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)

Adaptability..................

 

Here is the thing. Adaptability is the number one key to success. Not intelligence. Not work ethic. I used to think it was work ethic, but it is not. The ability to do different things will determine whether you succeed or fail.

-Jared Dillian

choices.......................

 

There is a price to be paid for fabricating around us a society which is as artificial and mechanised as our own, and this is that we can exist in it only on the condition that we adapt ourselves to it.  This is our punishment.

-Philip Sherrard

creative readjustments......................

 

You don't want to abandon the skills and experience you have gained, but to find a new way to apply them.  Your eye is on the future, not the past.  Often such creative readjustments lead to a superior path.

-Robert Greene, as quoted in The Way of the Champion

Pretty sure we aren't there yet.........

      Throughout the past, as successive stages of social evolution unfolded, man's awareness followed rather than preceded the event.  Because change was slow, he could adapt unconsciously, "organically."  Today, unconscious adaptation is no longer adequate.  Faced with the power to alter the gene, to create new species, to populate the planets or depopulate the earth, man must now assume conscious control of evolution itself.  Avoiding future shock as he rides the waves of change, he must master evolution, shaping tomorrow to human need.  Instead of rising in revolt against it, he must, from this historic moment on, anticipate and design the future.

-Alvin Toffler, from his 1970 classic, Future Shock

Evolution.............................

 

..............................can be messy and painful:

The world rewards those who can best adapt to change. Legacy companies struggle to adapt because their businesses are organized to dominate a market that no longer exists. The game has changed, but media is far from dead.

Tools..............................

 

.................................of versatility and adaptability.

Adaptable...................................

 The meaning of rational behaviour depends critically on the context of the situation and there are generally many ways of being rational.  We distinguish axiomatic rationality, as used by economists, from evolutionary rationality, was practiced by people.  Many so-called 'biases' are responses to the complex world of radical uncertainty.  Evolution in this uncertain world has led characteristics which are primarily adaptive to become embodied in human reasoning.  Humans are successful at adapting to the environment in which they find themselves, and have not evolved to perform rapid calculations of well-defined problems at which computers excel.  This is because the problems which humans face, whether sparkling at dinner party conversations or conducting international trade negotiations, are not well-defined problems amenable to rapid calculation.

-John Kay and Mervyn King,  Radical Uncertainty:  Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers

Darwin's message..................

..................wasn't survival of the fittest, it was the survival of the most adaptable.  For a long while now, us pesky humans have had the ability to adapt to most everything.  Not sure why that won't continue.

     The human brain evolved in an environment that was local and linear.  Local, meaning most everything that we interacted with was less than a day's walk away.  Linear, meaning the rate of change was exceptionally slow.  Your great-great-great-grandfather's life was roughly the same as his great-great-grandson's life.  But now we live in a world that is global and exponential.  Global, meaning if it happens on the other side of the planet, we hear about it seconds later (and our computers hear about it only milliseconds later).  Exponential, meanwhile, refers to today's blitzkrieg speed of development.  Forget about the difference between generations, currently mere months can bring a revolution.  Yet our brain—which hasn't really had a hardware update in two hundred thousand years—wasn't designed for this scale or speed.

-Peter H. Diamadis and Steven Kotler,  The Future Is Faster Than You Think:  How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

Embracing.....................