Toffler and his work have been discussed here on HN a few times, but I'd particularly call out this discussion, from the article announcing his death.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12004470

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock

The cautionary notes seem more enduring than its optimistic ones, and the commentary on cultural shifts and psychology more accurate than those on specific technical or scientific advances. Even Toffler seems to have underappreciated the scope and impact of infotech change, though that's balanced by overoptimism on other technology fronts.

Summing up his successful prognostications generally, they are "unintended consequences and side effects".

Thanks for the link to the obit discussion.

Attali was an adviser to the French President and writes in the French obscurantist style, and most of the book is a history of the past, not the future. But...

Attali does talk about the issues of:

everything-as-a-service;

corporate surveillance and hyper-invasive employee behaviour control (think: FB, Goog, MS, your employer with keyloggers etc);

decreasing relevance / capability of leading nation states, especially the US (demonstrated by this little virus thingy);

interregional and inter-ideological conflict (China cyberhacking turned up to 11, climate refugees);

a turning against (crony) capitalism, which has failed for nearly everybody (by externalising costs, and shifting risks onto households). Extinction Rebellion is an early, embryonic example of this, I think.

And he was writing all that back in the early 2000s.

I'm somewhat more interested in older histories as they have a track record which can be tracked and suggest possible guiding principles (or traps).

[0] Not even sure how that works for things like journals or pieces with multiple authors like scientific papers! I imagine for collected works each piece would be under a separate copyright duration?

I would still do this at a local library near my office. Unfortunately its closed now with appointment only due to covid.

There are so many interesting bits of information sitting in these books. Its almost as if it’s waiting for someone to stitch together a new idea or theory.

When you create a rich enough symbolic system you can detach from what it was intended to symbolize. If the king ordered a map as detailed as possible, as big as the kingdom itself, and dedicated resources to maintaining it, people would start living on the map itself as it becomes less of a map and more of an alternate reality.

The richness of human thought over history is less and less dependent on reality. It will only increase with time.

That's true (and much the same thought occurred to me), but there is still a difference between bandwidth and latency, and we use "speed" to talk about both.

Latency in its many forms has (on average) decreased enormously as well, whether we're talking about personal correspondence, fashion trends, research and development, stock trading, political speechifying, or practically anything else.

It's probably easier to distinguish between the two aspects of "speed" through their side effects.

The increased volume of information drives narrowing specialization, for example, while decreased latency increases collaboration.

Economically, you can also think of increasing bandwidth as falling distribution costs, and decreasing latency as falling distribution time[0].

So, yes, increased volume of information means that you have to absorb more of it faster even if nothing else changes, but decreased latency makes you, the human in the loop and the frequency with which you poll your information sources, the only remaining bottleneck. It also makes the dopamine hit of immediate feedback apply to ever broader contexts (thus, gamification).

So we get inane phenomena like "First post!", or two dozen voicemails left before lunch because some horrible event in your city made the national news while you had your phone turned off, or flame wars spiraling out of control over the course of a few hours, and so on.

So, yeah. Information coming at you faster isn't just about the amount of information produced or consumed in a given amount of time, it's also about how quickly you then see others' subsequent reaction/response, and how quickly others can see yours[1].

[0] This is complicated by the fact that even here we're talking about both reduced time-to-publication from automation and dematerialization, as well as the falling cost of speed-of-light distribution, getting it into the hands of people everywhere and anywhere, and into (or replacing) every link in the chain.

[1] "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." definitely applies here, but as elsewhere, isn't necessarily all that helpful.