How Thomas Friedman and Yuval Noah Harari Think About The Future of Humanity

you've all her re of course is a best-selling author and thinker whose work engages us in the history of humanity and where we're heading Thomas Friedman is also a best-selling author and columnist who for decades has been a guide to the world for readers of his columns and his books were in very good hands for the evening without further ado please welcome to the stage you've all her Aria and Thomas Friedman [Applause] so you've all we're gonna begin with you obviously we think about the future we think about what's happening in the world and what is setting the global agenda and if you could speak about the global agenda yeah I think the first thing to say about the global agenda is that it exists there is a global agenda which is not self-evident these days because with all the talk at least about the rise of nationalism and tribalism and the clash of civilizations and so forth we sometimes tend to forget that in a very deep sense all of humanity today constitutes a single civilization yes we have a lot of conflicts but every civilization every community every family has a lot of conflicts the people you fight most with are your family members not with strangers because they are there so the fact that the world is full of conflict doesn't mean that we are not a single community or a single civilization and I think in a deep sense almost all humans today or at least almost all countries today understand the fundamentals of reality in the same way they understand politics in the same way if you think about China the USA Iran or Israel they understand the basics of politics in the same way the basics of economics in the same way and the basics of nature in the same way they argue about a lot of things but when it comes time to build a hospital or an economy or a nuclear bomb they do it in the same way and just as we have a set of similar ideas and practices we also all of humanity we have a set of common problems global problems can only be solved on a global level and of these global problems the three most important of nuclear war climate change and technological disruption now the first two are quite familiar by now the third technological disruption is the most mysterious most people don't really understand what's coming even most experts cannot really say what kinds of threats what kind of dangers the new technologies especially AI artificial intelligence and bioengineering will create there are a lot of scenarios scary scenarios like if you think about artificial intelligence so one scary scenario is that it will lead to the emergence to the rise of a global useless class just as the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century created the urban working class so the automation revolution of the 21st century might create the useless class and much of the political and social history of the coming decades might revolve around the problems and the hopes and the fears of this new class another danger is that new technologies might lead to the collapse of liberal democracy especially if you think about the combination the merger of biotech and Infotech they might very soon reach the point when they create systems they create algorithms that understand us better than we understand ourselves and once you have an external algorithm that understands you better than you understand yourself liberal democracy as we have known it for the last century or so is doomed it will have to adapt to the new conditions it will have to reinvent itself in a radical new form or it will collapse because you can say that the Achilles heel of liberal democracy is the heart liberal democracy trusts in the feelings of human beings and that worked as long as nobody could understand your feelings better than you yourself or your mother but if there is an algorithm out there that understands your feelings better than your mother and can press your emotional buttons better than your mother and you won't even understand that this is happening then liberal democracy will become an emotional puppet show and we have these you know these slogans of listen to your heart follow your heart but what happens if your heart is a foreign agent is a double agent serving somebody else who knows how to press your emotional buttons who knows how to make you angry how to make you bold how to make you joyful this is the kind of threat that we are already beginning to see emerging today for example elections and referendums so really I would say that the three big challenges the three top items on our global agenda is how to prevent nuclear war how to prevent climate change and how to learn to control the new technology before it learns to control us thank you we think about the future we are the future of humanity we obviously have to think about our understanding of the world I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how you understand the world today well first of all Rachel's great to be with you and devolopment thank you all for coming out this is a real treat so in my last you know as a columnist one of the things I'm always asking myself is um how does the Machine work what are the biggest gears employees shaping or reshaping the world today and in my last book thank you for being late I picking up really on some of the themes you've all spoke about I argued that what is shaping more things in more places in more ways on more days is that we're in the middle three nonlinear accelerations with the three largest forces on the planet which I call the market mother nature and Moore's law so a mother nature for me is climate change biodiversity loss and population growth in the developing world if you put that on a graph it actually looks like a giant hockey stick the market for me is globalization but not your grandfather's globalization that was containers on ships and planes that's actually flat to going down right now but digital globalization so everything's being digitized and globalized put that on a graph whether it's measuring data consumed per month or cellphones it looks like a hockey stick and lastly Moore's Law coined by Gordon Moore in 1965 the co-founder of Intel argued that the speed and power of microchips will double every 24 months it's closer to 30 months now but never mind Moore's law has held up for 53 years put it on a graph it looks like a giant hockey stick so we're actually in the middle of three hockey stick accelerations all at the same time and I believe it's the interaction between them that really is not just changing our world it's it's reshaping our world and it's reshaping five realms in particular politics geopolitics ethics the community in the workplace so as I think about politics right now that some of these on everybody's mind you know one of the things you really see is that political parties all over the world here in the UK in the United States they're blowing up some are in power so they think they're alive but they're all basically dead and that's because they in my view they were all warned of an industrial age model that the central theme was capitalism