Future Shock

Chapter 9 THE SCIENTIFIC TRAJECTORY

We are creating a new society. Not a changed society. Not an extended, larger-than-life version of our present society. But a new society.

This simple premise has not yet begun to tincture our consciousness. Yet unless we understand this, we shall destroy ourselves in trying to cope with tomorrow.

A revolution shatters institutions and power relationships. This is precisely what is happening today in all the high-technology nations. Students in Berlin and New York, in Turin and Tokyo, capture their deans and chancellors, bring great clanking education factories to a grinding halt, and even threaten to topple governments. Police stand aside in the ghettos of New York, Washington and Chicago as ancient property laws are openly violated. Sexual standards are overthrown. Great cities are paralyzed by strikes, power failures, riots. International power alliances are shaken. Financial and political leaders secretly tremble – not out of fear that communist (or capitalist) revolutionaries will oust them, but that the entire system is somehow flying out of control.

These are indisputable signs of a sick social structure, a society that can no longer perform even its most basic functions in the accustomed ways. It is a society caught in the agony of revolutionary change. In the 1920's and 1930's, communists used to speak of the "general crisis of capitalism." It is now clear that they were thinking small. What is occurring now is not a crisis of capitalism, but of industrial society itself, regardless of its political form. We are simultaneously experiencing a youth revolution, a sexual revolution, a racial revolution, a colonial revolution, an economic revolution, and the most rapid and deep-going technological revolution in history. We are living through the general crisis of industrialism. In a word, we are in the midst of the super-industrial revolution.

If failure to grasp this fact impairs one's ability to understand the present, it also leads otherwise intelligent men into total stupidity when they talk about the future. It encourages them to think in simple-minded straight lines. Seeing evidence of bureaucracy today, they naïvely assume there will be more bureaucracy tomorrow. Such linear projections characterize most of what is said or written about the future. And it causes us to worry about precisely the wrong things.

One needs imagination to confront a revolution. For revolution does not move in straight lines alone. It jerks, twists and backtracks. It arrives in the form of quantum jumps and dialectical reversals. Only by accepting the premise that we are racing toward a wholly new stage of eco-technological development – the super-industrial stage – can we make sense of our era. Only by accepting the revolutionary premise can we free our imaginations to grapple with the future.

Revolution implies novelty. It sends a flood of newness into the lives of countless individuals, confronting them with unfamiliar institutions and first-time situations. Reaching deep into our personal lives, the enormous changes ahead will transform traditional family structures and sexual attitudes. They will smash conventional relationships between old and young. They will overthrow our values with respect to money and success. They will alter work, play and education beyond recognition. And they will do all this in a context of spectacular, elegant, yet frightening scientific advance.

If transience is the first key to understanding the new society, therefore, novelty is the second. The future will unfold as an unending succession of bizarre incidents, sensational discoveries, implausible conflicts, and wildly novel dilemmas. This means that many members of the super-industrial society will never "feel at home" in it. Like the voyager who takes up residence in an alien country, only to find, once adjusted, that he must move on to another, and yet another, we shall come to feel like "strangers in a strange land."

The super-industrial revolution can erase hunger, disease, ignorance and brutality. Moreover, despite the pessimistic prophecies of the straight-line thinkers, super-industrialism will not restrict man, will not crush him into bleak and painful uniformity. In contrast, it will radiate new opportunities for personal growth, adventure and delight. It will be vividly colorful and amazingly open to individuality. The problem is not whether man can survive regimentation and standardization. The problem, as we shall see, is whether he can survive freedom.

Yet for all this, man has never truly inhabited a novelty-filled environment before. Having to live at an accelerating pace is one thing when life situations are more or less familiar. Having to do so when faced by unfamiliar, strange or unprecedented situations is distinctly another. By unleashing the forces of novelty, we slam men up against the nonroutine, the unpredicted. And, by so doing, we escalate the problems of adaptation to a new and dangerous level. For transience and novelty are an explosive mix.

If all this seems doubtful, let us contemplate some of the novelties that lie in store for us. Combining rational intelligence with all the imagination we can command, let us project ourselves forcefully into the future. In doing so, let us not fear occasional error – the imagination is only free when fear of error is temporarily laid aside. Moreover, in thinking about the future, it is better to err on the side of daring, than the side of caution.

One sees why the moment one begins listening to the men who are even now creating that future. Listen, as they describe some of the developments waiting to burst from their laboratories and factories.

"Within fifty years," says Dr. F. N. Spiess, head of the Marine Physical Laboratory of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, "man will move onto and into the sea – occupying it and exploiting it as an integral part of his use of this planet for recreation, minerals, food, waste disposal, military and transportation operations, and, as populations grow, for actual living space."

More than two-thirds of the planet's surface is covered with ocean – and of this submerged terrain a bare five percent is well mapped. However, this underwater land is known to be rich with oil, gas, coal, diamonds, sulphur, cobalt, uranium, tin, phosphates and other minerals. It teems with fish and plant life.

These immense riches are about to be fought over and exploited on a staggering scale. Today in the United States alone more than 600 companies, including such giants as Standard Oil and Union Carbide, are readying themselves for a monumental competitive struggle under the seas.

The race will intensify year by year – with far-reaching impacts on society. Who "owns" the bottom of the ocean and the marine life that covers it? As ocean mining becomes feasible and economically advantageous, we can expect the resource balance among nations to shift. The Japanese already extract 10,000,000 tons of coal each year from underwater mines; tin is already being ocean-mined by Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. Before long nations may go to war over patches of ocean bottom. We may also find sharp changes in the rate of industrialization of what are now resource-poor nations.

Technologically, novel industries will rise to process the output of the oceans. Others will produce sophisticated and highly expensive tools for working the sea – deep-diving research craft, rescue submarines, electronic fish-herding equipment and the like. The rate of obsolescence in these fields will be swift. The competitive struggle will spur ever accelerating innovation.

Culturally, we can expect new words to stream rapidly into the language. "Aquaculture" – the term for scientific cultivation of the ocean's food resources – will take its place alongside "Agriculture." "Water," itself a term freighted with symbolic and emotional associations, will take on wholly new connotations. Along with a new vocabulary will come new symbols in poetry, painting, film and the other arts. Representations of oceanic life forms will find their way into graphic and industrial design. Fashions will reflect dependence on the ocean. New textiles, new plastics and other materials will be discovered. New drugs will be found to cure illness or alter mental states.

Most important, increased reliance on the oceans for food will alter the nutrition of millions – a change that, itself, carries significant unknowns in its wake. What happens to the energy level of people, to their desire for achievement, not to speak of their biochemistry, their average height and weight, their rate of maturation, their life span, their characteristic diseases, even their psychological responses, when their society shifts from a reliance on agri– to aquaculture?

The opening of the sea may also bring with it a new frontier spirit – a way of life that offers adventure, danger, quick riches or fame to the initial explorers. Later, as man begins to colonize the continental shelves, and perhaps even the deeper reaches, the pioneers may well be followed by settlers who build artificial cities beneath the waves – work cities, science cities, medical cities, and play cities, complete with hospitals, hotels and homes.

If all this sounds too far off, it is sobering to note that Dr. Walter L. Robb, a scientist at General Electric, has already kept a hamster alive under water by enclosing it in a box that is, in effect, an artificial gill – a synthetic membrane that extracts air from the surrounding water while keeping the water out. Such membranes formed the top, bottom and two sides of a box in which the hamster was submerged in water. Without the gill, the animal would have suffocated. With it, it was able to breathe under water. Such membranes, G.E. claims, may some day furnish air for the occupants of underwater experimental stations. They might eventually be built into the walls of undersea apartment houses, hotels and other structures, or even – who knows? – into the human body itself.

Indeed, the old science fiction speculations about men with surgically implanted gills no longer seem quite so impossibly far-fetched as they once did. We may create (perhaps even breed) specialists for ocean work, men and women who are not only mentally, but physically equipped for work, play, love and sex under the sea. Even if we do not resort to such dramatic measures in our haste to conquer the underwater frontier, it seems likely that the opening of the oceans will generate not merely new professional specialties, but new life styles, new ocean-oriented subcultures, and perhaps even new religious sects or mystical cults to celebrate the seas.

One need not push speculation so far, however, to recognize that the novel environments to which man will be exposed will, of necessity, bring with them altered perceptions, new sensations, new sensitivities to color and form, new ways of thinking and feeling. Moreover, the invasion of the sea, the first wave of which we shall witness long before the arrival of A.D. 2000, is only one of a series of closely tied scientific-technological trends that are now racing forward – all of them crammed with novel social and psychological implications.

The conquest of the oceans links up directly with the advance toward accurate weather prediction and, ultimately, climate control. What we call weather is largely a consequence of the interaction of sun, air and ocean. By monitoring ocean currents, salinity and other factors, by placing weather-watch satellites in the skies, we will greatly increase our ability to forecast weather accurately. According to Dr. Walter Orr Roberts, past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, "We foresee bringing the entire globe under continuous weather observation by the mid-1970's – and at reasonable cost. And we envision, from this, vastly improved forecasting of storms, freezes, droughts, smog episodes – with attendant opportunities to avert disaster. But we can also see lurking in the beyond-knowledge of today an awesome potential weapon of war – the deliberate manipulation of weather for the benefit of the few and the powerful, to the detriment of the enemy, and perhaps of the bystanders as well."

In a science fiction story entitled The Weather Man, Theodore L. Thomas depicts a world in which the central political institution is a "Weather Council." In it, representatives of the various nations hammer out weather policy and control peoples by adjusting climate, imposing a drought here or a storm there to enforce their edicts. We may still be a long way from having such carefully calibrated control. But there is no question that the day is past when man simply had to take whatever heaven deigned to give in the way of weather. In the blunt words of the American Meteorological Society: "Weather modification today is a reality."

This represents one of the turning points in history and provides man with a weapon that could radically affect agriculture, transportation, communication, recreation. Unless wielded with extreme care, however, the gift of weather control can prove man's undoing. The earth's weather system is an integrated whole; a minute change at one point can touch off massive consequences elsewhere. Even without aggressive intent, there is danger that attempts to control a drought on one continent could trigger a tornado on another.

Moreover, the unknown socio-psychological consequences of weather manipulation could be enormous. Millions of us, for example, hunger for sunshine, as our mass migrations to Florida, California or the Mediterranean coast indicate. We may well be able to produce sunshine – or a facsimile of it – at will. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is studying the concept of a giant orbiting space mirror capable of reflecting the sun's light downward on night-shrouded parts of the earth. A NASA official, George E. Mueller, has testified before Congress that the United States will have the capacity to launch huge sunreflecting satellites by mid-1970. (By extension, it should not be impossible to loft satellites that would block out sunlight over preselected regions, plunging them into at least semidarkness.)

The present natural light-dark cycle is tied to human biological rhythms in ways that are, as yet, unexplored. One can easily imagine the use of orbiting sun-mirrors to alter the hours of light for agricultural, industrial or even psychological reasons. For example, the introduction of longer days into Scandinavia could have a strong influence on the culture and personality types now characteristic of that region. To put the matter only half-facetiously, what happens to Ingmar Bergman's brooding art when Stockholm's brooding darkness is lifted? Could The Seventh Seal or Winter Light have been conceived in another climate?

The increasing ability to alter weather, the development of new energy sources, new materials (some of them almost surrealistic in their properties), new transportation means, new foods (not only from the sea, but from huge hydroponic food-growing factories) – all these only begin to hint at the nature of the accelerating changes that lie ahead.

In War With the Newts, Karel Capek's marvelous but little-known novel, man brings about the destruction of civilization through his attempt to domesticate a variety of salamander. Today, among other things, man is learning to exploit animals and fish in ways that would have made Capek smile wryly. Trained pigeons are used to identify and eliminate defective pills from drug factory assembly lines. In the Ukraine, Soviet scientists employ a particular species of fish to clear the algae off the filters in pumping stations. Dolphins have been trained to carry tools to "aquanauts" submerged off the coast of California, and to ward off sharks who approach the work zone. Others have been trained to ram submerged mines, thereby detonating them and committing suicide on man's behalf – a use that provoked a slight furor over inter-species ethics.

Research into communication between man and the dolphin may prove to be extremely useful if, and when, man makes contact with extra-terrestrial life – a possibility that many reputable astronomers regard as almost inevitable. In the meantime, dolphin research is yielding new data on the ways in which man's sensory apparatus differs from that of other animals. It suggests some of the outer limits within which the human organism operates – feelings, moods, perceptions not available to man because of his own biological make-up can be at least analyzed or described.

