Rede Temática Em Engenharia De Materiais

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Rede Temática em Engenharia de Materiais

UFOP - CETEC - UEMG

Belo Horizonte, 12 de agosto de 1996.

PROVA DE CONHECIMENTO DA LÍNGUA INGLESA

Nome do Candidato:

______

QUESTÃO ÚNICA

Leia e comente trechos da entrevista de Alvin Toffer, publicada na revista NEWSCIENTIST Nº 1917, de 19/03/1994, página 22.

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ALVIN TOFFLER: STILL SHOCKINGAFTER ALL THESE YEARS

Alvin Toffleburst into the limeligt in 1970 with the publication of future shock, a book that caught the spirit of the age with its challenging vision of a society being torn apart by the “premature arrival of the future”. It became a worldwide best seller. Since then, he and his wife Heidi (who recently owned up to her half of the creative effort and put her name on their books too) have published a string of influential books. The Third Wave (1980) and Power Shift (1990) forma trilogy with Future shock. Each one and the Tofflers’ most recent book, War and Anti-War, takes a different lens to explore the technological and cultural forces shaping the future.

Although the Tofflers are often thought of as the world’s most famous futurologists, two words that are definitely not in their vocabulary are “predict” and “trend”. “We believe nobody can predict the future”, says Alvin. “We’ll read the stuff that comes out of mathematical models, but we’ll read it with a degree of scepticism. What we have constructed is a model of historical and social change”

That model is seen most clearly in The Third Wave, which maps out three gigantic waves of change . The first wave corresponds to the agricultural revolution which dominated human history for thousands of years. The second Wave – industrial civilisation – is now playing itself out after 300 years of dominance. The Third Wave is crashing over us right now, having started with the birth of a postindustrial, high-technology, information economy in the 1950s.

The transforming power of technology always plays a central role in the Tofflers’ books, but their first love was not science. Both studied English at New York University and then plunged into the bohemian world of postwar Greenwich Village, writing poetry and planning novels. “I was your typical liberal arts student. Maths and science were absolutely the subjects that gave me the most difficulty. But for some reason, I knew at a very young age that technology was important, that science was important, and so I took a course in the history of technology and since then read, read and read”.

The Tofflers’, interest in technology (plus early left-wing leanings) even extended to working on a factory production line in their New York days. After that came years of journalism, with the Tofflers writing for everyone from Fortune and Palyboy to the Annals of the American Academy of Political and social Science, and acquiring a “dogmatic belief in never becoming dogmatic”. Then, in the 1960s, the Tofflers were asked to write a paper for IBM on the long-term social and organisational implications of the computer.

That gave them a period of immersion in technology.Future Shock followed soon afterwards, when they were living in Washington DC and Alvin was working as a correspondent for a Pennsylvania newspaper.

What led you to write Future Shock?

While covering Congress, it occurred to us that big technological and social changes were occurring in the United States, but that the political system seemed totally blind to their existence. Between 1955 and 1960, the birth control pill was introduced, television became universalised, commercial jet travel came into being and a whole raft of other technological events occurred. Having spent several years watching the political process, we came away feeling that 99 per cent of what politicians do is keep systems running that were laid in place by previous generations of politicians.

Our ideas came together in 1965 in a article called “The future as a way of life”. Which argued that change was going to accelerate and that the speed of change could induce disorientation in lots of people. We coined the phrase “futures shock” as an analogy to the concept of culture shock. With future shock you stay in one place but your own culture changes so rapidly that it has the same disorienting effect as going to another culture.

There seems to be some profound dislocation between this wave and all previous waves. Is there no going back?

I don’t think you can understand today’s changes without recognising the revolutionary nature of these changes. We made a conscious choice to do that, and we say that our work springs from a revolutionary premise that what’s taking place today is in fact a phase change, a fundamental transformation of some kind. We say we are going from a brute-force economy to a brain-force economy, and it’s clear that skill and knowledge are becoming the central resources for economic activity.

If I had studied economics I would have been taught that the factors of production are land, labour and capital. “Knowledge” doesn’t appear. Today, knowledge not only must appear in that list, it dominates the others. If you have the right knowledge at the right place at the right time, that means less labour, less energy, less capital, less raw material and less time. All the other inputs of economic production for the conversion of natural elements into what we call wealth can be done far more effectively and efficiently through the applicaton of knowledge.

Is it Computers that have been mainly responsible for this shift?

We are talking about knowledge in a much broader sense. I don’t mean just computer data, I mean also ideas. I think we use the word almost in a sense of culture. What’s really interesting is that we believe the nature of technology and the nature of the economy will drive the nature of social change. Which makes us sound like technological determinists. However, it is the culture that increasingly drives the technology and the economy. The economy is based on knowledge and that is based on culture. It’s Marx stood on its head.

So knowledge isn’t necessarily wisdom?

Right now I don’t think there is a clue in the White House as to what the interests of the US are in the emerging world. I think that vacuum exists because there is an intellectual error being made, a profound error.

For fifty years, the model was the Cold War and that explained everything. Now it’s the end of the Cold War that explains everything. And if we look back on this period in a hundred years from now, the historians will say, yes, there was this thing called the Cold War – iti was like some tribal conflict in ancient times, they had these big bombs they could kill each other with. But in fact the most important thing that happened in that period was the emergence of a new civilisation. You can call it postindustrial, Third Wave, or technotronic.

Basically the change in the relationship of knowledge to production and other social precesses means that everything has begun to change. It has cultural dimensions, religious dimensions, and certainly scientific dimensions. You’re getting models of change that are what I would call essentially Third Wave models, certainly not mechanistic.

You mean complexity chaos?

Yes, and these are not the classical theories of the industrial age. If science begins to change its assumptions about change itself, that’s pretty profound. If we are beginning to shift from the popular use of machine models to describe various things, to computer models, to biological models,then to ecological models, we are moving into a multi-logic culture. There is a logic that goes with print, and we call that literal logic.Video has arrived and video has its own logic. Pictures have their own grammar, and computers, too. We are going from a culture dominated by literal logic to a culture in which there are clashing logics. And I think we are moving into an era in which we are going to explode existing cultures.

Heidi and I are asked all over the world “Can we become Third Wave and stay Chinese, or English, or Mexican?”

The answer is you can’t stay anything . The Third Wave permits and even encourages culture diversity. You can define your own unique culture, but it isn’t going to be the culture of the past and it’s going to be configured out of elements that come into your culture from outside.

When you have messages beamed to you automatically translated into your own language, and you watch television from Nigeria, or Fiji, or anywhere in the world, gradually you pluck pieces or elements from those cultures and you put them together. Then you create your own unique English-of-the-future culture, or japanese-of-the-future culture. People do not simply relive the past.