A thousand years, ago, the world changed gradually—someone could live their entire life without seeing any major inventions. When there was a change, humanity had two or three generations to adapt.
Today, however, change hits fast and hard. Starting in 2007, the rate of change exploded, and by 2016, it was taking only five to seven years for the world to be noticeably different. Humanity has gotten faster at adapting due to the ability to share information and greater literacy, but in general, the world’s ability to change outpaces our ability to adapt to that change. The world changes at an accelerating pace, while humanity adapts at a constant pace.
This mismatch causes several problems:
Thank You For Being Late aims to explain: what the current conditions (as of 2016) are and how we can best adapt to them. The book’s title comes from one of the author’s personal strategies for adaptation: taking time to reflect and reorient. He has such a busy schedule that he only ever gets moments to reflect when people are late to meet him, and he’s learned to be grateful for this time.
According to the author, there are three major forces shaping the world: technology, globalization, and climate change.
These three forces all interact, and growth in one drives growth in the other, which is part of why the world feels so unstable today—everything’s changing at once. For example, technology and climate change interacted when the invention of the gas-burning engine contributed to climate change.
Technology is the first force that is shaping the world. It accelerates at an exponential rate, according to Moore’s law, which states that computational processing power will double every two years with only small increases in price.
The author discusses the five parts that make up computers and how they’ve dramatically advanced in a short time:
1. Sensors are devices that recognize environmental factors such as light, pressure, oxygen concentration—almost any of the things humans recognize using their senses—and then report this information to a computer via a signal. Over the years, sensors have gotten smaller, more efficient, and cheaper as materials and nanotechnology improved. Today, sensors, combined with people, make problem-solving much more efficient.
2. Storage is technology that retains data. (Sensors and their ability to collect large amounts of data wouldn’t be of any use if we have no way to keep the information around long enough to analyze it.) Over the years, storage capabilities have improved as memory chips became more powerful and software made them more efficient. Today, collecting, storing, and sharing information is almost free, and there’s no tradeoff between cost and speed—you can have both.
3. Software is a program that tells a computer what to do. Over the years, software advanced in two ways: by improving software-writing tools and increasing collaborative tools—the more great minds that work on a project, the more impressive the results of the project will be. Today, the open-source community collaborates to quickly create powerful software.
4. Networking is the system of cables and wireless networks that connect computers and smartphones all over the world. Via these cables and networks, people can share anything that can be digitized. Over the years, it became faster and cheaper to transmit information as wires improved and networking software and new standards were developed. Today, it’s possible and very inexpensive to transmit huge amounts of data quickly and networking is crucial to the acceleration of the other three computer components above because it allows new advances to be shared all over the globe.
5. The “supernova” (the cloud) is a term for the services and software that run on the internet instead of locally on your computer. The supernova is unique because it’s both powerful and far-reaching—in the past, the tools were only one or the other. Today, you can access anything on the supernova from anywhere in the world, on any device, as long as you have internet access.
Accelerations in technology have resulted in a corresponding acceleration in the second force that shapes the world, globalization—the flow of knowledge and information that connects the world and makes every part dependent on all the other parts.
There are four types of globalization:
1. The flow of technical knowledge. The supernova makes it possible to share technological advances all over the world.
2. The flow of business. These days, it’s cheap and easy to start a global business—all you have to do is set up your small business with a Facebook page or sell products via Amazon.
3. The flow of money. Globalization has resulted in the interdependence of markets and the ability for anyone to send money all over the world.
4. The flow of human connections. Pre-acceleration, your community was the people who were physically close to you. If you left a community, you lost the old one and found a new one wherever you went. Now, you can keep in touch with anyone anywhere in the world and there are more ways than ever to connect and empathize with strangers—social media, gaming, international TV, and so on.
The accelerations in technology and globalization are accelerating the third force that shapes the world, climate change. The climate is now changing at a pace greater than anything seen before in human history. The earth is good at maintaining equilibrium, so for some time, it’s been able to adapt to human effects. Today, however, changes are happening so fast and so globally that we’re approaching the limit of the planet’s ability to buffer the climate.
There are nine systems to consider when it comes to climate change. Scientists estimate that there’s a threshold, and if we exceed it, changes will become permanent. We’ve exceeded the threshold for the first four systems, we’re toeing the line for the next four, and we’re safely within the boundaries for the ninth.
1. Global warming is an increase in the average global temperature since preindustrial times. The global temperature is affected by the presence of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere. The more carbon dioxide there is, the more heat the atmosphere retains. Scientists estimate that the boundary is 350 parts per million carbon dioxide concentration, and we’re currently at 400.
2. Biodiversity is the number of species on the planet and the habitats they live in. Biodiversity is closely related to climate—trees take in carbon dioxide and trees require the presence of other living creatures to survive such as pollinators, soil microorganisms, and animals that spread their seeds. Scientists estimate that the boundary is no more than a 10% loss of biodiversity from preindustrial times, and no more than a 0.001% loss of species per year. Currently, in parts of Africa, biodiversity has dropped to 84%, and species loss is between 0.001% and 0.01% per year.
3. Deforestation is the loss of forests and trees. Scientists estimate that the boundary is no more than a 25% loss of the planet’s forest cover since preindustrial times and we’re at 38%.
4. Biogeochemical flows refer to the number of nutrients in the environment. Nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen are necessary for life—if plants and animals don’t have enough, they can’t grow—but the presence of too many nutrients chokes them. Nutrients are found in fertilizers and pesticides, and we’re currently overusing these products. Scientists estimate that the boundary is 25% less than we’re currently using.
5. Ocean acidification is the ocean’s absorption of carbon dioxide. When carbon dioxide mixes with water, the reaction produces carbonic acid. This acid dissolves calcium carbonate, which is a key ingredient of the shells of marine organisms. The acid also harms coral reefs and fish.
6. Freshwater use is the amount of water we can take from groundwater sources and rivers. If we take too much water, wetlands and rainforests will dry out.
7. Atmospheric aerosol loading is the tiny pollution particles in the atmosphere—such as the ones that make up smog—that come from burning fossil fuels. Pollution blocks sunlight and makes it more difficult to breathe.
8. Chemical pollution is the release of chemicals such as plastic and nuclear waste into the environment. These compounds would never form naturally and affect the environment in unpredictable ways—they might even eventually change organisms’ DNA.
9. The ozone layer is a shield in the atmosphere made of a gas called ozone. This layer protects the planet from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, which can cause skin cancer. In the 1970s, scientists learned that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), a human-made chemical, were damaging the ozone layer. In 1989, the world collectively banned the use of CFCs and the ozone layer recovered.
Population growth has a large effect on the nine systems above because the more people who live on the planet, the more resources they need to stay alive and healthy. For example, to grow enough food to feed everyone, we’ll have to use more fertilizer, water, and fossil fuels to power farm machinery, which will further degrade the planet.
The United Nations predicts that in 2050, the earth’s population will be 9.7 billion, which will be unsustainable. To control population, we need to provide easy access to contraception, educate women and give them control over their reproductive choices, and introduce modern gender norms.
Now we understand all three accelerating forces acting on the world—but what do we do about them? There are two options: 1) try to slow things down, or 2) increase humanity’s ability to adapt.
Option 1, putting on the brakes, isn’t going to work. It’s impossible to stop the accelerations and regain static stability. Even if it wasn’t impossible, the accelerations have created some major problems, such as climate change. We need the accelerations, particularly of technology, to come up with solutions.
Option 2, adaptation, is the only way forward. Adaptation involves:
There are five sectors that require innovation in social technologies: 1) the workplace, 2) geopolitics, 3) domestic politics and culture, 4) morality, and 5) society.
The three accelerations have changed the first sector, the workforce, in the following ways:
1. Middle-class jobs now require more education and knowledge, and to be part of the middle class, you have to work harder, participate in professional development, and deal with shifting employment regulations. Additionally, the increasing requirement for bachelor’s degrees or formal accreditation bars a lot of people from middle-class jobs.
2. Most jobs will change and become partly automated or require new skills.
3. Single jobs are being split into high- and low-skilled jobs. The high-skilled part will require more skill and pay better, and the low-skilled part will be automated or paid minimum wage.
4. There’s more competition for jobs, either with international workers or automation.
5. “Stempathy” jobs—jobs that require both technical (science, technology, engineering, and math) and people (empathy) skills—are the jobs of the future because technology will never be able to replace or automate human empathy.
To adapt to these changes, we need to rethink the workplace by:
1. Establishing lifelong learning programs. Today, at best, your education prepares you for your first job, and you have to keep learning throughout your life because the world and your job will change over time.
2. Building tools to help match people and their skills to jobs. While technology endangers jobs to some extent, it can also be used to improve the workforce.
3. Revising social contracts. The relationships among workers, schools, companies, and the government need to change to adapt to the age of accelerations.
The three accelerations have changed the second sector, geopolitics, in the following ways:
1. Average nations have become weak. New nations who don’t have the resources to create strong governments or industries used to be able to rely on foreign help, but the US and other superpowers no longer have the resources or motivation to help.
