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

by Thomas L. Friedman

I’d rather learn to pause. As the editor and writer Leon Wieseltier said to me once: technologists want us to think that patience became a virtue only because in the past “we had no choice”—we had to wait longer for things because our modems were too slow or our broadband hadn’t been installed, or because we hadn’t upgraded to the iPhone 7. “And so now that we have made waiting technologically obsolete,” added Wieseltier, “their attitude is: ‘Who needs patience anymore?’ But the ancients believed that there was wisdom in patience and that wisdom comes from patience … Patience wasn’t just the absence of speed. It was space for reflection and thought.” We are generating more information and knowledge than ever today, “but knowledge is only good if you can reflect on it.”

“I don’t always agree,” he said. “Great,” I responded. “It means you always have to check.”

Indeed, there is a mismatch between the change in the pace of change and our ability to develop the learning systems, training systems, management systems, social safety nets, and government regulations that would enable citizens to get the most out of these accelerations and cushion their worst impacts. This mismatch, as we will see, is at the center of much of the turmoil roiling politics and society in both developed and developing countries today. It now constitutes probably the most important governance challenge across the globe.

even though human beings and societies have steadily adapted to change, on average, the rate of technological change is now accelerating so fast that it has risen above the average rate at which most people can absorb all these changes. Many of us cannot keep pace anymore.

In the past, the way we detected weak signals was with intuition, added Ruh. Experienced workers knew how to process weak data. But now, with big data, “with a much finer grain of fidelity, we can make finding the needle in the haystack the norm”—not the exception. “And we can then augment the human worker with machines, so they work as colleagues, and enable them to process weak signals together and overnight become like a thirty-year veteran.”

Now the nation’s largest billboard company, Clear Channel Outdoor Inc., is bringing customized pop-up ads to the interstate. Its Radar program, up and running in Boston and 10 other US cities, uses data AT&T Inc. collects on 130 million cellular subscribers, and from two other companies, PlaceIQ Inc. and Placed Inc., which use phone apps to track the comings and goings of millions more. Clear Channel knows what kinds of people are driving past one of their billboards at 6:30 p.m. on a Friday—how many are Dunkin’ Donuts regulars, for example, or have been to three Red Sox games so far this year. It can then precisely target ads to them.

GE’s lab is like a mini United Nations. Every engineering team looks like one of those multiethnic Benetton ads. But this was not affirmative action at work; it was a brutal meritocracy. When you are competing in the global technology Olympics every day, you have to recruit the best talent from anywhere you can find it.

“In the twenty-first century, knowing all the answers won’t distinguish someone’s intelligence—rather, the ability to ask all the right questions will be the mark of true genius.”

And that is the point, concluded Wujec, with the advances in sensing, digitization, computation, storage, networking and software: all “industries are becoming computable. When an industry becomes computable, it goes through a series of predictable changes: It moves from being digitized to being disrupted to being democratized.”

“There is nothing called ‘underprivileged’ anymore,” said Yildiz. “All you need is a working brain, some short training, and then put your idea into a fantastic business from any part of the world!”

Although trade in physical goods and financial products and services—the hallmarks of the twentieth-century global economy—has actually flattened or declined in recent years, globalization as measured by flows is “soaring—transmitting information, ideas, and innovation around the world and broadening participation in the global economy” more than ever, concluded a pioneering study on this subject in March 2016 by the McKinsey Global Institute, Digital Globalization: The New Era of Global Flows: “The world is more interconnected than ever.”

arrested Navinder Singh Sarao, age thirty-six, on the request of U.S. prosecutors, who alleged that he’d helped cause the crash and profited from it to the tune of $875,000. What’s amazing is that Sarao operated with a computer and network connection out of his parents’ home in Hounslow, West London. But in a hyperconnected world, he managed to use computer algorithms to manipulate the market by creating fictitious orders that “spoofed” the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and, authorities maintain, set off a chain reaction.

Specifically, those societies that are most open to flows of trade, information, finance, culture, or education, and those most willing to learn from them and contribute to them, are the ones most likely to thrive in the age of accelerations. Those that can’t will struggle.

Build Floors, Not Walls Globalization has always been everything and its opposite—it can be incredibly democratizing and it can concentrate incredible power in giant multinationals; it can be incredibly particularizing—the smallest voices can now be heard everywhere—and incredibly homogenizing, with big brands now able to swamp everything anywhere. It can be incredibly empowering, as small companies and individuals can start global companies overnight, with global customers, suppliers, and collaborators, and it can be incredibly disempowering—big forces can come out of nowhere and crush your business when you never even thought they were in your business. Which way it tips depends on the values and tools that we all bring to these flows.

Yes, kids, there was a time and place when such things happened. No phone, no telex, no cell phone, no Internet, no nothing.

