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

by Thomas L. Friedman

around for a long time before Bill Gates. It’s just that the users of

knowledge that is far superior to anything

fast by creating a platform on which users could employ their smartphones

Washington at Davenport Field.” □ Human

Intelligent Assistants One of the most intriguing online intelligent assistants for the workplace that I came across in my research was LearnUp.com, cofounded by Alexis Ringwald, an adventurous young entrepreneur whom I first met in India, where she and a partner were highlighting that country’s grassroots renewable energy initiatives by touring around in a solar-powered car—with a solar-powered rock band! After doing a start-up in the States in solar energy, Ringwald got interested in the employment sector and spent six months interviewing workers looking for jobs. She discovered something she did not expect—that a majority of jobs on offer today don’t require a four-year college degree, and nine out of the top ten jobs in America by volume don’t require more than a high school degree. But she also discovered that the widespread assumption in America that anyone can get these entry-level customer service jobs by just showing up and demonstrating a pulse was even more wrong: these jobs do require basic skills that way too many applicants actually lacked. As she put it: “Even a clerk at the Gap, a hamburger flipper at McDonald’s, or a receptionist requires certain basic

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As they learn more about the job through LearnUp, candidates choose to go forward with the application or opt out by clicking a button that says: “I don’t want this job.” Most important, in my view, LearnUp also provides an online “coach” who proactively gives you encouragement, interview reminders, and advice, and who will answer your questions. It is so easy to forget that many, many people in America don’t have a professional network, an alumni network, two parents, or in some cases anyone around them with a job, to consult about how to get one. Ringwald was surprised to learn how many people would ask their coach something as simple as: “What should I wear to my job interview? What do I do if I am going to be late?” Some candidates will text the coach with a photo of what they are wearing to a job interview and ask: “Is this OK?” These questions may sound elementary to you, but, said Ringwald, you’d be amazed how many people need this kind of advice: “All the people we talk to are grateful for it.” She explained that the coach button was inspired by the power of real human coaches we encountered at workforce development offices. Their enthusiasm and support make a huge difference in a job seeker’s success. That’s why we built the coach into the platform. There’s so much friction to getting a job—while trying to manage your life and your family’s lives in the meantime—from deciding where to apply, filling out an application, figuring out if you live close enough, making...

Learnup.com

Maybe the most popular intelligent assistant in the world today is Khan Academy, which was started in 2006 by the educator Salman “Sal” Khan and offers free, short YouTube video lessons in English on subjects ranging from math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine to finance, history, and more. Anyone anywhere can go there to learn or brush up on any subject. Not only has it become the most important intelligent assistant for generalized learning in the world, but in 2014 it formed a partnership with the College Board, which administers the SAT college entry exams and the PSAT practice exams. Together, they created an intelligent assistant for anyone who wants to improve their SAT scores to get into college. They not only offer free SAT prep—so you don’t have to pay a small fortune to some private test prep service to get your kid into college—but they also created an amazing practice platform to help students fill their knowledge gaps. The system works like this, explained Stefanie Sanford of the College Board: In tenth or eleventh grade you take the practice SAT, known as the PSAT. And let’s say, for instance, you scored 1060 out of 1600 on English and math. Your results are fed into a computer, which, using AI and big data, then spits out a message: “Tom, you did really well, but you need some work on fractions. You have a real opportunity to grow here. Click here for customized lessons just for you on fractions.” Suddenly, I n...

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you what a valuable intelligent assistant it has become. And 450,000 have linked their College Board results on the PSATs with Khan Academy to get tailored tutoring on the questions they missed, which they can then practice on their own time wherever they are—including through their cell phones. This is one of the quietest but most important intelligent-assistant education tools being made available for free in America today. Practice for the SAT—and advice for getting into college—have long, rightly, been thought of as areas where privilege rather than merit matters, where the wealthy have special access.

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The Khan–College Board collaboration is really worth studying because it’s a microcosm of how we can beat the bots—how we can make the transition to a different education-to-work-to-lifelong-learning social contract in the age of accelerations. There are three basic ingredients of the Khan–College Board revolution: (1) More will be on you, and you’d better take ownership of that fact and seek out intelligent assistants and assistance everywhere that you can; (2) precisely because more is on you, government and social organizations need to get serious about providing you not just any tools, but much better tools—informed by artificial intelligence tailored exactly for you and your needs and reinforced by a caring adult or coach, wherever possible; and (3) technology can take you only so far. Concentration also matters. Coleman likes to say that today the “technology of interruption has outpaced the technology of concentration.” Students need to learn the discipline of sustained concentration more than ever and to immerse themselves in practice—without headphones on. No athlete, no scientist, no musician ever got better without focused practice, and there is no program you can download for that. It has to come from within. If

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Young people who are motivated to learn can now go to Khan’s platform and go as fast as they want, and some have started to go very, very fast. Said Khan: “There is no ceiling anymore.”

Fast learning

Restoration made Japan not only more resilient but

There has never ever been a time when the human being was capable of doing something and yet, eventually, that something did not happen. That means one of three things: 1) the human psyche is going to change fundamentally (good luck with that!); 2) the worldwide social contract changes so that the “angry men” can no longer be “empowered” (good luck with that too!); or 3) boom! —Garrett Andrews, online comment on my October 21, 2015, column on NYTimes.com Love does not win unless we start loving each other enough to fix our [expletive] problems. —Comedian Samantha Bee, commenting on the Orlando massacre on her TBS show, Full Frontal, June 13, 2016 I have been on the road selling different books ever since I published From Beirut to Jerusalem in 1989. I’ve given several hundred book talks to different audiences. So what’s the best question I ever got from someone in the audience on any book? That’s easy to answer. It was at an event at the Portland Theater, in Portland, Oregon, in 1999, when I was promoting The Lexus and the Olive Tree. A young man stood up in the balcony and asked me this question: “Is God in cyberspace?” I confess, I didn’t know how to answer his question, which was asked with the utmost sincerity and demanded an answer. After all, mankind had created a vast new realm for human interaction. (If the supernova is somewhere between Heaven and Earth, who is in charge there? Amazon or God on high?) The question seized me. So I called one of my most cherished sp...