2. Threats are no longer obviously galvanizing (for example, in the way Nazism and its disregard for human rights galvanized the Western world to oppose it) and can’t be solved simply with armies and a conclusive victory on a particular date.
3. The US has to both contain and work with superpowers Russia and China. The world is so interconnected now that the fall of other superpowers might actually be more dangerous for the US than the rise, and allies can quickly become enemies.
4. Due to globalization, disorder in any part of the world affects the rest of the world too.
5. Breakers—individuals or groups who want to cause chaos—are more powerful than ever because they have access to information via the supernova. (Friedman contrasts breakers with “makers,” people who use the accelerations to build new things or improve old things.)
6. Social media can help people end oppression but fails to help them create new systems.
To adapt to these changes, we need to rethink geopolitics by:
1. Amplifying. Give people educational opportunities and economic opportunities, both of which allow people to stay in their countries instead of migrating in search of resources or work.
2. Deterring. The US maintains enough power to stop countries from acting in ways the US doesn’t want them to.
3. Degrading. Discourage breakers from causing chaos and cutting them off from their leaders if they’re part of a group.
The three accelerations have changed the third sector, domestic politics and culture, in the following ways:
1. Political impasses. After the massive technological changes in 2007, the 2008 recession hit, and politics stalled because leaders couldn’t explain the situation to citizens and failed to implement policy changes, such as technology regulations, that would have helped people adapt. This left space for populists who promised to hold back changes.
2. Refusal to compromise politically. The two parties became too committed to their identities (and too reliant on their funders) to consider ideas that didn’t fit neatly into their platforms.
To adapt to these changes, we need to rethink domestic politics and culture by:
1. Studying Mother Nature. Mother Nature has enormous buffering capacities and many people, including the author, have looked to it for an example of how to handle accelerating change.
2. Applying Mother Nature’s buffering capacities to domestic politics and culture.
The three accelerations have changed the fourth sector, morality, in the following ways:
1. Everyone has godlike powers.
2. More spaces are unregulated by humans.
To adapt to these changes, we need to rethink morality by:
1. Increasing ethical education.
2. Building healthy communities. Community members watch out for each other and encourage and discourage certain behaviors. Character isn’t usually something that’s developed by an individual; it’s a group effort.
The author presents his hometown, St. Louis Park, Minnesota, as a model for how society, specifically communities, can adapt to the accelerations. St. Louis has been successful at adapting because it has implemented the following strategies:
Today, the world is accelerating at a pace never seen before, which results in many people feeling destabilized or lost. Thank You For Being Late aims to explain:
One of the important things we can do to feel more stable is to take a moment to reflect and reorient ourselves, which is where this book’s title comes from. Author, reporter, and columnist Thomas Friedman has a busy schedule, so busy that he never has any unscheduled time in which to think. He only ever gets moments to reflect when people are late to meet him, and he’s learned to be grateful for this reflection time.
A thousand years ago, the world changed gradually. Someone could live their entire life without seeing any major inventions or overhauls to society, and when there was a change, humans had two to three generations to adapt before the next change came along. Additionally, changes took a long time to spread across the globe. Changes happened first in major cities and then spread to the countryside and only years later made it to other parts of the world.
By the 1900s, however, the rate of change increased and it was only taking 20-30 years for the world to be noticeably different. It took people around a generation to adapt.
In 2007, the rate of change exploded. The costs of using mobile data fell, internet speeds increased, and mobile data advanced enough that more people wanted to use it. The iPhone was invented, Facebook opened to the general public and became popular globally, and the first cognitive computer was invented.
By 2016, it was taking only five to seven years for the world to be noticeably different. It takes humans 10-15 years to adapt, so by the time we adapt, whatever it was we adapted to will have already disappeared and been replaced by something newer.
As you can see from the timeline above, the world changes at an accelerating, exponential pace, which means the pace increases with time. To understand an exponential pace, imagine that a car is driving down a road at 30 mph, but also imagine that it doubles its speed every 10 minutes. After the first ten minutes, it will have covered 5 miles. In the second ten minutes, it will speed up to 60 mph and cover 10 miles. In the third 10 minutes, it will speed up to 120 mph and cover 20 miles. After half an hour, the car has gone 35 miles.
To imagine this exponential change in terms of technology, let’s compare the specs of a 1971 Intel microchip to today’s Intel Core processor. Today’s version is 60,000 times cheaper, performs 3,500 times better, and is almost 100,000 times more energy-efficient. If you applied this same growth to a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle, it would cost 4 cents, go 300,000 miles per hour, and have an energy efficiency of two million miles per gallon.
Humanity, on the other hand, adapts to change at a more or less constant, linear pace, which means the pace stays the same no matter how much time passes. To understand a linear pace, recall that car driving down a road. Because the pace never changes, the car will keep traveling at the speed it started at, 30 mph, for all time. In the first 10 minutes, it covers five miles. In the second 10 minutes, it still only covers five miles. In the third 10 minutes, it covers another five miles. After half an hour, the car has gone 15 miles.
Over time, humanity has increased its speed of adaptation due to greater literacy and the ability to share information. However, in general, the world’s ability to change still outpaces our ability to adapt to that change.
This mismatch causes several problems:
The Author’s Experience With the Technological Acceleration
In the 1950s, due to the exponential nature of change, the pace of technological innovation increased rapidly. The author was born in 1953 and saw a variety of major changes over the course of his reporting career:
1978—the author got a job with United Press International (UPI) as a wire reporter in London. He wrote stories on typewriters—which had been the standard for 100 years—and early word processors.
1979—the author went to Beirut as a foreign correspondent and wrote stories on a desktop manual typewriter. He sent these stories back to the UPI London office via telex. This involved sending three paragraphs at a time over telephone cables. The author couldn’t send the telex himself; he gave his paragraphs to a telex operator.
1981-1982—the author took a job with The New York Times. He was sent back to Beirut and this time took a portable typewriter, which was cutting-edge at the time. Telex was still the method for sending stories, and unfortunately, just after the author had finished an important story, the single cable switching box in Beirut went down and he wasn’t able to publish his story.
1984—The New York Times equipped the author with a TeleRam Portabubble, which was a word processor that could hook up to a phone. He sent his stories through the phone lines, via sound waves, back to the office in New York, which had early computers.
~1988—the author worked on IBM desktops and with floppy disks.
1989—the author moved to the Washington bureau and wrote stories on Tandy laptops. He sent them back to the Times office through phone lines.
1995—the author became a columnist and a company called Netscape emerged. Netscape sold internet services.
~2001—everyone had email.
~2006—people started reading the news online and newspapers started shutting down. Reporters who used to write a single story a day now wrote multiple stories for the web, Facebook posts, and tweets. They also narrated videos.
Early 2015—the author visited Google X’s facility and reported on it using photos he took on his cell phone camera from the backseat of a self-driving car.
March 2015—the author read an article comparing texts written by humans and computer algorithms. The algorithms are getting close to what a human can do.
April 2016—the author went to Niger to report on economic migrants. He interviewed Adamou Chaifou, the minister of the environment, and posted the story. He met up with Chaifou around five hours later and told him about the story, but Chaifou had already seen it—his children, who were studying in China, had already found it and sent it to him.
~2016—in the process of writing this book, the author had to interview nearly everyone two or three times in order to stay up to date.
(Shortform note: The author’s experiences with technology appear in the book’s Chapter 7.)
The world is changing faster than ever.
What discoveries and world events have significantly changed how you do your work or live your day-to-day life?
What’s a change that affects your job that you struggle with? What have you done so far to adapt? What could you do to further adapt?
What technologies currently exist that you’re not taking advantage of? What’s preventing you from engaging with that new technology?
What new industry or invention do you think the world is behind in regulating? Why?
According to the author, there are three major forces that shape the world: technology, globalization, and climate change. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 will cover technology, and subsequent chapters in Part 2 will cover globalization and climate change.
These three forces all interact, and growth in one drives growth in the others, which is part of why the world feels so unstable today—everything’s changing at once. For example, technology and climate change interacted when the invention of the gas-burning engine contributed to climate change.
The author starts his history of technological acceleration with the microchip, the part of a computer that runs the programs and is responsible for memory. Microchips are made of wires and switches called transistors, and the more transistors a microchip has, and the faster electrons move through the transistors to turn them on and off, the more powerful the chip is.
In 1965, Electronics magazine asked Gordon Moore, R&D director of Fairchild Semiconductor (later Intel) to predict what was going to happen in the microchip industry over the next decade. Moore looked at what had happened in the preceding years and noticed that every year, his company had doubled the processing power of microchips without increasing their cost.
Gordon predicted that this trend would continue for the next 10 years. He was right—though the industry hit barriers, someone always came up with a new solution in time to meet his deadline.
At the end of the decade, Moore predicted that the doubling would slow to every two years. He was right again. Over the past 50 years, each year, either of two possible ways to double processing occurred:
This phenomenon became known as Moore’s law, which states that computational processing power will double every two years with only small increases in price.
While this law was created to address microchips specifically, it can be more broadly applied to technology in general to state that technological capabilities grow at an exponential rate. Today, technology is in a place where each doubling is so large, the changes are massive. For example, instead of increasing the space on a floppy disk from 256MB to 512MB, we have self-driving cars.
