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

by Thomas L. Friedman

So this isn’t complicated: the most educated people who plug into the most flows and enjoy the best governance and infrastructure win. They will have the most data to mine; they will see the most new ideas first; they will be challenged by them first and able to respond and take advantage of them first. Being in the flow will constitute a significant strategic and economic advantage.

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.

In the face of more and more uncontrolled immigration, globalization today feels under

threat more than ever. We saw that in the vote by Great Britain to withdraw from the European Union and in the candidacy of Donald Trump. But disconnecting from a world that is only getting more digitally connected, from a world in which these digital flows will be a vital source of fresh and challenging ideas, innovation, and commercial energy, is not a strategy for economic growth.

If many Americans are feeling overwhelmed these days by globalization, it’s because we’ve let all the physical technologies driving it (immigration, trade, and digital flows) get way too far ahead of the social technologies (the learning and adapting tools) needed to cushion their impacts and anchor people in healthy communities that can help them thrive when the winds of change howl and bring so many strangers and strange ideas directly into their living rooms. Warning: in the age of accelerations, if a society doesn’t build floors under people, many will reach for a wall—no matter how self-defeating that would be.

Different from Moore’s Law, which involves the compiling of logic units to perform more rapid analytic functions, increased communication is the compiling of creative units (i.e., humans) to perform ever more creative tasks.

They identified nine key planetary boundaries that we humans must make sure we do not breach (or continue to breach further, since we have already breached several).

We have to make our newfound power of one, the power of machines, the power of many, and the power of flows our friends—and our tools to create abundance within the planetary boundaries—not just our enemies.

Every day there are new breakthroughs in solar energy, wind power, batteries, and energy efficiency that hold out the hope that we can have clean energy at a scale and price that billions can afford—provided we have the will to put a price on carbon so these technologies can rapidly scale and move down the cost-volume curve.

That’s why the only way to confront these compounding threats before they tip the wrong way is with a compounding commitment to stewardship, a compounding willingness to act collectively to do compounding research and make compounding investments in clean energy production and more efficient

consumption, along with a willingness, at least in America, to impose a carbon tax to get compounding investments in clean power and efficiency, plus a compounding commitment to women’s education and an ethic of empowerment everywhere. Without compounding, multiplicative commitments along all these fronts that are commensurate with the magnitude of the challenge we face, we stand no chance—zero—of preserving a stable planet when there will be so many more people, armed with so many more powerful tools, propelled by a supernova.

The only way to thrive is by maintaining dynamic stability—

We need to more deeply understand how individual psychology, organizations, institutions, and societies work and find ways to accelerate their adaptability and evolution.

That was true at one time: just show up, be average, do your job, play by the rules, everything will be fine … Well, say goodbye to all that.

Today’s American dream is now more of a journey than a fixed destination—and one that increasingly feels like walking up a down escalator. You can do it. We all did it as kids—but you do have to walk faster than the escalator, meaning that you need to work harder, regularly reinvent yourself, obtain at least some form of postsecondary education, make sure that you’re engaged in lifelong learning, and play by the new rules while also reinventing some of

them. Then you can be in the middle class.

You can’t just show up. You need a plan to succeed.

And when that happens only one divide will matter, says Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future, and that is “the motivational divide.” The future will belong to those who have the self-motivation to take advantage of all the free and cheap tools and flows coming out of the supernova.

‘How does it feel to know there are at least one million robots who can do your job?’ We are all feeling mounting performance pressure at a very personal level.”

new asset class becomes the main basis for productivity growth, wealth creation, and opportunity,” argued Byron Auguste, a former economic adviser to President Obama who cofounded Opportunity@Work, a social venture that aims to enable at least one million more Americans to “work, learn,

and earn to their full potential” in the next decade. “In the agrarian economy, that asset was land,” Auguste said. “In the industrial economy it was physical capital. In the services economy it was intangible assets, such as methods, designs, software, and patents.”

the age of accelerations we need to rethink three key social contracts—those between workers and employers, students and educational institutions, and citizens and governments.

So, at a minimum, our educational systems must be retooled to maximize these needed skills and attributes: strong fundamentals in writing, reading, coding, and math; creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration; grit, self-motivation, and lifelong learning habits; and entrepreneurship and improvisation—at every level.

The jobs issue “is a power law problem, and the only way to solve a power law problem is with a

power law solution” for improving humanity’s ability to adapt. Turning more forms of AI into more forms of IA is that solution.

So, for instance, the global shipping giant Maersk needed a sensor that it could affix to every shipping container it owns, enabling the company to track its containers anywhere in the world. The sensor had to affix to two hundred thousand cargo refrigerator containers, it had to be able to measure their humidity, temperature, and whether they had suffered any damage, and it had to broadcast that data to their headquarters, and—this was the real catch—the sensor had to operate without batteries and be able to last ten years, because they couldn’t be changing them all the time. In two weeks, AT&T engineers built a prototype of a sensor, half the size of a shoe box, that could affix to every Maersk container and was powered by a combination of solar and kinetic energy.

you come, they will build it—turning AI into IA is only going to get more efficient every year. “In the old days someone would publish a calculus textbook and get no data and no feedback on what is working for people and what is not,” explained Sal Khan. So they spent the next five years just changing page numbers. Today, he said, Khan Academy can put up a set of calculus tutorials and see within hours which ones are the most effective in helping students come up with the right answers, iterate immediately, and start scaling the best tutorials globally within a few more hours. The ability to refine content and make it better at scale is staggering.

