Armchair Adventurer

Back in the 20th century, a husband and wife team of "futurists" wrote a revolutionary book. It was a best-seller that excited us all about the fast-moving and confusing world of tomorrow that was rushing towards us.

It was a book of prophecy that was a hot cocktail party topic. The book was called Future Shock. Although published as the work of Alvin Toffler, his wife Heidi is now credited as co-author.

Those of us who are old enough to have read Future Shock when it was first published are now amazed to find ourselves living here, in the future that was described.

Some Toffler Quotes:

"Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future."

"Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate."

“The future arrives too soon and in the wrong order”

* * * If you're interested in the history of "futurists" and "futurology", here's something from "Wikipedia:

"in the mid-1940s the first professional "futurist" consulting institutions like RAND and SRI began to engage in long-range planning, systematic trend watching, scenario development, and visioning, at first under WWII military and government contract and, beginning in the 1950s, for private institutions and corporations. The period from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s laid the conceptual and methodological foundations of the modern futures studies field. Bertrand de Jouvenel's The Art of Conjecture in 1963 and Dennis Gabor's Inventing the Future in 1964 are considered key early works, and the first U.S. university course devoted entirely to the future was taught by futurist Alvin Toffler at The New School in 1966" -more