When it comes to microchips, though, Moore’s law will eventually hit a wall because wires and transistors can only get so small. However, there’s still a long way to go until we hit that wall—currently, microchips are the size of fingernails and can hold a billion 14-nanometer transistors, and people already have a pretty good idea for how to manage seven and five nanometers. While microchips aren’t close to their limit yet, the rate of change is slowing—the last two doublings each took two and a half years instead of two years.
Moore’s law applies to all five of the parts that make up computers:
Sensors are devices that recognize environmental factors such as light, pressure, oxygen concentration—almost any of the things humans recognize using their senses—and then report this information to a computer via a signal.
For example, Bigbelly garbage cans are fitted with sensors that can determine when they’re full. Once at capacity, they send a signal to garbage collectors. This saves collectors a lot of time—they never have to guess if a trip to a garbage can will be necessary.
Sensors, like microchips, have gotten smaller, more efficient, and cheaper over the years as materials and nanotechnology improved. According to Bill Ruh, the chief digital officer at GE, smartphones are responsible for much of this progress. Smartphones are full of sensors—cameras, microphones, and so on—and to fit on phones, people had to find ways to make these sensors small, durable, and cheap. Once phone-appropriate sensors were developed, they could be used for other machines.
The “Internet of Things,” or “industrial internet,” refers to the idea that eventually, every object will be “smart”—equipped with sensors. This will allow objects to report on their condition or the surrounding conditions and then be adjusted remotely.
For example, in the past, washing machine maintenance was conditional—if something looked wrong, you fixed it—or preventive—you serviced machines on a schedule, regardless of whether the machine needed attention or not. GE engineers used their understanding of physics to model washing machines and predict when something would break, and experienced repair people used their intuition and experience to diagnose problems.
Today, thanks to sensors, we have predictive and prescriptive maintenance. Sensors can sort through so much data and find patterns that are so weak that even experienced humans would never notice them. Today, a brand-new employee could figure out what was wrong with a washing machine just from looking at sensor data.
Sensors, combined with people, make problem-solving much more efficient, and bolstering the industrial internet is one of the ways people might adapt to keep up with the curve of change.
Sensors and their ability to collect large amounts of data wouldn’t be any use if we had no way to keep the information around long enough to analyze. Storage is technology that retains data, and storage, like microchips and sensors, also develops in accordance with Moore’s law.
Before major advances in storage technologies in recent years, companies had to delete data because there wasn’t enough space to keep everything.
There are two methods for increasing storage:
Method #1: Improve memory chips. Memory chips, like microchips, follow Moore’s law, and they can be made more powerful by using new materials or making the parts smaller.
Method #2: Use software that allows multiple computers to work together and combine their processing and storage power. (Storing data on a single computer has limitations—you can only store as much data as that one computer’s hard drive has space for, and you can only process as much data as that one computer’s processor can handle.)
Combining computers requires two types of software: one to link the computers, and another to make the data searchable. Google came up with the software for both and wrote papers about their software and shared them with the public. They only shared the ideas, not the exact code, but this was enough information for computer experts to start recreating the programs.
A man named Doug Cutting came up with a storage idea he called Hadoop. Like Google’s programs, Hadoop would harness the processing power and storage of hundreds of computers and link them.
Hadoop is “open-source,” which refers to a community-based way of developing software code. Anyone can use and edit the code as long as they share their edits and improvements with the rest of the community. It’s a fast and effective way of developing software because the talent pool is huge—anyone with an internet connection who’s interested can help with development.
Hadoop was a breakthrough—before it came into being around 2007, companies with large amounts of data such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, had no way to analyze their data.
In the past, there was a tradeoff between speed and scale. You could analyze small amounts of data quickly, but that didn’t give you a lot of information. Or, you could analyze large amounts of data and get meaningful stats, but it would take a long time. Today, however, thanks to programs such as Hadoop, you can get detailed information on your data at any scale.
Additionally, these days, collecting, storing, and sharing information is almost free. The last time there was such a major change in cost was in the 15th century when the printing press was invented and books became affordable to the average person.
Software is a program that tells a computer what to do. Like microchips, sensors, and storage, software capabilities are increasing in accordance with Moore’s law.
Software removes complexity. For example, imagine you want to find a photo of a ski trip in Montana you took with your neighbor. Pre-software, to find this photo, you’d sort through your hard copy prints and photo albums. Now, if your photos are stored in Google Photos, all you have to do is search a keyword or give a voice command. Google Photos does plenty of complex operations behind the scenes—it uses recognition software to identify people’s faces and certain landscapes—but all you see on your end is Google turning up the photo you want.
In the 20th century, hardware was the limitation of what technology could do. In the 21st century, software is the limiting factor, because software makes hardware work in different, more efficient ways.
Software capabilities can advance in two ways:
As we learned in the previous section, open-source is a method of community-based software development. Much of this development is done on a platform called GitHub, which is essentially a version control system that allows people to share, edit, and discuss code.
To use GitHub, you navigate to the GitHub library, find the software you need or want to work on, and download the code. You adapt the program and/or customize it to meet your needs, and finally upload your adaptation back to GitHub. The original developer can choose whether or not to accept your changes. If she accepts them, the new code is posted and anyone else can use and build on it. If she doesn’t accept your edits, there are tools for discussing the changes line-by-line.
(Shortform example: If you need a credit card processing system that could process a niche type of card, you could go find a general processing system on GitHub and then add functionality for that particular card you need. Then, you would upload your changes.)
GitHub makes money by charging companies for private business accounts, which allows them to choose who they want contributing to their software. Many companies have both private and public code on GitHub. Microsoft is one example. Microsoft originally only ran on Windows, and when the company made the decision that they wanted it to run on the operating systems Linux and Mac too, they released the code on GitHub. Impressively, the GitHub community created the Mac version overnight.
There’s no financial reward for contributing—people on GitHub work for free because they’re passionate about the work and want recognition.
Networking is the system of cables and wireless networks that connect computers and smartphones all over the world. Via these cables and networks, people can share anything that can be digitized. Networking is crucial to the acceleration of the other three computer components above because it allows new advances to be shared all over the world.
There are two main types of networks: wired and wireless.
Thank You for Being Late covers one way to improve wired networks: Improve the wires.
In the early days, a transmission was sent using a digital radio frequency over a copper cable. In the 1980s and 1990s, scientists began transforming transmissions into light and sending them through long, flexible glass tubes called fiber-optic cables. Initially, the transmissions weakened after traveling a certain distance, so they had to pass through electronic amplifier boxes periodically.
As time went on, scientists figured out how to make the cables longer and increase their capacity, and how to create signals that never weakened. Once the amplifiers were no longer needed, the speed of transmission increased a lot—scientists no longer had to contend with the properties of electricity, only the properties of light. Scientists figured out how to increase the speed and capacity of transmission further by pulsing the light and using different colors, or by doing both at the same time. They’re currently working on trying to shape the light differently, which allows transmission speeds of more than a hundred trillion bits per second.
Today, it’s possible and very inexpensive to transmit huge amounts of data quickly. For example, in 2013, the internet in Chattanooga was fast enough that T Bone Burnett (in LA) and Chuck Mead (in Chattanooga) were able to perform a duet of “The Wild Side of Life” without any lag.
There are three ways to improve wireless networking: Improve the hardware (Moore’s law), software, or standards.
In 2006, AT&T became the exclusive service provider for the iPhone. The iPhone was far more popular than AT&T had anticipated and they had to increase their capacity quickly—Apple wouldn’t be happy if their customers were having their calls dropped.
It would take Moore’s law some time to produce a new advance, and it would also take time to physically install that new advance. AT&T couldn’t wait, so they had to come up with a solution using the lines and infrastructure they already had.
Software-enabled networking was their solution. Software-enabled networking is a way of making existing networking hardware work more efficiently. For example, imagine a telephone wire as a freeway. If the vehicles on the freeway are left to their own devices, they’ll move in inefficient ways and sometimes crash. However, if you could control the behavior of every single vehicle on the freeway—imagine they’re self-driving cars—you could pack them in more tightly. The cars could all drive at high speeds very close to each and there would never be a problem. This is essentially what AT&T did—they manipulated the electric energy of calls and data to create extra capacity.
Mobile phones first emerged in the 1980s. The first generation (1G) of mobile phones used FM radio for transmission. 2G used digital cellular networks, specifically the Global System for Mobile (GSM), and included voice, data, and texting, but without using the internet.
GSM used the Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) standard for communication, which can transmit multiple conversations over one radio wave. Europe chose to standardize GSM across the continent so that if you crossed a border, your phone would still work in the new country. The EU tried to get the rest of the world to use TDMA too.
However, Irwin Jacobs of the brand-new start-up Qualcomm thought that Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) would be more effective than TDMA because it would increase wireless capacity. Like TDMA, CDMA could send multiple conversations over one radio wave, but CDMA allowed for more conversations because it took advantage of silences in conversations. It did this by using “spread spectrum,” a process in which calls are split up into multiple frequencies as they travel and then put back together at the receiving end. CDMA wouldn’t overload as fast as TDMA.
