We will be testing his theory......

 

    We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism's physical adaptive systems and its decision-making processes.  Put more simply, future shock is the human response to overstimulation.

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Change is not merely necessary to life; it is life. By the same token, life is adaptation.

     There are, however, limits on adaptability. When we alter our life style, when we make and break relationships with things, places or people, when we move restlessly through the organizational geography of society, when we learn new information and ideas, we adapt; we live. Yet there are finite boundaries; we are not infinitely resilient. Each orientation response, each adaptive reaction exacts a price, wearing down the body's machinery bit by minute bit, until perceptible tissue damage results.

     Thus man remains in the end what he started as in the beginning: a biosystem with a limited capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the consequence is future shock.

-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970)

Many great speeches...................

 

.............have been totally forgotten or ignored.  None more so than this read-worthy one.    A brief snippet:

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we - you and I, and our government - must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

thanks Michael

Marc Andreessen.....................

 

..................talks with Joe Rogan for three plus hours, mostly about AI.  Extremely interesting.

X summary here; a few snippets:

6. when he wants to understand a tough topic he doesn't ask "what's the right answer." he asks the AI to steelman one side, then steelman the other. then he decides for himself. 7. for big questions he tells the AI to pretend to be a panel of experts. "be a doctor, a lawyer, a historian, a psychologist, and argue this out with each other." then he reads the debate they have. 8. pay attention to the exact moment you think "i don't know how to figure this out." most people just give up at that moment. that's the moment you should open the AI. 9. the only real skill left in using AI is knowing what to ask it. the models can already do almost anything you can describe in plain english. the bottleneck lives in your own head.

the divide..........................

 

Two children are looking at screens.

One has an infinite iPad: videos, feeds, colors, and recommendations carefully designed to ask nothing of her other than her attention. The other has an AI tutor: patient, demanding, adaptive, and often hard work. It asks her what she thinks and why one answer is better than another.

It’s the same rectangle and the same general class of technology, but it is doing opposite things to the child. That is the divide I care about: how AI deployed two ways can form two different people.

-Brendan McCord, as quoted here

For kids of all ages................

The most damaging idea in modern parenting might be the phrase “screen time” itself.

Treating “screen time” as one thing is like treating “food time” as one thing. A grilled salmon and a Pop-Tart are both “food.” A kid using an adaptive math app for 20 minutes and a kid mainlining TikTok for 20 minutes are both on “screens.” In both cases, lumping them together makes it impossible to think clearly about what’s actually happening to your kid’s brain.

-From this episode of the Austin Scholar substack

Wondering about Francis Bacon...........

 

The contention that knowledge is power, as advanced by Bacon, secularized the previously occult dictum to great effect. Disinterested curiosity was not Bacon’s only goal; he also envisioned the command of nature, its subjugation and bondage, in the advancement of human comfort, wealth, control, and power. And his vision would shape the dominant ideology of the next half-millennium. “Human knowledge and human power meet in one,” claimed Bacon in Novum Organum, charting the passage of that supposedly unsinkable ship of civilization toward the brighter and more prosperous future that enlightened men had long dreamed of. All that was required was a ritual sacrifice of the mystery that had suffused the world in the millennia the scientific revolution. 

-as culled from this Hedgehog Review essay

On Generative AI.................

 

Most people don’t care that GPT 5.5, released late last week, underperformed Opus 4.7 on SWE-Bench Pro. They want the AI companies to let them know when they have a product that will actually and notably improve their lives, and until then, they want these companies to leave them alone and try their best not to ​crash the economy​.

As Lopatto concludes: “At some point, our Silicon Valley overlords forgot that in order for their vision of the future to be adopted, people had to want it.” They still have a lot of work to do.

Cal Newport, from this essay

Captivated...................

 

We live in an era that often feels defined by great despair. War rages, lawlessness spreads, politicians betray their values, and it can seem, at times, that we are simply drowning in the uncertainty of it all.

And then something breaks through. For the first time in more than 50 years, we sent human beings to the moon and back. For 10 days, we watched as they beat a new path for exploration beyond anything we have ever known.

We watched them record detailed scientific observations of the lunar surface. We pored over their remarkable images of the far side of the moon. We saw them collect biological samples, test radiation-monitoring equipment, and conduct bone marrow experiments, all while traveling more than 24,000 miles per hour through the solar system.

