Interview with Alvin Toffler: weekend FT
FT.com / Arts
Plays to India/US cultural strenghts
His big notion of the moment is that new technologies are enabling the radical fusion of the producer and consumer into the “prosumer”. One example with huge implications for ageing societies: “Soon there will be one billion people over 60,” he notes. “They will be using new technologies from self-diagnosis to instant toilet urinalysis to self-administered therapies delivered by nanotechnology to do for themselves what doctors used to do. This will change the way the whole health industry works.” Inexorably, this huge aspect of the non-money economy will drive the market for medical technologies, creating vast new value and a lot of wealth for somebody.
Freed from the demands of standardisation in Toffler’s new wealth system, we will live on “customised time” suited to our own personal rhythms, working and playing by our own schedule. “Creative piece work” will replace jobs and careers as we become prosumers, much of the time outside the money economy. Work will move out of the factory and office, and back into the home.
Standardised education is among the slowest institutions to adapt. If you were a cop monitoring the speed of cars going by, you would clock the car of business, which changes rapidly under competitive pressures, at 100 mph. But the car of education, which is supposedly preparing the young for the future, is only going at 10 mph. You cannot have a successful economy with that degree of desynchronisation.”
Japan, in Toffler’s view, also suffers from desynchronisation. “The technology is the easy part. The hard part is to make consonant changes in institutions and social structures to bring it all into sync. This is where Japan, with its notorious social and cultural rigidity, has fallen down. Japan’s main challenge is to loosen up.”
“While the revolutionary wealth system is all about decentralisation, niches, flexibility and devolution to networked and distributed power, Europe’s leaders are trying to build a megastate,” he says. “Europeans have very slow-moving institutions and societies. And they are proud of that fact. This is fine, but there will be a price. The large states - France, Germany, Italy - are falling into relative decline behind the US and Asia.”
Plays to India/US cultural strenghts
His big notion of the moment is that new technologies are enabling the radical fusion of the producer and consumer into the “prosumer”. One example with huge implications for ageing societies: “Soon there will be one billion people over 60,” he notes. “They will be using new technologies from self-diagnosis to instant toilet urinalysis to self-administered therapies delivered by nanotechnology to do for themselves what doctors used to do. This will change the way the whole health industry works.” Inexorably, this huge aspect of the non-money economy will drive the market for medical technologies, creating vast new value and a lot of wealth for somebody.
Freed from the demands of standardisation in Toffler’s new wealth system, we will live on “customised time” suited to our own personal rhythms, working and playing by our own schedule. “Creative piece work” will replace jobs and careers as we become prosumers, much of the time outside the money economy. Work will move out of the factory and office, and back into the home.
Standardised education is among the slowest institutions to adapt. If you were a cop monitoring the speed of cars going by, you would clock the car of business, which changes rapidly under competitive pressures, at 100 mph. But the car of education, which is supposedly preparing the young for the future, is only going at 10 mph. You cannot have a successful economy with that degree of desynchronisation.”
Japan, in Toffler’s view, also suffers from desynchronisation. “The technology is the easy part. The hard part is to make consonant changes in institutions and social structures to bring it all into sync. This is where Japan, with its notorious social and cultural rigidity, has fallen down. Japan’s main challenge is to loosen up.”
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