Thank You for Being Late
Page 23
So when I confessed to the Google engineer in the front seat of the autonomous vehicle driving me around how relaxed I felt, she calmly turned away from her laptop—which was tracking every move the car made—and gave me a quote I had never heard as a reporter.
“Mr. Friedman,” she said, “the car has no blind spots. Almost all the accidents are drivers rear-ending us because they were not paying attention.”
This car has no blind spots! I wrote that down in my reporter’s notebook.
Google’s cofounder Sergey Brin picked up the tour when we returned back to X’s headquarters. There, he showed me Google’s prototype of a two-person autonomous vehicle. It does not yet have a name, but it looks like a big egg on wheels or something you would ride up a mountain in on a ski lift. There were just two seats, no dashboard, and no steering wheel—nothing. But it is a self-driving vehicle.
“How do you tell it where to go?” I asked Brin.
“You will just program it on your cell phone,” he answered, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world.
Of course, why didn’t I think of that! My cell phone that I was using to take pictures, as a good reporter, would double as the key to my next car. Why not? Suddenly, I understood what the organizational consultant Warren Bennis meant when he once famously observed that the “factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”
And then I stopped laughing at even that joke. This was getting serious and starting to get way too close to home.
On March 7, 2015, The New York Times ran this news story/quiz: “Did a Human or a Computer Write This? A shocking amount of what we’re reading is created not by humans, but by computer algorithms. Can you tell the difference? Take the quiz:”
1. “A shallow magnitude 4.7 earthquake was reported Monday morning five miles from Westwood, California, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 6:25 a.m. Pacific time at a depth of 5.0 miles.”
□ Human
□ Computer
2. “Apple’s holiday earnings for 2014 were record shattering. The company earned an $18 billion profit on $74.6 billion in revenue. That profit was more than any company had ever earned in history.”
□ Human
□ Computer
3. “When I in dreams behold thy fairest shade
Whose shade in dreams doth wake the sleeping morn
The daytime shadow of my love betray’d
Lends hideous night to dreaming’s faded form.”
□ Human
□ Computer
4. “Benner had a good game at the plate for Hamilton A’s-Forcini. Benner went 2–3, drove in one and scored one run. Benner singled in the third inning and doubled in the fifth inning.”
□ Human
□ Computer
5. “Kitty couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. Her nerves were strained as two tight strings, and even a glass of hot wine, that Vronsky made her drink, did not help her. Lying in bed she kept going over and over that monstrous scene at the meadow.”
□ Human
□ Computer
6. “Tuesday was a great day for W. Roberts, as the junior pitcher threw a perfect game to carry Virginia to a 2–0 victory over George Washington at Davenport Field.”
□ Human
□ Computer
7. “I was laid out sideways on a soft American van seat, several young men still plying me with vodkas that I dutifully drank, because for a Russian it is impolite to refuse.”
□ Human
□ Computer
8. “In truth, I’d love to build some verse for you
To churn such verse a billion times a day
So type a new concept for me to chew
I keep all waiting long, I hope you stay.”
□ Human
□ Computer
Answers: 1. Computer algorithm. 2. Human. 3. Computer poetry app. 4. Computer algorithm. 5. Computer algorithm. 6. Computer algorithm. 7. Human. 8. Computer poetry app.
Today it’s poets. Tomorrow it’s columnists …
In April 2016, as noted earlier, I had traveled to Agadez, in northern Niger, in the middle of the Sahara, with the country’s minister of the environment, Adamou Chaifou, to watch the caravans of economic migrants from across the region transiting Niger for Libya and, many of them hoped, on to Europe. On April 13, 2016, I wrote a column from Niger that quoted Chaifou. It moved on NYTimes.com at 3:20 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, or 8:20 a.m. Niger time. I was departing the country that afternoon and went to the airport around 1:00 p.m. Chaifou came out to say goodbye to me and I took the opportunity to be the first to tell him: “I quoted you in my column in The New York Times today. It’s up on the Web on NYTimes.com.”
“I know,” he responded. “My kids are studying in China and they already sent it to me!” So today, a minister in Niger is telling me his kids studying in a remote university in China have e-mailed him my column from Niger before my wife had woken up and read it in Bethesda.
And, finally, there was writing this book. In the two and a half years I have taken to research it, I have had to interview almost all the principal technologists at least twice and sometimes three times to make sure what I was writing remained up-to-date. I have never had that experience as an author before—it was like chasing a butterfly with a net and every time I moved to catch it, it fluttered away just outside my reach.
So there you have it: just inside of four decades, I went from writing my own stories three paragraphs at a time on a manual typewriter to riding in a self-driving car and recording it on my phone to reading poetry crafted by an algorithm to filing my story wirelessly on the Internet from Niger and having it read the next morning in China and e-mailed from there back to my host in Niger—before I could even let him know that I had quoted him—to writing a book about technological change that kept getting overtaken by … technological change.
