Future Shock was heady stuff when Alvin Toffler wrote the book. And yet, as things have turned out, most of the futurists have, and do, continue to miss the graceful artiness of complex systems. Like Kurzweil in his Singularity: Cool conceptually, but it glosses (OK, ignores, then) the financial backplane. In other words, who pays for the future and who gets run over in the process. The run-over social remnants what I call victims of displacement shock…and since we’ve had a large number of such shocks (starting with solid-state diodes, jet engines, transistors, chips, embedded processors…well, you know the list) so we’ll just call the next shock ‘x‘ to keep life simple. What’s coming with it is NLO – next level optimization – as we more and more into robotic production and the demise of human inputs. We wonder what’s left to make an ‘economy’ of? First, a few headlines before we wade into the quicksand of deep thinking…a land where we wonder “What happened to the TV Repairman and the Fix-It Shop?”
