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January 21 - February 3, 2018
Intelligent assistance involves leveraging artificial intelligence to enable the government, individual companies, and the nonprofit social sector to develop more sophisticated online and mobile platforms that can empower every worker to engage in lifelong learning on their own time, and to have their learning recognized and rewarded with advancement. Intelligent
Lastly, we need to deploy AI to create more intelligent algorithms, or what Reid Hoffman calls “human networks”—so that we can much more efficiently connect people to all the job opportunities that exist, all the skills needed for each job, and all the educational opportunities to acquire those skills cheaply and easily.
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.
AT&T started telling some customers, heck, we’ll cut you a deal on the transmission costs if we can mine the data and use it to solve customer problems or puzzles. In the blink of an eye your friendly phone company became an all-around business solutions company, also competing with IBM or Accenture.
Most employees “embrace what we’re trying to do,” said Blase. “They say, ‘Just give me the tools, point me in the right direction, help me make [the transition] seamless, and make it cost-effective and make it mobile and make it Web based, so I can do it on my own time, and make it flexible and make the training in a format that I can learn quickly and effectively.’”
The executive’s role here is to define the vision for the future. The company’s responsibility is to provide the tools and platforms for employees to get there, and the individual’s role is to provide the selection and motivation. We need to make sure that anyone who leaves here [does not do so] because we did not provide them the platform—that it was their lack of motivation that did not make it happen.
Most good middle-class jobs today—the ones that cannot be outsourced, automated, roboticized, or digitized—are likely to be what I would call stempathy jobs. These are jobs that require and reward the ability to leverage technical and interpersonal skills—to blend calculus with human (or animal) psychology, to hold a conversation with Watson to make a cancer diagnosis and hold the hand of a patient to deliver it, to have a robot milk your cows but also to properly care for those cows in need of extra care with a gentle touch.
The latest research backs this up. In an essay in The New York Times on October 18, 2015, entitled “Why What You Learned in Preschool Is Crucial at Work,” Claire Cain Miller pointed out that “for all the jobs that machines can now do—whether performing surgery, driving cars or serving food—they still lack one distinctly human trait. They have no social skills. Yet skills like cooperation, empathy and flexibility have become increasingly vital in modern-day work.”
In the wake of World War I and the fall of several empires, scores of new independent nations were created. The Austro-Hungarian Empire gave way to Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Russia ceded Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. And Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire also birthed a new Poland and Romania. The Ottoman Empire gave way to a raft of newly independent or colonized states, including Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Cyprus, and Albania. And in Africa the dismantled German Empire was carved into states such as Namibia and Tanzania. Then, in the wake of
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China accounted for more than a third of global growth in recent years, and its growth engine multiplied the growth of many of the countries that exported raw materials to Beijing.
“The last twenty-five years was all about who could make things cheapest, and the next twenty-five years will be about who can make things smartest,” says van Agtmael.
It is hard to see how Madagascar reverses these trends. Said Russ Mittermeier, the renowned primatologist from Conservation International, who has worked in Madagascar to help preserve its environment since 1984: “The more you erode, the more people you have with less soil under their feet to grow things.” And the more insecure people feel, the more kids they have as insurance.
The idea of state government “was invented in this part of the world, in ancient Mesopotamia, precisely to manage irrigation and crop growing,”
I first met Monique Barbut, who heads the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, at the U.N. Paris climate meeting in late 2015. Her calling card was a presentation with three maps of Africa, each with an oblong outline around a bunch of dots clustered in the middle of the continent. Map number one: the most vulnerable regions of desertification in Africa in 2008. Map number two: conflicts and food riots in Africa, 2007–2008. Map number three: terrorist attacks in Africa in 2012. All three overlapped in the same sub-Saharan heart of Africa. “Desertification acts as the trigger,” explained
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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.
Which means they are losing the only thing they were rich in: a deep sense of community. Here, you grow up with your family, parents look after children and children then look after parents, and everyone eats and lives together. But now with the
“You live here and you see on TV people having a good life, and democracy [in Europe],” he added, “and here you are in a poor life, people have to do something …
The historian Walter Russell Mead once pointed out that after the 1990s revolution that collapsed the Soviet Union, Russians liked to say: “It’s easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than to turn fish soup into an aquarium.”