Existing animal species, however, are by no means all we have to work with. A number of writers have suggested that new animal forms be bred for specialized purposes. Sir George Thomson notes that "with advancing knowledge of genetics very large modifications in the wild species can no doubt be made." Arthur Clarke has written about the possibility that we can "increase the intelligence of our domestic animals, or evolve wholly new ones with much higher I.Q.'s than any existing now." We are also developing the capacity to control animal behavior by remote control. Dr. Jose M. R. Delgado, in a series of experiments terrifying in their human potential, implanted electrodes in the skull of a bull. Waving a red cape, Delgado provoked the animal to charge. Then, with a signal emitted from a tiny hand-held radio transmitter, he made the beast turn aside in mid-lunge and trot docilely away.

Whether we grow specialized animals to serve us or develop household robots depends in part on the uneven race between the life sciences and the physical sciences. It may be cheaper to make machines for our purposes, than to raise and train animals. Yet the biological sciences are developing so rapidly that the balance may well tip within our lifetimes. Indeed, the day may even come when we begin to grow our machines.

Raising and training animals may be expensive, but what happens when we go down the evolutionary scale to the level of bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms? Here we can harness life in its primitive forms just as we once harnessed the horse. Today a new science based on this principle is rapidly emerging and it promises to change the very nature of industry as we know it.

"Our ancestors domesticated various plant and animal species in the prehistoric past," says biochemist Marvin J. Johnson of the University of Wisconsin. But "microorganisms were not domesticated until very recently, primarily because man did not know of their existence." Today he does, and they are already used in the large-scale production of vitamins, enzymes, antibiotics, citric acid and other useful compounds. By the year 2000, if the pressure for food continues to intensify, biologists will be growing microorganisms for use as animal feed and, eventually, human food.

At Uppsala University in Sweden, I had the opportunity to discuss this with Arne Tiselius, the Nobel prizewinning biochemist who is now president of the Nobel Foundation itself. "Is it conceivable," I asked, "that one day we shall create, in effect, biological machines – systems that can be used for productive purposes and will be composed not of plastic or metal parts, but of living organisms?" His answer was roundabout, but unequivocal: "We are already there. The great future of industry will come from biology. In fact, one of the most striking things about the tremendous technological development of Japan since the war has been not only its shipbuilding, but its microbiology. Japan is now the greatest power in the world in industry based on microbiology ... Much of their food and food industry is based on processes in which bacteria are used. Now they produce all sorts of useful things – amino acids, for example. In Sweden everybody now talks about the need to strengthen our position in microbiology.

"You see, one need not think in terms of bacteria and viruses alone ... The industrial processes, in general, are based on man-made processes. You make steel by a reduction of iron ore with coal. Think of the plastic industries, artificial products made originally from petroleum. Yet it is remarkable that even today, with the tremendous development of chemistry and chemical technology, there is no single foodstuff produced industrially which can compete with what the farmers grow.

"In this field, and in a great many fields, nature is far superior to man, even to the most advanced chemical engineers and researchers. Now what is the consequence of that? When we gradually get to know how nature makes these things, and when we can imitate nature, we will have processes of an entirely new kind. These will form the basis for industries of a new kind – a sort of bio-technical factory, a biological technology.

"The green plants make starch with the aid of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the sun. This is an extremely efficient machine ... The green leaf is a marvelous machine. We know a great deal more about it today than two or three years ago. But not enough to imitate it yet. There are many such 'machines' in nature." Such processes, Tiselius continued, will be put to work. Rather than trying to synthesize products chemically, we will, in effect, grow them to specification.

One might even conceive of biological components in machines – in computers, for example. "It is quite obvious," Tiselius continued, "that computers so far are just bad imitations of our brains. Once we learn more about how the brain acts, I would be surprised if we could not construct a sort of biological computer ... Such a computer might have electronic components modeled after biological components in the real brain. And at some distant point in the future it is conceivable that biological elements themselves might be parts of the machine." Precisely such ideas have led Jean Fourastié, the French economist and planner, to state flatly: "Man is on the path toward integrating living tissue in the processes of physical mechanisms ... We shall have in the near future machines constituted at one and the same time of metal and of living substances ..." In the light of this, he says, "The human body itself takes on new meaning."

Like the geography of the planet, the human body has until now represented a fixed point in human experience, a "given." Today we are fast approaching the day when the body can no longer be regarded as fixed. Man will be able, within a reasonably short period, to redesign not merely individual bodies, but the entire human race.

In 1962 Drs. J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick received the Nobel prize for describing the DNA molecule. Since then advances in genetics have come tripping over one another at a rapid pace. Molecular biology is now about to explode from the laboratories. New genetic knowledge will permit us to tinker with human heredity and manipulate the genes to create altogether new versions of man.

One of the more fantastic possibilities is that man will be able to make biological carbon copies of himself. Through a process known as "cloning" it will be possible to grow from the nucleus of an adult cell a new organism that has the same genetic characteristics of the person contributing the cell nucleus. The resultant human "copy" would start life with a genetic endowment identical to that of the donor, although cultural differences might thereafter alter the personality or physical development of the clone.

Cloning would make it possible for people to see themselves born anew, to fill the world with twins of themselves. Cloning would, among other things, provide us with solid empirical evidence to help us resolve, once and for all, the ancient controversy over "nature vs. nurture" or "heredity vs. environment." The solution of this problem, through the determination of the role played by each, would be one of the great milestones of human intellectual development. Whole libraries of philosophical speculation could, by a single stroke, be rendered irrelevant. An answer to this question would open the way for speedy, qualitative advances in psychology, moral philosophy and a dozen other fields.

But cloning could also create undreamed of complications for the race. There is a certain charm to the idea of Albert Einstein bequeathing copies of himself to posterity. But what of Adolf Hitler? Should there be laws to regulate cloning? Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg, a scientist who takes his social responsibility very seriously, believes it conceivable that those most likely to replicate themselves will be those who are most narcissistic, and that the clones they produce will also be narcissists.

Even if narcissism, however, is culturally rather than biologically transmitted, there are other eerie difficulties. Thus Lederberg raises a question as to whether human cloning, if permitted, might not "go critical." "I use that phrase," he told me, "in almost exactly the same sense that is involved in nuclear energy. It will go critical if there is a sufficient positive advantage to doing so ... This has to do with whether the efficiency of communication, particularly along educational lines, is increased as between identical genotypes or not. The similarity of neurological hardware might make it easier for identical copies to transmit technical and other insights from one generation to the next."

How close is cloning? "It has already been done in amphibia," says Lederberg, "and somebody may be doing it right now with mammals. It wouldn't surprise me if it comes out any day now. When someone will have the courage to try it in a man, I haven't the foggiest idea. But I put the time scale on that anywhere from zero to fifteen years from now. Within fifteen years."

During those same fifteen years scientists will also learn how the various organs of the body develop, and they will, no doubt, begin to experiment with various means of modifying them. Says Lederberg: "Things like the size of the brain and certain sensory qualities of the brain are going to be brought under direct developmental control ... I think this is very near."

It is important for laymen to understand that Lederberg is by no means a lone worrier in the scientific community. His fears about the biological revolution are shared by many of his colleagues. The ethical, moral and political questions raised by the new biology simply boggle the mind. Who shall live and who shall die? What is man? Who shall control research into these fields? How shall new findings be applied? Might we not unleash horrors for which man is totally unprepared? In the opinion of many of the world's leading scientists the clock is ticking for a "biological Hiroshima."

Imagine, for example, the implications of biological breakthroughs in what might be termed "birth technology." Dr. E. S. E. Hafez, an internationally respected biologist at Washington State University, has publicly suggested, on the basis of his own astonishing work on reproduction, that within a mere ten to fifteen years a woman will be able to buy a tiny frozen embryo, take it to her doctor, have it implanted in her uterus, carry it for nine months, and then give birth to it as though it had been conceived in her own body. The embryo would, in effect, be sold with a guarantee that the resultant baby would be free of genetic defect. The purchaser would also be told in advance the color of the baby's eyes and hair, its sex, its probable size at maturity and its probable IQ.

Indeed, it will be possible at some point to do away with the female uterus altogether. Babies will be conceived, nurtured and raised to maturity outside the human body. It is clearly only a matter of years before the work begun by Dr. Daniele Petrucci in Bologna and other scientists in the United States and the Soviet Union, makes it possible for women to have babies without the discomfort of pregnancy.

The potential applications of such discoveries raise memories of Brave New World and Astounding Science Fiction. Thus Dr. Hafez, in a sweep of his imagination, suggests that fertilized human eggs might be useful in the colonization of the planets. Instead of shipping adults to Mars, we could ship a shoebox full of such cells and grow them into an entire citysize population of humans. "When you consider how much it costs in fuel to lift every pound off the launch pad," Dr. Hafez observes, "why send full-grown men and women aboard space ships? Instead, why not ship tiny embryos, in the care of a competent biologist ... We miniaturize other spacecraft components. Why not the passengers?"

Long before such developments occur in outer space, however, the impact of the new birth technology will strike home on earth, splintering our traditional notions of sexuality, motherhood, love, child-rearing, and education. Discussions about the future of the family that deal only with The Pill overlook the biological witches' brew now seething in the laboratories. The moral and emotional choices that will confront us in the coming decades are mind-staggering.

A fierce controversy is already raging today among biologists over the problems and ethical issues arising out of eugenics. Should we try to breed a better race? If so, exactly what is "better?" And who is to decide? Such questions are not entirely new. Yet the techniques soon to be available smash the traditional limits of the argument. We can now imagine remaking the human race not as a farmer slowly and laboriously "breeds up" his herd, but as an artist might, employing a brilliant range of unfamiliar colors, shapes and forms.

Not far from Route 80, outside the little town of Hazard, Kentucky, is a place picturesquely known as Valley of Troublesome Creek. In this tiny backwoods community lives a family whose members, for generations, have been marked by a strange anomaly: blue skin. According to Dr. Madison Cawein of the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, who tracked the family down and traced its story, the blue-skinned people seem perfectly normal in other respects. Their unusual color is caused by a rare enzyme deficiency that has been passed from one generation to the next.

Given our new, fast-accumulating knowledge of genetics, we shall be able to breed whole new races of blue people – or, for that matter, green, purple or orange. In a world still suffering from the moral lesion of racism, this is a thought to be conjured with. Should we strive for a world in which all people share the same skin color? If we want that, we shall no doubt have the technical means for bringing it about. Or should we, instead, work toward even greater diversity than now exists? What happens to the entire concept of race? To standards of physical beauty? To notions of superiority or inferiority?

We are hurtling toward the time when we will be able to breed both super– and subraces. As Theodore J. Gordon put it in The Future, "Given the ability to tailor the race, I wonder if we would "create all men equal,' or would we choose to manufacture apartheid? Might the races of the future be: a superior group, the DNA controllers; the humble servants; special athletes for the 'games'; research scientists with 200 IQ and diminutive bodies ..." We shall have the power to produce races of morons or of mathematical savants.

We shall also be able to breed babies with supernormal vision or hearing, supernormal ability to detect changes in odor, or supernormal muscular or musical skills. We will be able to create sexual superathletes, girls with super-mammaries (and perhaps more or less than the standard two), and countless other varieties of the previously monomorphic human being.

Ultimately, the problems are not scientific or technical, but ethical and political. Choice – and the criteria for choice – will be critical. The eminent science fiction author William Tenn once mused about the possibilities of genetic manipulation and the difficulties of choice. "Assuming hopefully for the moment that no dictator, self-righteous planning board or omnipotent black box is going to make genetic selections for the coming generation, then who or what is? Not parents, certainly ..." he said, "they'll take the problem to their friendly neighborhood Certified Gene Architect.

"It seems inevitable to me that there will also be competitive schools of genetic architecture ... the Functionalists will persuade parents to produce babies fitted for the present needs of society; the Futurists will suggest children who will have a niche in the culture as it will have evolved in twenty years; the Romantics will insist that each child be bred with at least one outstanding talent; and the Naturalists will advise the production of individuals so balanced genetically as to be in almost perfect equilibrium ... Human body styles, like human clothing styles, will become outré, or à la mode as the genetic couturiers who designed them come into and out of vogue."

Buried behind this tongue-in-cheek are serious issues, made more profound by the immensity of the possibilities – some of them so grotesque that they appear to leap at us from the canvases of Hieronymus Bosch. Mention was made earlier of the idea of breeding men with gills or implanting gills in them for efficiency in underwater environments. At a meeting of world renowned biologists in London, J. B. S. Haldane began to expatiate about the possibility of creating new, far-out forms of man for space exploration. "The most obvious abnormalities in extra-terrestrial environments," Haldane observed, "are differences in gravitation, temperature, air pressure, air composition, and radiation ... Clearly a gibbon is better preadapted than a man for life in a low gravitational field, such as that of a space ship, an asteroid, or perhaps even the moon. A platyrrhine with a prehensile tail is even more so. Gene grafting may make it possible to incorporate such features into the human stocks."

While the scientists at this meeting devoted much of their attention to the moral consequences and perils of the biological revolution, no one challenged Haldane's suggestion that we shall someday make men with tails if we want them. Indeed, Lederberg merely observed that there might well be non-genetic ways to accomplish the same ends more easily. "We are going to modify man experimentally through physiological and embryological alterations, and by the substitution of machines for his parts," Lederberg declared. "If we want a man without legs, we don't have to breed him, we can chop them off; if we want a man with a tail, we will find a way of grafting it on to him."

