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

by Thomas L. Friedman

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

The three largest forces on the planet—technology, globalization, and climate change—are all accelerating at once. As a result, so many aspects of our societies, workplaces, and geopolitics are being reshaped and need to be reimagined.

“The feeling being engendered now among a lot of people is that of always being in this state of acceleration.” In such a time, opting to pause and reflect, rather than panic or withdraw, is a necessity. It is not a luxury or a distraction—it is a way to increase the odds that you’ll better understand, and engage productively with, the world around you.

Acceleration curves are exponential curves. Which changes our view of linear world.

‘Who needs patience anymore?’ But the ancients believed that there was wisdom in patience and that wisdom comes from patience … Patience wasn’t just the absence of speed. It was space for reflection and thought.” We are generating more information and knowledge than ever today, “but knowledge is only good if you can reflect on it.”

“Our ability to forge deep relationships—to love, to care, to hope, to trust, and to build voluntary communities based on shared values—is one of the most uniquely human capacities we have.

It is probably no accident, therefore, that what sparked this book was a pause—a chance encounter I had in, of all places, a parking garage, and my decision not to rush off as usual but to engage with a stranger who approached me with an unusual request.

In previous epochs, “to make history you needed an army, to record it you needed a film studio or a newspaper, to publicize it you needed a publicist. Now anyone can start a wave. Now anyone can make history with a keystroke.”

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.

“What comes from the heart enters the heart.” What doesn’t come from your heart will never enter someone else’s heart. It takes caring to ignite caring; it takes empathy to ignite empathy.

Wells describes three ways of thinking about a problem: “inside the box,” “outside the box,” and “where there is no box.” The only sustainable approach to thinking today about problems, he argues, “is thinking without a box.”

There are vintage years in wine and vintage years in history, and 2007 was definitely one of the latter.

In 2007, storage capacity for computing exploded thanks to the emergence that year of a company called Hadoop, making “big data” possible for all.

In 2007, a micro-blogging company called Twitter, which had been part of a broader start-up, was spun off as its own separate platform and also started to scale globally.

In late 2006, Google bought YouTube, and in 2007 it launched Android, an open-standards platform for devices that would help smartphones scale globally with an alternative operating system to Apple’s

Also in 2007, Amazon released something called the Kindle, onto which, thanks to Qualcomm’s 3G technology, you could download thousands of books anywhere in the blink of an eye, launching the e-book revolution. In 2007, Airbnb was conceived in an apartment in San Francisco. In late 2006, the Internet crossed one billion users worldwide, which seems to have been a tipping point.

‘Watson’ became the first cognitive computer, combining machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

Moore’s law—the expectation that the power of microchips would double roughly every two years—continue on its path of delivering exponential growth in computing power.

When the first mainframe computers came out, you needed to have a computer science degree to use them. Today’s smartphone can be accessed by young children and the illiterate.

Suddenly there were so many more things that could be digitized, so much more storage to hold all that digital data, so many faster computers and so much more innovative software that could process that data for insights, and so many more organizations and people (from the biggest multinationals to the smallest Indian farmers) who could access those insights, or contribute to them, anywhere in the world through their handheld computers—their smartphones.

Moore’s law: the theory first postulated by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965 that the speed and power of microchips—that is, computational processing power—would double roughly every year, which he later updated to every two years, for only slightly more money with each new generation.

That is what happens “when the rate of change and the acceleration of the rate of change both increase at the same time,” said McAfee, and “we haven’t seen anything yet!”

“The Market” is my shorthand for the acceleration of globalization. That is, global flows of commerce, finance, credit, social networks, and connectivity generally are weaving markets, media, central banks, companies, schools, communities, and individuals more tightly together than ever.

making the world not only interconnected and hyperconnected but interdependent—everyone everywhere is now more vulnerable to the actions of anyone anywhere. And “Mother Nature” is my shorthand for climate change, population growth, and biodiversity loss—all of which have also been accelerating, as they, too, enter the second halves of their chessboards.

It is the core argument of this book that these simultaneous accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law together constitute the “age of accelerations,” in which we now find ourselves.

more Moore’s law is driving more globalization and more globalization is driving more climate change, and more Moore’s law is also driving more potential solutions to climate change and a host of other challenges—and at the same time transforming almost every aspect of modern life.

“The mathematical definition of velocity is the first derivative, and acceleration is the second derivative. So velocity grows or shrinks as a function of acceleration. In the world we are in now, acceleration seems to be increasing. [That means] you don’t just move to a higher speed of change. The rate of change also gets faster … 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.