versus labor or big government versus small government and the axis of politics was left to right and right to left um what I would argue and this is gets to how I think about the world today is that um that model is no longer relevant I think the way to think about politics today is through the model of climate change but I think we're in the middle of three climate changes at once a first friend the change of the climate of the climate we're going from what I call later to now so when I was growing up in Minnesota in the 50s and 60s later was when I could clean that Lake repair that River save that for us rescue that orangutan I could do it now or I could do it later well today later is officially over later will now be too late so whatever you're gonna save please save it now that's a climate change we're going through a change in the climate of globalization I think we're going from an interconnected world to an interdependent world and an interdependent world you get a kind of geopolitical invert inversion where you're first of all your friends your friends start to be able to kill you faster than your enemies um you have Greek and Italian banks go under tonight this room is half-full a Greece Italy wait a min NATO there in the EU in an interdependent world they can kill us and an interdependent world your rivals falling is actually more dangerous than your rivals rising so if China take six more islands in the South China Sea tonight don't quote me on this couldn't care less um if China loses 6% growth tonight this room is empty that's a climate change and lastly we're going through a change in the climate of business and technology I'm a big believer that um one reason I focus on technology so much I'm a big believer that whatever can be done will be done the only question in business is will it be done by you or to you but just don't think it won't be done so I'm going to ask you what can be done and when you look at AI and some of the themes that you've all talked about I think every company they can therefore must analyze optimize sighs customize socialize and digitize / autumn Atty virtually any job product or service so they can analyze now thanks to big data they can find the needle in the haystack of their data as the norm not the exception they can optimize I flew here on British Airways rolls-royce engines those engines actually connected by sensor to rolls-royce and they could tell ba exactly what altitude to fly every mile to optimize their energy efficiency they can prophesize you may have seen the IBM Watson ad where the IBM Watson repairman comes to a high-rise building says I'm here to fix the elevator and the doorman says the elevators not broken and he says I know but it will be in six weeks two three days okay you can do predictive analytics on anything now you can socialize that is you could connect now to your customers your suppliers your employees on a horizontal way like never before you can customize just for guys from Minnesota with brown eyes and a mustache and you can digitize / autumn Atty virtually any job product or service you put all those together and every business today finds himself in the middle of the climate change so as I thought about that I thought well what do you want when the climate changes I think you want two things you want resilience maybe I'll take a blow because you get disruptive behavior when the climate changes but you also want propulsion you want to be able to move ahead you don't be curled up in a ball under your bed waiting for the climate change to pass so as I thought about that I said who do I go to to find how you get resilience and propulsion when the climate changes then I realize I knew this woman she was 3.8 billion years old her name was Mother Nature and she dealt with more climate changes than anybody so I called her up made an appointment went out to see her um and I sat down I said mother nature how do you produce resilience in propulsion and when the climate changes she said well Tom everything I do I have to tell you I do unconsciously but um these are my strategies um first of all she said I'm incredibly adaptive in my world it's not the smartest that survive it's not the strongest it's actually the most adaptive that that bet survived and I do what she said through a rather brutal mechanism I call natural selection second she said I'm incredibly entrepreneurial where I see an opening in nature a blank space I fill it with a planter animal perfectly adapted for that niche third she said I'm incredibly pluralistic Oh Tom she said I'm the most pluralistic person you've ever met I tried 20 different species of everything see who wins and she did tell me something interesting she told me her most diverse ecosystems are her most resilient and propulsive ecosystems of course she told me she's totally sustainable in a circular way everything is food eat food poop seed eat food poop seed nothing is wasted um v she said I'm incredibly high bred and heterodox in my thinking nothing dogmatic about me I'll try any trees with any soils any bees with any flowers and lastly she did mention that she does believe in the laws of bankruptcy she told me she kills all her failures returns them to the great manufacturer in the sky and takes their energy to nourish her successes well my argument is that the community the country the government and the business that most closely mirrors mother nature strategies for building resilience and propulsion when the climate changes is the one that will thrive in this age of acceleration and since when I was writing my book it was the 216 election I actually imagine what if Mother Nature was running against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016 and so I created mother nature's political party based on these strategies I won't go into it I'm just close by saying that on some issues Mother Nature she's out there on the left with Bernie Sanders um because she believes in universal health care and making lifelong learning completely tax free cuz she understands in this world that you vols describing it's gonna be too damn fast for a lot of people so she wants to strengthen our safety nets to bounce people back into the game and protect him but at the same time mother nature would be out there on the right with the Wall Street Journal editorial page she'd actually be for abolishing all corporate taxes only unlike our Republican Party she'd replaced them with a carbon tax a tax on sugar attacks on bullets and a small financial transaction tax she would get radically entrepreneurial over here to pay for our safety nets over here unfortunately in our old industrial age model of politics if you're for stronger safety nets he almost never for radical entrepreneurship if your for radical entrepreneurship you're almost never for stronger safety nets what would mother nature call that stupid that's what she'd call it because she would understand you will never produce resilience unless you're a hybrid of these two and because our current political parties are not built on that model I think they're all struggling now to find a way to talk about