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

by Thomas L. Friedman

This act of chemistry usually involves mixing three basic ingredients: your own values, priorities, and aspirations; how you think the biggest forces, the world’s biggest gears and pulleys, are shaping events; and what you’ve learned about people and culture—how they react or don’t—when the big forces impact them.

And when the rate of change eventually exceeds the ability to adapt you get ‘dislocation.’ ‘Disruption’ is what happens when someone does something clever that makes you or your company look obsolete. ‘Dislocation’ is when the whole environment is being altered so quickly that everyone starts to feel they can’t keep up.”

Smartphone technology gave rise to Uber, but before the world figures out how to regulate ride-sharing, self-driving cars will have made those regulations obsolete.”

All the data being generated from the cows’ sensors revealed another, even more important insight, said Sirosh: Fujitsu researchers found that within the sixteen-hour ideal window for artificial insemination, if you performed that function in the first four hours, there was a “seventy percent probability you got a female calf, and if you did it in the second four hours there was a higher probability that you got a male.” So this could enable a farmer “to shape the mix of cows and bulls in his herd according to his needs.”

A decade and a half ago Microsoft created a technology called .NET—a proprietary closed-source platform for developing serious enterprise software for banks and insurance companies. In September 2014, Microsoft decided to open-source it on GitHub to see what the community could add. Within six months Microsoft had more people working on .NET for free than they had had working on it inside the company since its inception, said Wanstrath.

In time, all of this will reshape medicine and change how we think about being smart, argues Kelly: “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.”

So, for instance, in October 2015, Google released the basic algorithms for a program called TensorFlow for public consumption by the open-source community. TensorFlow is a set of algorithms that enable fast computers to do “deep learning” with big data sets to perform tasks better than a human brain. “By January 2016 we had a course online on how to use the TensorFlow open-source platform to write deep learning algorithms to teach a machine to do anything—copyediting, flying a plane, or legal discovery from documents,”

Imagine that you, as a worker, can decide when and how you want to earn income, using a platform that has information about your skills, capabilities, and previous tasks completed. You are seamlessly matched with the task that optimizes your income opportunity. Imagine that the same or another platform could direct you to learning opportunities that would maximize your earnings potential or support your desire to acquire new skills. Suppose that instead of having to come into the office, you can work at home or in a number of co-working spaces in your neighborhood, providing you with social connections, community, and the necessary infrastructure to support your tasks. And imagine that in this world, the social safety net—all your benefits—are not tied to your employer but are portable. Every time you work for pay, independent of the platform or an organization, your benefits accrue to your personal security account. Pieces of this new ecosystem of work are already beginning to take shape, but the process is

I didn’t care much for the King Tut paperweights or the pyramids ashtrays, but I was intrigued by a stuffed camel, which, if you squeezed its hump, emitted a camel honk. When I turned it over to see where it was manufactured, I read: “Made in China.” Same with the pyramids ashtrays. So Egypt, a country where nearly half the population lived on two dollars a day and at least 12 percent of the population, and far more young people, were unemployed, found itself suddenly competing in a world where a country half a world away could make its national icons into an ashtray or a honking-humped camel, ship them transcontinentally, and still make a profit more efficiently than Egyptians could.