Thank You for Being Late

by Thomas L. Friedman

  Now, Iorio told me, engineers using three-dimensional, computer-aided software could design the part on a computer screen, then transmit it to a 3-D printer filled with a fine metal powder and a laser device that literally built, or “printed,” the piece out of the metal powder before your eyes, to the exact specifications. Then you immediately tested it—four, five, six times in a day, adjusting each iteration with the computer and the 3-D printer—and when it was just perfect, presto, you had your new part. To be sure, more complex parts required more time, but this was the new system, and it was a fundamental departure from the way GE had built parts since it was founded by Thomas Edison back in 1892.

  “The feedback loop is so short now,” explained Iorio, that “in a couple days you can have a concept, the design of the part, you get it made, you get it back and test whether it is valid” and “within a week you have it produced … It is getting us both better performance and speed.” In the past, performance worked against speed: the more tests you did to get that optimal performance, the longer it took. What only a few years earlier had taken two years was being reduced to a week. That is the amplified power of machines.

  Then, summing up all that was new, Iorio told me that today, “complexity is free.”

  I said to her: “What did you say?”

  “Complexity is free,” she repeated.

  I thought that was a real insight. I never forgot it. But only in writing this book did I fully understand the importance of what she’d said. As we’ve noted, over the last fifty years microprocessors, sensors, storage, software, networking, and now mobile devices have been steadily evolving at this accelerating rate. At different stages they coalesce and create what we think of as a platform. With each new platform, the computing power, bandwidth, and software capabilities all meld together and change the method, cost, or power and speed at which we do things, or pioneer totally new things we can do that we never imagined—and sometimes all of the above. And these leaps are now coming faster and faster, at shorter and shorter intervals.

  Before 2007, the previous leap forward in our technology platform happened around the year 2000. It was driven by a qualitative change in connectivity. What happened was that the dot-com boom, bubble, and then bust in that time period unleashed a massive overinvestment in fiber-optic cable to carry broadband Internet. But bubbles are not all bad. The combination of that bubble and then its bursting—with the dot-com bust in the year 2000—dramatically brought down the price of voice and data connectivity and led, quite unexpectedly, to the wiring of the world to a greater degree than ever before. The price of bandwidth connectivity declined so much that suddenly a U.S. company could treat a company in Bangalore, India, as its back office, almost as if it were located in its back office. To put it another way, all of these breakthroughs around 2000 made connectivity fast, free, easy for you, and ubiquitous. Suddenly we could all touch people whom we could never touch before. And suddenly we could be touched by people who could never touch us before. I described that new sensation with these words: “The world is flat.” More people than ever could now compete, connect, and collaborate on more things for less money with greater ease and equality than ever before. The world as we knew it got reshaped.

  I think what happened in 2007—with the emergence of the supernova—was yet another huge leap upward onto a new platform. Only this move was biased toward easing complexity. When all the advances in hardware and software melded into the supernova, it vastly expanded the speed and scope at which data could be digitized and stored, the speed at which it could be analyzed and turned into knowledge, and how far and fast it could be distributed from the supernova to anyone, anywhere with a computer or mobile device. The result was that suddenly complexity became fast, free, easy for you, and invisible.

  Suddenly, all the complexity that went into getting a taxi, renting someone’s spare bedroom in Australia, designing an engine part, or buying lawn furniture online and having it delivered the same day was abstracted into one touch via applications such as Uber, Airbnb, and Amazon or by innovations in the labs of General Electric. No technology innovation more epitomizes this leap forward than Amazon’s invention of “one-click” checkout from any e-commerce site. As Rejoiner.com, which tracks e-commerce, noted, thanks to its one-click innovation, “Amazon achieves extremely high conversion from its existing customers. Since the customer’s payment and shipping information is already stored on Amazon’s servers, it creates a checkout process that is virtually frictionless.”

  The two graphs on the following page help demonstrate how complexity became free. The first shows how the maximum speed of data transmission dramatically rose—expanding the capabilities of what you could do with a mobile device and thus attracting more users—just as the cost to users of consuming each megabyte of all that data dramatically fell, so many more people could access the power of the supernova more often. Those lines crossed around 2007–2008. The second graph shows how the supernova/cloud emerged right after … 2007.

  If you read Apple’s original announcement of the iPhone in 2007, it was all about how Apple had abstracted away the complexity of so many complex applications, interactions, and operations—from e-mailing, to map searching, to photographing, to phoning, to web surfing—and about how the company had used software to neatly condense so much into one touch on the “iPhone’s remarkable and easy-to-use touch interface.” Or, as Steve Jobs put it at the time: “We are all born with the ultimate pointing device—our fingers—and iPhone uses them to create the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse.”