politics we'd also be hearing from mother nature this evening so there's the three of us on stage and a variety of perspective problems also not our problems as you mentioned she is quite keen on extinction and she does believe in that and she wouldn't care if we are unable to cope with our problems and go extinct also she wouldn't care very much if humankind splits and say a small percentage becomes a new species better adapted to the new conditions and a couple of billions just go in the way of the Neanderthals and the mammoths and all that so it's very good to learn from mother nature but copying her methods too closely would be I think very bad news for a lot of people my you've always get the best out of her and cushion the worst because and I I do agree with you your mother nature my one of my science teachers talked about this that she just chemistry biology and physics that's all she is you can't talk her up you can't talk her down can't say mother nature were we're having a recession this year could we take a year off on the climate um she's gonna actually do whatever chemistry biology and physics dictate and to put it in American baseball terms mother nature always bats last and she always bats a thousand so do not mess with mother nature which is exactly what we're doing I wonder where obviously I'm talking on a long-term framework here but of course I imagine many of you came here tonight thinking about you know what's immediately in front of you what news alerts are on your phones what what tom I believe you've referred to the American president as a brain-eating disease perhaps what he might be up to what else is going on both speak to how we deal with what is unrelenting in front of us while thinking about the broader challenges that you've outlined how do we do both at once how do we adapt to do both at once first of all can we have a bit more light on the audience because it's very difficult to see who I'm talking to it's just a sea of darkness and it's nice to see some faces after all it's really about you not about us you will have to deal with the future also yeah it's it's very difficult for for people I mean humans have proven throughout history that they are very good when it comes to short-term problems and solutions but it's extremely difficult to foresee the long-term consequences and one of the things that happened if we talk about then various climate changes is that time is accelerating so thousands of years ago something like the Agricultural Revolution takes centuries even thousands of years and the consequences of our decision today to start growing wheat we will see or not we somebody our descendants will see the consequences of these this decision in a couple of centuries maybe even in thousands of years but now time is accelerating so the long term is not 2,000 years or 200 years the long term is 20 years we are really in an unprecedented situation in history when nobody knows the basics about how the world would look like in 20 or 30 years not just the basics of geopolitics who would be the big superpowers in 20 or 30 years or what will be the major alliances in the world in 20 30 years we don't know much more basic stuff such as what the job market would look like what kind of skills people will need what family structure would look like what general relations would look like so it's really the first time in history when we have no idea how human society will be like in a couple of decades and this means among other things that for the first time in history we have no idea what to teach in schools and so we focus on the short term and not just on the short term but actually we should then go back and focus on the past connecting to what you said about the crisis of most political parties that still think in terms of the 20th century and right versus left and capitalism versus socialism and all that I think that politics and government in most of the world today they are doing a far better job than ever before in running the day-to-day business of the of the country it may not look like this but I'm a medievalist so I constantly compare the government of today to the government of a doll the third or low st. Louis or something like that and it's wonderful the world we're living in is really wonderful so they are doing an excellent job in in in the day to day business of the country but what they have almost lost completely is the ability to have a long term plan for the future because they can't see they have no realistic vision of against base things like the job market in 30 years so what you see in more and more countries is that they look to the Past instead of to the future and instead of formulating meaningful visions for the word humankind will be in 2050 they repackage nostalgic fantasies about the past and there is a kind of competition who can look back farthest so you have Donald Trump wanting to go back to the 1950s or something like that and you have put in basically wanting to go back to the Tsarist Empire a century after the Bolshevik Revolution and you have Isis that wants to go back to the seventh century Arabia and in my country in Israel they beat everybody they want to go back 2500 years to the age of the Bible so we win we have the Bell the longest term vision backwards and this is a as a historian I can tell you two things about the past the past wasn't a very good time you don't really want to go back there and secondly it is not coming back no matter what you do you can't bring it back and so we are facing really a crisis of the inability of the political system to produce meaningful visions for the future maybe the only place in the world where there is serious work on producing a meaningful vision for the future is in China whether it's a good vision or a bad vision it's a different question but this is the one place I think where the government is seriously thinking in future terms and in long terms of decades and not in terms of one or two years and certainly not in terms of going back decades and centuries so just to pick up on what you've all said Richie that we're starting with Trump I described Trump as a brain-eating disease because as a columnist you're always in this position everyday where he says or does something so outrageous you feel if you don't write about it you're normalizing him but if you do write about it he stoled your brains for a day now if you do that twice a week four times or eight times a month you'll wake up after a year and discover all you've written about is that knucklehead and um and he's actually sucked your brains out so it's a real it's a real challenge um so you know my the subtitle of my book is is an optimist guide to thriving in the age of acceleration so everything's sped up and the reason it's called thank you for being late as the title comes from meeting people in Washington DC for breakfast over the years and every once in a while someone would come 15 20 minutes late they say Tom I'm really sorry it was the weather the traffic the subway the dog ate my homework and um one day three and a half years ago an Energy entrepreneur Peter Carr cell