However, many people didn’t think CDMA was worth exploring—TDMA was working just fine and no one could imagine how much traffic there would be in the future or that anyone would want to use the internet on their phone. As a result, no one would make Qualcomm a CDMA phone, so they had to make one themselves. In 1995 Qualcomm was able to get Hutchison Telecom on board, and once CDMA was out there competing in the world, it won out over TDMA, especially once 3G came along. 3G allowed access to the internet, though it was slow and awkward—think dial-up.
Today, 4G is the current standard. On a 4G network, wireless internet is as reliable as wired and it’s perfectly possible to watch videos, which requires a good connection.
5G, according to Qualcomm, will be your phone anticipating what you want to do with it.
In Chapters 2-3, we covered four out of the five parts of computers that are affected by Moore’s law. In this chapter, we’ll talk about the fifth part, the cloud, which is so significant—as significant for humanity as the discovery of fire—that it requires its own chapter.
The cloud, or as the author prefers to call it, the “supernova,” is a term for the services and software that run on the internet instead of locally on your computer, for example, Netflix, Dropbox, or Microsoft Office 365. You can access anything on the supernova from anywhere in the world, on any device, as long as you have internet access. The supernova is unique because it’s both powerful and far-reaching. In the past, tools were either one or the other.
Like networking, the supernova is a major player in the acceleration of all the other parts of computing because it allows any type of technology to be constantly updated, improved, or shared. The supernova increases the power of:
An example of the increasing power of machines is the design of jet engine parts. Pre-supernova, when GE designed a new jet-engine part, it was a two-year process. They had to design the part, build the tools that could build the part, build a prototype using the new tools, build the actual part, and then test it. Today, it takes a week. GE designs the part on a computer, sends it to a 3-D printer, and then tests it multiple times a day.
The dot-com boom in the 1990s and 2000 paved the way for the supernova. During the dot-com boom, people and companies overinvested in internet technology, which resulted in the set up of wires all over the world and a decrease in the cost of connectivity. The internet became easy, fast, free, and universal.
The supernova emerged in 2007, and it was designed to make things less complicated. Complexity became like the internet—easy, fast, free, and additionally, invisible. For example, consider Amazon’s “one-click” checkout. From a customer perspective, you only have to click one button to make an order. Behind the scenes, there are many complicated processes and codes running, but from the customer’s end, things have never been simpler. This benefits Amazon—the easier it can make checkout, the more likely the customer is to do so.
The supernova is transforming all industries around the world. Previously, problems were expensive and complicated to solve because businesses didn’t have access to the information they needed to create a solution. Now, however, it’s practically free to get all sorts of information.
According to John E. Kelly III, an IBM senior vice president, there are three eras of computing:
Era #1: The “Tabulating Era.” This era lasted from the 1900s-1940s and was made up of machines that did a single task, such as punch-card systems.
Era #2: The “Programming Era.” This era lasted from the 1950s to around the 2000s and in this era, people programmed machines to use software and algorithms—a series of rules and steps. The rules and steps are determined by people, and while programmable computers are powerful, they can only do what they’ve been programmed to do and they can only handle certain kinds of data. Home computers, smartphones, and the internet are part of this era.
Era #3: The “Cognitive Era.” This era started in 2007 (it required advances in processing power, storage, networking, software, and the supernova) and will continue until some point in the future. Cognitive computers are designed to adapt to different situations and types of information. They don’t give a correct solution the way a programmable computer does; they give a list of the most likely answers and their probability of being correct.
Some people are scared of cognitive computers and worry that they might take over the world. This is unlikely for two reasons:
Watson was the first cognitive computer—you may remember it from its appearance on Jeopardy! in 2011.
Watson “learned” to play Jeopardy! like any cognitive computer—pattern recognition and statistics. One set of algorithms helped Watson understand what the question was asking—was the answer a place, a date, and so on. Another set of algorithms searched all the data Watson had access to and then analyzed the probability of what in that data could be the correct answer. The answer was given a degree of confidence, and if the confidence level was high enough, Watson would give the answer. Then, once Watson’s answer was determined right or wrong, that was one more example to add to Watson’s database and include in its statistical calculations.
The latest version of Watson lives in the supernova and is currently learning all known medical research. Watson isn’t just a repository of information however; it helps doctors with diagnostics.
For example, if IBM gives Watson 3,000 images, 6% of which show melanoma, Watson will use its algorithm to determine distinguishing features of melanomas such as shape and color. Then, when it’s given an image of a patient, it can identify whether it shows a melanoma or not. If Watson handles the diagnostics, then a doctor can focus on the patient, leveraging the human-only skills of judgment and empathy.
In the 21st century, how much knowledge you can keep in your head won’t be a measure of your intelligence because technology can hold knowledge for you. Instead, intelligence will be measured by your ability to work with technology to access the information you need.
Additionally, creativity will no longer be about coming up with ideas, it will be about asking the right questions. A person doesn’t have to actually create a design, they just have to pick the best of the options a computer comes up with.
Though the supernova has been around for years now, its effects aren’t showing up yet in the ratio of output (goods and services) to input (labor to produce goods and services). Productivity improvements usually drive growth, so economists debate why the ratios aren’t changing. There are two schools of thought:
A 2015 study discovered that there’s a large gap between the most digitized industries and other industries, even though everyone is adopting the supernova. The less digitized sectors are the big players in terms of GDP, so they affect the numbers a lot. The study said that the US economy is only at 18% of what it could be if it fully embraced its digital potential.
Even if the numbers don’t show that our economies are more productive yet, it’s obvious that technology is making our world more powerful.
As technology and the supernova accelerate, everything is becoming digitizable and all industries will become computable. There’s a three-step process:
Airbnb is a company that allows anyone in the world to turn their vacation home, spare bedroom, or couch into a bed and breakfast. Someone with rental space posts a description of it on Airbnb’s website, and then someone looking for accommodation gets in touch via the website, pays via the website, and stays in the host’s home. Airbnb doesn’t own any property, but the company is larger than all the major hotel chains.
Airbnb relies on the supernova. It came into being in 2007, at that sweet spot when the internet became easy, fast, free, and universal, and complexity became easy, fast, free, and invisible. Airbnb was possible because:
Accelerations in technology have resulted in a corresponding acceleration in globalization—the flows of knowledge and information that connect the world and make every part dependent on all the other parts.
Advances in technology made globalization possible. In the 20th century, pre-internet, the economy was based in the exchange of physical goods, services, and money. In 1990, when the internet was just emerging and 435 million tourists traveled around the globe, the global flows of finance, services, and goods were 24% of the world’s GDP.
Today, physical flows have slowed or declined, but the transmission of data across the globe has shot up. In 2014, 1.1 billion tourists traveled around the globe, and the global flows of finance, services, and goods were 39% of the world’s GDP. Digital goods, such as ebooks or movie rentals, are much easier to distribute globally than physical goods, and eventually, 3-D printing might digitize even more products.
Additionally, since 2005, cross-border internet traffic is 45 times larger. Almost a billion people have at least one international contact on social media, and on Facebook, 50% of people have at least one international friend.
The MGI Connectedness Index is a measure of how much different countries are participating in global flows of knowledge and information. Participation in global flows is a good indicator of growth and prosperity because connected countries have access to the most data and are the first to see new ideas. For example, Singapore is at the top of the index because it has both the infrastructure to connect with different flows and citizens educated enough to make use of the flows.
There’s a correlation between GDP and “high internet penetration.” As technology grows and the population of a country adapts to this new technology, the workforce becomes more productive, and GDP increases.
Globalization is the flow of knowledge and information, and there are several different types of globalization, each named for what type of knowledge or information is flowing around the world.
The first type of globalization is the flow of technical knowledge. The supernova makes it possible to share technological advances all over the world.
Outsourcing was an early stage of globalization. US and European companies took advantage of the fact that the world was more connected and hired relatively cheap international engineers to solve their problems. For example, many Indian engineers worked on solving Y2K—the worry that computers would stop working at the beginning of the year 2000.
Once people in non-US or European countries were connected to the flows, they could start using them to solve their own countries’ problems. For example, Aloke Bajpai initially worked in the US before returning to India to start Ixigo.com. Ixigo is a travel search program that helps Indians find cheap travel options. Bajpai used open-source software and the supernova to build Ixigo, and it will run on the least advanced cell phones, allowing more people to access it.
Conversational commerce is the phenomenon of messaging apps being fitted with additional non-messaging features such as allowing you to make reservations, buy things, or do your banking. For example, Venmo is an app that allows you to both transfer money to your friends and send them messages. These apps, which were created by technical flows, enable people to more easily participate in the other flows we’ll discuss below.
Messaging apps are becoming more popular than email. In the coming years, email will probably continue to exist but be used only for things that don’t require immediate attention. In addition to providing features for conversational commerce, messaging apps have far more features than email—they’re not restricted to text and can include media, stickers, GIFs, and location information. Messaging apps are also more convenient ways of connecting with people than phone or email—all you’ll need to connect with someone is their name.
The second type of globalization is the flow of businesses. These days, it’s cheap and easy to start a global business—all you have to do is set up your small business with a Facebook page or sell products via Amazon. In 2014, there were around 25 million small businesses on Facebook and just two years later, there were 50 million.