Social media is good for collective sharing, but not always so great for collective building; good for collective destruction, but maybe not so good for collective construction; fantastic for generating a flash mob, but not so good at generating a flash consensus on a party platform or a constitution.
Ghonim sees five critical challenges facing today’s social media in the political arena: First, we don’t know how to deal with rumors. Rumors that confirm people’s biases are now believed and spread among millions of people. Second, we create our own echo chambers. We tend to only communicate with people that we agree with, and thanks to social media, we can mute, unfollow, and block everybody else. Third, online discussions quickly descend into angry mobs. All of us probably know that. It’s as if we forget that the people behind screens are actually real people and not just avatars. And
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But today, conventional military power, while still important, is only one factor. If you want to measure the balance of power now, if you want to explain geopolitics, let alone manage it, you need to consider the power of one, the power of machines, and the power of flows and how all of that is breaking down weak states and empowering breakers—all in a more interdependent world.
So I repeat, what to do? If I were reimagining geopolitics from an American/Western perspective in such a world, I would begin with the most honest statement I can offer: I don’t know what is sufficient to restore order to the World of Disorder—one should be very humble in the face of such a wicked problem—but I am fairly certain of what is necessary. It’s a policy that can be called ADD, because those are its initials: amplify, deter, and degrade.
Gates put it to me this way: “For good stuff to happen, it requires a lot of things to go well—you need many pieces to get stability right.” None of it is going to happen overnight, but we need to work with the forces of order that do still exist in the World of Disorder to start building a different trajectory, beginning with all the basics: basic education, basic infrastructure—roads, ports, electricity, telecom, mobile banking—basic agriculture, and basic governance. The goal, said Gates, is to get these frail states to a level of stability where enough women and girls are getting educated
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Chicken coops, gardens, and Webs—it’s either some combination of those or: Would the last one out please turn off the lights …
Which only reinforces why, as Waylon Jennings might have put it in song, “Momma, don’t let your daughters grow up to be secretaries of state.” You need to juggle drones and walls where you must; invest in chickens, gardens, and schools where you can; amplify islands of decency wherever you find them; deter competing superpowers—whenever you’re not also enlisting their help; learn to live with the fact that a foreign policy of amplify, deter, and degrade will more often than not require us to side with the least bad over the worst; and finally, appreciate that widening decency is the necessary
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the civilization that is able to survive is the one that is able to adapt to the changing physical, social, political, moral, and spiritual environment in which it finds itself.
This vacuum could not be happening at a worse time—at a time when we are, in effect, experiencing three “climate” changes at once: a change in the climate of technology, in the climate of globalization, and in the actual climate and environment, thanks to their simultaneous accelerations.
She would tell us that there is nothing static about stability. In nature a system that looks stable and seems to be in equilibrium is not static. A system that looks static and is static is a system that’s about to die. Mother Nature knows that to remain stable you have to be open to constant change,
The very engine of nature is each plant and animal’s drive for reproductive success and its ability to adapt in ways that best enable them to produce offspring or seeds that go into the next generation”—all while other species try to eat them or oust them so they can procreate instead.
I would focus on five of these killer apps that have immediate application to governing today: (1) the ability to adapt when confronted by strangers with superior economic and military might without being hobbled by humiliation; (2) the ability to embrace diversity; (3) the ability to assume ownership over the future and one’s own problems; (4) the ability to get the balance right between the federal and the local—that is, to understand that a healthy society, like a healthy tropical forest, is a network of healthy ecosystems on top of ecosystems, each thriving on its own but nourished by the
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What exactly is culture? I like this concise definition offered by BusinessDictionary.com: culture is the “pattern of responses discovered, developed, or invented during the group’s history of handling problems which arise from interactions among its members, and between them and their environment.
the definition of leadership offered by a Harvard University expert on the subject, Ronald Heifetz, who says the role of a leader is “to help people face reality and to mobilize them to make change” as their environment changes to ensure the security and prosperity of their community.