At another meeting of scientists and scholars, Dr. Robert Sinsheimer, a Caltech biophysicist, put the challenge squarely:

"How will you choose to intervene in the ancient designs of nature for man? Would you like to control the sex of your offspring? It will be as you wish. Would you like your son to be six feet tall – seven feet? Eight feet? What troubles you? – allergy, obesity, arthritic pain? These will be easily handled. For cancer, diabetes, phenylketonuria there will be genetic therapy. The appropriate DNA will be provided in the appropriate dose. Viral and microbial disease will be easily met. Even the timeless patterns of growth and maturity and aging will be subject to our design. We know of no intrinsic limits to the life span. How long would you like to live?"

Lest his audience mistake him, Sinsheimer asked: "Do these projections sound like LSD fantasies, or the view in a distorted mirror? None transcends the potential of what we now know. They may not be developed in the way one might now anticipate, but they are feasible, they can be brought to reality, and sooner rather than later."

Not only can such wonders be brought to reality, but the odds are they will. Despite profound ethical questions about whether they should, the fact remains that scientific curiosity is, itself, one of the most powerful driving forces in our society. In the words of Dr. Rollin D. Hotchkiss of the Rockefeller Institute: "Many of us feel instinctive revulsion at the hazards of meddling with the finely balanced and far-reaching systems that make an individual what he is. Yet I believe it will surely be done or attempted. The pathway will be built from a combination of altruism, private profit and ignorance." To this list, worse yet, he might have added political conflict and bland unconcern. Thus Dr. A. Neyfakh, chief of the research laboratory of the Institute of Development Biology of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, predicts with a frightening lack of anxiety that the world will soon witness a genetic equivalent of the arms race. He bases his argument on the notion that the capitalist powers are engaged in a "struggle for brains." To make up for the brain drain, one or another of the "reactionary governments" will be "compelled" to employ genetic engineering to increase its output of geniuses and gifted individuals. Since this will occur "regardless of their intention," an international genetics race is inevitable. And this being so, he implies, the Soviet Union ought to be ready to jump the gun.

Criticized by the Soviet philosopher A. Petropavlovsky for his seeming willingness, even enthusiasm, to participate in such a race, Neyfakh shrugged aside the horrors that might be unleashed by hasty application of the new biology, replying merely that the advance of science is, and ought to be, unstoppable. If Neyfakh's political logic leaves something to, be desired, his appeal to cold war passions as a justification for genetic tinkering is terrifying.

In short, it is safe to say that, unless specific counter-measures are taken, if something can be done, someone, somewhere will do it. The nature of what can and will be done exceeds anything that man is as yet psychologically or morally prepared to live with.

We steadfastly refuse to face such facts. We avoid them by stubbornly refusing to recognize the speed of change. It makes us feel better to defer the future. Even those closest to the cutting edge of scientific research can scarcely believe the reality. Even they routinely underestimate the speed at which the future is breaking on our shores. Thus Dr. Richard J. Cleveland, speaking before a conference of organ transplant specialists, announced in January, 1967, that the first human heart transplant operation will occur "within five years." Yet before the same year was out Dr. Christiaan Barnard had operated on a fifty-five-year-old grocer named Louis Washkansky, and a staccato sequence of heart transplant operations exploded like a string of firecrackers into the world's awareness. In the meantime, success rates are rising steadily in kidney transplants. Successful liver, pancreas and ovary transplants are also reported.

Such accelerating medical advances must compel profound changes in our ways of thinking, as well as our way of caring for the sick. Startling new legal, ethical and philosophical issues arise. What, for instance, is death? Does death occur when the heart stops beating, as we have traditionally believed? Or does it occur when the brain stops functioning? Hospitals are becoming more and more familiar with cases of patients kept alive through advanced medical techniques, but doomed to exist as unconscious vegetables. What are the ethics of condemning such a person to death to obtain a healthy organ needed for transplant to save the life of a person with a better prognosis?

Lacking guidelines or precedents, we flounder over the moral and legal questions. Ghoulish rumors race through the medical community. The New York Times and Komsomolskaya Pravda both speculate about the possibility of "future murder rings supplying healthy organs for black-market surgeons whose patients are unwilling to wait until natural sources have supplied the heart or liver or pancreas they need." In Washington, the National Academy of Sciences, backed by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, begins a study of social policy issues springing from advances in the life sciences. At Stanford, a symposium, also funded by Russell Sage, examines methods for setting up transplant organ banks, the economics of an organ market, and evidences of class or racial discrimination in organ availability.

The possibility of cannibalizing bodies or corpses for usable transplant organs, grisly as it is, will serve to accelerate further the pace of change by lending urgency to research in the field of artificial organs – plastic or electronic substitutes for the heart or liver or spleen. (Eventually, even these may be made unnecessary when we learn how to regenerate damaged organs or severed limbs, growing new ones as the lizard now grows a tail.)

The drive to develop spare parts for failing human bodies will be stepped up as demand intensifies. The development of an economical artificial heart, Professor Lederberg says, "is only a few transient failures away." Professor R. M. Kenedi of the bio-engineering group at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow believes that "by 1984, artificial replacements for tissues and organs may well have become commonplace." For some organs, this date is, in fact, conservative. Already more than 13,000 cardiac patients in the United States – including a Supreme Court justice – are alive because they carry, stitched into their chest cavity, a tiny "pacemaker" – a device that sends pulses of electricity to activate the heart. (At a major Midwest hospital not long ago a patient appeared at the emergency room in the middle of the night. He was hiccupping violently, sixty times a minute. The patient, it turned out, was an early pacemaker wearer. A fast-thinking resident realized what had happened: a pacemaker wire, instead of stimulating the heart, had broken loose and become lodged in the diaphragm. Its jolts of electricity were causing the hiccupping. Acting swiftly, the resident inserted a needle into the patient's chest near the pacemaker, ran a wire out from the needle and grounded it to the hospital plumbing. The hiccupping stopped, giving doctors a chance to operate and reposition the faulty wire. A foretaste of tomorrow's medicine?)

Another 10,000 pioneers are already equipped with artificial heart valves made of dacron mesh. Implantable hearing aids, artificial kidneys, arteries, hip joints, lungs, eye sockets and other parts are all in various stages of early development. We shall, before many decades are past, implant tiny, aspirin-sized sensors in the body to monitor blood pressure, pulse, respiration and other functions, and tiny transmitters to emit a signal when something goes wrong. Such signals will feed into giant diagnostic computer centers upon which the medicine of the future will be based. Some of us will also carry a tiny platinum plate and a dime-sized "stimulator" attached to the spine. By turning a midget "radio" on and off we will be able to activate the stimulator and kill pain. Initial work on these pain-control mechanisms is already under way at the Case Institute of Technology. Push-button pain killers are already being used by certain cardiac patients.

Such developments will lead to vast new bio-engineering industries, chains of medicalelectronic repair stations, new technical professions and a reorganization of the entire health system. They will change life expectancy, shatter insurance company life tables, and bring about important shifts in the uman outlook. Surgery will be less frightening to the average individual; implantation routine. The human body will come to be seen as modular. Through application of the modular principle – preservation of the whole through systematic replacement of transient components – we may add two or three decades to the average life span of the population. Unless, however, we develop far more advanced understanding of the brain than we now have, this could lead to one of the greatest ironies in history. Sir George Pickering, Regius professor of medicine at Oxford, has warned that unless we watch out, "those with senile brains will form an ever increasing fraction of the inhabitants of the earth. I find this," he added rather unnecessarily, "a terrifying prospect." Just such terrifying prospects will drive us toward more accelerated research into the brain – which, in turn, will generate still further radical changes in the society.

Today we struggle to make heart valves or artificial plumbing that imitate the original they are designed to replace. We strive for functional equivalence. Once we have mastered the basic problems, however, we shall not merely install plastic aortas in people because their original aorta is about to fail. We shall install specially-designed parts that are better than the original, and then we shall move on to install parts that provide the user with capabilities that were absent in the first place. Just as genetic engineering holds out the promise of producing "super-people," so, too, does organ technology suggest the possibility of track stars with extra-capacity lungs or hearts; sculptors with a neural device that intensifies sensitivity to texture; lovers with sex-intensifying neural machinery. In short, we shall no longer implant merely to save a life, but to enhance it – to make possible the achievement of moods, states, conditions or ecstasies that are presently beyond us.

Under these circumstances, what happens to our age-old definitions of "human-ness?" How will it feel to be part protoplasm and part transistor? Exactly what possibilities will it open? What limitations will it place on work, play, sex, intellectual or aesthetic responses? What happens to the mind when the body is changed? Questions like these cannot be long deferred, for advanced fusions of man and machine – called "Cyborgs" – are closer than most people suspect.

Today the man with a pacemaker or a plastic aorta is still recognizably a man. The inanimate part of his body is still relatively unimportant in terms of his personality and consciousness. But as the proportion of machine components rises, what happens to his awareness of self, his inner experience? If we assume that the brain is the seat of consciousness and intelligence, and that no other part of the body affects personality or self very much, then it is possible to conceive of a disembodied brain – a brain without arms, legs, spinal cord or other equipment – as a self, a personality, an embodiment of awareness. It may then become possible to combine the human brain with a whole set of artificial sensors, receptors and effectors, and to call that tangle of wires and plastic a human being.

All this may seem to resemble medieval speculation about the number of angels who can pirouette on a pinhead, yet the first small steps toward some form of man-machine symbiosis are already being taken. Moreover, they are being taken not by a lone mad scientist, but by thousands of highly trained engineers, mathematicians, biologists, surgeons, chemists, neurologists and communications specialists.

Dr. W. G. Walter's mechanical "tortoises" are machines that behave as though they had been psychologically conditioned. These tortoises were early specimens of a growing breed of robots ranging from the "Perceptron" which could learn (and even generalize) to the more recent "Wanderer," a robot capable of exploring an area, building up in its memory an "image" of the terrain, and able even to indulge in certain operations comparable, at least in some respects, to "contemplative speculation" and "fantasy." Experiments by Ross Ashby, H. D. Block, Frank Rosenblatt and others demonstrate that machines can learn from their mistakes, improve their performance, and, in certain limited kinds of learning, outstrip human

students. Says Block, professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University: "I don't think there's a task you can name that a machine can't do – in principle. If you can define a task and a human can do it, then a machine can, at least in theory, also do it. The converse, however, is not true." Intelligence and creativity, it would appear, are not a human monopoly.

Despite setbacks and difficulties, the roboteers are moving forward. Recently they enjoyed a collective laugh at the expense of one of the leading critics of the robot-builders, a former RAND Corporation computer specialist named Hubert L. Dreyfus. Arguing that computers would never be able to match human intelligence, Dreyfus wrote a lengthy paper heaping vitriolic scorn on those who disagreed with him. Among other things, he declared, "No chess program can play even amateur chess." In context, he appeared to be saying that none ever would. Less than two years later, a graduate student at MIT, Richard Greenblatt, wrote a chess-playing computer program, challenged Dreyfus to a match, and had the immense satisfaction of watching the computer annihilate Dreyfus to the cheers of the "artificial intelligence" researchers.

In a quite different field of robotology there is progress, too. Technicians at Disneyland have created extremely life-like computer-controlled humanoids capable of moving their arms and legs, grimacing, smiling, glowering, simulating fear, joy and a wide range of other emotions. Built of clear plastic that, according to one reporter, "does everything but bleed," the robots chase girls, play music, fire pistols, and so closely resemble human forms that visitors routinely shriek with fear, flinch and otherwise react as though they were dealing with real human beings. The purposes to which these robots are put may seem trivial, but the technology on which they are based is highly sophisticated. It depends heavily on knowledge acquired from the space program – and this knowledge is accumulating rapidly.

There appears to be no reason, in principle, why we cannot go forward from these present primitive and trivial robots to build humanoid machines capable of extremely varied behavior, capable even of "human" error and seemingly random choice – in short, to make them behaviorally indistinguishable from humans except by means of highly sophisticated or elaborate tests. At that point we shall face the novel sensation of trying to determine whether the smiling, assured humanoid behind the airline reservation counter is a pretty girl or a carefully wired robot. (This raises a number of half-amusing, half-serious problems about the relationships between men and machines, including emotional and even sexual relationships. Professor Block at Cornell speculates that manmachine sexual relationships may not be too far distant. Pointing out that men often develop emotional attachments to the machines they use, he suggests that we shall have to give attention to the "ethical" questions arising from our treatment of "these mechanical objects of our affection and passion." A serious inquiry into these issues is to be found in an article by Roland Puccetti in the British Journal of the Philosophy of Science, 18 (1967) 39-51.)

The likelihood, of course, is that she will be both.