Since the flows of business result in the creation of more organizations, there’s more competition, and often from unexpected arenas. Usually, competitors are companies in a similar industry. However, many companies are branching out—for example, Amazon started as a bookstore and now makes Golden Globe-winning TV series.
The third type of globalization is the flow of money—globalization has resulted in the interdependence of markets. For example, when China experienced stock market turbulence in summer 2015, the American stock market was severely impacted within a week.
Notably, the use of algorithms in the stock market can have a huge effect on global financial flows. Companies can trade faster, which is more lucrative, if they use algorithms. For example, some firms can complete more than 100,000 trades per second.
However, these algorithms can fail or be tricked. For example, in 2015, Navinder Singh Sarao spoofed the market by creating a huge number of fake buy or sell orders. High-frequency trading firms program their algorithms to get out of the market when it gets too volatile, and Sarao made the market appear so volatile that all the algorithms pulled out at once, creating a crash. This allowed him to buy low, sell high, and make $875,000. He was later arrested.
Even when people aren’t spoofing the market, algorithms can go wrong—in 2012, Knight Capital lost $440 million in 45 minutes.
To be profitable, bank branches require $30 million worth of deposits. In low-income areas, branches don’t get enough deposits to justify their existence, so they close, which results in people who live in these areas having less access to banking services.
Enter Paypal, which digitizes money and allows it to be sent or received anywhere in the world. Instead of traveling long distances to banks, standing for hours in line, and being charged huge fees, people can send money on their phones.
Additionally, Paypal offers loans through its Working Capital program. It can take as little as minutes for a small business to get a loan through Paypal, versus the weeks it might take to get approved by a bank. Paypal doesn’t rely on credit scores; they look at your payment records through Paypal, and their analysis is actually a more accurate picture of your creditworthiness than a credit score.
In addition to creating technical, business, and financial flows across the world, globalization has also contributed to the final type of flow—the flow of human contact. Pre-acceleration, your community was the people who were physically close to you. If you left a community, you lost the old one and found a new one wherever you went. Now, you can keep in touch with anyone anywhere in the world and there are more ways than ever to connect with strangers—social media, gaming, international TV, and so on.
Flows allow for a global conversation about values and public opinion is changing faster than ever. People meet and talk to people they never would have encountered in real life, and encountering more people creates empathy. For example, homophobic people have more opportunities to meet gay people and possibly develop more positive attitudes.
Unfortunately, this works the other way too—people with negative ideas can more easily find each other and connect. For example, neo-Nazis use social media to find new converts.
As a result of the accelerations in technology and globalization, climate change—what the author calls “Mother Nature”—is also accelerating at a pace greater than anything seen before in human history. For example, on July 31, 2015, Bandar Mahshahr, Iran recorded a heat index (a combination of heat and humidity) of 163 degrees Fahrenheit, one of the most extreme readings ever recorded anywhere in the world.
The earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago and scientists divide this time into chunks (epochs, periods, and eras) based on major events that happened at certain times.
For most of the earth’s existence, the climate swung between hot periods and ice ages and human life as we know it couldn’t exist—the climate was too unpredictable for agriculture, city-building, or industrial revolutions.
Then, after the last major ice age approximately 11,500 years ago, the earth entered the Holocene epoch. In the Holocene, the climate and environment created a perfect balance for human life. The atmosphere contained the right amount of gases to keep the global temperature survivable, forests released enough oxygen to make the atmosphere breathable, and freshwater was plentiful.
During the Industrial Revolution, however, human activity started to affect the balanced conditions of the Holocene. For example, burning fossil fuels released greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere, which warms the planet.
In the 1960s-1970s, middle classes all over the globe emerged and more people began driving cars and flying in planes, both of which release carbon dioxide. Middle classes also began living in single-family homes and using more resources and energy.
The earth is good at maintaining equilibrium, so for some time, it’s been able to adapt to human effects. Today, however, changes are happening so fast and so globally that we’re approaching the limit of the planet’s ability to buffer the climate. As a result, we’re about to enter (or already have entered, according to some scientists) a new epoch—the Anthropocene, a period in which changes to the environment are caused by humans.
(Shortform note: For more information on how humans have changed the earth, read our summary of Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction.)
In 2008, a group of earth scientists came up with the idea of planetary boundaries. These boundaries are the limit of how much we can change the earth before the changes become permanent. Permanent change is bad news—modern society is based on the environment we live in and modern infrastructure may no longer work in a changed world.
The baseline for all of the boundaries is the conditions of the planet in preindustrial times. There are nine boundaries, some of which we’re within, some of which we’ve exceeded:
1. The ozone layer is a shield in the atmosphere made of a gas called ozone. This layer protects the planet from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, which can cause skin cancer. In the 1970s, scientists learned that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), a human-made chemical, were damaging the ozone layer. In 1989, the world collectively banned the use of CFCs and the ozone layer recovered.
2. Global warming is an increase in the average global temperature since preindustrial times. The global temperature is affected by the presence of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere. The more carbon dioxide there is, the more heat the atmosphere retains.
3. Biodiversity is the number of species on the planet and the habitats they live in. Biodiversity is closely related to climate—trees take in carbon dioxide and trees require the presence of other living creatures to survive such as pollinators, soil microorganisms, and animals that spread their seeds. Naturally, 0.0001% of species go extinct per year.
4. Deforestation is loss of forests and trees.
5. Biogeochemical flows refer to the number of nutrients in the environment. Nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen are necessary for life—if plants and animals don’t have enough, they can’t grow—but the presence of too many nutrients chokes them. Nutrients are found in fertilizers and pesticides and we’re currently overusing these products.
6. Ocean acidification is the ocean’s absorption of carbon dioxide. When carbon dioxide mixes with water, the reaction produces carbonic acid. This acid dissolves calcium carbonate, which is a key ingredient of the shells of marine organisms. The acid also harms coral reefs and fish.
7. Freshwater use is the amount of water we can take from groundwater sources and rivers. If we take too much water, wetlands and rainforests will dry out.
8. Atmospheric aerosol loading is the tiny pollution particles in the atmosphere—such as the ones that make up smog—that come from burning fossil fuels. Pollution blocks sunlight and makes it more difficult to breathe.
9. Chemical pollution is the release of chemicals such as plastic and nuclear waste into the environment. These compounds would never form naturally and affect the environment in unpredictable ways—they might even eventually change organisms’ DNA.
Population growth has a huge effect on Mother Nature—the more people there are on the planet, the more resources they’ll need to survive, placing further stress on the environment. The United Nations predicts that in 2050, the earth’s population will be 9.7 billion.
In earlier times, many people had lots of children but there was also a high mortality rate. Now, in general, the human mortality rate is decreasing and people are having fewer children. However, in certain parts of the world, the mortality rate is decreasing but people are having the same number of children. Most of the estimated population growth will take place in nine countries, including India, Nigeria, and the US. These nine countries either already have a large population or have high fertility rates. Countries with high fertility tend to also have high levels of child marriage, gender inequality, and opposition to birth control.
Many of these countries are already contending with poverty, resource limitation, environmental destruction, or political conflict. Adding more people to the mix will multiply these issues.
Population explosion makes it difficult to keep up with globalization—education and new jobs can only be developed so quickly. Because globalization accelerates exponentially, a country can fall far behind even in a short period of time. Previous methods for catching up—for example, exports—are no longer as viable in an automated, digital world. Additionally, countries that were able to catch up in the past, such as East Asian countries in the 20th century, had smaller populations.
Falling behind on global flows can have two consequences:
Not every person on the planet uses the same amount of resources, and the middle and upper classes use the most—they can afford to buy cars, install air conditioning, and so on. Tom Burke, chairman of Third Generation Environmentalism, divides people into four groups:
The 1.5 and 2 groups who live in the city can see the inequality between what others have and what their groups have. They have the potential to disrupt the middle class, pursue political instability, and create social unrest. For example, many of the people in the Arab Spring Awakening were members of these two groups.
For future stability and growth, it’s important that the 1.5 and 2 groups acquire secure incomes.
According to Adair Turner, the chairman of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, extreme measures such as China’s one-child policy aren’t necessary to control the population growth. What is necessary is:
The author adds that introducing modern gender norms would go a long way because decreasing gender inequality and reducing child marriage would result in lower fertility.
Now we understand all three accelerating forces acting on the world—but what do we do about them? There are two options: 1) try to slow things down, or 2) increase humanity’s ability to adapt.
Option 1, putting on the brakes, isn’t going to work. It’s impossible to stop the accelerations and regain static stability. Even if it wasn’t impossible, the accelerations have created some major problems, such as climate change. We need the accelerations, particularly of technology, to come up with solutions.
Option 2, adaptation, is the only way forward. Adaptation involves:
There are five sectors that require innovation in social technologies: 1) the workplace, 2) geopolitics, 3) domestic politics and culture, 4) morality, and 5) society. Chapters 7-8 cover the workplace and subsequent chapters cover the other four sectors.
The first sector that requires social innovation to keep up with the three accelerations is the workplace.
