This week, our polymath Business Maverick editor Tim Cohen recalled the genius of futurist Alvin Toffler, author of several influential and popular books, including Future Shock in 1970 and The Third Wave in 1980.

Toffler, who was also a businessman, is regarded as “the world’s most outstanding futurist”, predicting everything from the internet to the “technological rampage” that was to come.

How this would manifest precisely and what shape exactly it would take he could not have foretold, but we have had a taste of it here in the 21st century.

Voilà: Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Add to the mix Vladimir Putin, Argentina’s “anarcho-capitalist” President Javier Milei and the UK’s Boris Johnson, and you get the drift.

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The “future shock” that Toffler described back then occurs in a society when the rate of change is so rapid that human imagination cannot keep up. It is then that real news becomes fake news, and fake news becomes gospel truth.

Unless, of course, we rise to the challenge. But would we be up to it? Will we be up to it?

Future Shock is eerily prescient when it comes to the post-Covid era of unmediated truth-bending spread like a Trojan virus on social media platforms and swallowed hook, line and sinker by millions.

Many people still linger today in a mental limbo of conspiracy theories; others dig deep into the past to find meaning. They court nativism, mesmerised by the graves of history, forgetting to look up and out at the changing horizon.

The new dawn

The global Covid epidemic in 2020 was one such ­pivotal moment in the 21st century when technological developments that might have taken years to roll out were compressed into one.

The ways we “do business”, never mind human relations, were changed in that moment as we were sucked online (those lucky enough to have connection).

The smart, forward-thinking users of social media rose in the electronic storm. Not all of them were pleasant, though.

There, the algorithm revealed its seductive hand. We will show you what you want; we will point you to people who think like you, no matter how irrational or fantastical. Knock yourself out.

Some lost their sanity, it is clear from one cursory scroll. Others found purpose, an income and an audience with minds all tabula rasa.

The smart, forward-thinking users of social media were the people who rose in the electronic storm. Not all of them were pleasant, though. Many turned out to be raging narcissists.

“Sick societies need scapegoats,” warned Toffler. And all around us people were – and are – looking for scapegoats.

“The horrifying truth is that, so far as much technology is concerned, no one is in charge.”

‘Decision overload’

Many people born and raised in an early era of technology creep (the gradual landing of technology in our homes and the exponential explosion since the birth of the internet about 34 years ago) might feel technologically overwhelmed.

More than 50 years ago Toffler wrote that “advanced technology helps create overchoice, with respect to available goods, cultural products, services, subcults and lifestyles. At the same time overchoice comes to characterise technology itself.”

If you are an impolite boor, OLIVER will know and act accordingly… If you are a marital cheater, ­OLIVER will know and help.

To deal with this “decision overload”, back in 1968, OLIVER was born – an On-Line Interactive Vicarious Expediter and Responder.

This would be, said the computer scientists,  “a complex of computer programs and data that resides within the network and acts on behalf of its principal”.

Read more in Daily Maverick: The tortoise and the hare revisited – the inevitable failure of AI regulation

Conjured from the minds of psychologist and computer scientist JCR Licklider and Robert W Taylor of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, it was envisioned as an “individualised automated personal assistant” that would “learn what should be prioritised by the user”.

Toffler theorised that it was possible to construct an OLIVER that would “analyse the content of its owner’s words, scrutinise his choices, deduce his value system, update its own program to reflect changes in his values, and ultimately handle larger and larger decisions for him”.

Fifty years later we had Brexit and a Trump victory fiddled in cyberspace.

Here’s Toffler on the ability to swing political sentiments: “OLIVER would know, for example, whether its owner would vote for candidate X, whether he would contribute to charity Y, whether he would accept a dinner invitation from Z.”

Mechanical alter ego

Back then psychologists predicted that trolls – large and small, powerful and insignificant – cultivated in the Astroturf of the internet would find their true selves amplified.

“If you are an impolite boor, OLIVER will know and act accordingly… If you are a marital cheater, ­OLIVER will know and help. For OLIVER will be nothing less than your mechanical alter ego.”

The challenge with technology, said Toffler, was not solely intellectual but also political.

The responsibility for exerting social “control” over technology should be shared by public agencies and the “corporations and laboratories in which technological innovations are hatched”.

Finally, he mooted a technology ombudsman to save the world from the ravages of the algorithm and the unthinking human mind. It might be time to do just that. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R29.