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

by Thomas L. Friedman

therefore make mobile telephony available to many more people—and support more subscribers per satellite—than the TDMA protocol being mandated in Europe.

CDMA, however, could also take advantage of natural pauses in the way people speak to allow more conversations simultaneously. This is known as “spread spectrum,” whereby each call is assigned a code that is scrambled over a wide frequency spectrum and then reconstructed at the receiving end, thus allowing multiple users to occupy the same spectrum simultaneously, using very complicated software coding and other techniques.

With TDMA, by contrast, each phone call took up its own slot. That limited its ability to scale, because eventually a mobile network operator would run out of slots, if too many people tried to make calls at the same time. Every network can overload, but TDMA would overload sooner with many fewer users. All in all, CDMA promised much more efficient use of the spectrum—later, it would also support the transmission of broadband data over wireless networks. In short, TDMA was the key to a finite room. CDMA was the key to an almost unlimited room.

3G, of cellular communications that would enable you to transmit large amounts of data and voice efficiently.

CDMA would efficiently support Internet access as well as voice.

Meanwhile, once its protocol and software were taken up for mass adoption, Qualcomm got out of the business of making phones and transmission platforms and just focused on the chips and software.

Now they’re below thirty dollars in India.”

No, Apple gave you a larger screen and better display, but the reason it is not buffering is because Qualcomm and AT&T and others invested billions of dollars in making the wireless network and phones more efficient.

To put it another way, the cloud is actually a vast network of computer servers spread all over the world that can be reached through companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, HP, IBM, and Salesforce and that acts like a giant utility in the sky. And because the services and applications the cloud offers—like Google Photos—are stored there and

not on your hard drive or smartphone, they can be constantly updated by the providers. APIs permit each component to seamlessly feed off the others with incredible efficiency.

Only 16 percent understood that it was a “network to store, access and share data from Internet-connected devices.”

When you combine robots, big data, sensors, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology and seamlessly integrate them into and power them off the cloud, it starts to feed on itself—pushing out boundaries in multiple fields at once.

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

If you look back over human history, only a few energy sources fundamentally changed everything for most everyone—fire, electricity, and computing. And now, given where computing has arrived with the cloud, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that it’s becoming more profound than fire and electricity. Fire and electricity were hugely important sources of mass energy. They could warm your home, power your tools, or transport you from place to place. But in and of themselves they couldn’t help you think or think for you. They could not connect you to all the world’s knowledge or all the world’s people. We have simply never had a tool like this that could be accessed by people all over the world at the same time via a smartphone.

“Everything is getting changed, and everyone is being impacted by it in positive and negative ways.”

These digital flows carry the energy, services, and tools of the supernova all across the world, where anyone can plug into them to power a new business, participate in the global debate, acquire a new skill, or export their latest product or hobby. All of that, in turn, is vastly amplifying the power of one.

level. It used to take a person to kill a person; now it is possible to imagine a world where one day one person could kill everyone.

But the flip side is also true—one person can now help so many more people—one person can educate millions with an Internet learning platform; one person can entertain or inspire millions; one person can now communicate a new idea, a new vaccine, or a new application to the whole world at once.

In sum, human beings have steadily built themselves better tools, but they have never ever built a tool like this supernova.

“we have never had this much richness with this much reach.”

“The feedback loop is so short now,” explained Iorio, that “in a couple days you can have a concept, the design of the part, you get it made, you get it back and test whether it is valid” and “within a week you have it produced … It is getting us both better performance and speed.”

“The world is flat.” More people than ever could now compete, connect, and collaborate on more things for less money with greater ease and equality than ever before. The world as we knew it got reshaped.

The result was that suddenly complexity became fast, free, easy for you, and invisible.

“We are all born with the ultimate pointing device—our fingers—and iPhone uses them to create the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse.”

This brings us to the essence of what really happened between 2000 and

2007: we entered a world where connectivity was fast, free, easy for you, and ubiquitous and handling complexity became fast, free, easy for you, and invisible.

Fast is a natural evolution of putting all this technology together and then diffusing it everywhere.”

“Mobility gives you mass market, broadband gives you access to the information digitally, and the cloud stores all the software applications so you can use them anytime anywhere and the cost is zero—it changed everything,” said Hans Vestberg, former CEO of the Ericsson Group.

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. And so whatever you want to move, compute, analyze, or communicate can be done with less effort.

As a result, the motto in Silicon Valley today is: everything that is analog is now being digitized, everything that is being digitized is now being stored, everything that is being stored is now being analyzed by software on these more powerful computing systems, and all the learning is being immediately applied to make old things w...