The thrust toward some form of man-machine symbiosis is furthered by our increasing ingenuity in communicating with machines. A great deal of much-publicized work is being done to facilitate the interaction of men and computers. But quite apart from this, Russian and American scientists have both been experimenting with the placement or implantation of detectors that pick up signals from the nerve ends at the stub of an amputated limb. These signals are then amplified and used to activate an artificial limb, thereby making a machine directly and sensitively responsive to the nervous system of a human being. The human need not "think out" his desires; even involuntary impulses are transmittable. The responsive behavior of the machine is as automatic as the behavior of ones' own hand, eye or leg.

In Flight to Arras, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, novelist, poet and pioneer aviator, described buckling himself into the seat of a fighter plane during World War II. "All this complication of oxygen tubes, heating equipment; these speaking tubes that form the 'intercom' running between the members of the crew. This mask through which I breathe. I am attached to the plane by a rubber tube as indispensable as an umbilical cord. Organs have been added to my being, and they seem to intervene between me and my heart ..." We have come far since those distant days. Space biology is marching irresistibly toward the day when the astronaut will not merely be buckled into his capsule, but become a part of it in the full symbiotic sense of the phrase.

One aim is to make the craft itself a wholly self-sufficient universe, in which algae is grown for food, water is recovered from body waste, air is recycled to purge it of the ammonia entering the atmosphere from urine, etc. In this totally enclosed fully regenerative world, the human being becomes an integral part of an on-going micro-ecological process whirling through the vastnesses of space. Thus Theodore Cordon, author of The Future and himself a leading space engineer, writes: "Perhaps it would be simpler to provide life support in the form of machines that plug into the astronaut. He could be fed intravenously using a liquid food compactly stored in a remote pressurized tank. Perhaps direct processing of body liquid wastes, and conversion to water, could be accomplished by a new type of artificial kidney built in as part of the spaceship. Perhaps sleep could be induced electronically ... to lower his metabolism ..." Und so weiter. One after another, the body functions of the human become interwoven with, dependent on, and part of, the machine functions of the capsule.

The ultimate extension of such work, however, is not necessarily to be found in the outer reaches of space; it may well become a common part of everyday life here on the mother planet. This is the direct link-up of the human brain – stripped of its supporting physical structures – with the computer. Indeed, it may be that the biological component of the supercomputers of the future may be massed human brains. The possibility of enhancing human (and machine) intelligence by linking them together organically opens enormous and exciting probabilities, so exciting that Dr. R. M. Page, director of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, has publicly discussed the feasibility of a system in which human thoughts are fed automatically into the storage unit of a computer to form the basis for machine decisionmaking. Participants in a RAND Corporation study conducted several years ago were asked when this development might occur. Answers ranged from as soon as 1990 to "never." But the median date given was 2020 – well within the lifetime of today's teen-agers.

In the meantime, research from countless sources contributes toward the eventual symbiosis. In one of the most fascinating, frightening and intellectually provocative experiments ever recorded, Professor Robert White, director of neurosurgery at the Metropolitan General Hospital in Cleveland, has given evidence that the brain can be isolated from its body and kept alive after the "death" of the rest of the organism. The experiment, described in a brilliant article by Oriana Fallaci, saw a team of neurosurgeons cut the brain out of a rhesus monkey, discard the body, then hook the brain's carotid arteries up to another monkey, whose blood then continued to bathe the disembodied organ, keeping it alive.

Said one of the members of the medical team, Dr. Leo Massopust, a neurophysiologist: "The brain activity is largely better than when the brain had a body ... No doubt about it. I even suspect that without his senses, he can think more quickly. What kind of thinking, I don't know. I guess he is primarily a memory, a repository for information stored when be had his flesh; he cannot develop further because he no longer has the nourishment of experience. Yet this, too, is a new experience."

The brain survived for five hours. It could have lasted much longer, had it served the purposes of research. Professor White has successfully kept other brains alive for days, using machinery, rather than a living monkey, to keep the brain washed with blood. "I don't think we have reached the stage," he told Miss Fallaci, "where you can turn men into robots, obedient sheep. Yet ... it could happen, it isn't impossible. If you consider that we can transfer the head of a man onto the trunk of another man, if you consider that we can isolate the brain of a man and make it work without its body ... To me, there is no longer any gap between science fiction and science ... We could keep Einstein's brain alive and make it function normally."

Not only, Professor White implies, can we transfer the head of one man to the shoulders of another, not only can we keep a head or a brain "alive" and functioning, but it can all be done, with "existing techniques." Indeed, he declares, "The Japanese will be the first to [keep an isolated human head alive]. I will not, because I haven't resolved as yet this dilemma: Is it right or not?" A devout Catholic, Dr. White is deeply troubled by the philosophical and moral implications of his work.

As the brain surgeons and the neurologists probe further, as the bio-engineers and the mathematicians, the communications experts and robot-builders become more sophisticated, as the space men and their capsules grow closer and closer to one another, as machines begin to embody biological components and men come bristling with sensors and mechanical organs, the ultimate symbiosis approaches. The work converges. Yet the greatest marvel of all is not organ transplantation or symbiosis or underwater engineering. It is not technology, nor science itself.

The greatest and most dangerous marvel of all is the complacent past-orientation of the race, its unwillingness to confront the reality of acceleration. Thus man moves swiftly into an unexplored universe, into a totally new stage of eco-technological development, firmly convinced that "human nature is eternal" or that "stability will return." He stumbles into the most violent revolution in human history muttering, in the words of one famous, though myopic sociologist, that "the processes of modernization ... have been more or less 'completed.'" He simply refuses to imagine the future.

In 1865 a newspaper editor told his readers that "Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value." Barely a decade later, the telephone erupted from Mr. Bell's laboratory and changed the world.

On the very day that the Wright brothers took wing, newspapers refused to report the event because their sober, solid, feet-on-the-ground editors simply could not bring themselves to believe it had happened. After all, a famous American astronomer, Simon Newcomb, had not long before assured the world that "No possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances."

Not long after this, another expert announced publicly that it was "nothing less than feeblemindedness to expect anything to come of the horseless carriage movement." Six years later the one-millionth Ford rolled off an assembly line. And then there was the great Rutherford, himself, the discoverer of the atom, who said in 1933 that the energy in the atom's nucleus would never be released. Nine years later: the first chain reaction.

Again and again the human brain – including the first class scientific brain – has blinded itself to the novel possibilities of the future, has narrowed its field of concern to gain momentary reassurance, only to be rudely shaken by the accelerative thrust.

This is not to imply that all the scientific or technological advances so far discussed will necessarily materialize. Still less does it imply that they will all occur between now and the turn of the century. Some will, no doubt, die a-borning. Some may represent blind alleys. Others will succeed in the lab, but turn out to be impractical for one reason or another. Yet all this is unimportant. For even if none of these developments occur, others, perhaps even more unsettling, will.

We have scarcely touched on the computer revolution and the far-ramifying changes that must follow in its churning wake. We have barely mentioned the implications of the thrust into outer space, an adventure that could, before the new millennium arrives, change all our lives and attitudes in radical and as yet unpredicted ways. (What would happen if an astronaut or space vehicle returned to earth contaminated with some fast-multiplying, deathdealing microorganism?) We have said nothing about the laser, the holograph, the powerful new instruments of personal and mass communication, the new technologies of crime and espionage, new forms of transport and construction, the developing horror of chemical and bacteriological warfare techniques, the radiant promise of solar energy, the coming discovery of life in a test tube, the startling new tools and techniques for education, and an endless list of other fields in which high-impact changes lie just ahead.

In the coming decades, advances in all these fields will fire off like a series of rockets carrying us out of the past, plunging us deeper into the new society. Nor will this new society quickly settle into a steady state. It, too, will quiver and crack and roar as it suffers jolt after jolt of high-energy change. For the individual who wishes to live in his time, to be a part of the future, the super-industrial revolution offers no surcease from change. It offers no return to the familiar past. It offers only the highly combustible mixture of transience and novelty.

This massive injection of speed and novelty into the fabric of society will force us not merely to cope more rapidly with familiar situations, events and moral dilemmas, but to cope at a progressively faster rate with situations that are, for us, decidedly unfamiliar, "first-time" situations, strange, irregular, unpredictable.

This will significantly alter the balance that prevails in any society between the familiar and unfamiliar elements in the daily life of its people, between the routine and non-routine, the predictable and the unpredictable. The relationship between these two kinds of daily-life elements can be called the "novelty ratio" of the society, and as the level of newness or novelty rises, less and less of life appears subject to our routine forms of coping behavior. More and more, there is a growing weariness and wariness, a pall of pessimism, a decline in our sense of mastery. More and more, the environment comes to seem chaotic, beyond human control.

Thus two great social forces converge: the relentless movement toward transience is reinforced and made more potentially dangerous by a rise in the novelty ratio. Nor, as we shall next see, is this novelty to be found solely in the technological arrangements of the society-to-be. In its social arrangements, too, we can anticipate the unprecedented, the unfamiliar, the bizarre.

Chapter 10 THE EXPERIENCE MAKERS

The year 2000 is closer to us in time than the great depression, yet the world's economists, traumatized by that historic disaster, remain frozen in the attitudes of the past. Economists, even those who talk the language of revolution, are peculiarly conservative creatures. If it were possible to pry from their brains their collective image of the economy of, say, the year 2025, it would look very much like that of 1970 – only more so.

Conditioned to think in straight lines, economists have great difficulty imagining alternatives to communism and capitalism. They see in the growth of large-scale organization nothing more than a linear expansion of old-fashioned bureaucracy. They see technological advance as a simple, non-revolutionary extension of the known. Born of scarcity, trained to think in terms of limited resources, they can hardly conceive of a society in which man's basic material wants have been satisfied.

One reason for their lack of imagination is that when they think about technological advance, they concentrate solely on the means of economic activity. Yet the super-industrial revolution challenges the ends as well. It threatens to alter not merely the "how" of production but the "why." It will, in short, transform the very purposes of economic activity.

Before such an upheaval, even the most sophisticated tools of today's economists are helpless. Input-output tables, econometric models – the whole paraphernalia of analysis that economists employ simply do not come to grips with the external forces – political, social and ethical – that will transform economic life in the decades before us. What does "productivity" or "efficiency" mean in a society that places a high value on psychic fulfillment? What happens to an economy when, as is likely, the entire concept of property is reduced to meaninglessness? How are economies likely to be affected by the rise of supranational planning, taxing and regulatory agencies or by a kind of dialectical return to "cottage industry" based on the most advanced cybernetic technologies? Most important, what happens when "no growth" replaces "growth" as an economic objective, when GNP ceases to be the holy grail?

Only by stepping outside the framework of orthodox economic thought and examining these possibilities can we begin to prepare for tomorrow. And among these, none is more central than the shift in values that is likely to accompany the super-industrial revolution.

Under conditions of scarcity, men struggle to meet their immediate material needs. Today under more affluent conditions, we are reorganizing the economy to deal with a new level of human needs. From a system designed to provide material satisfaction, we are rapidly creating an economy geared to the provision of psychic gratification. This process of "psychologization," one of the central themes of the super-industrial revolution, has been all but overlooked by the economists. Yet it will result in a novel, surprise-filled economy unlike any man has ever experienced. The issues raised by it will reduce the great conflict of the twentieth century, the conflict between capitalism and communism, to comparative insignificance. For these issues sweep far beyond economic or political dogma. They involve, as we shall see, nothing less than sanity, the human organism's ability to distinguish illusion from reality.

Much excitement has accompanied the discovery that once a techno-society reaches a certain stage of industrial development, it begins to shift energies into the production of services, as distinct from goods. Many experts see in the services the wave of the future. They suggest that manufacturing will soon be outstripped by service activity in all the industrial nations – a prophecy already on its way toward fulfillment.

What the economists, however, have not done, is to ask the obvious question. Where does the economy go next? After the services, what?

The high technology nations must, in coming years, direct vast resources to rehabilitating their physical environment and improving what has come to be called "the quality of life." The fight against pollution, aesthetic blight, crowding, noise and dirt will clearly absorb tremendous energies. But, in addition to the provision of these public goods, we can also anticipate a subtle change in the character of production for private use.

The very excitement aroused by the mushrooming growth of the service sector has diverted professional attention from another shift that will deeply affect both goods and services in the future. It is this shift that will lead to the next forward movement of the economy, the growth of a strange new sector based on what can only be called the "experience industries." For the key to the post-service economy lies in the psychologization of all production, beginning with manufacture.

One of the curious facts about production in all the techno-societies today, and especially the United States, is that goods are increasingly designed to yield psychological "extras" for the consumer. The manufacturer adds a "psychic load" to his basic product, and the consumer gladly pays for this intangible benefit.

