hope won't happen, in the years and decades ahead.
I'm also not talking about the Futurist art movement of the early 1900's, unfortunately tied closely to Mussolini and fascism, which I didn't know existed, until I started looking up futurists on YouTube.
All of these, in their era, had some effect on getting people to think about innovation, dream of possibilities that could happen in future years, and put expectations of "the future" into most of our heads.
The futurists I'm writing about, like the Tofflers above, are people who seem to have taken on this title in the late 1950's and 1960's, when new technologies like television, the early mainframe computers, early robots, and the first moves into space, were beginning to actually happen. These futurists were intellectuals and writers who looked at technology, and began to spend a lot more time thinking about the what would be possible in a few decades, and what kind of world we actually wanted to create.
In the 1960's, as the Space Race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (Russia) took off, humans began to make jumps in technology that seemed outlandish only a decade or two earlier. I was born in the middle of the 1960's, and remember watching the later Apollo missions, where we landed men on the moon, as a little kid. My dad was a draftsman then, working on a secret super sonic airplane project, the SST. There was a sense, just in general, that all kinds of wonderful and work saving devices would be invented in the coming years, and we would live in a much better, much more modern world later in our lives.
At the same time, the year 2000, the dawn of a new millennium, was a convenient benchmark to look forward to. What will the 21st century look like? That was a common thought at that time. Many of us 1970's kids, and a lot of adults, thought we actually would have practical flying cars, and be able to take vacations in space, by "that far off year 2000."
The futurists spawned in that era made it their job to seek out the technological changes, and sociological changes that would lead us into "the future." These futurists wrote books, or gave lectures, on the possibilities they saw as all these new technologies came into practical use.
Along with the late Alvin Toffler, here are a few of them:
These people range from really far "out there," to pretty down to Earth. There are many others as well. I, too, am a futurist thinker. The job of a futurist is not to predict exactly how the world will look on a certain day in the future. The job of futurists is to look at the trends happening, the technology being invented, and the possibilities we might face. Futurists also look for the potential problems that may have a catastrophic effect, the "black swan" events that no one else sees coming.
The Covid-19 pandemic is a perfect example. It turned into a train wreck for society as a whole, and three years later, most of us average people, are still dealing with its after effects. Why didn't someone warn us that a pandemic like that would happen? Bill Gates, aa well as some scientists, did try to warn people, years before. As a whole, we didn't listen. Which brings us to another continual aspect of futurists, most people, including most political, business, and other social leaders, don't listen to them.
Like many of these others above, I have my own take on what's happening in our world, and views on where things are going for our society. I'll go into much more detail in future posts. In a nutshell, I think the decade of the 2020's will probably be the most chaotic, toughest, and most transformative decade in our lives. I think millions of people, just here in the U.S., will have to find new, or better, ways to make a living, myself included. I think the U.S. needs literally MILLIONS of new microbusinesses (1 person business) and small businesses. Some of those will grow into larger businesses, many won't. So I'm starting this new blog to dive into what I see happening in our society, the issues we're facing collectively, and most important, look for things that will help people start, run, and grow businesses that fill some need, and make them a good living, in this rapidly changing world.
I'm a futurist thinker, an avid blogger, and I've made several pretty damn good calls, in advance, on some of the changes that have happened in recent years. I want this blog to help you find bits and pieces of information, and new ideas, that will make your life better in these chaotic times. That's what this blog, and everything that springs from it, is all about. If that sounds interesting, stay tuned, there's a lot more to come.
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