Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America.

For nearly twenty years now, Howard Segal has been urging Americans to reject the very idea of a technological imperative, and to realize that we can choose our technologies in terms of human needs. Not only is the most advanced technology not necessarily the best, Segal has argued, but there is no direct connection between technological progress and social progress. That the relationship between the two may be partially antithetical is, so he says in the present work, the "real lesson" to be learned from a serious study of the history of technology. (p. 200)

Future Imperfect is a rewritten and updated collection of Segal's writings on this subject. It includes book reviews, Op-Ed pieces, papers originally prepared for oral presentation, and journal articles. Despite the diversity of origin and style, the whole thing is well tied together in the rewrite by virtue of the common themes that they share.

Readers of Segal's work will recognize the assortment of villains that regularly emerge - technological utopians, model community designers, planners of worlds' fairs and "prophets for profit" like Toffler and Naisbett. They share a common inability to predict the "real" future and a common inability to translate technical advance into social advance. (pp. 96, 186) Segal believes that a major reason for their failure is that their technique, which is simply to accept the present as given and extrapolate from there, is both ahistorical and amoral. Neglecting the past as they do and not even offering a moral critique of the present, the idea of either altering society or of directing technology for social purposes is alien to them. (pp. 186, 190-91)

While there are no real heroes in this story, Mumford's major works come in for praise for their role in making readers and some policy makers more sensitive to the values in democratic planning, decentralization, and the need for "human scale" in everything from individual buildings to whole nations. (p. 159) Segal is also a good bit more friendly toward the dystopian writers, of whom Kurt Vonnegut is his major example. In particular, he approves of the view held in common by the dystopians of unadulterated technological advance as the immediate problem and human nature as the underlying problem. Segal, like the dystopians, places the ultimate blame upon human nature because he sees that technology's eventual omnipotence is based upon mankind's desire to dominate the entire world through technology and to have technology solve all problems. (p. 139)

Like most critics of technology, Segal is better on criticism than he is on prescription. Although he faults the futurists in general for trying to substitute will power and "positive thinking" for the kinds of fundamental changes necessary to avert lasting future shock, he does not really have a list of changes of his own to offer. Multinational corporations are cited as a "fundamental obstacle" to the kind of participatory democracy he favors for the future (p. 170) and he considers advertising "with its endless creation of artificial wants" to be a major cause of future shock. (p. 167) But especially given his disenchanted view of human nature, it is not enough to simply rest one's hopes on the belief that the United States has reached a "technological plateau" where technology has become so widespread and advanced that further developments are so much less important that equivalent attention can be given to achieving non-technical improvements of a social, economic, cultural, or political nature. (p. 33) One is reminded of an analogous situation which John Kenneth Galbraith thought he saw in the 1950s as he pondered new possibilities for a society that was as affluent as he thought it needed to be. One hates to go further with the comparison. But Segal should not be faulted if he has left directions to the society of the "Middle Landscape" less than clear, or even if his vision seems as utopian as that of some of those he criticizes. His critique of the technological futurists is sharp and to the point, and certainly a prerequisite to attaining a worthwhile future is to understand the failings of the many false prophets. For that task, Segal is a very good guide.

George H. Daniels University of South Alabama