A classic example is the case of the appliance or auto manufacturer who adds buttons, knobs or dials to the control panel or dashboard, even when these have seemingly no significance. The manufacturer has learned that increasing the number of gadgets, up to a point, gives the operator of the machine the sense of controlling a more complex device, and hence a feeling of increased mastery. This psychological payoff is designed into the product.

Conversely, pains are taken not to deprive the consumer of an existing psychological benefit. Thus a large American food company proudly launched a labor-saving, add-wateronly cake mix. The company was amazed when women rejected the product in favor of mixes that require extra labor – the addition of an egg along with the water. By inserting powdered egg in the factory, the company had oversimplified the task of the housewife, depriving her of the sense of creatively participating in the cake-baking process. The powdered egg was hastily eliminated, and women went happily back to cracking their own eggs. Once again a product was modified to provide a psychic benefit.

Examples like these can be multiplied endlessly in almost any major industry, from soap and cigarettes to dishwashers and diet colas. According to Dr. Emanuel Demby, president of Motivational Programmers, Incorporated, a research firm employed in the United States and Europe by such blue-chip corporations as General Electric, Caltex and IBM, "The engineering of psychological factors into manufactured goods will be a hallmark of production in the future – not only in consumer goods, but in industrial hardware.

"Even the big cranes and derricks built today embody this principle. Their cabs are streamlined, slick, like something out of the twenty-first century. Caterpillar, International Harvester, Ferguson – all of them. Why? These mechanical monsters don't dig better or hoist better because the cab is aesthetically improved. But the contractor who buys them likes it better. The men who work on them like it better. The contractor's customers like it better. So even the manufacturers of earthmoving equipment begin to pay attention to non-utilitarian – i.e., psychological – factors."

Beyond this, Demby asserts, manufacturers are devoting more attention to reducing tensions that accompany the use of certain products. Manufacturers of sanitary napkins, for example, know that women have a fear of stopping up the toilet when disposing of them. "A new product has been developed," he says, "that instantly dissolves on contact with water. It doesn't perform its basic function any better. But it relieves some of the anxiety that went with it. This is psychological engineering if ever there was any!"

Affluent consumers are willing and able to pay for such niceties. As disposable income rises, they become progressively less concerned with price, progressively more insistent on what they call "quality." For many products quality can still be measured in the traditional terms of workmanship, durability and materials. But for a fast-growing class of products, such differences are virtually undetectable. Blindfolded, the consumer cannot distinguish Brand A from Brand B. Nevertheless, she often argues fiercely that one is superior to another.

This paradox vanishes once the psychic component of production is taken into account. For even when they are otherwise identical, there are likely to be marked psychological differences between one product and another. Advertisers strive to stamp each product with its own distinct image. These images are functional: they fill a need on the part of the consumer. The need is psychological, however, rather than utilitarian in the ordinary sense. Thus we find that the term "quality" increasingly refers to the ambience, the status associations – in effect, the psychological connotations of the product.

As more and more of the basic material needs of the consumer are met, it is strongly predictable that even more economic energy will be directed at meeting the consumer's subtle, varied and quite personal needs for beauty, prestige, individuation, and sensory delight. The manufacturing sector will channel ever greater resources into the conscious design of psychological distinctions and gratifications. The psychic component of goods production will assume increasing importance.

This, however, is only the first step toward the psychologization of the economy. The next step will be the expansion of the psychic component of the services.

Here, again, we are already moving in the predictable direction, as a glance at air travel demonstrates. Once flying was simply a matter of getting from here to there. Before long, the airlines began to compete on the basis of pretty stewardesses, food, luxurious surroundings, and in-flight movies. Trans-World Airlines recently carried this process one step further by offering what it called "foreign accent" flights between major American cities.

The TWA passenger may now choose a jet on which the food, the music, the magazines, the movies, and the stewardess' miniskirt are all French. He may choose a "Roman" flight on which the girls wear togas. He may opt for a "Manhattan Penthouse" flight. Or he may select the "Olde English" flight on which the girls are called "serving wenches" and the decor supposedly suggests that of an English pub.

It is clear that TWA is no longer selling transportation, as such, but a carefully designed psychological package as well. We can expect the airlines before long to make use of lights and multi-media projections to create total, but temporary, environments providing the passenger with something approaching a theatrical experience.

The experience may, in fact, soon go beyond theater. British Overseas Airways Corporation recently pointed a wavering finger at the future when it announced a plan to provide unmarried American male passengers with "scientifically chosen" blind dates in London. In the event the computer-selected date failed to show up, an alternate would be provided. Moreover, a party would be arranged to which "several additional Londoners of both sexes of varying ages" would be invited so that the traveler, who would also be given a tour of discotheques and restaurants, would under no circumstances be alone. The program, called "The Beautiful Singles of London," was abruptly called off when the governmentowned airline came under Parliamentary criticism. Nevertheless, we can anticipate further colorful attempts to paint a psychic coating on many consumer service fields, including retailing.

Anyone who has strolled through Newport Center, an incredibly lavish new shopping plaza in Newport Beach, California, cannot fail to be impressed by the attention paid by its designers to aesthetic and psychological factors. Tall white arches and columns outlined against a blue sky, fountains, statues, carefully planned illumination, a pop art playground, and an enormous Japanese wind-bell are all used to create a mood of casual elegance for the shopper. It is not merely the affluence of the surroundings, but their programmed pleasantness that makes shopping there a quite memorable experience. One can anticipate fantastic variations and elaborations of the same principles in the planning of retail stores in the future. We shall go far beyond any "functional" necessity, turning the service, whether it is shopping, dining, or having one's hair cut, into a pre-fabricated experience. We shall watch movies or listen to chamber music as we have our hair cut, and the mechanical bowl that fits over the skull of a woman in the beauty parlor will do more than simply dry her hair. By directing electronic waves to her brain, it may, quite literally, tickle her fancy.

Bankers and brokers, real estate and insurance companies will employ the most carefully chosen decor, music, closed circuit color television, engineered tastes and smells, along with the most advanced mixed-media equipment to heighten (or neutralize) the psychological charge that accompanies even the most routine transaction. No important service will be offered to the consumer before it has been analyzed by teams of behavioral engineers to improve its psychic loading.

Reaching beyond these simple elaborations of the present, we shall also witness a revolutionary expansion of certain industries whose sole output consists not of manufactured goods, nor even of ordinary services, but of pre-programmed "experiences." The experience industry could turn out to be one of the pillars of super-industrialism, the very foundation, in fact, of the post-service economy.

As rising affluence and transience ruthlessly undercut the old urge to possess, consumers begin to collect experiences as consciously and passionately as they once collected things. Today, as the airline example suggests, experiences are sold as an adjunct to some more traditional service. The experience is, so to speak, the frosting on the cake. As we advance into the future, however, more and more experiences will be sold strictly on their own merits, exactly as if they were things.

Precisely this is beginning to happen, in fact. This accounts for the high growth rate visible in certain industries that have always been, at least partly, engaged in the production of experiences for their own sake. The arts are a good example. Much of the "culture industry" is devoted to the creation or staging of specialized psychological experiences. Today we find art-based "experience industries" booming in virtually all the techno-societies. The same is true of recreation, mass entertainment, education, and certain psychiatric services, all of which participate in what might be called experiential production.

When Club Méditerranée sells a package holiday that takes a young French secretary to Tahiti or Israel for a week or two of sun and sex, it is manufacturing an experience for her quite as carefully and systematically as Renault manufactures cars. Its advertisements underscore the point. Thus a two-page spread in The New York Times Magazine begins with the headline: "Take 300 men and women. Strand them on an exotic island. And strip them of every social pressure." Based in France, Club Méditerranée now operates thirty-four vacation "villages" all over the world.

Similarly, when the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, offers weekend seminars in "body-awareness" and "non-verbal communication," at seventy dollars per person, or fiveday workshops at $180, it promises not simply to teach, but to plunge its affluent customers into "joyous" new interpersonal experiences – a phrase some readers take to mean adventures with sex or LSD. Group therapy and sensitivity training sessions are packaged experiences. So are certain classes. Thus, going to an Arthur Murray or Fred Astaire studio to learn the latest dance step may provide the student with a skill that will bring enjoyment in the future, but it also provides a pleasurable here-and-now experience for the lonely bachelor or spinster. The learning experience, itself, is a major attraction for the customer.

All these, however, provide only the palest clue as to the nature of the experience industry of the future and the great psychological corporations, or psych-corps, that will dominate it.

One important class of experiential products will be based on simulated environments that offer the customer a taste of adventure, danger, sexual titillation or other pleasure without risk to his real life or reputation. Thus computer experts, roboteers, designers, historians, and museum specialists will join to create experiential enclaves that reproduce, as skillfully as sophisticated technology will permit, the splendor of ancient Rome, the pomp of Queen Elizabeth's court, the "sexoticism" of an eighteenth-century Japanese geisha house, and the like. Customers entering these pleasure domes will leave their everyday clothes (and cares) behind, don costumes, and run through a planned sequence of activities intended to provide them with a first-hand taste of what the original – i.e., unsimulated – reality must have felt like. They will be invited, in effect, to live in the past or perhaps even in the future.

Production of such experiences is closer than one might think. It is clearly foreshadowed in the participatory techniques now being pioneered in the arts. Thus "happenings" in which the members of the audience take part may be regarded as a first stumbling step toward these simulations of the future. The same is true of more formal works as well. When Dionysus in 69 was performed in New York, a critic summed up the theories of its playwright, Richard Schechner, in the following words. "Theater has traditionally said to an audience, 'Sit down and I'll tell you a story.' Why can't it also say, 'Stand up and we'll play a game?'" Schechner's work, based loosely on Euripides, says precisely this, and the audience is literally invited to join in dancing to celebrate the rites of Dionysus.

Artists also have begun to create whole "environments" – works of art into which the audience may actually walk, and inside which things happen. In Sweden the Moderna Museet has exhibited an immense papier-mâché lady called "Hon" ("She"), into whose innards the audience entered via a vaginal portal. Once inside, there were ramps, stairways, flashing lights, odd sounds, and something called a "bottle smashing machine." Dozens of museums and galleries around the United States and Europe now display such "environments." Time magazine's art critic suggests that their intention is to bombard the spectator with "wacky sights, weirdo sounds and otherworldly sensations, ranging from the feeling of weightlessness to hopped-up, psychedelic hallucinations." The artists who produce these are really "experiential engineers."

In a deceptively shabby storefront on a Lower Manhattan street lined with factories and warehouses, I visited Cerebrum, an "electronic studio of participation" where, for an hourly fee, guests are admitted into a startling white, high-ceilinged room. There they strip off their clothing, don semi-transparent robes, and sprawl comfortably on richly padded white platforms. Attractive male and female "guides," similarly nude under their veils, offer each guest a stereophonic headset, a see-through mask, and, from time to time, balloons, kaleidoscopes, tambourines, plastic pillows, mirrors, pieces of crystal, marshmallows, slides and slide projectors. Folk and rock music, interspersed with snatches of television commercials, street noises and a lecture by or about Marshall McLuhan fill the ears. As the music grows more excited, guests and guides begin to dance on the platforms and the carpeted white walkways that connect them. Bubbles drift down from machines in the ceiling. Hostesses float through, spraying a variety of fragrances into the air. Lights change color and random images wrap themselves around the walls, guests and guides. The mood shifts from cool at first to warm, friendly, and mildly erotic.

Still primitive both artistically and technologically, Cerebrum is a pale forerunner of the "$25,000,000 'super' Environmental Entertainment Complex" its builders enthusiastically talk of creating some day. Whatever their artistic merit, experiments such as these point to far more sophisticated enclave-building in the future. Today's young artists and environmental entrepreneurs are performing research and development for the psych-corps of tomorrow.

Knowledge gained for this research will permit the construction of fantastic simulations. But it will also lead to complex live environments that subject the customer to significant risks and rewards. The African safari today is a colorless example. Future experience designers will, for example, create gambling casinos in which the customer plays not for money, but for experiential payoffs – a date with a lovely and willing lady if he wins, perhaps a day in solitary confinement if he loses. As the stakes rise, more imaginative payoffs and punishments will be designed.

A loser may have to serve (by voluntary pre-agreement) as a "slave" to a winner for several days. A winner may be rewarded by ten free minutes of electronic pleasure-probing of his brain. A player may risk flogging or its psychological equivalent – participation in a day-long session during which winners are permitted to work off their aggressions and hostilities by sneering, shouting at, reviling, or otherwise attacking the ego of the loser. High rollers may play to win a free heart or lung transplant at some later date, should it prove to be necessary. Losers may have to forego a kidney. Such payoffs and punishments may be escalated in intensity and varied endlessly. Experiential designers will study the pages of Krafft-Ebing or the Marquis de Sade for ideas. Only imagination, technological capability, and the constraints of a generally relaxed morality limit the possibilities. Experiential gambling cities will rise to overshadow Las Vegas or Deauville, combining in a single place some of the features of Disneyland, the World's Fair, Cape Kennedy, the Mayo Clinic, and the honky-tonks of Macao. (For a brilliant and provocative insight into experiential gambling and its philosophical implications, see "The Lottery in Babylon," by Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian philosopher-essayist. This short work is found in Borges' collection entitled Labyrinths.)

