One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split -up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again.

Information overload will lead to 'future shock syndrome' as an individual will suffer severe physical and mental disturbances.

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock.

The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.

My wife and I, unlike many intellectuals, spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age, in which you are an appendage of a machine that sets the pace.

Much education springs from some image of the future. If the image of the future held by a society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its youth.