Am I the one who needs a hammer now?
Mind the Gap
Much as I fantasize about it some days, the answer is no. We have no choice but to learn to adapt to this new pace of change. It will be harder and require more self-motivation—and that reality is surely one of the things roiling politics all over the world today, particularly in America and Europe. The accelerations we’ve charted have indeed opened a wide gap between the pace of technological change, globalization, and environmental stresses and the ability of people and governing systems to adapt to and manage them. Many people seem to be feeling a loss of control and are desperate for navigational help and sense-making.
Who can blame them? When so many things are accelerating at once, it’s easy to feel like you’re in a kayak in rushing white water, being carried along by the current at a faster and faster clip. In such conditions, there is an almost irresistible temptation to do the instinctive thing—but the wrong thing: stick your paddle in the water to try to slow down.
That will not work, explained Anna Levesque, a former member of the Canadian Freestyle Whitewater Kayak Team and an Olympic bronze medalist, who has more than fifteen years of experience as an international competitor, instructor, and guide. She posted some simple strategies on her blog for how to control a kayak on a fast-rushing river that are worth keeping in mind for managing our own age of accelerations.
Her post was entitled “Why ‘Keep Your Paddle in the Water’ Is Bad Advice for Beginners.”
Have you ever stopped to consider what the phrase “keep your paddle in the water” actually means? If you did you wouldn’t ever recommend it to a beginner whitewater paddler. The paddlers and instructors who give this advice are well intended and what they are really expressing is: “Keep paddling to maintain your stability through rapids.” When beginners hear “keep your paddle in the water,” they end up doing a bad version of a rudder dragging their paddle in the water back by their stern while using their blade to steer. This is a real
ly bad position to be in …
To enhance stability in rapids it’s important to move as fast or faster than the current. Every time you rudder or drag your paddle in the water to steer you lose momentum and that makes you more vulnerable to flipping over.
And so it is with governing today. The only way to steer is to paddle as fast as or faster than the rate of change in technology, globalization, and the environment. The only way to thrive is by maintaining dynamic stability—that bike-riding trick that Astro Teller talked about. But what is the political and social equivalent of paddling as fast as the water or maintaining dynamic stability?
It’s innovation in everything other than technology. It is reimagining and redesigning your society’s workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and communities—in ways that will enable more citizens on more days in more ways to keep pace with how these accelerations are reshaping their lives and generate more stability as we shoot through these rapids.
It will take workplace innovation to identify exactly what humans can do better than machines and better with machines and increasingly train people for those roles. It will take geopolitical innovation to figure out how we collectively manage a world where the power of one, the power of machines, the power of flows, and the power of many are collapsing weak states, super-empowering breakers, and stressing strong states. It will take political innovation to adjust our traditional left-right party platforms, born to respond to the Industrial Revolution, the New Deal, and the Cold War, to meet the new demands for societal resilience in the age of the three great accelerations. It will take moral innovation—to reimagine how we scale sustainable values to everyone we possibly can when the power of one and the power of machines become so amplified that human beings become almost godlike. And, finally, it will take societal innovation, learning to build new social contracts, lifelong learning opportunities, and expanded public-private partnerships, to anchor and propel more diverse populations and build more healthy communities.
One of my favorite thinkers on this challenge is Eric Beinhocker, the executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford University and author of The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What It Means for Business and Society. In an interview, Beinhocker succinctly summarized the challenge before us. He began by distinguishing between the evolution of “physical technologies”—stone tools, horse-drawn plows, microchips—and the evolution of “social technologies”—money, the rule of law, regulations, Henry Ford’s factory, the U.N.:
Social technologies are how we organize to capture the benefits of cooperation—non-zero-sum games. Physical technologies and social technologies coevolve. Physical technology innovations make new social technologies possible, like fossil fuel technologies made mass production possible, smartphones make the sharing economy possible. And vice versa, social technologies make new physical technologies possible—Steve Jobs couldn’t have made the smartphone without a global supply chain.
But there is one big difference between these two forms of technology, he added:
Physical technologies evolve at the pace of science—fast and getting exponentially faster, while social technologies evolve at the pace at which humans can change—much slower. While physical technology change creates new marvels, new gadgets, better medicine, social technology change often creates huge social stresses and turmoil, like the Arab Spring countries trying to go from tribal autocracies to rule of law democracies. Also, our physical technologies can get way ahead of the ability of our social technologies to manage them—nuclear proliferation, bioterrorism, cyber crime—some of which is happening around us right now.
