In 1969, Playboy Magazine interviewed Marshall McLuhan in an extensive and far reaching exploration of his ideas at that time. As many have noted, from the perspective of circa 45 years later, or maybe 50 years if one considers that “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man” was published in 1964….the man defines prescient.

Then there’s Alex Toffler’s ideas about “future shock” , or rapid transitions of technology and their effect on “everything else”…which was published in 1970.

And a really big idea, that is echoed by both McLuhan and Toffler, Teilhard Chardin’s use of the concept “Noosphere” to explain some sort of “field” of human interconnection encircling the earth as a next stage in “evolution”.

The Noosphere (/ˈnoʊ.ɵsfɪər/; sometimes noösphere), according to the thought of Vladimir Vernadsky^[1] and of Teilhard de Chardin, denotes the “sphere of human thought”.^[2] The word derives from the Greek νοῦς (nous “mind“) and σφαῖρα (sphaira “sphere“), in lexical analogy to “atmosphere” and “biosphere“.^[3] It was introduced by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1922^[4] in his Cosmogenesis.^[5] Another possibility is the first use of the term by Édouard Le Roy (1870-1954), who together with Teilhard was listening to lectures of Vladimir Vernadsky at the Sorbonne. In 1936 Vernadsky accepted the idea of the noosphere in a letter to Boris Leonidovich Lichkov (though he states that the concept derives from Le Roy).^[6]