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

by Thomas L. Friedman

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.”