came three enough minutes 15 minutes late and said I'm really sorry whether the traffic the subway the dog ate my homework and I just spontaneously said to him actually Peter thank you for being late because you were late I've been eavesdropping on their conversation fascinating I've been people watching the lobby fantastic and best of all best of all I just connected to ideas I've been struggling with for a month so thank you for being late people started to get into it they'd say well you're welcome because they understood I was actually giving them permission to pause to slow down in fact my favorite quote from the front of the book is from my teacher and friend of Simon who says you know when you press the pause button on a computer it stops but when you press the pause button on a human being it starts that's when it starts to reflect rethink and reimagine and boy don't we need to do a lot of that right now now to pick up on you Vols point about leadership when the world is fast small errors in navigation can have huge consequences when we just needed to go fifty miles at five miles an hour well if you had a bad president or prime minister for governor or mayor you'd get off track but the pain of getting back on track was fairly tolerable but when you need to feel like you're going fifty thousand miles at five thousand miles an hour when you have a bad leader now you can get so far off track it's like a 747 pilot just changing two digits as he enters the navigation of his jet and suddenly you're halfway across the world in the wrong direction and so leadership really matters more right now now I you know I I think I would agree with with what you've all said about China in this sense I think China's leaders do wake up every day more than the average leader in the world and start the day by asking what world am i living in what are the biggest trends in this world and how do i align myself with those trends unlike I think a lot of leaders in the world but I would find I would tell you I'm seeing amazing leadership in America today in two places you've a one is at the corporate level and the other is at the local level so at the corporate level as I think about the workplace challenge the way I put it I think our central challenge is how do we turn a I into ia how do we take artificial intelligence and turn it into intelligent assistance ance intelligent assistance a NTS and intelligent algorithms so more people can learn faster and govern smarter so I'll give you example of intelligent assistance um that I use it's the HR department resources department at AT&T are giant telecom so you know what's interesting on AT&T three hundred thirty thousand employees in one of the most competitive businesses and world global telecom pretty good chance that whatever is going on in their HR department is coming to a neighborhood near you so what's going on in HR at AT&T well they begin their year now where their leader Randall Stephenson he starts the year with a pretty radically transparent speech about where the companies going what businesses they're gonna be in and what skills you need as a worker at 80 that year filters down through the company then they put all their managers a hundred ten thousand people on their own in-house LinkedIn system so I'm there it's Tom Friedman you know and it has my academic background and the jobs I've had in the company then they match that up with the skill sets I'm making up the number cuz I don't remember it exactly but it's probably ten skill sets you need that year to be a rising employee at AT&T they've got my CV they're on LinkedIn and they realize I've got seven of the ten but I'm missing three then they partnered with Sebastian Thrun from Udacity the online learning University and he created nanodegrees for all ten skill sets then they came to me and said Tom here's the deal um we will give you up to eight thousand dollars a year to take the Nano degrees for the skill sets you're missing that we heard that you're interested in computer science we just created an online computer science degree for six thousand dollars a year with Georgia Tech fact we heard you're interested in history you can take an online course from that guy yeah you've all Hariri will pay for that as well yeah just one condition mr. Tom you have to take these courses at home at night on your own time not on company time now if I say to them you know what mr. AT&T I've actually climbed up one too many telephone poles I'm just not into this anymore um they now have a wonderful severance package for me okay but I will not be working there much longer so they flush out now about thirty thousand people they take in about thirty thousand people they advance about ten thousand every year what is AT&T social contract today with their employees it's a you can be a lifelong employee still today if you're at AT&T but now only if you're a lifelong learner if you are not ready to be a lifelong learner you can no longer be a lifelong employee at AT&T and that is the social contract coming to a neighborhood near you and that's why one of my teacher is Heather McGowan there's an education expert and this picks up on something that you've all said Heather likes to say mom dad never asked your kids today what you want to be when you grow up because whatever it is not be here unless it's policemen or firemen okay only ask your kid today how you want to be when you grow up will you have an agile learning mindset will you be predisposed to be a lifelong learner long after you've left home and mom and dad are not there to say you've all have you done your homework and that leads to what I think is really roiling societies today and and and you've all touched on this with these people might be out of work which is something I learned from marina gorebyss who runs the institute of the future if we were having this conversation 15 years ago one of the themes we'd be talking about is the digital divide you know London's got Internet Manchester dozen Europe's got it Africa doesn't digital divide it was huge um I believe that digital byte is rapidly disappearing I don't know when it'll be gone but I'm sure in a decade it'll be gone and when it is the most important divide in the world is going to be the self-motivation divide whose kids have the self-motivation to be a lifelong learner long after they've left home and mom and dad are not there to ask them to do their homework is what you learned in your first year now could be outdated by your fourth year of college the idea that you can get a four-year degree Undine out on that for 30 years is like so 1950s and that that has a lot of people really unnerved because a lot of people were actually born and bred to do what they were told and God bless and they built your country in mind and you Falls but just doing what you're told now will not bring you average income and an average lifestyle and I think that has a lot of people really frightened I think what you're describing is extremely stressful I mean I just hear you and you know there is so much stress and reinventing yourself again and again throughout your life sounds