In the 19th century, most Americans were farmers. After the Industrial Revolution, trade guilds disappeared, and in the 20th century, most people worked in factories or office jobs.
By the ‘90s, you could reach middle-class if you just worked hard and followed all the rules—well-paying jobs only required average skills. If you worked 40 hours a week you could buy a house, afford to have children, go on vacation, and retire. This was because, after World War II, there were lots of manufacturing jobs, there was little outsourcing or international competition for jobs, and people switched jobs less frequently, so companies put in the resources to train them. Acceleration was slower, so your education was relevant for longer, and technology wasn’t powerful enough to start taking over jobs.
Additionally, back then, not everyone had internet access—there were probably hundreds of thousands of people in the world who could do your job, but because they didn’t have a way to access your job, you didn’t have to compete with them.
The three accelerations have changed the first sector, the workforce, in the following ways:
Change #1: Middle-class jobs now require more education and knowledge, and the increasing requirement for bachelor’s degrees bars a lot of people from middle-class jobs. (A degree isn’t necessarily indicative of your skills or perfectly matched to a job description—for example, 65% of postings for executive assistants and secretaries require a bachelor’s degree, and 71% of people currently working these jobs don’t have a bachelor’s degree.) Today, to be part of the middle class, you have to work harder, participate in lifelong learning (at best, your education prepares you for your first job), and deal with shifting employment regulations.
Change #2: Single jobs are being split into high- and low-skilled jobs. The high-skilled part will require more skill and pay better, and the low-skilled part will be automated or paid minimum wage.
Change #3: There’s more competition for jobs, either with international workers or automation. Now that more people have internet access and everyone has access to the same information, geographical location no longer matters as much. The only difference among candidates is motivation.
Change #4: To continue existing, jobs need to fit into new niches or take advantage of new opportunities. Automation will only take over if we fail to rethink the workforce.
Change #5: While some jobs will become partly automated, most jobs won’t disappear, and according to a paper by economist James Bessen, industries with higher use of computers actually increase the number of available jobs.
Change #6: Technology can change what tasks are necessary in certain occupations and can transfer tasks between occupations.
Change #7: Some jobs will completely disappear.
Change #8: “Stempathy” jobs are the jobs of the future. “Stempathy” jobs are jobs that require both technical (science, technology, engineering, and math) and people (empathy) skills. Since the 1980s, the number of jobs that require people skills has grown, and the jobs that require both people skills and cognitive skills have increased in salary since 2000. This is because jobs that only require technical skills are usually possible to automate, and jobs that only require people skills can be done by lots of people, so the pay is low.
There are jobs for which it's hard to find employees with the right skills, and in the age of accelerations, those skills are usually related to their proficiency with technology. There can be a gap between available jobs and enough skilled workers to fill them for three reasons:
To adapt to these accelerating times, we need to rethink the workplace by: 1) establishing lifelong learning programs, 2) building tools to help match people and their skills to jobs, and 3) revising social contracts.
Lifelong learning—constantly learning new things to keep up with the accelerations—is an inevitable part of the future and several companies have built platforms or programs to support it. Ideally, these platforms will be able to keep up with the three accelerations so that as soon as there’s a change, resources on how to adapt to that change are quickly available.
Example #1: Udacity offers online courses on, among other things, brand-new technology. In October 2015, Google released TensorFlow—a set of algorithms that work with big data—to the public. Only three months later, Udacity released a course on how to use TensorFlow that they’d put together with the help of Google engineers. It would take a traditional college at least a year to put together a course.
Example #2: Olin College is a brick-and-mortar college, but its programs are flexible in order to keep up with accelerations. Faculty members don’t have tenure, there are no academic departments, and the curriculum expires every seven years. Additionally, all students must work with a corporate sponsor for a year on a project. All of these elements help keep education relevant in a changing world.
The author covers four tools that can help match people and their skills to jobs, all of which have the acronym IA:
1. Intelligent assistance is creating platforms that allow everyone in the world to pursue professional development and then use that development to get jobs.
2. Intelligent assistants are software programs that teach people about job-hunting.
3. Intelligent advice is analyzing patterns in the school system or workforce.
4. Intelligent algorithms help skilled people find jobs that require their skills. They also help job seekers find out what skills they need to get jobs and where they can get those skills.
The relationships between workers, schools, companies, and the government need to change to adapt to the age of accelerations. In the past, land or physical goods were the most valuable asset to the economy, but now, the world’s population—everyone’s skills, creativity, and knowledge—are most valuable.
Three social contracts need to be rewritten, those between:
The workforce is changing fast and the current era is ending, but while the transition will be bumpy, the new workplace might be better. In a workplace with a platform that would match people and their skills to jobs:
The three accelerations of technology, globalization, and climate change drive change in the workforce.
Which parts of your job could be automated? Which parts can’t?
If you had full control over your job description, how would you change it so that it more evenly requires both people and technical skills?
Where might you find lifelong learning opportunities? Consider professional development programs at your workplace, online classes, and so on.
The second sector that requires social innovation to keep up with the three accelerations is geopolitics.
Pre-acceleration, maintaining geopolitical stability was about armed forces, nuclear weapons, and regulation of weapons—essentially, conventional military power. After World War I, nations fell and new ones rose, for example, the Austro-Hungarian Empire became Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria, and Czechoslovakia and after World War II, many nations, such as India and Senegal, gained their independence from colonizers. In between World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the geopolitical arena was fairly stable.
Most of the new nations didn’t have the resources to create strong governments or industries. However, at this period in time, they didn’t need to be strong, just average. The internet didn’t exist yet, so people couldn’t compare their situations with those of others around the world, automation wasn’t a threat yet, and China was keeping to itself and wasn’t competing for low-wage jobs. Most countries hadn’t used up all their natural resources and climate change hadn’t yet affected agriculture. Most countries also had young populations thanks to decreased child mortality and better health care, so pensions weren’t an economic burden yet either.
Additionally, there was plenty of help. During the Cold War, the major geopolitical conflict was between two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, and both nations needed allies. Both the US and the Soviet Union provided new nations with money to build infrastructure, leadership training, and citizen education. If funding wasn’t enough to secure an allyship, the US or the Soviet Union would put people on the ground. For example, the Soviet Union rebuilt Syria’s army several times.
During this period of time, US foreign policy was easy—the goal was simply to not let Russia take over. While the US and the Soviet Union were technically at war, both had reasonable leaders who were in communication with each other and kept each other in check. Both had enough nuclear power to destroy each other, so neither wanted to start a war because it would result in mutually assured destruction.
In between the Cold War and the early 2000s, Russia lost its superpower status and more nations gained independence, such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and America became the single superpower. The major geopolitical conflict was between the US and the rest of the world. As there were no wars going on, foreign policy was mainly the US involving itself with the governance of other countries.
After the failure of the US intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq and after the 2008 recession, the US lost power and confidence and pulled out of the Middle East. This resulted in two things: The rise of ISIS and the migration of refugees from ISIS states. The migration caused fear of immigration in Europe.
Today, conventional military power still matters, but global stability also requires taking into account the three accelerations. Threats are no longer obviously galvanizing (for example, in the way Nazism galvanized the Western world to oppose it) and can’t be solved simply with armies and a conclusive victory on a particular date. The US and European countries don’t have the resources to go into other countries anymore, and they also don’t have the resources to handle people from other countries coming in.
US foreign policy used to be easy—contain one other superpower, Russia—but in the age of accelerations it's far more complicated and has three major arms:
Today, there are three superpowers, the US, Russia, and China, and dealings with superpowers are no longer simply about containment and recruiting allies. The world is so interconnected now that the fall of other superpowers might actually be more dangerous for the US than the rise, and allies can quickly become enemies.
In addition to superpowers, US foreign policy must manage state failure, which is the fall of governments and the takeover of countries by tribes, gangs, and extremist groups. Weak states in the Middle East and Africa are causing regions of disorder, and this disorder is spilling into more stable nations as migrants and refugees travel from weak states to Europe or the US.
The final arm US foreign policy must address is containing breakers. Breakers are individuals or groups who want to cause chaos. (Friedman contrasts breakers with “makers,” people who use the accelerations to build new things or improve old things.)
Pre-acceleration, new technologies were first available to governments and it took some time for them to make their way into the hands of the general public, but now, it’s easy to get destructive technology or find out how to build it online. A single person now has the ability to compete with superpowers and unlike superpowers, breakers often can’t be deterred by mutually assured destruction—some breakers are happy to commit suicide if it means hurting others too.
Additionally, single breakers are far harder to identify, predict, and take down than an organization. When a government is dealing with a terrorist organization, the strategy is to find the organization, disrupt it, and destroy it. Individual people are harder to keep track of and they can come out of nowhere. The rise of breakers is part of why radical Islamism is so persistent—it’s not an organization, it’s a movement. There’s no leadership structure, so taking out certain people doesn’t have a major effect on the movement.
US citizens need to remember that the US is a superpower, which means the country is a major player in the maintenance of global stability and disaster assistance. Organizations such as the United Nations are important, but the US is the lynchpin of global stability, particularly since the EU has been weakening in recent years. The entire world’s stability relies on the stability of the US’s economy, military, and democracy.