Our physical technologies won’t slow down—Moore’s law will win—so we’re in a race for our social technologies to keep up. We need to more deeply understand how individual psychology, organizations, institutions, and societies work and find ways to accelerate their adaptability and evolution.
This will be a huge ongoing challenge.
Every society and every community must compound the rate at which it reimagines and reinvents its social technologies, because our physical technologies will not likely be slowing anytime soon. As the systems thinker Lin Wells put it in his November 1, 2014, essay, “Better Outcomes Through Radical Inclusion,” if, roughly speaking,
computing power per unit cost is doubling about every 18 months, in a year and a half we’ll have 100% more power, in five years more than 900% and in ten years over 10,000% … Moreover, the change is not just happening in the information domain. Biotechnology is changing even faster than information, robotics and autonomous systems are becoming ubiquitous, nanotechnology is poised to affect a range of commercially useful areas, from new materials to energy storage, and energy itself is undergoing profound changes affecting all of society. Collectively, the rates of technological change in just these five areas—bio, robo, info, nano, and energy (BRINE, for short)—pose legal, ethical, policy, operational, and strategic opportunities, and risks, that no company or individual can address alone.
This is a full-on societal reinvention challenge.
America, precisely because it is decentralized into fifty states and thousands of localities that enable multiple different experiments in governing, is ideally suited for such a broad project of societal reinvention. But in 2008—right after 2007 birthed a whole new set of accelerating technologies—we entered a severe economic recession that also triggered severe political gridlock in Washington. As a result, we’ve seen a lot of our physical technologies hurtling along, while our social technologies—the learning, governing, and regulating systems we need to go along with these accelerations to get the best out of them while cushioning the worst—stall. As I suggested earlier, it is as if the ground under everyone’s feet started shifting faster and faster just as the governing systems meant to help people adjust and adapt largely froze—and few political leaders could explain to people what was happening.
This policy gap has left way too many citizens in America and around the world feeling unmoored and at sea, prompting an increasing number to seek out candidates from the far left or far right. So many people today seem to be looking for someone to put on the brakes, or take a hammer to the forces of change—or just give them a simple answer to make their anxiety go away.
It is time to redouble our efforts to close that anxiety gap with imagination and innovation and not scare tactics and simplistic solutions that will not work. I would not even pretend to know all that is sufficient in this regard. But in this next section of the book I will offer some of the best adaptation ideas I have gleaned that are surely necessary in five key areas—the workplace, geopolitics, politics, ethics, and community building—to help people feel more anchored, resilient, and propelled in this age of accelerations. The last thing we want is for everyone to stick their paddles in the white water to slow down. That is exactly how you destabilize a kayak and a country.
EIGHT
Turning AI into IA
Let’s get one thing straight: The robots are not destined to take all the jobs. That happens only if we let them—if we don’t accelerate innovation in the labor/education/start-up realms, if we don’t reimagine the whole conveyor belt from primary education to work to lifelong learning.
But that has to start with an honest conversation about work—and, in America, we have not had an honest conversation about this subject for a long, long time. Ever since the early 1990s, President Bill Clinton and his successors have been telling Americans the same old, same old: if you “work hard and play by the rules” you should expect that the American system will deliver you a decent middle-class life and a chance for your children to have a better one. That was true at one time: just show up, be average, do your job, play by the rules, everything will be fine …
Well, say goodbye to all that.
Just as we seem to be leaving the Holocene climate epoch—that perfect Garden of Eden period when everything in nature was nicely in balance—we are also
leaving the Holocene epoch for work. In those “glorious” decades after World War II, before the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law all entered the second half of their chessboards, you could lead a decent lifestyle as an average worker with an average high school or four-year college education, belonging to an average union or none at all. And by just working an average of five days a week at an average of eight hours a day, you could buy a house, have an average of 2.0 kids, visit Disney World occasionally, save for an average retirement and sunset to life.
So many things then were working in favor of the average worker. America dominated a world economy in which the industrial foundations of many European and Asian countries had been destroyed by World War II, so for years thereafter there were vast numbers of manufacturing jobs to be filled. Outsourcing was limited, and China had yet to join the World Trade Organization (that happened in December 2001) and its workforce was not yet much of a threat to most good blue-collar jobs. With the push and pull of globalization relatively mild, innovation slower, and the barriers to entry into different industries higher, unions were relatively stronger and could negotiate healthy and steady wage and benefits packages from employers. Companies could also afford more in-house training of their workers, who were less mobile and therefore less likely to learn and quit. Because the pace of change was slower, whatever you had learned in high school or college stayed relevant and useful much longer; skills gaps were less prevalent. Machines, robots, and, most important, software had not advanced to the point where they could abstract so much complexity so easily and cheaply—and in the process undermine the bargaining power of both industrial and service unions.