terrible to most people because you know when you're 15 you're 16 then you're inventing yourself and it's still stressful when you're 15 but it's still doable when you reach 4050 you don't want to change yes I want to keep on learning new things and to gain experience and to go into new places and so forth but really change the deep structures of my personalities of my professional skills to learn things afresh it sounds you know very exciting and then very like good but it's actually extremely difficult and if this is what we are heading and we are heading in the direction we will be facing a stress epidemic even far worse than then today and then other things with all these algorithms that again are watching us all the time in our learning our abilities and our problems and whether we are self-motivated or not once the algorithms reached the conclusion that you are not going to make it you will not go you will not be able to make it I mean we are used to this problem of discrimination against people based on wrong statistics like in the 20th century discrimination against people usually took the form of discriminating against entire groups based either on faulty statistics or based on just religious biases and racism and so forth so as the world if you were gay you had discrimination against all gays if you're a woman then all all women and one of the things about it is that you could actually do something about it because most of the time the biases were not true and because many people suffered from them they could join together and have some a political action against the discrimination now in the coming years in the coming decades we will face individual discrimination and it might actually be based on a good assessment of who you are I mean if 88 NT if the algorithms and the big data algorithms of AT&T they follow you around they look up your Facebook profile your DNA your records from kindergarten until today they will be able to figure out quite accurately who you are and if they for example find out that I lack motivation on the on the X scale on the Harare scale of the Freedmen's scale of motif of of self-motivation 0 to 10 he is just 7.1 and we don't want to accept to our company people of less than 8.2 and we know from experience that yes we can give you a little push but you just lack what we need and you will not be able to do anything or almost anything about this discrimination first of all because it's just you they don't discriminate against your me because you're Jewish or gay or black or whatever because you are you and the worst thing is there will be it will be true I mean they got me i I really lack self motivation they really got me so what do I do about it and it sounds funny in a way but if you think about it deeply it's terrible everybody on what everybody has something and you will not be able to do much about it so let me give you the flip side of that because everything about these systems you've all is everything and it's opposite so you you just described the downside of that but let me talk about intelligent assistant for a second example I give him the book so the example I use is on the janitorial staff at Qualcomm big American tech company in San Diego they have 64 billion building campus they they built the inside your iPhone not Apple that's why Apple is always suing them over patents and um they three years ago they took six of their buildings they put sensors on everything every door window light pipe faucet drain computer and they beamed all that data up to the cloud and now they beam it down onto an iPad with this incredibly user-friendly interface for their janitorial staff so if you leave your computer on or a pipe bursts above my head the janitor knows it before you or I do and they just swipe down to see who to call or how to fix it themselves they've actually turned their janitors into it's technologists they're janitors now give tours to foreign visitors what do you think that does for the dignity of a janitor because he or she now has an intelligent assistant enabling them to learn you know faster and work smarter I will give you another example intelligent algorithm so um those of you American students here know that an 11th grade way to take the PSAT exam the practice SAT exam to take the SAT exam to measure our math and verbal skills to get into the college of our choice so we also know in America that a lot of parents go out in 11th grade and hire a tutor for $200 an hour to Goose your scores in math and verbal a completely rigged game because if you come from a family or neighborhood where you can't afford that you're really at a disadvantage so three years ago the College Board that administers the PSAT and SAT exam your a-levels and o-levels partnered with Khan Academy the online learning platform to create free PSAT and SAT prep so the way it works now is I take my PSAT and 11th grade I get the results back I did really well in verbal it says Tom you you could be a journalist actually um but um but it says I have a problem with math it actually says I Tom Friedman personally because it knows me have a problem with fractions and right angles then it takes me to a practice site just for fractions and right angles doesn't waste any time on my weaknesses if I do well there takes me to another site that says Tom you could be an AP math Wow you need to be met I mean no one in my family is an AP math no one in my neighborhood yeah you could be an AP math if I do well there text me another site with 180 college scholarships last year 3 million American kids got free PSAT and SAT prep on this intelligent algorithm and I'll give you another one that's very relevant to the point you raised we have about 32 million people who start a college but never finished they go one year two years two and a half three three and a half years they drop out go to bite get a job or do it online the algorithm says you have no BA no job so a whole new set of intelligent algorithms have emerged one eye profiles opportunity at work so what they do now is you can go to them with your year two year two and a half of knowledge they will badge what you actually know and what you can do with what you know and they partner with companies to slot you in without a BA so I profiled a young african-american woman LaShonda Lewis she went to Michigan Tech for three and a half years studied computer science had to drop out for family reasons she went back home was driving a school bus to and from a computer school couldn't make that up and working at a law firm on the helpdesk helping lawyers rediscover their lost passwords okay she was discovered by opportunity at work they partnered with MasterCard slotted her in as a stay measured her knowledge slotted her in as a systems engineer at MasterCard she's now a senior systems engineer at MasterCard and as she says in the last line of her interview and mr. Friedman I still don't have a BA so that's an intelligent help that's the other side of this and and what I found is there is enormous innovation going on on the other side of this you're absolutely right on the downside but for every downside