Post

It’s weird how everyone is having big apprehensive reaction about a technology that changes the nature of humanity

This has gotten missed a couple times so just to make this clear: it's not weird how everyone is apprehensive about this. It's the exact right reaction

We use the term futureshock in my friendgroup to describe the bottomless disorientation that we experience when we see these things do something new that didn't previously seem possible. I'll probably never forget the first time I loaded up claude code.

This is a new kind of disorientation though? I am sure people were futureshocked when flight first happened, or they learned that there had been people on the moon. But this is different. Like meeting aliens or something.

Interesting question where it ranks compared to the moon flight. I have read people describing what sounds like futureshock when that happened

You do realize futureshock was a zeitgeist word in 1970, right? Thread context doesn't make that clear, though it does seem like your friendgroup is using a slightly more diluted sense of the word that surface in the Cyberpunk role playing game. Wait'll the friendgroup tries out powershift.

Yeah, Alvin Toffler was a sociologist who became a sort of pop sociologist / futurist, not sure about his academic impact but he def informed futurism oriented thinking through the 70s and 80s, Future Shock the book was adapted into a film narrated by Orson Welles.

Third Wave and Powershift are his follow up works. I don't think he's super relevant to more contemporary philosophy and sociology of technology, but he coined more buzzwords that got a life of their own in popular discourse than most.