For example, when the Ebola virus, which could have affected the whole globe, broke out, it was the US, not China or Russia, who dealt with it. The US sent troops to Africa to contain the spread and spent $3 billion eradicating the virus.
Russia and China don’t have to deal with breakers and disorder the same way that the US does because they’re authoritarian states—they have a high degree of control over their citizens and immigration.
In the age of accelerations, average nations become weak nations for several reasons:
Madagascar is an example of a previously average nation that became weak in the age of accelerations. During the Cold War, Madagascar received a lot of foreign aid—for example, the US built a NASA station, Cuba sent teachers, and North Korea built a Presidential Palace. Now, most of this aid has dried up, the population has exploded, cyclones have destroyed infrastructure, the island’s topsoil is eroding, and education is only mandatory until age fifteen and taught in the local language, so it’s difficult for people to connect to global flows.
It’s always hard to come back from disorder, but it's especially hard in the age of accelerations because a country can much more quickly get far behind, and there’s so much to do to catch up and keep up—set up flow access, lifelong learning, infrastructure, and innovation.
As we learned earlier, to maintain global stability, we need to take the three accelerations into account. In this chapter, the author specifically focuses on the role of connectivity and geopolitics—connectivity and the supernova have the potential to both free people from oppression and create political instability.
There are two types of freedom:
Type #1: “Freedom from” is liberation from oppression such as dictators, consumerism, and anything you’re forced to do against your will. This type of freedom is easier to create—you just need to break the current system.
Type #2: “Freedom to” is the ability to do things you want to. This type of freedom is harder to create—not only do you need to escape the current system, but you also have to build a new one that will support you in doing what you want.
Connectivity is an aid to “freedom from” and a deterrent to “freedom to.” Social media, cell phones, and other forms of digital communication excel at putting large groups of people in touch with each other quickly and give everyone a voice, and this group effort can topple existing systems. However, digital connection doesn’t provide any opportunity for debate, help people to trust each other, unite organizations, or create strong leadership, all of which are needed to create a new system.
Wael Ghonim, who created the anonymous Facebook page that helped start the Egyptian revolution, sees five limitations to using social media for political ends:
These limitations are partly due to the existence of cyberbullying and trolls, but also partly due to the design of social media. Social media platforms are currently set up so that writing inflammatory posts gets you more attention. If the platforms were changed to promote thoughtful reflection, social media might not be so polarized and destabilizing.
In these accelerating times, we need to rethink geopolitics. The days of occupation and aggressive foreign aid are over and the US can’t come in from the outside and change things—countries will have to make changes themselves. The US can support these countries by using a three-step process: 1) amplify, 2) deter, and 3) degrade.
Amplifying is giving people educational opportunities and economic opportunities, both of which allow people to stay in their countries instead of migrating in search of resources or work.
In terms of educational opportunities, education is empowering and allows youth to make changes to their countries. Educated youth can use their knowledge of history and human rights to call their governments on inappropriate action, and youth who get an American-style education can compete with anyone in the world.
In terms of economic opportunities, the author lists three specific initiatives:
Deterring is the US maintaining enough power to stop countries from acting in ways the US doesn’t want them to. For example, the US needs to maintain its nuclear power so that other countries, especially Russia, China, and North Korea, won’t use theirs.
Russia benefits from small amounts of instability because it's a petro-state and oil prices are always high in times of instability. Russia has embraced the three accelerations and uses technology particularly to create instability. For example, Russian hackers broke into Democratic Party computers to influence US elections.
China, on the other hand, benefits more from stability because China exports products globally and trades with the US economy. China only works at dominating nearby countries.
While the US has to deter Russia and China, all three countries have to work together regularly against greater evils—breakers and large-scale disorder are bad for all three powers. This leaves the US in some awkward situations. For example, to deal with instability in Syria, would it be better to remove the Syrian president from power and cause short-term disorder (which Iran and Russia wouldn’t support), or would it be better to take out ISIS (which Iran and Russia would support) and leave a murderous ruler in place but maintain order? There’s often no good solution, but the US has to do its best to deter.
Breakers can’t be deterred because they’re not scared of superpowers. Breakers come from weak states that can’t keep up with the accelerations, and young people in these states, especially men, face humiliation—they’ve never had money, a job, or a romantic relationship. These young people are susceptible to jihadist-Islamist organizations who promise them money or rewards in the afterlife.
However, breakers can be degraded. Degradation means delegitimizing chaos-causing action and cutting breakers off from their leaders. Degradation must come from people in breakers’ communities—who will notice when they’re behaving erratically and shame them—and their nations. According to strategist George Friedman, the only solution to Islamist terrorism is for Muslim states and other strands of Islam to fight the jihadists. The US can only help by providing military assistance.
Domestic politics and culture is the third sector that needs to adapt to the three accelerations.
In the 20th century, the US political system centralized and nationalized political power and directed it towards big problems such as social programs. This was logical in the 20th century because smaller governments weren’t very powerful—certain individuals had more money than states and municipalities.
Federal power was further consolidated in the 21st century. The Great Depression’s New Deal created national programs such as Social Security, and in World War II, even more responsibility shifted from smaller levels of government to the federal government as it tackled issues such as urban decay and pollution. Then, the Cold War created more federal responsibility.
All of the above events contributed to the maintenance of the two-party federal system. The Republicans oppose immigration, want to relax the rules on the market, and want to cut taxes, while the Democrats support social programs and regulation.
After the massive technological changes in 2007, the 2008 recession hit and politics stalled because leaders couldn’t explain the situation to citizens and failed to implement policy changes, such as technology regulations, that would have helped people adapt. This left space for populists who promised to hold back changes.
The US is currently experiencing political upheaval because the current political system was developed in slower times and can’t keep up with the three accelerations. The two parties are too committed to their identities (and too reliant on their funders) to consider ideas that don’t fit neatly into their platforms, and as a result, they’re limiting the country’s ability to adapt because they won’t consider compromising or starting from scratch. For example, some members of the Republication Party deny that one of the accelerations, climate change, is even happening.
In these accelerating times, we need to rethink domestic politics and culture by: 1) studying Mother Nature, which is one of the most adaptable and resilient systems on the planet, and 2) applying nature’s adaptations to domestic politics and culture.
Mother Nature has enormous buffering capacities and many people, including the author, have looked to it for an example of how to handle accelerating change. To maintain dynamic stability, Mother Nature uses the following mechanisms:
Mechanism #1: Adaptability. Evolution is fueled by adaptation—the organisms that have biological advantages, or that can figure out a behavioral advantage, find enough resources to survive long enough to reproduce. The organisms that don’t adapt, or don’t adapt well enough to compete with other organisms, die.
Mechanism #2: Bankruptcy. If an organism can’t adapt fast enough, it dies off, which makes more resources available for stronger organisms.
Mechanism #3: Diversity. The more species there are in a particular area, the more resilient it is. This is because when there are many options, even if not every species can survive and adapt, at least some will be able to.
Mechanism #14: Ownership. Species all have a niche and habitat where they thrive, which you can think of them “owning.” When every organism is locked into its place, it’s hard for a single introduced species or pollutant to destroy the whole system.
Mechanism #5: Federalism. Nature is made up of many small networks that make up larger ecosystems that make up even larger ecosystems. Every organism is part of multiple networks, and the network of networks is stabilizing.
Mechanism #6: Entrepreneurship. If there’s an open niche, some organism will find a way to fill it. Additionally, organisms are always testing out if they can coevolve—if an experiment makes an ecosystem better, the change survives.
Mechanism #7: Interdependency. Interdependence can either be to the benefit of all parties or the detriment. Organisms in healthy interdependencies thrive.
Nature is brutal and a constant battle, so we can’t apply Mother Nature’s mechanisms exactly the way they act in nature, but five of them are particularly transferable to domestic politics and culture. The countries that choose to leverage these apps will be the most successful in riding the three accelerations.
Adaptation, in the context of domestic politics and culture, is the ability to learn from other cultures. As we’ve learned in previous chapters, in the age of accelerations, we encounter new cultures more than ever.
When a country, culture, or individual is presented with a country, culture, or individual that’s more successful in some way—economic, military, and so on—there are two possible responses: 1) try to learn from the more successful party, or 2) feel humiliated, blame the other party for deficiencies, and turn away.
The cultures that choose to learn from others will do a better job of weathering the accelerations. For example, in the 19th century, when Japan opened to trade with other countries, Japanese politicians realized that their country was behind the West. Japan decided it wanted to match the West, so the country overhauled its society. It took decades, but in 1905, Japan had become strong enough to defeat Russia in war.
Diversity, in the context of domestic politics and culture, is having as wide a knowledge and talent pool as possible so that when there’s a problem, someone will have a solution. (Note that diversity isn’t simply about the existence of multiple groups within a population, it also requires the interaction of the multiple groups.)
The cultures that embrace diversity will do a better job of weathering the accelerations. For example, when the Arab-Muslim world was most diverse (between the eighth and 13th centuries), it was one of the most advanced societies of the time. This was because Islamic scholars considered the work and teachings of a variety of other cultures, which gave them new ideas they could build upon.