of this somebody's invented an upside I would just add one other point you know what was the fastest growing restaurant chain in America according to Entrepreneur Magazine in 2015 and you never guess it it's actually called paint nite fastest burn restaurant chain in America what is paint nite it's paint by numbers for adults and bars turns out idols like to get together in a bar have an artist draw a design for them and they paint by numbers together according to that design and have a drink it's amazing how many adults like to paint by numbers in bars okay who knew okay that is there all these jobs out there and that's why I would close by saying if you really want to blow your mind go to Airbnb x' website you'll notice now there are two icons on the front page ones homes that's because I'm coming to London like my sister did this week and I want to get an apartment here you know we all know that but now the other ones called experiences and click if you want to have some fun click experiences it's people monetizing their passions I will give you a tour of three man basketball games in Havana at night with a mojito at the end read that one the American mother who said I send my 18 year old on this he didn't come back till 2:00 in the morning he was having so much fun I'll teach you how to make falafel you know in job I'll teach you how to make it you know this is it full time employment maybe maybe not it's the fastest growing part of Airbnb is website and I predict in five years it'll be the biggest job site in the world people monetizing their passions sticking with this theme we've been talking a lot about individuality we'll be able to learn individually just how unmotivated we are again perhaps motivated to go paint plates by numbers so we'll know so much more about ourselves as individuals how is that going to affect how we all live together Tom you've written about I believe you called yourself a pluralism supremacist how does increase knowledge it's increased knowledge of our individuality exactly just how well-suited we are for a job or poorly suited for any job what does that mean and how we all live together and and are we moving more inward in this moment or where do you see floral ISM going it's very hard to say I mean of course as you said I mean every technology has good potential and in bad potential this is what is different about disruptive technologies compared to nuclear war and climate change nuclear war is this is obviously terrible nobody nobody wants it the question is just how to prevent it with disruptive technology the danger in a way is far greater because it has some wonderful potential so there are a lot of forces that for some very good reasons are pushing us faster and faster to develop and adopt these disruptive technologies and it's very difficult to know in advance what the consequences will be in terms of community in terms of relations between people in terms of politics 20 years ago in the high days of internet optimism you had all this extremely optimistic and today we say naive dreams and visions that the internet will bring everybody closer together you could have friends from all over the world in the end there will be freedom of expression and all the dictators will fall and the world will turn into one big happy and peaceful community and this didn't happen and we look back today and we say oh this was extremely naive I mean if people forget about human nature did we learn nothing from history and the answer is yes we learn very little from history does it mean that every new technology will just make things worse no obviously not but it extremely difficult to know which way it will go I think that history is just not deterministic and again when you look to the past when you look at the 20th century and what people could do with new technologies and you could build you can use the trains and radio to build Nazi Germany or you could use the same technology to build liberal democracy and it's it's kind of touching goal who wins I don't think there is any predetermined or preordained winner in these competitions so again with AI we can sit here all evening and a couple of more evenings and spin all kinds of likely scenarios which are all possible what will happen some very good and some very bad and some in between and we just don't know I think as a story in the the best thing the most important thing we need to realize is that there is no predetermined story which is in a way very frightening and you know we are now living with the collapse of the last story of inevitability and in the 1990s in the same era of the extremely optimistic vision of the internet we also had this story this idea that history is over that we know who won the great ideological battle of the 20th century liberal democracy and in free-market capitalism came out on out on top and now it's just a question of time until it will spread and take over the whole world and again this now seems extremely naive and the moment we are at now is a moment of extreme disillusionment and bewilderment because we have no idea where things will will go from here this is why I think it's it's very important to be aware of the of the downside of the dangerous scenarios of the new technologies I mean obviously the the corporation's the engineers the people in the laboratories they naturally focus on all the enormous benefits that these technologies might bring us and it folds to historians and to philosophers and to social scientists to think about all the ways in which things can go wrong so when Frank Okayama wrote the end of history I at the same time wrote a book called Lexus and the olive tree and the argument of the book was that I think what is going to shape the future is a tension between all of these things that are old faith community religion sect tribe all things that anchor us in the world olive trees and the interaction between them and technology and I still believe that that is that's certainly for me a helpful framework that it's a because what we do with those passions how we govern them how we mobilize them it can be for good or for ill and that for it for me you know it's a good segue to talk about the ethics question and one you wrote a whole book about Homo dias you know so uh III just did a little chapter on it and and let me give mine and then you give yours because I think to be an interesting contrast between the two so my version of the argument you made the chapter on it is called is God in cyberspace he's God in cyberspace best question ever got on book tour 1990 I was selling Lexus the Ala tree in Portland Oregon question time came young man stood up in the balcony said mr. Friedman I have a question he is god in cyberspace I said I have no idea I felt like an idiot so I got home I called my spiritual teacher he was a rabbi I got to know at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem when I was the New York Times correspondent there great tome u2 scholar three marks now there's an Amsterdam married to a Dutch priest interesting character and um I called him up in Amsterdam I said see I got a question I've never