Being Adaptive When Confronted with the Stranger; or, The Need to Change
One of the key differentiators when it comes to the openness of a culture or political system to adaptation is how it responds to contact with strangers. Is your culture easily humiliated by how much it’s been left behind and therefore likely to dig in its heels, or is it more inclined to swallow some pride and try to learn from the stranger?
differences. All I know is that since becoming a reporter in 1978, I have spent a lot of my career covering the difference between peoples, societies, leaders, and cultures focused on learning from “the other”—to catch up after falling behind—and those who feel humiliated by “the other,” by their contact with strangers, and lash out rather than engage in the hard work of adaptation. This theme has so permeated my reporting that I have been tempted at times to change my business card to read: “Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times Global Humiliation Correspondent.”
There are cultures that, when faced with adversity or a major external challenge, tend to collectively say, “I am behind, what is wrong with me? Let me learn from the best to fix it.” And they learn to adapt to change. And there are those that say, “I am behind, what did you do to me? It is your fault.”
Skeptics counter that diversity is an artifact of economic development rather than a contributor. They argue that diverse populations flock to certain locations because they are either rich already or are fast becoming that way.
Our film crew came out to America’s wheat-growing farmland to illustrate how the drought that hit wheat farms in central Kansas in 2010 ended up raising bread prices in Egypt and, as we’ve seen, helping to fuel its revolution in early 2011.
decision. I tried a similar technique with my chiefs. I introduced a problem/issue, solicited their advice/ideas, and ultimately came up with two options for action; one was usually a better option than the other, and they naturally chose the option I liked best. But it appeared—to them, at least—that they had a choice—and, therefore, buy-in.
When experiences feel good that’s usually a signal that they have served some kind of evolutionary purpose—so the brain evolved to find certain kinds of food tasty because eating those foods had survival value for our ancestors.
In an interview I did with the U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, he instinctively echoed that finding: “We have such a fascination with new medicines and new cures, but if you think about it, compassion and love are our oldest medicines and they have been around for millennia. When you practice medicine you learn very quickly how much they are a part of the healing process.”
And that feeling is more important than ever, because when people feel protected, respected, and connected in a healthy community, it generates enormous trust.
“Collaboration moves at the speed of trust,” argued Chris Thompson, who works with cities for the Fund for Our Economic Future, in an essay on its website. When people trust each other, they take ownership of problems and practice stewardship.
Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity—noted that “social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of
First, as I explained at the outset, a column has to combine three things: your own value set, how you think the Machine works, and what you have learned about how the Machine affects people and culture and vice versa.
When you are in a real one, never, ever say to someone in need: “Call me if you need help.” If you want to help someone, just do it.
Susan graduated from St. Louis Park High in 1960 and attended the University of Minnesota. Through her boyfriend at the time, she met an African student from Macalester College in St. Paul at a party. She remembered that “he was wearing a trench coat and a hat and looked like someone in one of the French crime movies.” So one day in the summer of 1962 she invited this exotic African and some other friends to their home in St. Louis Park—when her parents weren’t home. One of the neighbors, seeing black men enter the house, called the police. A few days later her dad sat her down to find out
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Fifty-four years later I asked Annan if he recalled the incident, which he did in vivid detail. “I was quite a young student—there was a group of us, an Indonesian, an Indian, and others, and we all hung out together” at Macalester, said Annan.
For foreign students from Africa, India, or Indonesia, newly independent countries, this kind of racism, that a neighbor would call the cops because they saw a black man enter a house, was a bit of a shock, said Annan. “For a young Ghanaian, whose country was just a few years out of independence and [was] so proud of his country, it takes you a while to register and understand. We all came from cultures where we were the majority, where we never had this experience. When I sometimes hear societies say, ‘We have no discrimination’—I am sure they don’t, until they have someone to discriminate
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Kofi was the second black man Susan’s brother Paul Linnee ever met. In 1962, he recalled: I was pumping gas at Norm’s Texaco at 5125 Minnetonka Blvd., when a dingy ’62 Chevy Bel Air with Kansas plates pulled in for a tank of Fire Chief gasoline. While I was using my whisk broom to sweep out the passenger compartment, the rather large black man—who was, literally, the first black person I had ever spoken to in my life—who was driving, asked me if there was a pet hospital in town. I pointed him towards Fitch’s Pet Hospital up behind the Pastime Arena. Not too long after that I heard that he had
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