Think of the historic problem with wind-generated electricity. Because the wind blows intermittently and the electricity it generates cannot be stored at scale, and thus a utility could never be totally assured of sufficient supply, the ability of wind to replace coal-fired power has always been limited.

What is absolutely clear right now is that while the supernova may not have made our economies measurably more productive yet, it is clearly making all forms of technology, and therefore individuals, companies, ideas, machines, and groups, more powerful—more able to shape the world around them in unprecedented ways with less effort than ever before.

history of computing into three distinct eras.

The first era, he says, is the “Tabulating Era,” which lasted from the early 1900s to the 1940s and was built on single-purpose, mechanical systems that counted things and used punch cards to calculate, sort, collate, and interpret data.

That was followed by the “Programming Era”—the 1950s to the present. “As populations grew, and economic and societal systems got more complex, [the] manual, mechanical-based systems just couldn’t keep up. We turned to software programmed by humans that applied if/then logic and iteration to calculate answers to prescribed scenarios. This technology rode the wave of Moore’s law and gave us personal computers, the Internet, and smartphones. [The] problem is, as powerful and transformational as t...

And so, from 2007 onward, we have seen the birth of the “Cognitive Era” of computing. It could happen only after Moore’s law entered the second half of the chessboard and gave us sufficient power to digitize almost everything imaginable—words, photos, data, spreadsheets, voice, video, and music—as well as the capacity to load it all into computers and the supernova, the networking ability to mov...

computer to make sense of unstructured data, just as a human brain might, and thereby enhance every as...

Cognitive systems, on the other hand, he explained, are “probabilistic, meaning they are designed to adapt and make sense of the complexity and unpredictability of unstructured information. They can ‘read’ text, ‘see’ images and ‘hear’ natural speech. And they interpret that information, organize it and offer explanations of what it means, along with the rationale for their conclusions.

So in building the Watson that won on Jeopardy!, Kelly noted, they first created a whole set of algorithms that enabled the computer to parse the question—much the way your reading teacher taught you to diagram a sentence. “The algorithm breaks down the language and tries to figure out what is being asked: Is it a name, a date, an animal—what am I looking for?” said Kelly. The second set of algorithms is designed to do a

sweep of all the literature Watson had been uploaded with—everything from Wikipedia to the Bible—to try to find everything that might be relevant to a given subject area, person, or date. “The computer would look for many pieces of evidence and form a preliminary list of what might be the possible answers, and look for supporting evidence for each possible answer—[such

If you give the computer enough examples of what is right and what is wrong—and in the age of the supernova you can do that to an almost limitless degree—the computer will figure out how to properly weight answers, and learn by doing. And it never has to really learn grammar or Urdu or Chinese—only statistics!

“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.”

When an industry becomes computable, it goes through a series of predictable changes: It moves from being digitized to being disrupted to being democratized.” With Uber, the very analog process of hailing a cab in a strange city got digitized. Then the whole industry got disrupted.

And that is why Wujec likes to say that “the twentieth century was all about getting you to love the things we make. And the twenty-first is all about how to make the things you love.”

when the power of machines gets amplified, the nature of the “power of one” shifts—creativity becomes, in part, about asking the best questions. “The world of the designer changes,” explains Bass, “from the form maker to the person that creates the goals and the constraints of the object to be designed—[and that person] then no longer creates the designs, but

selects the design from a landscape of possibilities.

Chesky got to town, in early October 2007, San Francisco was hosting the Industrial Designers Society of America, and all the hotel rooms on the conference website were sold out. So Chesky and Gebbia thought: Why not turn their house into a bed and breakfast for attendees? The problem was, they had no beds, but Gebbia did have three air mattresses. “So we inflated them and called ourselves ‘Airbed and Breakfast.’ Three people stayed with us, and we charged them eighty dollars a night. We also made breakfast for them and became their local guides,” Chesky, thirty-four, explained. In the process, they made enough money to cover the rent. More important, though, they discovered a bigger idea that has since blossomed into a multibillion-dollar company, a whole new way for people to make money and tour the world.

In homage to its roots, they called the company Airbnb, which has grown so large that it is now bigger than all the major hotel chains combined—even though, unlike Hilton and Marriott, it doesn’t own a single bed.

Answer: a lot! By 2016, there were sixty-eight thousand commercial hotel rooms in Paris and more than eighty thousand Airbnb listings.

Indeed, the top three all-time popular Airbnb listings are tree houses—two of which made the owners enough money to pay off their actual home mortgages.