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Rede Temtica em Engenharia de Materiais

UFOP - CETEC - UEMG

Belo Horizonte, 12 de agosto de 1996.

PROVA DE CONHECIMENTO DA LNGUA INGLESA

Nome do Candidato:

________________________________________________________________________

QUESTO NICA

Leia e comente trechos da entrevista de Alvin Toffer, publicada na revista NEWSCIENTIST N1917, de 19/03/1994, pgina 22.

ALVIN TOFFLER: STILL SHOCKINGAFTER ALL

THESE YEARS

Alvin Toffle burst into the limeligt in 1970 with the

publication offuture 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 puther name on their books too) have published a string of

influential books. The Third Wave (1980) and Power Shift

(1990) form a 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 worlds

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. Well read the

stuff that comes out of mathematical models, but well 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 centralrole 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 Academyof 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 inWashington DC and Alvin was working as a correspondent for

a Pennsylvania newspaper.

We argued that both capitalism and

socialism would collapse eventuallybecause both were the offspring of

industrial civilisation

What led you to write Futur e 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 thepolitical 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.

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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 inducedisorientation 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 thiswave and all previous waves. Is there no going back?I dont think you can understand todays 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 whats 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 its 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 doesnt 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 materialand 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 thisshift?We are talking about knowledge in a much broader sense. I

dont mean just computer data, I mean also ideas. I think we

use the word almost in a sense of culture. Whats 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. Its Marx stood on its

head.

The US Air Force has just bought 300 000

personal computers. There will be morecomputers in the armies of the world thanthere will be guns

So knowledge isnt necessarily wisdom?Right now I dont 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 its the end of the Cold War that

explains everything. And if we look back on this period in ahundred years from now, the historians will say, yes, there

was this thing called the Cold Wariti was like some tribalconflict 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, ortechnotronic.

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. Youre getting

models of change that are what I would call essentially ThirdWave 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, thats 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 cant stay anything . The Third Wave

permits and even encourages culture diversity. You can define

your own unique culture, but it isnt going to be the culture of

the past and its going to be configured out of elements that

come into your culture from outside.

When you have messages beamed to you automaticallytranslated 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.