THE MIAMI HERALD
Thursday, Sept. 16, 1976; p. ?F

SOCIOCYBERNEERING IS OUR SALVATION FUTURIST BELIEVES
SOCIOCYBERNEERING PIONEERING A BRAVE NEW WORLD

HARTFORD CURRANT
Sunday, Sept. 19, 1976; p. 12A

'FUTURIST' PROMISES SHOCKS
 
BRADENTON HERALD
Sunday, Sept. 26, 1976; p. 6C

LIFE IS CHANGE
 
ST. PETERSBURG INDEPENDENT
Saturday, Oct. 16, 1976; p. 3B

FUTURE: HUMANS MUST PLAN FOR NEW WAY
by Charles Whited

"Scientists studying the structure of human cells say they are close to finding a chemical that will reverse the aging process, and produce a life potential of 800 years."
– From a Sept. 4 news story

Jacque Fresco, at 60, is a baldish, intent man given to wearing a goatee and rumpled yachting cap. Age has dug creases in his face, but the mind is bright, questing, energetic.

From the ordered clutter of his south Florida home, a place for futuristic designs and chromed furnishings, Fresco ponders the years ahead and says flatly: "The world to come will be loaded with shock. People must change their value system in order to cope."


JACQUE FRESCO, Ph.D. (honorary), erstwhile industrial designer, movie technical consultant, art instructor, author, lecturer, devotes his time nowadays to a concept called Sociocyberneering.

As such, he stands as a kind of guru and intellectual bellwether for a small but ardent band of people who call themselves futurists.

Fresco's view, oversimply stated, is that if man does not obliterate himself (one lecture topic: "New Dimensions in Human Stupidity"), he must produce a bold new order of living.

"Either we continue along our present patterns of social, environmental, and political incompetence and face annihilation, or we reorganize our thinking along entirely new lines."


IN A FUTURISTIC workshop behind his shrub-shrouded home near Coral Gables, Fresco has translated many of his technical visions into drawings, sketches, paintings, and models.

Designs for great circular cities of tomorrow. Concepts for harnessing energy from the fiery inner earth, the sun, the wind, the atom, chemistry, cosmic radiation. Thousand mile-per-hour tunnel trains. Domestic lifestyles in which computers free man and woman from toil.

Sociocyberneering, he declares, would coordinate science, engineering, and technology "to enhance the life of all mankind."

But the first ingredient also is the most unpredictable: The human factor.


IN FRESCO'S world of tomorrow, today's rugged individualist – whose energy and drive created material and technical abundance to make it all possible – would be an anthropological museum piece.

And in his place there would flourish a highly-educated, peaceful and genetically-superior breed of man freed from war, poverty, greed and work, his numbers on earth intelligently stabilized to match the supply of food and natural resources, his government built on individual competence rather than electoral or power process.

"Today, we pick politicians because they go to church on Sundays and have a nice smile, not for their knowledge of ecological systems and human relations. It is our own inadequacies and lack of concern that permit governmental chaos."

He wonders, indeed, if government might not someday be replaced by intelligent self-control. "Let's someday educate people so they are sane enough not to need governing."


IN FRESCO'S world, aging will be reversed, prospective parents may select in advance desired genetic characteristics of their children, and children will be educated apart from parental influence and control.

"Schools of the future will enable children to grow and find fulfillment…It isn't that parents are not good; they are simply inadequate."

Even today's concepts of right and wrong will be altered. "When we speak of right and wrong, we must think of the culture in which we live. Fifty years ago a woman who wore a bikini to the public beach would have been arrested."

For nothing is so certain as change.

"No one will ever arrive at Utopia, but rather at a new beginning. Stagnation is death."

"To live is to change."