  The Phase Change

  This brings us to the essence of what really happened between 2000 and 2007: we entered a world where connectivity was fast, free, easy for you, and ubiquitous and handling complexity became fast, free, easy for you, and invisible. Not only could you touch people whom you had never touched before or be touched by them, but you could do all these amazing, complex things with one touch. These developments were powered by the supernova, and when you put them together, computing became so powerful and so cheap and so effortless that it suffused itself “into every device and every aspect of our lives and our society,” said Craig Mundie. “It is making the world not just flat but fast. Fast is a natural evolution of putting all this technology together and then diffusing it everywhere.”

  It is taking the friction out of more and more businesses and industrial processes and human interactions. “It is like grease,” added Mundie, “and is seeping into every nook and cranny and pore and everything is getting very slippery and leveraged, and so you can move it with less force”—whether it is a boulder, a country, a pile of data, a robot, the paging of a taxi, or the renting of a room in Timbuktu. And it all happened in this first decade of the twenty-first century. The price of sensing, generating, storing, and processing data collapsed just as the speed of uploading or downloading that data to or from the supernova soared, and just as Steve Jobs gave the world a mobile device with such an amazingly easy user interface, Internet connectivity, and rich software applications that a two-year-old could navigate it. When all those lines crossed—when connectivity became fast, free, easy for you, and ubiquitous and when handling complexity became fast, free, easy for you, and invisible—there was an energy release into the hands of humans and machines the likes of which we have never seen and are only beginning to understand. That is the inflection point that happened around 2007.

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

  It is the equivalent of a “phase change” in chemistry from a solid to a liquid. What is the feature of something solid? It is full of friction. What is the feature of a liquid? It feels friction-free. When you simultaneously take the friction and complexity out of more and more things and provide interactive
one-touch solutions, all kinds of human-to-human and business-to-consumer and business-to-business interactions move from solids to liquids, from slow to fast, from their complexity being a burden and full of friction to their complexity becoming invisible and frictionless. And so whatever you want to move, compute, analyze, or communicate can be done with less effort.

  As a result, the motto in Silicon Valley today is: everything that is analog is now being digitized, everything that is being digitized is now being stored, everything that is being stored is now being analyzed by software on these more powerful computing systems, and all the learning is being immediately applied to make old things work better, to make new things possible, and to do old things in fundamentally new ways. For instance, the invention of the Uber taxi service did all three: it didn’t just create a new competitive taxi fleet; it created a fundamentally new and better way to summon a taxi, to gather data on riders’ needs and desires, to pay for a taxi, and to rate the behavior of the driver and the passenger.

  These sorts of transformations are now happening in every business, thanks to the energy release of the supernova. Quite often, the reason a problem is complex and therefore expensive to solve is that the information you need is not accessible or consumable, making it difficult to gather the relevant data and turn it into applicable knowledge. But when sensing, gathering, and storing data and beaming it to the supernova and analyzing it through software applications becomes virtually free, a crucial breakthrough has occurred: now any system can be optimized for peak performance—with much less effort.

  Just one example: Think of the historic problem with wind-generated electricity. Because the wind blows intermittently and the electricity it generates cannot be stored at scale, and thus a utility could never be totally assured of sufficient supply, the ability of wind to replace coal-fired power has always been limited. But now, weather-prediction software using big data analytics has become so intelligent it can tell you the exact hour when the wind will blow or the rain will come or the temperature will rise. And so a utility in a city such as Houston can know twenty-four hours in advance that the next day is going to be a particularly hot day and demand for air-conditioning will spike in those exact hours, meaning that demand for wind-generated electricity could exceed supply. That utility can now notify buildings in Houston to automatically turn up their air-conditioning between 6:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m., before employees arrive, and when the wind is generating the most electricity. Buildings are good storehouses of cooling. So that stored cooling keeps the building comfortable most of the day. As a result, the amount of wind power that utility generates, rather than being insufficient, perfectly matches the demand—without having to worry about storing it on batteries or needing to call in coal-generated power. An incredibly complex demand-response challenge was solved at a cost of … zero—just by bringing intelligence to all the machines and optimizing the whole system. All the complexity was abstracted away by the software, and it is starting to happen everywhere today.

