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

by Thomas L. Friedman

At first it moves up very gradually, then it starts to slope higher as innovations build on innovations that have come before, and then it starts to soar straight to the sky.

We go to school for twelve or more years during our childhoods and early adulthoods, and then we’re done. But when the pace of change gets this fast, the only way to retain a lifelong working capacity is to engage in lifelong learning.

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.”

we are turning more and more “digital exhaust into digital fuel”

“Software is this magical thing that takes each emerging form of complexity and abstracts it away. That creates the new baseline that the person looking to solve the next problem just starts with, avoiding the need to master the underlying complexity themselves. You just get to start at that new layer and add your value. Every time you move the baseline up, people invent new stuff, and the compounding effect of that has resulted in software now abstracting complexity everywhere.”

The history of computers and software, explains Mundie, “is really the history of abstracting away more and more complexity through combinations of hardware and software.” What enables application developers to perform that magic are APIs, or application programming interfaces. APIs are the actual programming commands by which computers fulfill your every wish. If you want the application you’re writing to have a “save” button so that when you touch it your file is stored in the flash drive, you create that with a set of APIs—the same with “create file,” “open file,” “send file,” and on and on.

Software, concluded Donovan, “has power and flexibility greater than anything materials can offer. Software better captures new wisdom than materials.” Basically what we have done “is amplify Moore’s law with software. Moore’s law was viewed as the magic carpet we were riding, and then we discovered we could use software and literally accelerate Moore’s law.”

It creates a tremendous release of energy into the hands of human beings to compete, design, think, imagine, connect, and collaborate with anyone anywhere.

“And this release of energy is enabling the reshaping of virtually every man-made system that modern society is built on—and these capabilities are being extended to virtually every person on the planet,” said Mundie. “Everything is getting changed, and everyone is being impacted by it in positive and negative ways.”

The clue was: “Iron fitting on the hoof of a horse or a card-dealing box in a casino.” Watson, in perfect Jeopardy! style, responded with the question “What is ‘shoe’?” That response should go down in history with the first words ever uttered on a telephone, on March 10, 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor, called his assistant—whose name, ironically, was Thomas Watson—and said, “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.”

If they do, they die—and they die fast. As a result, they stay very close to the edge of the supernova. They draw energy from it and they also drive it forward. They feel its heat first and they wake up every morning and read the financial obituaries to make sure that they aren’t being melted down by it.

when connectivity became fast, free, easy for you, and ubiquitous and when handling complexity became fast, free, easy for you, and invisible—there was an energy release into the hands of humans and machines the likes of which we have never seen and are only beginning to understand. That is the inflection point that happened around 2007.

It is the equivalent of a “phase change” in chemistry from a solid to a liquid. What is the feature of something solid? It is full of friction. What is the feature of a liquid? It feels friction-free. When you simultaneously take the friction and complexity out of more and more things and provide interactive one-touch solutions, all kinds of human-to-human and business-to-consumer and business-to-business interactions move from solids to liquids, from slow to fast, from their complexity being a burden and full of friction to their complexity becoming invisible and frictionless.

estimates suggest that a primary care physician would need more than 630 hours a month to keep up with the flood of new literature that is being unleashed related to his or her practice.

“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.”

Every variable is built into the software, so as the designer changes the shape or floors or the building as a whole, the software immediately tells him or her how much that change will cost, how much energy it will save or add, and what the impact will be on the people using the building.

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“This is a tectonic shift. The Industrial Revolution was a ten-million-person story. This is a couple-of-billion-person story.” And we are just at the beginning of it.

“We are living in a world where flow will prevail and topple any obstacles in its way,”

The key is the amount of data you can now analyze. I can take all the data exhaust from our platform—six billion transactions a year and rising exponentially—and it allows us to make better decisions.

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.

“Without this level of connectivity you used to live your life in separate chapters,” he explained, “and you grew as a person in each one, but now there is a connectivity between chapters” and it is possible to open chapters far outside your geographic context that include people with shared interests. “Our mission is to connect the world. And as that happens, ‘the nature of community’ will evolve. In the past you basically had two life choices—stay in a community or leave it.”

And so it is with governing today. The only way to steer is to paddle as fast as or faster than the rate of change in technology, globalization, and the environment. The only way to thrive is by maintaining dynamic stability—that bike-riding trick that Astro Teller talked

ideas I have gleaned that are surely necessary in five key areas—the workplace, geopolitics, politics, ethics, and community building—to help people feel more anchored, resilient, and propelled in this age of accelerations. The last thing we want is for everyone to stick their paddles in the white water to slow down. That is exactly how you destabilize a kayak and a country.

Like everything else in the age of accelerations, securing and holding a job requires dynamic stability—you need to keep pedaling (or paddling) all the time. Today, argues Zach Sims, the founder of Codecademy, “you have to know more, you have to update what you know more often, and you have to do more creative things with it” than just routine tasks. “That recursive loop really defines work and learning today. And that is why self-motivation is now so much more important”—

constantly retrain them to work in a networked house.”

“This data is giving us those insights—it’s amazing.” But the fun part is that they started to stream all the data into icons on a tablet and then outfitted each of their maintenance men with one. The minute a leak or short happens or a valve is left open, it shows up on the tablet. And if something breaks the tablet will immediately display the repair manual. If something breaks or leaks that the maintenance team doesn’t know how to fix, they take a picture of it with their tablet. “The system will know that this part in this building is connected to a pipe on the fourth floor and that floor is assigned to this technician, and it automatically sends a ticket to him to fix it,” said Tipirneni. “The device will know exactly where the pipe is behind the drywall,” so there is no need to guess where to make the hole. “You save time and money and use only what you need in the most efficient way. And then you use the time saved from treating symptoms to fix root causes.”

an infrastructure that could map those relationships up to three degrees. In doing so, they provided the foundation for what would eventually become the world’s largest professional graph. Our current long-term vision at LinkedIn is to extend this professional graph into an economic graph by digitally manifesting every economic opportunity [i.e., job] in the world (full-time and temporary); the skills required to obtain those opportunities; the profiles for every company in the world offering those opportunities; the professional profiles for every one of the roughly 3.3 billion people in the global workforce; and subsequently overlay the professional knowledge of those individuals and companies onto the “graph” [so that individual professionals could share their expertise and experience with anyone].

“We have to move to more hiring based on mastery, not history,” argued Chopra. “We can steepen the slope of the learning curve, but if that learning and those skills are not recognized in the labor market, there is no incentive and no payoff.” Too many companies today are investing in screening software to keep people out, based on pedigrees, rather than learning and matching software that could tap everyone’s highest and best use. How crazy is that?

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.

Alas, the euphoria soon faded, said Ghonim, because “we failed to build consensus, and the political struggle led to intense polarization.” Social media, he noted, “only amplified” the polarization “by facilitating the spread of misinformation, rumors, echo chambers, and hate speech. The environment was purely toxic. My online world became a battleground filled with trolls, lies, hate speech.” Supporters

The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

One of the ways Itasca members sought to fix this problem was to get behind Sondra Samuels, who heads the Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ)—a collaborative of forty-three organizations and schools aimed at closing the achievement gap. NAZ was founded in 2008 in Minneapolis, and is modeled on Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone. It uses a holistic web of family coaches and tutors, combined with academic and wraparound support, for 1,100 families, to keep 2,300 children in an education pipeline from early childhood to college.

Launched Real Time Talent, one of the most innovative workforce development initiatives in the country. It links the curriculum and training for more than four hundred thousand postsecondary students with the skill requirements of employers in the state (RealTimeTalentMN.org).