had before is God in cyberspace what should I said and I he said well Tom in our faith tradition we actually have two concepts of the Almighty a biblical concept and a post biblical concept so the biblical concept is that the almighty is almighty he smites evil and rewards good and if that's your view of God he sure isn't in cyberspace which is full of pornography gambling cheating lying people smearing one another and Twitter and now we know fake news so um fortunately though he said we have a post biblical view of God and the post biblical view of God is that God manifests himself by how we behave so if we want God to be in cyberspace we have to bring him there by how we behave there I really like this answer I put it into the paperback edition of Lexus the olive tree in 2000 where none of you saw it and it sat there for 16 years anyways I started working on this book and I found myself spontaneously retelling that story I said why are you retelling that story and it became obvious to me for two reasons and one just happened I think in the last couple of years in the developed world we began living 51 scent of our lives in cyberspace it's not where you go to find a date find us out spouse buy a house buy a car write a book buy a book get a mortgage give alone get your news generate your news we're now living do your banking your brokerage we're now living 51% of our lives in cyberspace and my definition of cyberspace is that it's a realm where we're all connected and no one's in charge so there are no courts in cyberspace no lovely ceman no stoplights no no 1-800 please stop Putin from hacking my election but that's where we're living our lives another way to describe it we're living 51% of our lives in a realm that is fundamentally God free at the same time because of these accelerations you and I both have talked about I think we're standing at a moral intersection we have never stood at before as a species in 1945 we entered the world where one country could kill all of us possi regime and that was the United States I'm glad it had to be one country but it was the United States I think we're entering a world where one person can kill all of us and at the same time at the same time where all of us could actually fix everything because these accelerated powers for the first time are creating world where one of us could kill all of us and all of us now if we actually put our minds to it we have the tools to feed house clothe and educate every person on the planet we have never been to this intersection before where one of us can kill all of us and all of us could fix everything and what does that mean means we've never been more godlike as a species than we are today well put those two together we've never lived more of our lives in a realm that's Godfrey and we have never been more godlike and what that means is that what every person thinks feels and believes really matters it means everyone needs to be in the grip of sustainable values it means at a minimum everyone needs to be in the embrace of the Golden Rule and every faith and culture has their version of it doing to others as you wish them to do unto you because you now live in a world where more people can do unto you farther faster deeper cheaper than ever before Putin did unto us in our election and we can do unto others farther faster deeper cheaper than ever for everyone needs to be in the embrace of the golden rule I know what you're thinking actually gave this thing as a commencement address at Olin College of Engineering two years ago and I said to the parents there I know what you're thinking you paid two hundred thousand dollars for your kid to get an engineering degree and who do they bring us the commencement speaker but a knucklehead promoting the golden rule is there anything more naive and what I told them is what I would say again tonight I think in this age of acceleration naivete is the new realism because what's really naive is thinking we're gonna be okay in a world that is this interdependent we're men women and machines get this super empowered if everyone is not in the embrace of the golden rule where does the golden rule come from I think two places primarily strong families and healthy communities and that's why my focus and my work today is so much on healthy communities but I would say that maybe the big problem is not so much morality as it is causality that we just cause a little I mean the ability to understand the change of causes and effects in the world I think there is no lack of values today in the world but to really act well it's not enough to have good values you need to have a good understanding of the chains of causes and effects like if you think about the commandment like don't steal so okay let's everybody agree it's not good to steal but the big problem today is not that somebody says hey I want to steal what will you do to me the big problem is that stealing has become so complicated that I'm steaming all the time and I'm not even aware of it the commandment don't steal was formalized in an era when stealing meant meant breaking myself I'm breaking into somebody's house and snatching some gold coins or a goat or whatever and it was easy - at least honest what I'm doing and what the potential consequences are for the owner of the gold coins of the gold but how do I still today well I put like ten thousand and I have a pension fund and ten thousand dollars out of my pension fund are invested in some big oil corporation or chemical corporation that brings profits of say four or five percent every years with a very good investment and how does the corporation makes such huge profits for example by dumping toxic waste into a river and polluting the entire water resources of the area and hurting the health of the local population and the wildlife and so forth but the cooperation is so rich that it can retain an army of lawyers that protects it against all lawsuits and also a small brigade of people in the capital that block any attempt to have stronger environmental regulations now am i guilty of stealing a river I'm not even a word that part of my pension fund is invested in this cooperation and even if I am aware I don't know how the cooperation makes its money it will take me months maybe years to find out where my money what my money is doing and during that time I will be guilty of so many other crimes which I know nothing about and the really the problem is that our sense of morality our sense of justice like our other senses was evolved in the ancient African savanna when your pension funds you had just one pension funds which was your kids and you knew what your pension fund was you was doing it was playing in the mud or something and so the entire the ability that the problem is no agreeing on basic morality the problem is on understanding the extremely complicated change of cause and effect in the world and again my fear is that maybe Homo sapiens is just not up to it we have created such a complicated world that we have no longer able to make sense of what is happening and if I looked at politics in the u.s. again from the vantage point of