University of Virginia Library

Is Man Becoming A Cyborg

Alvin Toffler, a New York freelance writer and author of The
Culture Consumers and the forthcoming. The Future As A Way of
Life, was invited to participate in a conference on Communications
for the U.S. Student Press Association. He entered the spirit
of the invitation fully, and spent his time chatting informally with
dozens or hundreds of people there. The following are excerpts
from his Summer 1966 article in Horizon, also entitled the Future
As A Way of Life.

As more Americans travel abroad, the term
"cultural shock" is beginning to creep into the
popular vocabulary. Cultural shock is the
effect that immersion in a strange culture has
on the unprepared visitor. Peace Corps volunteers
suffer from it in Borneo or Brazil. Marco
Polo probably suffered from it in Cathay.
Culture shock is what happens when a traveler
suddenly finds himself in a place where "yes"
may mean no, where a "fixed price" is
negotiable, where to be kept waiting in an
outer office is no cause for insult, where
laughter may signify anger. It is what happens
when all the familiar psychological cues that
help an individual to function in society are
suddenly withdrawn and replaced by new
ones that are strange or incomprehensible.

The culture-shock phenomenon accounts
for much of the bewilderment, frustration,
and disorientation that plague Americans in
their dealing with other societies. It causes a
breakdown in communication, a misreading of
reality, an inability to cope. Yet culture shock
is relatively mild in comparison with a much
more serious malady that might be called
"future shock." Future shock is the dizzying
disorientation brought on by the premature
arrival of the future. It may well be the most
important disease of tomorrow.

Future shock will not be found in Index
Medicus or in any listing of psychological
abnormalities. Yet, unless intelligent steps are
taken to combat it, I believe that most human
beings alive today will find themselves increasingly
disoriented and, therefore, progressively
incompetent to deal rationally with their
environment. I believe that the malaise, mass
neurosis, irrationality, and free-floating violence
already apparent in contemporary life
are merely a foretaste of what may lie ahead
unless we come to treat and understand this
psychological disease.

Future shock is a time phenomenon, a
product of the greatly accelerated rate of
change in society. It arises from the superimposition
of a new culture on an old one. It
is culture shock in one's own society. But its
impact is far worse. For most Peace Corps
men, in fact most travelers, have the comforting
knowledge that the culture they left
behind will be there to return to. The victim
of future shock does not.

Take an individual out of his own culture
and set him down suddenly in an environment
sharply different from his own, with a different
set of cues to react to, different
conceptions of time, space, work, love, religion,
sex, and everything else; then cut him
off from any hope of retreat to a more
familiar social landscape, and the dislocation
he suffers is doubly severe. Moreover, if this
new culture is itself in a constant turmoil of
revolutionary transition, and if - worse yet -
its values are incessantly changing, the sense
of disorientation will be still further intensified.
Given few clues as to what kind of
behavior is rational under the radically new
circumstances, the victim may well become a
hazard to himself and others.

Now imagine not merely an individual but
an entire society, an entire generation -
including its weakest, least intelligent, and
most irrational members - suddenly transported
into this new world. The result is mass
disorientation, future shock on a grand scale.

This is the prospect that man now faces as
a consequence of accelerated change - the
prospect of dislocation far more subtle, complex,
and continuous than any we have
known. Change is avalanching down upon our
heads and most people are utterly unprepared
to cope with it.

Is all this exaggerated? I think not. It has
become a cliche to say that we are now living
through a "second revolution." This phrase is
supposed to impress us with the speed and
profundity of the change around us. But
beyond being platitudinous, it is misleading.
For what is occurring now is a transformation
that is, in all likelihood, bigger, deeper, and
more important than the industrial revolution.
In fact, there is a growing body of reputable
opinion that the period we are now living
through represents nothing less than the
second great divide in human history, comparable
in magnitude only with that first great
break in historic continuity, the shift from
barbarism to civilization.

This idea has begun to occur with increasing
frequency in the writings of scientists,
social critics, economists, business analysts,
and others. For example, Sir George Thomson,
the British physicist and Nobel Prize
winner, suggests in The Foreseeable Future
that the nearest historical parallel with today
lies on the "invention of agriculture in the
neolithic age." John Diebold, the automation
expert, is among men who assert that we are
seriously underestimating the degree of
change that will occur in our society as a
result of cybernetics. "It is the rate of change
itself which I believe to be the most significant
phenomenon of all," he warns that "the
effects of the technological revolution will be
deeper than any social change we have experienced
before." Kurt W. Marek, the student
and popularizer of archaeology, observes that
"we, in the twentieth century, are concluding
an era of mankind five thousand years in
length...We are not, as Spengler supposed, in
the situation of Rome at the beginning of the
Christian West, but in that of the year 3000
b.c. We open our eyes like prehistoric man we
see a world totally new."

