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Interestingly enough, this idea (or at least a variation of it) has been around for quite some time. Alvin Toffler[0] wrote about similar ideas in the late 1960's / early 1970's, and a lot of his thoughts are expressed in his book titled Future Shock[1] - which is also the term he coined for the phenomenon he was describing.

Toffler and his work have been discussed here on HN a few times, but I'd particularly call out this discussion, from the article announcing his death.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12004470

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock

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Future Shock has a mixed reputation, but as I've worked my way through it this year (the 50th since its publication), I've been impressed by both its hits and misses.

The cautionary notes seem more enduring than its optimistic ones, and the commentary on cultural shifts and psychology more accurate than those on specific technical or scientific advances. Even Toffler seems to have underappreciated the scope and impact of infotech change, though that's balanced by overoptimism on other technology fronts.

Summing up his successful prognostications generally, they are "unintended consequences and side effects".

Thanks for the link to the obit discussion.

If you like that kind of thing (I do), then you may be interested in A Brief History of the Future, by Jacques Attali, first published in 2006.

Attali was an adviser to the French President and writes in the French obscurantist style, and most of the book is a history of the past, not the future. But...

Attali does talk about the issues of:

everything-as-a-service;

corporate surveillance and hyper-invasive employee behaviour control (think: FB, Goog, MS, your employer with keyloggers etc);

decreasing relevance / capability of leading nation states, especially the US (demonstrated by this little virus thingy);

interregional and inter-ideological conflict (China cyberhacking turned up to 11, climate refugees);

a turning against (crony) capitalism, which has failed for nearly everybody (by externalising costs, and shifting risks onto households). Extinction Rebellion is an early, embryonic example of this, I think.

And he was writing all that back in the early 2000s.

Thanks, new to me though John Naughton's similarly titled book is in my pile.

I'm somewhat more interested in older histories as they have a track record which can be tracked and suggest possible guiding principles (or traps).

Also infoglut.

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