Once again, present-day developments foreshadow the future. Thus certain American television programs, such as The Dating Game, already pay players off in experiential rewards, as does the contest recently discussed in the Swedish Parliament. In this contest, a pornographic magazine awarded one of its readers a week in Majorca with one of its "topless" models. A Conservative M.P. challenged the propriety of such goings-on. Presumably, he felt better when he was assured by the Finance Minister, Gunnar Sträng, that the transaction was taxable.

Simulated and non-simulated experiences will also be combined in ways that will sharply challenge man's grasp of reality. In Ray Bradbury's vivid novel, Fahrenheit 451, suburban couples desperately save their money to enable them to buy three-wall or four-wall video sets that permit them to enter into a kind of televised psycho-drama. They become actor-participants in soap operas that continue for weeks or months. Their participation in these stories is highly involving. We are, in fact, beginning to move toward the actual development of such "interactive" films with the help of advanced communications technology. The combination of simulations and "reals" will vastly multiply the number and variety of experiential products.

But the great psych-corps of tomorrow will not only sell individual, discrete experiences. They will offer sequences of experiences so organized that their very juxtaposition with one another will contribute color, harmony or contrast to lives that lack these qualities. Beauty, excitement, danger or delicious sensuality will be programmed to enhance one another. By offering such experiential chains or sequences, the psych-corps (working closely, no doubt, with community mental health centers) will provide partial frameworks for those whose lives are otherwise too chaotic and unstructured. In effect, they will say: "Let us plan (part of) your life for you." In the transient, change-filled world of tomorrow, that proposition will find many eager takers.

The packaged experiences offered in the future will reach far beyond the imagination of the average consumer, filling the environment with endless novelties. Companies will vie with one another to create the most outlandish, most gratifying experiences. Indeed, some of these experiences – as in the case of topless Swedish models – will even reach beyond tomorrow's broadened boundaries of social acceptability. They may be offered to the public covertly by unlicensed, underground psych-corps. This will simply add the thrill of "illicitude" to the experience itself.

(One very old experiential industry has traditionally operated covertly: prostitution. Many other illegal activities also fit within the experience industry. For the most part, however, all these reveal a paucity of imagination and a lack of technical resources that will be remedied in the future. They are trivial compared with the possibilities in a society that will, by the year 2000 or sooner, be armed with robots, advanced computers, personalityaltering drugs, brain-stimulating pleasure probes, and similar technological goodies.)

The diversity of novel experiences arrayed before the consumer will be the work of experience-designers, who will be drawn from the ranks of the most creative people in the society. The working motto of this profession will be: "If you can't serve it up real, find a vicarious substitute. If you're good, the customer will never know the difference!" This implied blurring of the line between the real and the unreal will confront the society with serious problems, but it will not prevent or even slow the emergence of the "psyche-service industries" and "psych-corps." Great globe-girdling syndicates will create super-Disneylands of a variety, scale, scope, and emotional power that is hard for us to imagine.

We can thus sketch the dim outlines of the super-industrial economy, the post-service economy of the future. Agriculture and the manufacture of goods will have become economic backwaters, employing fewer and fewer people. Highly automated, the making and growing of goods will be relatively simple. The design of new goods and the process of coating them with stronger, brighter, more emotion-packed psychological connotations, however, will challenge the ingenuity of tomorrow's best and most resourceful entrepreneurs.

The service sector, as defined today, will be vastly enlarged, and once more the design of psychological rewards will occupy a growing percentage of corporate time, energy and money. Investment services, such as mutual funds, for example, may introduce elements of experiential gambling to provide both additional excitement and non-economic payoffs to their shareholders. Insurance companies may offer not merely to pay death benefits, but to care for the widow or widower for several months after bereavement, providing nurses, psychological counseling and other assistance. Based on banks of detailed data about their customers, they may offer a computerized mating service to help the survivor locate a new life partner. Services, in short, will be greatly elaborated. Attention will be paid to the psychological overtones of every step or component of the product.

Finally, we shall watch the irresistible growth of companies already in the experiential field, and the formation of entirely new enterprises, both profit and non-profit, to design, package and distribute planned or programmed experiences. The arts will expand, becoming as Ruskin or Morris might have said, the handmaiden of industry. Psych-corps and other businesses will employ actors, directors, musicians and designers in large numbers. Recreational industries will grow, as the whole nature of leisure is redefined in experiential terms. Education, already exploding in size, will become one of the key experience industries as it begins to employ experiential techniques to convey both knowledge and values to students. The communications and computer industries will find in experiential production a major market for their machines and for their soft-ware as well. In short, those industries that in one way or another associate themselves with behavioral technology, those industries that transcend the production of tangible goods and traditional services, will expand most rapidly. Eventually, the experience-makers will form a basic – if not the basic – sector of the economy. The process of psychologization will be complete.

The essence of tomorrow's economy, declares the Stanford Research Institute in a report by its Long Range Planning Service, will be an "emphasis upon the inner as well as the material needs of individuals and groups." This new emphasis, SRI suggests, will arise not merely from the demands of the consumer, but from the very need of the economy to survive. "In a nation where all essential material needs can be filled by perhaps no more than three-fourths or even half of the productive capacity, a basic adjustment is required to keep the economy healthy."

It is this convergence of pressures – from the consumer and from those who wish to keep the economy growing – that will propel the techno-societies toward the experiential production of the future.

The movement in this direction can be delayed. The poverty-stricken masses of the world may not stand idly by as the world's favored few traverse the path toward psychological self-indulgence. There is something morally repellent about one group seeking to gratify itself psychologically, pursuing novel and rarified pleasures, while the majority of mankind lives in wretchedness or starvation. The techno-societies could defer the arrival of experientialism, could maintain a more conventional economy for a time by maximizing traditional production, shifting resources to environmental quality control, and then launching absolutely massive anti-poverty and foreign aid programs.

By creaming off "excess" productivity and, in effect, giving it away, the factories can be kept running, the agricultural surpluses used up, and the society can continue to focus on the satisfaction of material wants. A fifty-year campaign to erase hunger from the world, for example, would not only make excellent moral sense, but would buy the techno-societies badly needed time for an easier transition to the economy of the future.

Such a pause might give us time to contemplate the philosophical and psychological impact of experiential production. If consumers can no longer distinguish clearly between the real and the simulated, if whole stretches of one's life may be commercially programmed, we enter into a set of psycho-economic problems of breathtaking complexity. These problems challenge our most fundamental beliefs, not merely about democracy or economics, but about the very nature of rationality and sanity.

One of the great unasked questions of our time has to do with the balance between vicarious and non-vicarious experience in our lives. No previous generation has been exposed to one-tenth the amount of vicarious experiences that we lavish on ourselves and our children today, and no one, anywhere, has any real idea about the impact of this monumental shift on personality. Our children mature physically more rapidly than we did. The age of first menstruation continues to drop four to six months every decade. The population grows taller sooner. It is clear that many of our young people, products of television and instant access to oceans of information, also become precocious intellectually. But what happens to emotional development as the ratio of vicarious experience to "real" experience rises? Does the step-up of vicariousness contribute to emotional maturity? Or does it, in fact, retard it?

And what, then, happens when an economy in search of a new purpose, seriously begins to enter into the production of experiences for their own sake, experiences that blur the distinction between the vicarious and the non-vicarious, the simulated and the real? One of the definitions of sanity, itself, is the ability to tell real from unreal. Shall we need a new definition?

We must begin to reflect on these problems, for unless we do – and perhaps even if we do – service will in the end triumph over manufacture, and experiential production over service. The growth of the experiential sector might just be an inevitable consequence of affluence. For the satisfaction of man's elemental material needs opens the way for new, more sophisticated gratifications. We are moving from a "gut" economy to a "psyche" economy because there is only so much gut to be satisfied.

Beyond this, we are also moving swiftly in the direction of a society in which objects, things, physical constructs, are increasingly transient. Not merely man's relationships with them, but the very things themselves. It may be that experiences are the only products which, once bought by the consumer, cannot be taken away from him, cannot be disposed of like non-returnable soda pop bottles or nicked razor blades.

For the ancient Japanese nobility every flower, every serving bowl or obi, was freighted with surplus meaning; each carried a heavy load of coded symbolism and ritual significance. The movement toward the psychologization of manufactured goods takes us in this direction; but it collides with the powerful thrust toward transience that makes the objects themselves so perishable. Thus we shall find it easier to adorn our services with symbolic significance than our products. And, in the end, we shall pass beyond the service economy, beyond the imagination of today's economists; we shall become the first culture in history to employ high technology to manufacture that most transient, yet lasting of products: the human experience.

Chapter 11 THE FRACTURED FAMILY

The flood of novelty about to crash down upon us will spread from universities and research centers to factories and offices, from the marketplace and mass media into our social relationships, from the community into the home. Penetrating deep into our private lives, it will place absolutely unprecedented strains on the family itself.

The family has been called the "giant shock absorber" of society – the place to which the bruised and battered individual returns after doing battle with the world, the one stable point in an increasingly flux-filled environment. As the super-industrial revolution unfolds, this "shock absorber" will come in for some shocks of its own.

Social critics have a field day speculating about the family. The family is "near the point of complete extinction," says Ferdinand Lundberg, author of The Coming World Transformation. "The family is dead except for the first year or two of child raising," according to psychoanalyst William Wolf. "This will be its only function." Pessimists tell us the family is racing toward oblivion – but seldom tell us what will take its place.

Family optimists, in contrast, contend that the family, having existed all this time, will continue to exist. Some go so far as to argue that the family is in for a Golden Age. As leisure spreads, they theorize, families will spend more time together and will derive great satisfaction from joint activity. "The family that plays together, stays together," etc.

A more sophisticated view holds that the very turbulence of tomorrow will drive people deeper into their families. "People will marry for stable structure," says Dr. Irwin M. Greenberg, Professor of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. According to this view, the family serves as one's "portable roots," anchoring one against the storm of change. In short, the more transient and novel the environment, the more important the family will become.

It may be that both sides in this debate are wrong. For the future is more open than it might appear. The family may neither vanish nor enter upon a new Golden Age. It may – and this is far more likely – break up, shatter, only to come together again in weird and novel ways.

The most obviously upsetting force likely to strike the family in the decades immediately ahead will be the impact of the new birth technology. The ability to pre-set the sex of one's baby, or even to "program" its IQ, looks and personality traits, must now be regarded as a real possibility. Embryo implants, babies grown in vitro, the ability to swallow a pill and guarantee oneself twins or triplets or, even more, the ability to walk into a "babytorium" and actually purchase embryos – all this reaches so far beyond any previous human experience that one needs to look at the future through the eyes of the poet or painter, rather than those of the sociologist or conventional philosopher.

It is regarded as somehow unscholarly, even frivolous, to discuss these matters. Yet advances in science and technology, or in reproductive biology alone, could, within a short time, smash all orthodox ideas about the family and its responsibilities. When babies can be grown in a laboratory jar what happens to the very notion of maternity? And what happens to the self-image of the female in societies which, since the very beginnings of man, have taught her that her primary mission is the propagation of and nurture of the race?

Few social scientists have begun as yet to concern themselves with such questions. One who has is psychiatrist Hyman G. Weitzen, director of Neuropsychiatric Service at Polyclinic Hospital in New York. The cycle of birth, Dr. Weitzen suggests, "fulfills for most women a major creative need ... Most women are proud of their ability to bear children ... The special aura that glorifies the pregnant woman has figured largely in the art and literature of both East and West."

What happens to the cult of motherhood, Weitzen asks, if "her offspring might literally not be hers, but that of a genetically 'superior' ovum, implanted in her womb from another woman, or even grown in a Petri dish?" If women are to be important at all, he suggests, it will no longer be because they alone can bear children. If nothing else, we are about to kill off the mystique of motherhood.

Not merely motherhood, but the concept of parenthood itself may be in for radical revision. Indeed, the day may soon dawn when it is possible for a child to have more than two biological parents. Dr. Beatrice Mintz, a developmental biologist at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia, has grown what are coming to be known as "multi-mice" – baby mice each of which has more than the usual number of parents. Embryos are taken from each of two pregnant mice. These embryos are placed in a laboratory dish and nurtured until they form a single growing mass. This is then implanted in the womb of a third female mouse. A baby is born that clearly shares the genetic characteristics of both sets of donors. Thus a typical multi-mouse, born of two pairs of parents, has white fur and whiskers on one side of its face, dark fur and whiskers on the other, with alternating bands of white and dark hair covering the rest of the body. Some 700 multi-mice bred in this fashion have already produced more than 35,000 offspring themselves. If multi-mouse is here, can "multi-man" be far behind?