Indeed, there is a mismatch between the change in the pace of change and our ability to develop the learning systems, training systems, management systems, social safety nets, and government regulations that would enable citizens to get the most out of these accelerations and cushion their worst impacts. This mismatch, as we will see, is at the center of much of the turmoil roiling politics and society in both developed and developing countries today. It now constitutes probably the most important governance challenge across the globe.

how the accelerations in Moore’s law and in the flow of ideas are together causing an increase in the pace of change that is challenging the ability of human beings to adapt.

He then drew a graph with the Y axis labeled “rate of change” and the X axis labeled “time.” Then he drew the first curve—a swooping exponential line that started very flat and escalated slowly before soaring to the upper outer corner of the graph,

“That’s because technology stands on its own shoulders—each generation of invention stands on the inventions that have come before,”

He’d promised two lines, and he now drew the second, a straight line that began many years ago above the scientific progress line but since then had climbed far more incrementally, so incrementally you could barely detect its positive slope. “The good news is that there is a competing curve,” Teller explained. “This is the rate at which humanity—individuals and society—adapts to changes in its environment.” These, he added, can be technological changes (mobile connectivity), geophysical changes (such as the Earth warming and cooling), or social changes (there was a time when we weren’t okay with mixed-race marriages, at least here in the United States). “Many of those major changes were driven by society, and we have adapted. Some were more or less uncomfortable. But we adapted.”

even though human beings and societies have steadily adapted to change, on average, the rate of technological change is now accelerating so fast that it has risen above the average rate at which most people can absorb all these changes. Many of us cannot keep pace anymore.

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.”

This is a real problem. When fast gets really fast, being slower to adapt makes you really slow—and disoriented.

If the technology platform for society can now turn over in five to seven years, but it takes ten to fifteen years to adapt to it, Teller explained, “we will all feel out of control, because we can’t adapt to the world as fast as it’s changing. By the time we get used to the change, that won’t even be the prevailing change anymore—we’ll be on to some new change.”

“Without clear knowledge of the future potential or future unintended negative consequences of new technologies, it is nearly impossible to draft regulations that will promote important advances—while still protecting ourselves from every bad side effect.”

In other words, if it is true that it now takes us ten to fifteen years to understand a new technology and then build out new laws and regulations to safeguard society, how do we regulate when the technology has come and gone in five to seven years?

The only adequate response, said Teller, “is that we try to increase our society’s ability to adapt.”

Most of the solutions to the big problems in the world will come from scientific progress.”

If we could “enhance our ability to adapt even slightly,” he continued, “it would make a significant difference.”

Enhancing humanity’s adaptability, argued Teller, is 90 percent about “optimizing for learning”—applying features that drive technological innovation to our culture and social structures.

“Innovation,” Teller said, “is a cycle of experimenting, learning, applying knowledge, and then assessing success or failure. And when the outcome is failure, that’s just a reason to start the cycle over again.”

“is the difference between a constant state of destabilization versus occasional destabilization.”

“but the new kind of stability has to be dynamic stability. There are some ways of being, like riding a bicycle, where you cannot stand still, but once you are moving it is actually easier. It is not our natural state. But humanity has to learn to exist in this state.”

Every computing device today has five basic components: (1) the integrated circuits that do the computing; (2) the memory units that store and retrieve information; (3) the networking systems that enable communications within and across computers; (4) the software applications that enable different computers to perform myriad tasks individually and collectively; and (5) the sensors—cameras and other miniature devices that can detect movement, language, light, heat, moisture, and sound and transform any of them into digitized data that can be mined for insights.

A microprocessor is built out of transistors, which are tiny switches that can turn a flow of electricity on or off. The computational power of a microprocessor is a function of how fast the transistors actually turn on and off and how many of these you can fit onto a single silicon chip.

As Fred Kaplan notes in his book 1959: The Year Everything Changed, the microchip might not have taken off if it hadn’t been for big government programs, notably the race to the moon and the Minuteman ICBM.

“In the early 1960s, the entire global semiconductor industry adopted Fairchild’s approach to making silicon microchips, and a market emerged for them in military fields, particularly aerospace computing.”

though, so in 1975 he updated his prediction and said the doubling would happen roughly every two years and the price would stay almost the same.

A microchip, or chip, as we said, is made up of transistors, which are tiny switches; these switches are connected by tiny copper wires that act like pipes through which electrons flow. The way a chip operates is that you push electrons as fast as possible through many copper wires on a single chip. When you send electrons from one transistor to another, you are sending a signal to turn a given switch on and off and thus perform some kind of computing function or calculation. With each new generation of microchips, the challenge is to push electrons through thinner and thinner wires to more and smaller switches to shut the electron flow on and off faster and faster to generate more computing power with as little energy and heat as possible for as low a cost as possible in as small a space as possible.