Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman

when the pace of change gets this fast, the only way to retain a lifelong working capacity is to engage in lifelong learning. There is a whole group of people—judging from the 2016 U.S. election—who “did not join the labor market at age twenty thinking they were going to have to do lifelong learning,” added Teller, and they are not happy about it.

example: if you took Intel’s first-generation microchip from 1971, the 4004, and the latest chip Intel has on the market today, the sixth-generation Intel Core processor, you will see that Intel’s latest chip offers 3,500 times more performance, is 90,000 times more energy efficient, and is about 60,000 times lower in cost. To put it more vividly, Intel engineers did a rough calculation of what would happen had a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle improved at the same rate as microchips did under Moore’s law. These are the numbers: Today, that Beetle would be able to go about three hundred thousand miles per hour. It would get two million miles per gallon of gas, and it would cost four cents!