Under such circumstances, what or who is a parent? When a woman bears in her uterus an embryo conceived in another woman's womb, who is the mother? And just exactly who is the father?

If a couple can actually purchase an embryo, then parenthood becomes a legal, not a biological matter. Unless such transactions are tightly controlled, one can imagine such grotesqueries as a couple buying an embryo, raising it in vitro, then buying another in the name of the first, as though for a trust fund. In that case, they might be regarded as legal "grandparents" before their first child is out of its infancy. We shall need a whole new vocabulary to describe kinship ties.

Furthermore, if embryos are for sale, can a corporation buy one? Can it buy ten thousand? Can it resell them? And if not a corporation, how about a noncommercial research laboratory? If we buy and sell living embryos, are we back to a new form of slavery? Such are the nightmarish questions soon to be debated by us. To continue to think of the family, therefore, in purely conventional terms is to defy all reason.

Faced by rapid social change and the staggering implications of the scientific revolution, super-industrial man may be forced to experiment with novel family forms. Innovative minorities can be expected to try out a colorful variety of family arrangements. They will begin by tinkering with existing forms.

One simple thing they will do is streamline the family. The typical pre-industrial family not only had a good many children, but numerous other dependents as well – grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Such "extended" families were well suited for survival in slowpaced agricultural societies. But such families are hard to transport or transplant. They are immobile.

Industrialism demanded masses of workers ready and able to move off the land in pursuit of jobs, and to move again whenever necessary. Thus the extended family gradually shed its excess weight and the so-called "nuclear" family emerged – a stripped-down, portable family unit consisting only of parents and a small set of children. This new style family, far more mobile than the traditional extended family, became the standard model in all the industrial countries.

Super-industrialism, however, the next stage of eco-technological development, requires even higher mobility. Thus we may expect many among the people of the future to carry the streamlining process a step further by remaining childless, cutting the family down to its most elemental components, a man and a woman. Two people, perhaps with matched careers, will prove more efficient at navigating through education and social shoals, through job changes and geographic relocations, than the ordinary child-cluttered family. Indeed, anthropologist Margaret Mead has pointed out that we may already be moving toward a system under which, as she puts it, "parenthood would be limited to a smaller number of families whose principal functions would be childrearing," leaving the rest of the population "free to function – for the first time in history – as individuals."

A compromise may be the postponement of children, rather than childlessness. Men and women today are often torn in conflict between a commitment to career and a commitment to children. In the future, many couples will sidestep this problem by deferring the entire task of raising children until after retirement.

This may strike people of the present as odd. Yet once childbearing is broken away from its biological base, nothing more than tradition suggests having children at an early age. Why not wait, and buy your embryos later, after your work career is over? Thus childlessness is likely to spread among young and middle-aged couples; sexagenarians who raise infants may be far more common. The post-retirement family could become a recognized social institution.

If a smaller number of families raise children, however, why do the children have to be their own? Why not a system under which "professional parents" take on the childrearing function for others?

Raising children, after all, requires skills that are by no means universal. We don't let "just anyone" perform brain surgery or, for that matter, sell stocks and bonds. Even the lowest ranking civil servant is required to pass tests proving competence. Yet we allow virtually anyone, almost without regard for mental or moral qualification, to try his or her hand at raising young human beings, so long as these humans are biological offspring. Despite the increasing complexity of the task, parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.

As the present system cracks and the super-industrial revolution rolls over us, as the armies of juvenile delinquents swell, as hundreds of thousands of youngsters flee their homes, and students rampage at universities in all the techno-societies, we can expect vociferous demands for an end to parental dilettantism.

There are far better ways to cope with the problems of youth, but professional parenthood is certain to be proposed, if only because it fits so perfectly with the society's overall push toward specialization. Moreover, there is a powerful, pent-up demand for this social innovation. Even now millions of parents, given the opportunity, would happily relinquish their parental responsibilities – and not necessarily through irresponsibility or lack of love. Harried, frenzied, up against the wall, they have come to see themselves as inadequate to the tasks. Given affluence and the existence of specially-equipped and licensed professional parents, many of today's biological parents would not only gladly surrender their children to them, but would look upon it as an act of love, rather than rejection.

Parental professionals would not be therapists, but actual family units assigned to, and well paid for, rearing children. Such families might be multi-generational by design, offering children in them an opportunity to observe and learn from a variety of adult models, as was the case in the old farm homestead. With the adults paid to be professional parents, they would be freed of the occupational necessity to relocate repeatedly. Such families would take in new children as old ones "graduate" so that age-segregation would be minimized.

Thus newspapers of the future might well carry advertisements addressed to young married couples: "Why let parenthood tie you down? Let us raise your infant into a responsible, successful adult. Class A Pro-family offers: father age 39, mother, 36, grandmother, 67. Uncle and aunt, age 30, live in, hold part-time local employment. Fourchild-unit has opening for one, age 6 – 8. Regulated diet exceeds government standards. All adults certified in child development and management. Bio-parents permitted frequent visits. Telephone contact allowed. Child may spend summer vacation with bio-parents. Religion, art, music encouraged by special arrangement. Five year contract, minimum. Write for further details."

The "real" or "bio-parents" could, as the ad suggests, fill the role presently played by interested godparents, namely that of friendly and helpful outsiders. In such a way, the society could continue to breed a wide diversity of genetic types, yet turn the care of children over to mother-father groups who are equipped, both intellectually and emotionally, for the task of caring for kids.

Quite a different alternative lies in the communal family. As transience increases the loneliness and alienation in society, we can anticipate increasing experimentation with various forms of group marriage. The banding together of several adults and children into a single "family" provides a kind of insurance against isolation. Even if one or two members of the household leave, the remaining members have one another. Communes are springing up modeled after those described by psychologist B. F. Skinner in Walden Two and by novelist Robert Rimmer in The Harrad Experiment and Proposition 31. In the latter work, Rimmer seriously proposes the legalization of a "corporate family" in which from three to six adults adopt a single name, live and raise children in common, and legally incorporate to obtain certain economic and tax advantages.

According to some observers, there are already hundreds of open or covert communes dotting the American map. Not all, by any means, are composed of young people or hippies. Some are organized around specific goals – like the group, quietly financed by three East Coast colleges – which has taken as its function the task of counseling college freshmen, helping to orient them to campus life. The goals may be social, religious, political, even recreational. Thus we shall before long begin to see communal families of surfers dotting the beaches of California and Southern France, if they don't already. We shall see the emergence of communes based on political doctrines and religious faiths. In Denmark, a bill to legalize group marriage has already been introduced in the Folketing (Parliament). While passage is not imminent, the act of introduction is itself a significant symbol of change.

In Chicago, 250 adults and children already live together in "family-style monasticism" under the auspices of a new, fast-growing religious organization, the Ecumenical Institute. Members share the same quarters, cook and eat together, worship and tend children in common, and pool their incomes. At least 60,000 people have taken "EI" courses and similar communes have begun to spring up in Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles and other cities. "A brand-new world is emerging," says Professor Joseph W. Mathews, leader of the Ecumenical Institute, "but people are still operating in terms of the old one. We seek to re-educate people and give them the tools to build a new social context."

Still another type of family unit likely to win adherents in the future might be called the "geriatric commune" – a group marriage of elderly people drawn together in a common search for companionship and assistance. Disengaged from the productive economy that makes mobility necessary, they will settle in a single place, band together, pool funds, collectively hire domestic or nursing help, and proceed – within limits – to have the "time of their lives."

Communalism runs counter to the pressure for ever greater geographical and social mobility generated by the thrust toward super-industrialism. It presupposes groups of people who "stay put." For this reason, communal experiments will first proliferate among those in the society who are free from the industrial discipline – the retired population, the young, the dropouts, the students, as well as among self-employed professional and technical people. Later, when advanced technology and information systems make it possible for much of the work of society to be done at home via computer-telecommunication hookups, communalism will become feasible for larger numbers.

We shall, however, also see many more "family" units consisting of a single unmarried adult and one or more children. Nor will all of these adults be women. It is already possible in some places for unmarried men to adopt children. In 1965 in Oregon, for example, a thirtyeight-year-old musician named Tony Piazza became the first unmarried man in that state, and perhaps in the United States, to be granted the right to adopt a baby. Courts are more readily granting custody to divorced fathers, too. In London, photographer Michael Cooper, married at twenty and divorced soon after, won the right to raise his infant son, and expressed an interest in adopting other children. Observing that he did not particularly wish to remarry, but that he liked children, Cooper mused aloud: "I wish you could just ask beautiful women to have babies for you. Or any woman you liked, or who had something you admired. Ideally, I'd like a big house full of children – all different colors, shapes and sizes." Romantic? Unmanly? Perhaps. Yet attitudes like these will be widely held by men in the future.

Two pressures are even now softening up the culture, preparing it for acceptance of the idea of childrearing by men. First, adoptable children are in oversupply in some places. Thus, in California, disc jockeys blare commercials: "We have many wonderful babies of all races and nationalities waiting to bring love and happiness to the right families ... Call the Los Angeles County Bureau of Adoption." At the same time, the mass media, in a strange nonconspiratorial fashion, appear to have decided simultaneously that men who raise children hold special interest for the public. Extremely popular television shows in recent seasons have glamorized womanless households in which men scrub floors, cook, and, most significantly, raise children. My Three Sons, The Rifleman, Bonanza and Bachelor Father are four examples.

As homosexuality becomes more socially acceptable, we may even begin to find families based on homosexual "marriages" with the partners adopting children. Whether these children would be of the same or opposite sex remains to be seen. But the rapidity with which homosexuality is winning respectability in the techno-societies distinctly points in this direction. In Holland not long ago a Catholic priest "married" two homosexuals, explaining to critics that "they are among the faithful to be helped." England has rewritten its relevant legislation; homosexual relations between consenting adults are no longer considered a crime. And in the United States a meeting of Episcopal clergymen concluded publicly that homosexuality might, under certain circumstances, be adjudged "good." The day may also come when a court decides that a couple of stable, well educated homosexuals might make decent "parents."

We might also see the gradual relaxation of bars against polygamy. Polygamous families exist even now, more widely than generally believed, in the midst of "normal" society. Writer Ben Merson, after visiting several such families in Utah where polygamy is still regarded as essential by certain Mormon fundamentalists, estimated that there are some 30,000 people living in underground family units of this type in the United States. As sexual attitudes loosen up, as property rights become less important because of rising affluence, the social repression of polygamy may come to be regarded as irrational. This shift may be facilitated by the very mobility that compels men to spend considerable time away from their present homes. The old male fantasy of the Captain's Paradise may become a reality for some, although it is likely that, under such circumstances, the wives left behind will demand extramarital sexual rights. Yesterday's "captain" would hardly consider this possibility. Tomorrow's may feel quite differently about it.

Still another family form is even now springing up in our midst, a novel childrearing unit that I call the "aggregate family" – a family based on relationships between divorced and remarried couples, in which all the children become part of "one big family." Though sociologists have paid little attention as yet to this phenomenon, it is already so prevalent that it formed the basis for a hilarious scene in a recent American movie entitled Divorce American Style. We may expect aggregate families to take on increasing importance in the decades ahead.

Childless marriage, professional parenthood, postretirement childrearing, corporate families, communes, geriatric group marriages, homosexual family units, polygamy – these, then, are a few of the family forms and practices with which innovative minorities will experiment in the decades ahead. Not all of us, however, will be willing to participate in such experimentation. What of the majority?

Minorities experiment; majorities cling to the forms of the past. It is safe to say that large numbers of people will refuse to jettison the conventional idea of marriage or the familiar family forms. They will, no doubt, continue searching for happiness within the orthodox format. Yet, even they will be forced to innovate in the end, for the odds against success may prove overwhelming.

The orthodox format presupposes that two young people will "find" one another and marry. It presupposes that the two will fulfill certain psychological needs in one another, and that the two personalities will develop over the years, more or less in tandem, so that they continue to fulfill each other's needs. It further presupposes that this process will last "until death do us part." These expectations are built deeply into our culture. It is no longer respectable, as it once was, to marry for anything but love. Love has changed from a peripheral concern of the family into its primary justification. Indeed, the pursuit of love through family life has become, for many, the very purpose of life itself.

Love, however, is defined in terms of this notion of shared growth. It is seen as a beautiful mesh of complementary needs, flowing into and out of one another, fulfilling the loved ones, and producing feelings of warmth, tenderness and devotion. Unhappy husbands often complain that they have "left their wives behind" in terms of social, educational or intellectual growth. Partners in successful marriages are said to "grow together."

This "parallel development" theory of love carries endorsement from marriage counsellors, psychologists and sociologists. Thus, says sociologist Nelson Foote, a specialist on the family, the quality of the relationship between husband and wife is dependent upon "the degree of matching in their phases of distinct but comparable development."

If love is a product of shared growth, however, and we are to measure success in marriage by the degree to which matched development actually occurs, it becomes possible to make a strong and ominous prediction about the future.

