Tag Archives: Alvin Toffler

promise them anything

Birds entrails, the stars in the heavens, crystal balls: people have resorted to all these and more in an effort to foretell the future. Today of course, with business have market capitalizations in the billions, there are no soothsayers in … Continue reading

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the future: misleading desires for permanence

The future is a relic, and industry and a myth. For all our scientific prognostications, do we know any more about it than the average Zoroastrian? …After Louis Sebastien Mercier passed into the dustbin of history, a new breed of … Continue reading

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future: like beads on an infinite string

The modern future was born, according to one dating, in the year 1770, when a Parisian hack writer named Louis-Sebastien Mercier wrote a book called L’an 2440… …This linear conception of the time is another essential ingredient of the modern … Continue reading

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tomorrow: not rotating on the great cosmic wheel

The modern future was born, according to one precise dating, in the year 1770, when a Parisian hack writer named Louis-Sebastien Mercier wrote a book called L’an 2440 in which he set out to predict the blissful state of human … Continue reading

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“what’s new?”

“What’s New?” we ask each other ritually, and there is generally a ready answer at hand. Journalism, with its vested interest in change, has become enormously more pervasive and influential, first from television, and then the internet, ans perhaps this … Continue reading

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i-robots: can they serve one bourbon, one scotch, one beer?

A robot as being. A mechanical figure closely resembling humans. The implications of robotics at this level on productivity and employment are quite profound. What in the fifties, with the first computers such as the UNIVAC, seemed like science fiction, … Continue reading

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as time goes by

Is the future what it used to be? Is there in fact, a power, a destiny, a divinity of some kind that “shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will”? The opinion of the majority has always been that there … Continue reading

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Promise them anything

…but give them a propadeutic scenario…. Bird’s guts, crystal balls, the stars in the heavens, tea leaves- individuals have resorted to all of these and more in an effort to foretel the future. Today, the seer’s tools are charts, statistics, … Continue reading

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element of surprise

Indeed, for a historian who can establish himself in the past and not the future, the world’s development is full of surprises: in religion, in politics, in social attitudes, there are sudden, almost electrifying, shifts nad changes that would, were … Continue reading

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The future: it ain’t what it used to be

Human beings, it has been said, are the only creatures that think about the future, but the individual has conceived of it in remarkably different ways.The future is a relic, an industry, a myth, a commodity. For all our scientific … Continue reading

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