I've been reading some old (olde?) tech references, forecasts, and futurist works of late, and am noting a few trends.

Among them are Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, which turned 50 last year, read for the first time, Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (22 years), a re-read, and Andrew Shapiro's The Control Revolution, also for the first time.

All have hits and misses. Some of them are more slanted one way than the other.

Toffler has aged surprisingly well, in my view, despite some weaknesses. Lessig, at least in his introduction and first chapter, similarly. Shapiro is rapidly shaping up to be an excellent Really Bad Example. (Lessig references Shapiro early in Code, hence my looking into it.)

I've been toying with a notion of an ontology of technological mechanisms, which looks not at fields of technology, but rather how they achieve their effects. I've come up with nine basic categories: materials, fuels, process knowledge (what's generally meant by "technology"), causal knowlege (roughly, "science"), power transmission and transformation (ask if you're curious), networks, systems, information (accessing, storage/retrieval, processing, disseminating), and a final category I've tended to call hygiene functions -- dealing with unwanted or unintended consequences.

It's that last aspect which seems to dominate considerations ultimately, because all technologies can be thought of as interventions in some system to an intended effect, but having several dimensions, including:

- Benefit / harm

- Near term / long term

- Clearly evident / non-evident

Generally, we tend to choose technologies with clearly evident near-term benefit, and strictly avoid those with clearly evident near-term harm. In cases where a mixed set of benefits and harms of varying evidence or perceptibility, and of differing timeframes is present ... things get more complicated.

And as interventions in systems become more complex, the odds of a negative interaction tend to increase.

The upshot is that cautions are often more significant than ethusiasms, and in the case most especially of Toffler, the concerns he raises, most especially of psychological and sociological impacts of increasing information flows and rates of change, do seem to have been reasonably prophetic. Sections dealing with specific technologies and their presumed social benefits are the weakest. In some cases the promised benefits have come to pass, occasionally to such a degree that it's hard to even see them from the present vantage point --- they've very much become part of our world in a way that is like water to a fish: so ubiquitous it's easy to forget it exists at all. In particular, the developers or advocates of a specific technique (or occasionally, scientific advance) seem to be exceedingly poor at conceiving of, or at least sharing any conceptions of, downsides. There's an extraordinarily strong positivity bias. Not universally, but as a general rule.

Lessig is similarly concerned with harms, and (at least in its introduction) seems to focus accurately on the right problem areas and dynamics.

Shapiro has read to me through the first part of his book as, charitably, remarkably oracular in the sense of "this is a prophecy which might be read two ways", as in "if King Croesus crosses the Halys River, a great empire will be destroyed." (Spoiler: one was. It wasn't the one Croesus had in mind.) For the most part, Shapiro reads to me as childishly naive, credulous, fatuistic, uninsightful, concerned with the trivial, self-parodying, and often foreshadowing but apparently with absolutely no self-awareness in doing so. It is remarkable how many of the specific actors and situations what are front-of-mind today are mentioned or alluded to in the text. But the references don't seem aware of their own significance.

In his defence, Shapiro occasionally evidences some degree of awareness or perception, though these feel like brief moments of lucidity in a once sound mind. And it's possible that the latter parts of the book refute the naivete of the first chapters, though I'm skeptical (and reviews I've read suggest otherwise). It's very much a case of The Author To Whom I Must Constantly Scream as I read the text though.

But yeah: be very skeptical of self-involved proponents of technological or other initiatives. Whatever expertise they may have is strongly moderated by deliberate or unconscious self-serving bias.