It is possible to demonstrate that, even in a relatively stagnant society, the mathematical odds are heavily stacked against any couple achieving this ideal of parallel growth. The odds for success positively plummet, however, when the rate of change in society accelerates, as it now is doing. In a fast-moving society, in which many things change, not once, but repeatedly, in which the husband moves up and down a variety of economic and social scales, in which the family is again and again torn loose from home and community, in which individuals move further from their parents, further from the religion of origin, and further from traditional values, it is almost miraculous if two people develop at anything like comparable rates.

If, at the same time, average life expectancy rises from, say, fifty to seventy years, thereby lengthening the term during which this acrobatic feat of matched development is supposed to be maintained, the odds against success become absolutely astronomical. Thus, Nelson Foote writes with wry understatement: "To expect a marriage to last indefinitely under modern conditions is to expect a lot." To ask love to last indefinitely is to expect even more. Transience and novelty are both in league against it.

It is this change in the statistical odds against love that accounts for the high divorce and separation rates in most of the techno-societies. The faster the rate of change and the longer the life span, the worse these odds grow. Something has to crack.

In point of fact, of course, something has already cracked – and it is the old insistence on permanence. Millions of men and women now adopt what appears to them to be a sensible and conservative strategy. Rather than opting for some offbeat variety of the family, they marry conventionally, they attempt to make it "work," and then, when the paths of the partners diverge beyond an acceptable point, they divorce or depart. Most of them go on to search for a new partner whose developmental stage, at that moment, matches their own.

As human relationships grow more transient and modular, the pursuit of love becomes, if anything, more frenzied. But the temporal expectations change. As conventional marriage proves itself less and less capable of delivering on its promise of lifelong love, therefore, we can anticipate open public acceptance of temporary marriages. Instead of wedding "until death us do part," couples will enter into matrimony knowing from the first that the relationship is likely to be short-lived.

They will know, too, that when the paths of husband and wife diverge, when there is too great a discrepancy in developmental stages, they may call it quits – without shock or embarrassment, perhaps even without some of the pain that goes with divorce today. And when the opportunity presents itself, they will marry again ... and again ... and again. Serial marriage – a pattern of successive temporary marriages – is cut to order for the Age of Transience in which all man's relationships, all his ties with the environment, shrink in duration. It is the natural, the inevitable outgrowth of a social order in which automobiles are rented, dolls traded in, and dresses discarded after one-time use. It is the mainstream marriage pattern of tomorrow.

In one sense, serial marriage is already the best kept family secret of the technosocieties. According to Professor Jessie Bernard, a world-prominent family sociologist, "Plural marriage is more extensive in our society today than it is in societies that permit polygamy – the chief difference being that we have institutionalized plural marriage serially or sequentially rather than contemporaneously." Remarriage is already so prevalent a practice that nearly one out of every four bridegrooms in America has been to the altar before. It is so prevalent that one IBM personnel man reports a poignant incident involving a divorced woman, who, in filling out a job application, paused when she came to the question of marital status. She put her pencil in her mouth, pondered for a moment, then wrote: "Unremarried."

Transience necessarily affects the durational expectancies with which persons approach new situations. While they may yearn for a permanent relationship, something inside whispers to them that it is an increasingly improbable luxury.

Even young people who most passionately seek commitment, profound involvement with people and causes, recognize the power of the thrust toward transience. Listen, for example, to a young black American, a civil-rights worker, as she describes her attitude toward time and marriage:

"In the white world, marriage is always billed as 'the end' – like in a Hollywood movie. I don't go for that. I can't imagine myself promising my whole lifetime away. I might want to get married now, but how about next year? That's not disrespect for the institution [of marriage], but the deepest respect. In The [civil rights] Movement, you need to have a feeling for the temporary – of making something as good as you can, while it lasts. In conventional relationships, time is a prison."

Such attitudes will not be confined to the young, the few, or the politically active. They will whip across nations as novelty floods into the society and catch fire as the level of transience rises still higher. And along with them will come a sharp increase in the number of temporary – then serial – marriages.

The idea is summed up vividly by a Swedish magazine, Svensk Damtidning, which interviewed a number of leading Swedish sociologists, legal experts, and others about the future of man-woman relationships. It presented its findings in five photographs. They showed the same beautiful bride being carried across the threshold five times – by five different bridegrooms.

As serial marriages become more common, we shall begin to characterize people not in terms of their present marital status, but in terms of their marriage career or "trajectory." This trajectory will be formed by the decisions they make at certain vital turning points in their lives.

For most people, the first such juncture will arrive in youth, when they enter into "trial marriage." Even now the young people of the United States and Europe are engaged in a mass experiment with probationary marriage, with or without benefit of ceremony. The staidest of United States universities are beginning to wink at the practice of co-ed housekeeping among their students. Acceptance of trial marriage is even growing among certain religious philosophers. Thus we hear the German theologian Siegfried Keil of Marburg University urge what he terms "recognized premarriage." In Canada, Father Jacques Lazure has publicly proposed "probationary marriages" of three to eighteen months.

In the past, social pressures and lack of money restricted experimentation with trial marriage to a relative handful. In the future, both these limiting forces will evaporate. Trial marriage will be the first step in the serial marriage "careers" that millions will pursue.

A second critical life juncture for the people of the future will occur when the trial marriage ends. At this point, couples may choose to formalize their relationship and stay together into the next stage. Or they may terminate it and seek out new partners. In either case, they will then face several options. They may prefer to go childless. They may choose to have, adopt or "buy" one or more children. They may decide to raise these children themselves or to farm them out to professional parents. Such decisions will be made, by and large, in the early twenties – by which time many young adults will already be well into their second marriages.

A third significant turning point in the marital career will come, as it does today, when the children finally leave home. The end of parenthood proves excruciating for many, particularly women who, once the children are gone, find themselves without a raison d'être. Even today divorces result from the failure of the couple to adapt to this traumatic break in continuity.

Among the more conventional couples of tomorrow who choose to raise their own children in the time-honored fashion, this will continue to be a particularly painful time. It will, however, strike earlier. Young people today already leave home sooner than their counterparts a generation ago. They will probably depart even earlier tomorrow. Masses of youngsters will move off, whether into trial marriage or not, in their mid-teens. Thus we may anticipate that the middle and late thirties will be another important breakpoint in the marital careers of millions. Many at that juncture will enter into their third marriage. This third marriage will bring together two people for what could well turn out to be the longest uninterrupted stretch of matrimony in their lives – from, say, the late thirties until one of the partners dies. This may, in fact, turn out to be the only "real" marriage, the basis of the only truly durable marital relationship. During this time two mature people, presumably with wellmatched interests and complementary psychological needs, and with a sense of being at comparable stages of personality development, will be able to look forward to a relationship with a decent statistical probability of enduring.

Not all these marriages will survive until death, however, for the family will still face a fourth crisis point. This will come, as it does now for so many, when one or both of the partners retires from work. The abrupt change in daily routine brought about by this development places great strain on the couple. Some couples will go the path of the postretirement family, choosing this moment to begin the task of raising children. This may overcome for them the vacuum that so many couples now face after reaching the end of their occupational lives. (Today many women go to work when they finish raising children; tomorrow many will reverse that pattern, working first and childrearing next.) Other couples will overcome the crisis of retirement in other ways, fashioning both together a new set of habits, interests and activities. Still others will find the transition too difficult, and will simply sever their ties and enter the pool of "in-betweens" – the floating reserve of temporarily unmarried persons.

Of course, there will be some who, through luck, interpersonal skill and high intelligence, will find it possible to make long-lasting monogamous marriages work. Some will succeed, as they do today, in marrying for life and finding durable love and affection. But others will fail to make even sequential marriages endure for long. Thus some will try two or even three partners within, say, the final stage of marriage. Across the board, the average number of marriages per capita will rise – slowly but relentlessly.

Most people will probably move forward along this progression, engaging in one "conventional" temporary marriage after another. But with widespread familial experimentation in the society, the more daring or desperate will make side forays into less conventional arrangements as well, perhaps experimenting with communal life at some point, or going it alone with a child. The net result will be a rich variation in the types of marital trajectories that people will trace, a wider choice of life-patterns, an endless opportunity for novelty of experience. Certain patterns will be more common than others. But temporary marriage will be a standard feature, perhaps the dominant feature, of family life in the future.

A world in which marriage is temporary rather than permanent, in which family arrangements are diverse and colorful, in which homosexuals may be acceptable parents and retirees start raising children – such a world is vastly different from our own. Today all boys and girls are expected to find life-long partners. In tomorrow's world, being single will be no crime. Nor will couples be forced to remain imprisoned, as so many still are today, in marriages that have turned rancid. Divorce will be easy to arrange, so long as responsible provision is made for children. In fact, the very introduction of professional parenthood could touch off a great liberating wave of divorces by making it easier for adults to discharge their parental responsibilities without necessarily remaining in the cage of a hateful marriage. With this powerful external pressure removed, those who stay together would be those who wish to stay together, those for whom marriage is actively fulfilling – those, in short, who are in love.

We are also likely to see, under this looser, more variegated family system, many more marriages involving partners of unequal age. Increasingly, older men will marry young girls or vice versa. What will count will not be chronological age, but complementary values and interests and, above all, the level of personal development. To put it another way, partners will be interested not in age, but in stage.

Children in this super-industrial society will grow up with an ever enlarging circle of what might be called "semi-siblings" – a whole clan of boys and girls brought into the world by their successive sets of parents. What becomes of such "aggregate" families will be fascinating to observe. Semi-sibs may turn out to be like cousins, today. They may help one another professionally or in time of need. But they will also present the society with novel problems. Should semi-sibs marry, for example?

Surely, the whole relationship of the child to the family will be dramatically altered. Except perhaps in communal groupings, the family will lose what little remains of its power to transmit values to the younger generation. This will further accelerate the pace of change and intensify the problems that go with it.

Looming over all such changes, however, and even dwarfing them in significance is something far more subtle. Seldom discussed, there is a hidden rhythm in human affairs that until now has served as one of the key stabilizing forces in society: the family cycle.

We begin as children; we mature; we leave the parental nest; we give birth to children who, in turn, grow up, leave and begin the process all over again. This cycle has been operating so long, so automatically, and with such implacable regularity, that men have taken it for granted. It is part of the human landscape. Long before they reach puberty, children learn the part they are expected to play in keeping this great cycle turning. This predictable succession of family events has provided all men, of whatever tribe or society, with a sense of continuity, a place in the temporal scheme of things. The family cycle has been one of the sanity-preserving constants in human existence.

Today this cycle is accelerating. We grow up sooner, leave home sooner, marry sooner, have children sooner. We space them more closely together and complete the period of parenthood more quickly. In the words of Dr. Bernice Neugarten, a University of Chicago specialist on family development, "The trend is toward a more rapid rhythm of events through most of the family cycle."

But if industrialism, with its faster pace of life, has accelerated the family cycle, superindustrialism now threatens to smash it altogether. With the fantasies that the birth scientists are hammering into reality, with the colorful familial experimentation that innovative minorities will perform, with the likely development of such institutions as professional parenthood, with the increasing movement toward temporary and serial marriage, we shall not merely run the cycle more rapidly; we shall introduce irregularity, suspense, unpredictability – in a word, novelty – into what was once as regular and certain as the seasons.

When a "mother" can compress the process of birth into a brief visit to an embryo emporium, when by transferring embryos from womb to womb we can destroy even the ancient certainty that childbearing took nine months, children will grow up into a world in which the family cycle, once so smooth a d sure, will be jerkily arhythmic. Another crucial stabilizer will have been removed from the wreckage of the old order, another pillar of sanity broken.

There is, of course, nothing inevitable about the developments traced in the preceding pages. We have it in our power to shape change. We may choose one future over another. We cannot, however, maintain the past. In our family forms, as in our economics, science, technology and social relationships, we shall be forced to deal with the new.

The Super-industrial Revolution will liberate men from many of the barbarisms that grew out of the restrictive, relatively choiceless family patterns of the past and present. It will offer to each a degree of freedom hitherto unknown. But it will exact a steep price for that freedom.

As we hurtle into tomorrow, millions of ordinary men and women will face emotionpacked options so unfamiliar, so untested, that past experience will offer little clue to wisdom. In their family ties, as in all other aspects of their lives, they will be compelled to cope not merely with transience, but with the added problem of novelty as well.

Thus, in matters both large and small, in the most public of conflicts and the most private of conditions, the balance between routine and non-routine, predictable and nonpredictable, the known and the unknown, will be altered. The novelty ratio will rise.

In such an environment, fast-changing and unfamiliar, we shall be forced, as we wend our way through life, to make our personal choices from a diverse array of options. And it is to the third central characteristic of tomorrow, diversity, that we must now turn. For it is the final convergence of these three factors – transience, novelty and diversity – that sets the stage for the historic crisis of adaptation that is the subject of this book: future shock.