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The current system, in which there is one job winner and a thousand losers, is simply wasting too much human capital, and in the age of accelerations that is politically dangerous.

Imagine a micro-equity investment in a talented low-income student’s tuition and living expenses for a fifteen-week “coding boot camp,” which converts into debt only once she gets her first job as a software developer. We can open up job opportunities, solve our skills mismatch, and unlock immense value in our human capital if we move past the current antiquated frameworks of public and private student lending to more personalized, talent-based, pay-it-forward financing systems—where both educational institutions and employers have more skin in the game to ensure the payoff to students of securing an in-demand job.

Thanks to the supernova, the workplace is being globalized, digitized, and roboticized at a speed, scope, and scale we’ve never seen before. It is hard to think of any career not being touched by this process, which is why it is posing such a fundamental challenge to how we think about educating people for work, organizing people at work, and helping people adjust to both new realities.

In the 20th century most Americans spent their time pushing paper in offices or bashing widgets in factories. In the 21st century most of us are going to work with people, providing services that enhance each other’s lives … We are going to have to discover the inherent dignity of work that is people to people rather than people to things. We are going to have to realize that engaging with other people, understanding their hopes and their needs, and using our own skills, knowledge and talent to give them what they want at a price they can afford is honest work.

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.

In short, weep not for that nine-to-five work era of old. It’s gone and it is not coming back. But once we get through this transition, and it will be rough, I am convinced there’s a high probability that a better and fairer workplace is waiting on the other side, if we can learn to combine the best of what is new—artificial intelligence—with the best of what never changes and never will change: self-motivation, caring adults and mentors, and practice in your area of interest or aspiration.

Successful students had one or more teachers who were mentors and took a real interest in their aspirations, and they had an internship related to what they were learning in school.

It’s important to remember that America is such an important player on the world stage that even small shifts in how we project power can have decisive impacts.

The age of accelerations in geopolitics is an equally plastic period, but it is not yet clear that we have the ability or imagination to build the alliances and global institutions to stabilize it the way the post–World War II statesmen did—yet that is our calling.

The father started to tear up. These people live so close to the edge. One reason they have so many children is that the offspring are a safety net for aging parents. But the boys are all leaving and the edge is getting even closer. Which means they are losing the only thing they were rich in: a deep sense of community.

have secured their freedom from but not their freedom to, “the inequality of freedom.” And it may be the most relevant inequality in the world today.

Military strategists will tell you that the network is the most empowered organizational form in this period of technological change;

Sometimes you have to go through the analog steps of knocking on doors, printing out leaflets, and persuading neighbors face-to-face,

face, one at a time, to build the institutional muscles and civic habits that are needed most the morning after the revolution. Until that old lesson is relearned, we well could see the World of Disorder enlarging as more and more people find it easier to secure their freedom from but not their freedom to.

“If we are evolving to be more like nature, we better damn well get good at it,” observed the physicist and environmentalist Amory Lovins.

It is true, notes Lovins, that 99 percent of experiments that Mother Nature has tried didn’t work and “got recalled by the Manufacturer.” But the 1 percent that survived did so because they learned to adapt to a certain niche in the natural world and were able, therefore, to thrive and procreate and project their DNA into the future. Mother Nature also adapts “through social specialization,” or learned behavior.

When you have such a pluralistic system, adds Amory Lovins, “it automatically adapts to turn every form of adversity into a manageable problem, if not something advantageous.” (He’s paraphrasing his late mentor Edwin Land, who said, “A failure is a circumstance not yet fully turned to your advantage.”)

Indeed, I would go a step further and say that the ROI—return on investment—on pluralism in the age of accelerations will soar and become maybe the single most important competitive advantage for a society—for both economic and political reasons.

A pluralistic country that embraces pluralism has the potential to be much more innovative, because it can draw the best talent from anywhere in the world and mix together many more diverse perspectives; oftentimes the best ideas emerge from that combustion.

The evidence is mounting that geographical openness and cultural diversity and tolerance are not by-products but key drivers of economic progress.

The whole stereotype of all white men in one place is gone. If you are running a smart company today, it is filled by people from everywhere … Pluralism allows you to be fast and smart.”

“Ownership is the one thing that fixes more things so other things can be made easier to fix,” argues the education expert Stefanie Sanford of the College Board.

Since we started with Mother Nature’s wisdom, let’s end with the same: biological systems that thrive all have one thing in common, notes Amory Lovins: “They are all highly adaptive—and all the rest is detail.”