ADAPTABILITY In those delicious quiet moments retirement can afford, I find myself asking if I’m living the tired cliché of ‘dropping out!’ I hope not but there is a sense in which stepping back from the intruding intensity of modern life has become, frankly, refreshing. Arlene and I both came from the corporate world before retirement. Our experience was in a high technology environment in the midst of the information processing revolution. Nothing seemed to have a shorter half-life than yesterday’s new computer software algorithms. It was a guiding principle that survival depended on a high threshold for frustration in dealing with constant change. Who had time to think about it? The world in which we all live brings evidence the speed of technological innovation continues to be increasing at an ever more rapid rate. Many of these changes have been beneficial but change of this magnitude is not happening without complex consequences. Social scientists and humanist thinkers have been asking about the societal and interpersonal implications of this issue. The resulting ‘Futurist’ visionary movement began in earnest in the last half of the twentieth century. In particular, the question was raised as to whether contemporary society is adequately equipped to accommodate to technologies that are not only rapidly expanding but also becoming more and more difficult to comprehend. After the scientific revolution of the late eighteen-century it became apparent that significant changes in the intellectual climate were happening faster than society at large had a capacity to absorb. Novelists, including Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, began addressing this issue. Verne and Wells followed earlier commentators, such as Charles Dickens, who recognized the largely unforeseen negative consequences of rapid industrialization not adequately moderated by sensitivity to the human condition. The largely unforeseen implications of increasingly rapid change on society were later captured in the expression of the “Principle of Unintended Consequences.” In looking into this concept, I discovered sociologist Robert K. Merton popularized it in 1936. His analysis concerned itself with potential side effects of actions resulting in social change. If Merton were writing today, I suspect he would add the pressures of an intensely competitive globalized market economy. In the contemporary world, market share prospects of new...