In the context of domestic politics and culture, ownership is feeling responsible for a space. When people feel like they own their space, whether that’s their country or their education, the space is more resilient because people will take care of it and defend it from harm.
For example, in Independence Square in Kiev during the 2014 revolution, elderly women cleared the ice from the sidewalks so the protestors wouldn’t slip. They cared about the space, so they maintained it.
In the context of domestic politics and culture, federalism is the assignment of responsibility between local, state, and federal governments. These three networks need to reevaluate their roles in order to weather the accelerations.
Today, the US federal government is hugely bureaucratic and too slow to keep up with the accelerations. State and local governments, on the other hand, have learned to react to change promptly. State and local governments are at the epicenters of the regions they’re responsible for, so they notice change quickly, and they’re well-equipped to address the change because: 1) new people with new knowledge now live in the US due to globalization, 2) they can access knowledge from anywhere because of the supernova, and 3) they can use all this knowledge to sponsor trade missions or reeducate their workforces.
The federal level of government is still necessary, but its major role should become supporting development at other levels of government.
In the context of domestic politics and culture, entrepreneurship is looking for solutions anywhere, regardless of party lines.
According to the author, the lines aren’t between the left and right anymore, they’re between openness and closedness, and to adapt, we need to choose openness—openness to flows, the supernova, and innovation. He suggests we:
1. Create universal healthcare. This would simplify healthcare—US companies would no longer need to provide healthcare to their employees and Medicare wouldn’t be related to payroll. The steps include:
2. Label high-sugar foods with warnings about health problems. Diabetes costs $825 billion a year globally and global diabetes has been rising since 1980.
3. Improve free trade. Free trade benefits the general public because it makes goods cheaper, but it also creates job loss. The steps to improving free trade include:
4. Reform immigration. The steps include:
5. Reform foreign aid by making aid conditional—foreign countries only receive it if they commit to working towards gender equality and making family planning available to those who want it.
6. Improve infrastructure. Today’s interest rates are low, so it’s a good time to borrow $50 billion and put it towards grids, airports, and ports. This will also create jobs.
7. Improve postsecondary education. The steps include:
8. Open a “race to the top” contest between states with million-dollar prizes to encourage innovation in social technologies. For example, the contest might be to come up with the best way to retain workers.
9. Improve internet connectivity. Studies show that Internet access is directly related to economic growth. The steps to improving connectivity include:
10. Strengthen gun control. Australia’s gun control methods are effective and we should implement them too:
11. Improve national security. The steps include:
12. Reform the tax system to incentivize desirable behavior and discourage undesirable behavior. These reforms will provide the funding for other points on this list. The steps include:
13. Improve the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit. These credits top up the income of low-income workers so that they don’t fall into poverty, but also encourage people to work because they can make more money from their jobs than they would receive from the credit. Recent research found that the EITC is more beneficial for children’s education than early childhood programs such as Head Start or prekindergarten.
14. Streamline laws and regulations. The steps include:
15. Reform bankruptcy laws and encourage entrepreneurship. The steps include:
16. Adjust national political campaigning. The steps include:
17. Implement electoral reform. The steps include:
The fourth sector that requires social innovation to keep up with the three accelerations is morality, which the author appears to strongly associate with living according to God’s teachings.
Unlike in other sections, the author only briefly covers historical morality by discussing two views on God:
There are two major components to morality today: 1) as a result of the three accelerations, almost everyone has godlike powers, and 2) the acceleration of technology has created new, digital spaces that are impossible for anyone, moral or not, to govern.
Today, we have more free will than ever and almost everyone has access to godlike powers. For example, technology and globalization allow an individual to affect people all over the world, and humanity as a whole is changing the climate. Because everyone can be a god, people’s individual sense of right and wrong affect everyone—a single person can destroy the world, and a single person can make life better for everyone.
The acceleration of technology, in particular, has created new, digital spaces that are impossible for any religious institution, political leader, or individual to govern or enforce the use of morals. As a result, more spaces have the potential to be godless and lawless.
Example #1: The YouTube ads that run before videos are assigned by an algorithm, not by YouTube staff or the companies who buy the ads. As a result, no one actually knows where the ad will be placed unless she happens upon the video the algorithm selected. This algorithm has resulted in Aveeno, Secret, and Bud Light ads playing in advance of jihadi and ISIS videos. The algorithm had no human judgment to inform its selections.
Example #2: App developers have come up with “ghost apps” that allow users to hide photos and documents on their phones. The apps look like a nondescript default app, often a calculator, until you type in the correct code. In 2015, over 100 high school students in Colorado used one of these apps to share nude photos of themselves. The app allowed teenagers to escape their parents’ governance.
Technology doesn’t have morals, values, or principles, and there are some choices that technology shouldn’t be responsible for. Some work needs to be done by people.
Today, views on God have to take into account the three accelerations, particularly technology. Depending on which view you subscribe to, there’s a different answer to whether or not God exists in cyberspace:
In these accelerating times, we need to rethink morality by: 1) including ethics in education, and 2) building strong communities.
The most obvious way to stop breakers is to create rules and organizations that enforce the rules, such as laws and the FBI. However, rules alone won’t suffice in the age of accelerations. We also need to teach people good values and moral principles so that they’ll behave ethically even when they’re not legally obligated to. (And they often won’t be—technology always evolves faster than the laws that regulate it, as we’ve learned.)
Future leaders, in particular, will need more liberal arts and ethics training in order to make the right choices about technology. The people who understand technology, such as nuclear physicists, aren’t necessarily taught what they should do with that information and ability and may need guidance.
One of the simplest moral principles the author suggests teaching is the Golden Rule—treat others as you want to be treated. The Golden Rule will be effective no matter how much the age of accelerations changes the world because it’s adaptable and scalable and applies to any situation, whether simple or complex.
In addition to ethical education, another way to develop moral values in people is to make sure everyone is part of a healthy community. Character isn’t usually something that’s developed by an individual; it’s a group effort. Community members watch out for each other and encourage and discourage certain behaviors. If a community as a whole disagrees with a particular behavior—for example, a Palestinian village doesn’t approve of suicide bombing—members of the community will be less likely to engage in these nonapproved behaviors because they don’t want their community members to shame or hate them.
Additionally, the community is aware of what its members are doing and will notice and stop them if they decide to do something destructive.
For example, people who become breakers often don’t have communities. Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the man who drove a truck into a crowd of people in Nice, was a loner. He didn’t know his neighbors—he wouldn’t even return casual greetings—and he had no religious community. It’s hard for anyone to learn the Golden Rule if they don’t have anyone to extend it to.
Because the world is so interconnected, our communities aren’t just our families and neighborhoods anymore; they’re the entire globe. As a result, everyone’s going to succeed, or everyone’s going to fail—the human race will survive, or it won’t, and the only way to survive is to embrace community and interdependency.
The Paris climate agreement is an example of acknowledging a global community. The agreement was designed to slow climate change, which affects everyone on the planet, and 175 countries signed.
The final sector that requires social innovation to keep up with the three accelerations is society. The author presents his hometown, St. Louis Park, Minnesota, as a model for how society, specifically communities, can adapt to the accelerations.
Between the 1880s and early 1900s, many Jewish immigrants settled in North Minneapolis because it was one of few areas they could get housing—anti-Semitic discrimination was rampant throughout the city. Jews were banned from all sorts of public institutions and had to start their own schools and hospitals.
In the 1950s, many Jews were fed up and left North Minneapolis for St. Louis Park. St. Louis Park was more welcoming than other suburbs, and it was platted for starter homes and Realtors didn’t mind selling to Jews. By the 1960s, around 20% of people living in St. Louis Park were Jewish.
Most of the other people living in St. Louis Park were Catholic and Protestant Nordic and German-descended Americans. There were plenty of clashes between these people and the incoming Jews, but at the same time, people started to figure out how to live and work together.
Part of this, the author suspects, was due to people mixing in public spaces. Public spaces in St. Louis Park were plentiful and people of all backgrounds and economic levels used them. Specifically, the following community features contributed to class-mixing:
Additionally, the community was supported by:
St. Louis Park wasn’t perfect—there was plenty of racism and sexism—but it did some things right.
When the author returned to St. Louis Park four decades after leaving, he found that the community was still strong and still supported by:
St. Louis Park is an example of a community that’s well poised to weather the three accelerations. How do we build more communities like it? The author discusses two steps: 1) create communities of an appropriate size, and 2) overhaul infrastructure.
The fastest-adapting, smallest community—a single family—is too weak for the age of accelerations. Many families don’t have financial security, a permanent place to live, or the resources to engage in lifelong learning.
On the other hand, large communities, such as states or countries, aren’t fast and flexible enough to meet the needs of the age of accelerations, as we learned in Chapter 10.
A municipal community is the perfect size—small enough to be fast and flexible, and large enough to be supportive and improve everyone’s quality of life.
Traditional community infrastructure, such as parks, schools, and centers, needs to overhaul to meet the needs of the 21st century. Schools should become places that people of all ages can learn from, whether elementary education, adult lifelong learning, or daycare. Most people interact with community infrastructure anyway, so these public spaces are a good place to revamp.