Are We Suffering From Future Shock?

"The end of a year and the beginning of another is a natural time to ponder what may lie ahead of us both as individuals and as a society. This year, there appears to be great anxiety about the future, much of it based in scary scenarios stemming from advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). AI is already transforming much of everyday life, and many experts are predicting that it will be employed to create a world that is difficult to imagine today."

"Some sixty years ago, Americans were experiencing an even greater degree of trepidation about the world of tomorrow. The nation's utopian future of the postwar era began to evaporate with the assassination of President Kennedy, and the slide was compounded by the plethora of other major traumas of the 1960s. In 1965, a full five years before the release of his Future Shock, Alvin Toffler wrote an article for Horizon magazine"

"Fittingly titled, "The Future as a Way of Life," the piece explained the origins of the concept of "future shock," a riff on "culture shock" or disorientation many Americans were believed to be experiencing. "Change is avalanching down upon our heads," Toffler wrote, "and most people are utterly unprepared to cope with it.""

Year-end reflection often prompts consideration of personal and societal futures, and current discourse shows pronounced anxiety driven by artificial intelligence scenarios. The notion of "future shock" captures cultural disorientation caused by rapid change and loss of earlier postwar optimism after major 1960s traumas. Key drivers of such disorientation include the shift from agriculture to urban life, rapid scientific and technological advances, and exponential growth in population, information, and energy consumption. These combined forces produce feelings of being unprepared to cope, while historical experience indicates that humans are capable of accommodating significant cultural change.

Read at Psychology Today