If my Twitter feed is anything to go by, AI is now changing everything roughly once every 24 hours. This has gotten me interested in the question of how societies cope with rapid technological change.
This week I finished reading a classic of the genre, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, a breathless account of the future published in 1970.
Toffler defines future shock as a malaise in which we get so psychologically and systemically overwhelmed by change that we experience a kind of societal motion sickness, or collective nausea.
Rather than adapting to change, or riding technological change to human ends, we lose any sense of control.
The sheer pace, diversity, and vibrancy of change triggers something akin to a fit, and we float along in the rapids, wide-eyed and paralysed, in a direction we may not like and might not even understand.
This concept feels uncomfortably timely. And indeed the whole book is worth a read, if only for the fun of its dodgier forecasts (why did anyone ever think we’d end up living in vast cities under the sea?)
What I find most interesting about Future Shock, though, are Toffler’s proposed remedies, which come in a final section of the book called Strategies for Survival.
So — on the off-chance that I’m not the only one feeling nauseous at the unstoppable frenzy of AI — what medicine does Toffler prescribe?
What mechanisms sit behind motion sickness?
Change-proofing our practices
The first set of remedies Toffler proposes for future shock are essentially about management practices. He thinks we need to change the way we run organisations to make them more capable of continual adaptation in fast-changing and complex environments.
What I love about reading this material is that it feels like you’re watching, live, as agile methods are born.
Here, for example, is Toffler’s account (written in 1970, remember) of why old-school corporations struggle with rapid, unpredictable change:
The increasingly unstable environment demands more and more non-programmed decisions down below; the need for instant feedback blurs the distinction between line and staff; and hierarchy totters. Planners are too remote, too ignorant of local conditions, too slow in responding to change. As suspicion spreads that top down controls are unworkable, planees begin clamouring for the right to participate in the decision-making. (406)
You could draw a straight line from that paragraph to the principles of the digital product team: push decisions as close to the work as possible, consider the autonomous product team to be the unit of delivery, and integrate learning and doing into rapid cycles of iteration.
Back in 1970, of course, none of this had crystallised, still less had it been written down into the codified set of practices, ceremonies, and tools that are available to organisations today.
If anything, though, what I find so striking isn’t how far we’ve come, but how slow we’ve been to adopt these new practices, especially in our institutions of government.
It’s now 50 years on from Toffler’s diagnoses — and even longer since Peter Drucker’s earlier diagnoses along similar lines —yet when you push for these practices in Whitehall it still feels like you’re asking for something new.
So step one for dealing with future shock is to go much further and deeper in what we tend, these days, to call digital transformation, i.e. to adopt contemporary/internet-era management practices by default.
New management practices, though, are only part of how we cope with rapid change. And for me Toffler’s most interesting material comes when he talks more broadly about “the death of technocracy”.(404)
Here we get into a deeper critique not just of how we run organisations but of how we govern in ways that make us bad at coping with change — especially changes in complex systems like societies and economies.
At the heart of this is the question of how we come together as a society to think about the future.
Toffler’s core concerns here could not feel more timely. He’s interested in how we get better at anticipating where we’re heading as a society, and how we could get better at keeping alternative futures alive.
On one level this all sounds quite abstract but Toffler has a practical project of institution-building in mind. He wants us to build “a post-technocratic social intelligence system”, which is an ugly phrase that hides a powerful and timely idea.
Toffler is thinking of a suite of institutions that would equip us to approach the future with more intent. A system of governance that would enable us to anticipate the future, as best we can, and reflect on whether we like where we’re headed, and course-correct if we don’t.
What would this system look like in practice?
Part of Toffler’s argument is that it would need to be broader than the narrow technocratic apparatus that we normally use in public policy to think about the future. In particular, it would go beyond what Toffler dismissively calls “econo-thinking”, drawing in diverse disciplines to reflect on where we’re headed as a society not just economically but culturally, environmentally, and psychologically.
At the core of Toffler’s vision of social futurism, then, is the question of how we save enough space — and the right kind of space — to anticipate the future and imagine different futures together.
Here’s how Toffler put it in 1970:
Today as never before we need a multiplicity of visions, dreams and prophecies — images of potential tomorrows. … Today we suffer from a lack of utopian ideas around which to organise competing images of possible futures. (421)
Hence the need for a ”collaborative utopianism” and Toffler’s provocative suggestion that we “construct utopia factories”. (421)
This again all starts to sound pretty head-in-the-clouds but in a sense it’s quite a practical project of democratic reform. Toffler refers to jury service as a model, suggesting a system in which we call people up periodically to engage in deliberations about the kind of future we’re building and the kind of future we want. The goal being to fill a gap:
Nowhere in politics is there an institution through which an ordinary person can express their ideas about what the distant future ought to look, feel, or taste like. (437)
One thing I was struck by, reading these passages, is how contemporary they feel, despite being written half a century ago.
We’re seeing a revived interest in the role of imagination, just as technological change seems to accelerate. See, for example, Cassie Robinson’s work on imagination infrastructures or Geoff Mulgan’s recent book on the role of social and political imagination.
I’m also struck that we’re seeing fresh energy in debates about democratic reform, and specifically the question of what democracy could look like — and needs to look like — in a digital society.
This is again in keeping with Toffler’s argument. Because it’s clear that Toffler sees his “post-technocratic social intelligence system” as part of a long and unfinished project of democratic reform.
Toffler takes what you could call a functional view of democracy, arguing that democracy emerged in large part because an industrial society required more sophisticated feedback mechanisms:
Democratic political forms arose in the West not because a few geniuses willed them into being or because man showed an ‘unquenchable first for freedom’. They arose because the historical pressure towards social differentiation and towards faster-paced systems demanded sensitive social feedback. (429)
So as AI ramps up the pace of change, it would be surprising if we didn’t need new forms of democracy in these terms — or what Toffler calls new information systems.
Maybe we should think about this as developing novel forms of human intelligence — manifested in novel institutions — that are capable of matching the pace and complexity of artificial intelligence.
And again it’s interesting that we see lively debates in precisely these areas. There’s momentum behind plural technologies, which use digital technologies to enable deliberation and cooperation across diverse groups. And there’s a whole field of collective intelligence, pioneered at Nesta, which offers a suite of well-tested deliberative and participatory tools.
My hunch is that these debates will gain momentum, so that in time we’ll think differently about what democracy means in a high technology society.
It seems likely that AI will force us to dust off those radical questions about how we relate to the future. And maybe in climate change we see glimmers of the kind of “anticipatory democracy” that Toffler had in mind. We are at least attempting, albeit imperfectly, to anticipate where we’re heading and to change our path before we get there.
Finally, I suspect a lot of this will go back to those agile management practices, as we press on with the work of diffusing user-centred practices across the state, so that public services are run in a way that is participatory and iterative by default.
I suspect that in time we’ll come to realise that these approaches aren’t in tension with democracy, as people sometimes suggest, but are a key part of what democracy will mean in the rapid currents of the 21st century.
For more on contemporary practices, see my recent blogs: How to solve wicked problems and Move fast and fix things. And as always, for the big picture take on how we govern a digital age, there’s my book, End State.