John Diebold never wearies of pointing
out to businessmen that they must begin to
think in terms of shorter life spans for their
products. Smith Brother's Cough Drops, Calumet
Baking Soda, Ivory Soap, have become
institutions by virtue of their long reign in the
market place. In the days ahead, he suggests,
few products will enjoy such longevity. Corporations
may create new products knowing
full well that they will remain on the market
for only a matter of a few weeks or months.
By extension, the corporations themselves -
as well as unions, government agencies, and all
other organizations - may either have shorter
life spans or be forced to undergo incessant
and radical reorganization. Rapid decay and
regeneration will be the watchwords of tomorrow.
The men and women who live, work,

and play in a society where whole categories
of merchandise seen on the shelves of the
nearby store last month are no longer manufactured
today and where their own place in
the bureaucratic structure of society is being
constantly reshuffled, will have to use entirely
new yardsticks for measuring the passage of
time on their own lives.

Even our conceptions of self will be
transformed in a world in which the line
between man and machine grows increasingly
blurred. It is now almost certain that within a
matter of years the implantation of artificial
organs in human bodies will be a common
medical procedure. The human "body" in the
future will often consist of a mixture of
organic and machine components. What happens
to the definition of man when one's
next-door neighbor or oneself may be equipped
with an electronic or mechanical lung, heart,
kidney, or liver, or when a computer system
can be plugged into a living brain? How will it
"feel" to be part protoplasm and part transistor?
What new possibilities will it open? What
limitations will it place on work, play, sex,
intellectual or aesthetic responses? How will it
feel to have information transferred electronically
between computer and brain? What
happens to mind when body is changed? Such
fusions of man and machine - called Cyborgs
- are closer than most people suspect. As
Fortune magazine, not ordinarily given to
overstatement, has reported "These are not
just fantasies, they are extensions of work
already being done in laboratories."

Work, too, is being transformed. There was
a time when for men 'the job' was a central
organizing principles of life. One's living arrangements,
one's hours, income, everything,
was determined or at least heavily influenced,
by the nature of one's job. In the cybernetic
society that lies around the corner the entire
present occupational structure of society will
be overthrown. A great many professions
simply will not exist, and new ones as yet
unpredicted will spring up. This must radically
affect the texture of everyday life for millions.

In the past it was possible to know in advance
what occupations would exist when a boy
became a man. Today the life span of occupations
has also been compressed. The computer
programmer, who was first heard of in the
1950's, will be as extinct as the blacksmith
within a matter of years, perhaps by 1970.
Individuals now train for a profession and
look forward to remaining in that profession
for the entire period of their working life. Yet
within a generation the notion of serving in a
single occupation for one's entire life may
seem quaintly antique. Individuals may need
to be trained to serve successively in three,
four, or half a dozen different professions in
the course of a career. The jobs will no longer
serve as man's anchor and organizing principle.

The willingness to speculate freely, combined
with a knowledge of scientific method
and predictive techniques, is coming to be
valued in precisely the place where, in the
past, the greatest emphasis has been placed on
conservatism and feet-on-the-ground 'realism.'
Corporations are beginning to hire men who
are, in effect, staff prophets, men willing to
look ahead ten years or more. 'A few years
ago,' says Tom Alexander in Fortune magazine,
'most such people were called crackpots.
A lot of bitter recent experience has shown
that such crackpots are too often likely to be
right, and that it is usually the 'sound thinkers'
who make fools of themselves when it
comes to talking about the future.' Shortly
after reading this, I learned of a giant corporation
that is looking for a science-fiction writer
to come in, analyze its operations, and write a
report about what the company will look like
fifty years from now.

The idea of hiring 'prophets,' 'wild birds,'
or 'blue-skyers,' as they are variously known,
is one that should be adopted not by only
corporations but by all the major institutions
of our society. Schools, cultural organizations,
and government agencies at the city, state,
and federal level, should begin to emulate
industry in this respect. It would be refreshing
and healthy if some of these blue-skyers were
to be retained by Congress and state legislatures.
They should be invited into classrooms
to lecture and lead discussions all over
the country. This could have more than direct
educational value. It would, I believe, thrill
and inspire our children, many of whom now
look forward to the future with foreboding
and a sense of futility. Finally, we might
consider creating a great national or international
institute staffed with top-caliber men
and women from all the sciences and social
sciences, the purpose of which would be to
collect and systemically integrate the predictive
reports that are generated by scholars and
imaginative thinkers in all the intellectual
disciplines all over the world. Of course, those
working in such an institute would know that
they could never create a single, static diagram
of the future. Instead, the product of their
effort would be a constantly changing geography
of the future, a continually re-created
overarching image based on the best predictive
work available. The men and women engaged
in this work would know that nothing is
certain; they would know that they must
work with inadequate data; they would appreciate
the difficulties inherent in exploring the
uncharted territories of tomorrow. But man
already knows more about the future than he
has ever tried to formulate and integrate in
any systematic and scientific way. Attempts
to bring this knowledge together would constitute
one of the crowning intellectual efforts
in history-and one of the most worthwhile.