The end of a year and the beginning of another is a natural time to ponder what may lie ahead of us both as individuals and as a society. This year, there appears to be great anxiety about the future, much of it based in scary scenarios stemming from advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). AI is already transforming much of everyday life, and many experts are predicting that it will be employed to create a world that is difficult to imagine today.

Some sixty years ago, Americans were experiencing an even greater degree of trepidation about the world of tomorrow. The nation’s utopian future of the postwar era began to evaporate with the assassination of President Kennedy, and the slide was compounded by the plethora of other major traumas of the 1960s. In 1965, a full five years before the release of his Future Shock, Alvin Toffler wrote an article for Horizon magazine in which he spelled out most of the ideas which would go into his landmark book that captured the........

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