The high-wage, middle-skilled job has gone the way of Kodak film. In the age of accelerations, there is increasingly no such animal in the zoo anymore. There are still high-wage, high-skilled jobs. And there are still middle-wage, middle-skilled jobs. But there is no longer a high-wage, middle-skilled job.

“People say tests are biased; well, tests are not nearly as biased as people are.” Intelligent assistants are color-blind.

Opportunity@Work is trying to solve this problem by working at the community level to create intelligent networks that help employers who are ready—even desperate—to hire anyone who can effectively do the tech jobs that they need filled. Many employers say that college degrees don’t come with the skills they need—yet the screening tools they use for hiring mean that many people who have those skills are currently overlooked because they lack the diplomas or degrees or badges to prove it.

Those occupations requiring strong social skills, she added, have grown much more than others since 1980, according to new research. And the only occupations that have shown consistent wage growth since 2000 require both cognitive and social skills … Yet to prepare students for the change in the way we work, the skills that schools teach may need to change. Social skills are rarely emphasized in traditional education. “Machines are automating a whole bunch of these things, so having the softer skills, knowing the human touch and how to complement technology, is critical, and our education system is not set up for that,” said Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, where he studies education.

If traditional postsecondary schools are going to remain relevant in a world where everyone will require lifelong learning, educators need to provide those opportunities at a viable speed, price point, and level of on-demand mobility.

Do you remember the name of the intelligence agency Maxwell Smart worked for? It was called “Control.” And do you remember the name of Control’s global enemy? It was called “Kaos”—“an international organization of evil.” The creators of Get Smart were way ahead of their time. After all, it increasingly appears that the most important division in the “post–post–Cold War world,” which we’re now in, is between regions of “Control” and regions of “Kaos”—or, as I prefer to describe them, “the World of Order” and “the World of Disorder.”

Referring to U.S. operations in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan and to Chinese human rights policy, Russian democratization, NATO expansion, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Mandelbaum wrote: “The United States after the Cold War … became the equivalent of a very wealthy person, the multibillionaire among nations. It left the realm of necessity that it had inhabited during the Cold War and entered the world of choice. It chose to spend some of its vast reserves of power on the geopolitical equivalent of luxury items: the remaking of other countries.”

China may be America’s rival, but, in today’s interdependent world, its collapse would be far more threatening to America than its rise.

Globally, 1 in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. If this were the population of a country, the report said, it would be the world’s twenty-fourth biggest.

governance in places such as Washington and Brussels got either bogged down in bureaucracy or gridlocked. So no one was giving people the right diagnosis of what was happening in the world around them, and most established political parties were offering catechisms that were simply not relevant to the age of accelerations. Into this vacuum, this empty room, stepped populists with easy answers—the Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders promised to make it all right by taking down “the Man,” and Donald Trump promised to make it all right by personally holding back the hurricane of change because he was “the Man.”

But even to this day, Putin continues to look for dignity for Russia in all the wrong places—such as harassing Ukraine or diving into the Syrian civil war—rather than truly tapping and unleashing the greatness and talents of his own people.

He wrote that “terrorists are perennial wound collectors,” bringing up “events from decades and even centuries past.” He noted: “Their recollection of these events is as meaningful and painful today as when they originally took place. For them there is no statute of limitations on suffering. Wound collection to a great extent is driven by their fears and their paranoia, which coalesces nicely with their uncompromising ideology. Wound collecting serves a purpose, to support and vindicate, keeping all past events fresh, thus magnifying their significance into the present, a rabid rationalization for fears and anxieties within.”

Hal Harvey, the environmental strategist, once remarked that “what keeps me up at night is the thought of some guy in a dark room eating pizza out of a delivery box, staring into a computer figuring out how to open the gates of the Hoover Dam—stuff you would only think of if you are morally and socially disconnected. It is much easier to break a dam than build one.”

with a voice suddenly gentle and imploring, he responded: “When you look into the face of the person who is beside you, and you can see that person is your brother or your sister, then finally the night has ended and the day has begun.”

The song was called “The Eye,” and it’s written by the country-folk singer Brandi Carlile and her bandmate Tim Hanseroth and sung by Carlile. I wish it could play every time you open these pages, like a Hallmark birthday card, because it’s become the theme song of this book. The main refrain is: I wrapped your love around me like a chain But I never was afraid that it would die You can dance in a hurricane But only if you’re standing in the eye. I hope that it is clear by now that every day going forward we’re going to be asked to dance in a hurricane, set off by the accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law.

I am a socially liberal, deeply patriotic, pluralism-loving, community-oriented, fiscally moderate, free-trade-inclined, innovation-obsessed environmentalist-capitalist. I believe that America at its best—and we’re not always at our best—can deliver a life of decency, security, opportunity, and freedom for its own people, and can also be a bulwark of stability and a beacon of liberty and justice for people the world over.