For 10 days, we were captivated by achievements most of us could never imagine. And yet, the most compelling part of it all was not how foreign it felt, but how familiar.

-from The Free Press

Us history majors...............

 

...........typically spend little time thinking about the interplay between comparative advantage and competitive advantage.  But, we are pleased that people like Noah Smith do.

Upon.............................

 

...........................agreeing with Taylor Lorenz.

 

It's a puzzle......................

 

That’s a major acceleration. 2.8% labor productivity growth is about equal to the best decades we’ve seen since World War 2. If that rate is sustained for a decade, or accelerates further, it’ll be pretty historic.

What’s driving the productivity boom? It’s tempting to conclude that AI is making white-collar workers more productive, but Ernie Tedeschi points out that the biggest swing has been in manufacturing productivity. For a long time, manufacturing productivity was basically flatlining in America; now it’s suddenly growing again.

Tedeschi argues that this is also probably AI-driven, but it’s not about people using ChatGPT and Claude Code at work — it’s about the fact that a ton of data centers are being built, and data centers are very valuable:

If you look at data centers’ contribution to growth itself, it looks pretty small, but this masks the value of the computers contained within the data centers. Together, the creation of data centers and computing equipment have been contributing about as much to GDP growth as they were during the dot-com boom:

-Noah Smith, as cut-and-pasted from here

hot-gospellers.................

 

No two more different people could be imagined than Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan: in appearance, in style, in manner, in speech and, it would seem, in what they stand for.  Fuller is short and round and speaks in epic poetry.  McLuhan is tall and angular and utters puns and epigrams.  But both men became cult heroes at the same time, in the 1960s.  And both for the same reason: they are bards and hot-gospellers of technology.

-Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander

The Agenbite of Outwit ....................

 

When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.  Our electronic world now calls for a unified field of global awareness; the kind of private consciousness appropriate to literate man can be viewed as an unbearable kink in the collective consciousness demanded by electronic information movement.

-Marshall McLuhan, as culled from here

adjustments..................

 

Technology paces industry, but there's a long lag in the process. Industry paces economics. It changes the tools, a great ecological change. And in that manner we come finally to everyday life.

The politician is someone who deals in man's problems of adjustment. To ask a politician to lead us is to ask the tail of a dog to lead the dog.

-Buckminster Fuller

A nonzero chance...........

I don’t want to get sidetracked here, but I think there’s a nonzero chance that AI never gets much better than humans at most of the things that humans were better than computers at in 2021.

-Noah Smith, contemplating world domination

cognitive patience.......................

...............apparently, we are losing it:

. . . which is defined as the “ability to [maintain] focused and sustained attention and delay gratification, while refraining from multitasking.”

Sippican Cottage.....................

 

.................notes the times they are a changing';

. . . there are bound to be lots of casualties from the integration of leviathan computational machines into everyday life. It might not be you directly, but there’s bound to be a lot of collateral damage.

Emergence....................

 

The pattern is remarkably consistent. We either wildly overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies (remember when blockchain was going to replace every institution within five years?) or we catastrophically underestimate their long-term consequences. Nobody building the early internet imagined it would reshape elections, create trillion-dollar companies, or leave millions of people psychologically dependent on dopamine hits from their phones.

It isn’t just that we fail to predict which technologies will emerge; we fail spectacularly at predicting the second- and third-order effects of the technologies we already have. Social media was supposed to connect the world. It did. It also polarised it. The smartphone was a communication device. It became an anxiety machine for an entire generation of teenagers. Nobody planned these outcomes. They emerged.

-Nicholas Bate, from here

Ah, science...........

 

Apparently everywhere in the "developed world" human communities and their natural and cultural supports are being destroyed, not by natural calamities or "acts of God" or invasion by foreign enemies, but by a sort of legalized vandalism known as "the economy."  The economy now famously depends upon the authority and the applicable knowledge of science.  It would therefore be useful to say what is the character of this science that has benefited us in so many ways, and yet has cost us so dearly and exacted from us such deference and such questionable permissions.

-Wendell Berry, Life Is A Mircle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

Knocking on your door..........

The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from "helpful tool" to "does my job better than I do", is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I've seen in just the last couple of months, I think "less" is more likely.

"But I tried AI and it wasn't that good"

I hear this constantly. I understand it, because it used to be true.

If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought "this makes stuff up" or "this isn't that impressive", you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.

That was two years ago. In AI time, that is ancient history.

-Matt Shumer, from this post