  Show Me the Money

  But if these transformations are real, why is it taking so long for them to show up in the productivity figures, as economists define them—the ratio of the output of goods and services to the labor hours devoted to the production of that output? Since productivity improvements drive growth, that is an important and now a hotly debated subject among economic writers. The economist Robert Gordon has made a compelling case in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War that the days of steadily rising growth are probably behind us. He believes all the big gains were made in the “special century” between 1870 and 1970—with the likes of automobiles, radio, television, indoor plumbing, electrification, vaccines, clean water, air travel, central heating, women’s empowerment, and air-conditioning and antibiotics. Gordon is skeptical that today’s new technologies will ever produce another leap forward in productivity comparable to that special century.

  But MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson has countered Gordon’s pessimism with an argument I find even more compelling. As we transition from an industrial-age economy to a computer-Internet-mobile-broadband-driven economy—that is, a supernova-driven economy—we are experiencing the growing pains of adjusting. Both managers and workers are having to absorb these new technologies—not just how they work but how factories and business processes and government regulations all need to be redesigned around them. The same thing, notes Brynjolfsson, happened 120 years ago, in the Second Industrial Revolution, when electrification—the supernova of its day—was introduced. Old factories did not just have to be electrified to achieve the productivity boosts; they had to be redesigned, along with all business processes. It took thirty years for one generation of managers and workers to retire and for a new generation to emerge to get the full productivity benefits of that new power source.

  A December 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute on American industry found a “considerable gap between the most digitized sectors and the rest of the economy over time and [found] that despite a massive rush of adoption, most sectors have barely closed that gap over the past decade … Because the less digitized sectors are some of the largest in terms of GDP contribution and employment, we [found] that the US economy as a whole is only reaching 18 percent of its digital potential … The United States will need to adapt its institutions and training pathways to help workers acquire relevant skills and navigate this period of transition and churn.”

  The supernova is a new power source, and it will take some time for society to reconfigure itself to absorb its full potential. As that happens, I believe that Brynjolfsson will be proved right and we will start to see the benefits—a broad range of new discoveries around health, learning, urban planning, transportation, innovation, and commerce—that will drive growth. That debate is for economists, though, and beyond the scope of this book, but I will be eager to see how it plays out.

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

  If you want to be a maker, a starter-upper, an inventor, or an innovator, this is your time. By leveraging the supernova you can do so much more now with so little. As Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.”

  Something sure is, and the rest of this chapter is about how makers big and small are taking advantage of all the new powers coming out of the supernova to do totally new things, and to do really old things faster and smarter. And it doesn’t matter if you are a cancer doctor, a traditional retailer, a cutting-edge designer, a remote innovator in the mountains of eastern Turkey, or someone who wants to turn the tree house in your backyard into a profit center and rent it online to tourists coming from as near as New York or as far as New Guinea. In the age of the supernova, there has never been a better time to be a maker—anywhere.

  Dr. Watson Will See You Now

  I got to meet—and get my picture taken with—the original Watson on a visit to IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He didn’t say much. He’s retired now. He’s actually unplugged—but he fills a good-sized room with his racks of servers.

  I also got to meet Watson’s grandson—sort of. He’s the size of a big suitcase. He’s actually a mock-up, though—what today’s version of Watson would look like after two generations more of Moore’s law. Technically speaking, though, today’s version of Watson is not even that big suitcase,
because Watson now resides in the supernova.

  “Watson is no longer contained in a box that is unconnected to the Internet, but rather is now of the Internet,” explained David Yaun, an IBM communications vice president. IBM put together the mini-Watson mockup “to illustrate that we could cram all the computing power of the Jeopardy! Watson into a suitcase today. But Watson itself now is literally part of your supernova—unleashed from a twentieth-century paradigm of a box or a standalone server.”

  And anyway—Watson’s grandson would never waste his time trying to beat humans on Jeopardy! That is so 2011! Today’s Watson is now busy ingesting all known medical research on subjects such as cancer diagnostics and treatments. Indeed, Yaun confided to me when we sat down for lunch at Watson’s home base that “we’re thinking of having Watson take the radiology boards”—to get certified to read and interpret X-rays. Ho-hum, I was thinking of doing the same thing myself. Right! Watson could practically do that in his spare time, while taking every bar exam in America, the dental boards, the pathology boards, the urology boards—and beating the pants off you on Jeopardy!

  The supernova offers computing power for everyone everywhere. Watson offers deep knowledge everywhere for everyone. Watson is not just a big search engine or digital assistant. He does not operate looking for keywords, per se. And he is not just a big computer that is programmed by software engineers to perform certain tasks that they design. Watson is different. You have not seen the likes of him before, except on Star Trek. Watson represents nothing less than the dawn of “the Cognitive Era of computing,” said John E. Kelly III, who divides the history of computing into three distinct eras.