a medievalist Republicans and Democrats seems almost identical I just don't understand what's the difference if you can enlighten me on this what's the big difference between them in ethical in their ethical view in their view of the world they have a big difference in their understanding of cause-and-effect relations but when it comes down to two basic values I think the difference is is not big but again the problem is that maybe we are no longer able like the engineers you gave the talk to so they could all agree yes we should keep the Golden Rule but then when they go to design some I don't know bridge of software they don't understand what they are what are the consequences of what they are doing so how can they act morally without this understanding well you just described why we need a free press um I think that's one roll the free press really plays today and again what's the upside of this age of acceleration is now an individual can go take a picture of that waste dumping by that factory put it up on the internet and it'll go around the world in in 30 minutes competing against funny cat videos ah no actually if you're in my business you'll find that if I take a picture of General Electric doing that and put it up on the New York Times a General Electric will stop doing that I can assure you that will not compete with cat videos so there's an upside to all of these I think you've all that that I'm gonna we're playing a very useful function here I'll do the outside and but but but what I your people ask me what I do for a living tell them I am a translator from English to English that's what I do I try to take complex things and break them down first so I can understand them and then hopefully explain them to others and I am really my motto I've adopted from Marie Curie who once said now is the time to understand more so we may fear less and now it's truly I this is never good journalism I think that practice by the New York Times and many others has never been more important to understand more so people will fear less because we now have a president who is actually in the fear business backed up by a Pravda like Network called Fox television that's in the business of making people stupid and you put those two together you know it's really dangerous and and the good news is we are finding at the New York Times more people that we know Donald Trump toys clients are failing New York Times I assure you we are anything but that today because so many people are coming to not just the New York Times but to trusted new sites because they want to understand more so they may fear less and and so many individuals now can go out and actually you know be citizen journalists like never before and I would say this the political side of that is that you know so which like if you want to be an optimist about America today I tell people stand on your head because the country looks so much better from the bottom up than the top down okay so I think that as we go into this age of acceleration national governments with a few exceptions are really too slow certainly the big democracies are because we're too tribal eyes partisan eyes now they they can't move at the pace of change because government moves at the pace of trust and there's no trust the single individual single family way too weak against these forces so I think it's the healthy community that is going to be the proper of governing unit of the 21st century and if you want to know what makes me an optimist in America is that our country you know the cliche about America is that we're divided by two so these two coasts everyone is pluralizing diversifying globalizing and modernizing and in between them is flyover for America where everyone's high on opioids voted for Trump and waiting for 1950 okay that's kind of the cliché so um well you only have to be from Minnesota you only have to be from flyover America - no that is not true America is actually a checkerboard today of communities that are collapsing from the bottom down and communities that are rising from the bottom up so I did a trip a year ago to um I was invited to give a talk at our national lab at Oak Ridge Tennessee so I got the map out Oak Ridge Tennessee hey it's down here southern tip of Appalachia haven't been to Appalachia I think I'll do a car trip across Appalachia reading about all these people voted for drum so I started the trip in Austin Indiana so it's a southern Indiana northern tip of Appalachian I went to excite read about the town 4400 people and a 5% of the town is HIV positive which is just the worst possible levels of epidemic you can imagine what was the story two factories in the town one closed the other got automated a lot of white working-class men and women got unemployed very quickly um the they couldn't adapt and I fell into drug use and you had son father grandfather all shooting up together it's a terrible store and I went there to interview the one doctor in the town then I got on my car and drove 40 minutes south on i-70 to Louisville Kentucky Louisville Kentucky has 30,000 open jobs anybody looking for a job Louisville Kentucky so what's going on there so which organisms thrive when the climate changes they call complex adaptive organisms what's happening at the community level the commutes that are rising they're creating complex adaptive coalition's and what you see in Louisville and I can show you communities all over the country these complex adaptive coalition's you have the business community you're not plugging directly into the public school system k12 community college four-year college translating in real-time their skills needs and demands okay not waiting for the schools to figure it out then you have the philanthropic community coming in supplementing it with scholarships after-school programs supplemental learning opportunities then you have the local government catalyzing at all and hiring global recruiters to go into the world and find global investors for their local attributes so in the case of Louisville Louisville happens to be the capital of Bourbon tourism so Louisville is de Bourbon what Napa Valley is - red wine and they're now distilleries and bed-and-breakfast you go you know across just they've created a tourism industry Louisville happens to be the headquarters of ups so you fly into Louisville Airport all you see are factories everywhere because when Jeff Bezos of Amazon com says you've all get to that product in 24 hours it's because he's doing end of runway assembly and manufacturing now in Louisville and Louisville is a headquarters of Humana wellness company so the mayor's equipped any young person in the town who wants with a web neighbor cloud connected breathalyzer and kids got in the morning trying to create citizen scientists and they map the air quality in their neighborhood and they feed it all into a website in the city they've created a complex adaptive coalition and this is happening all over the country and so we've got communities like Austin that opioid crisis is real they're collapsing but those were you get this leadership together are creating complex adaptive coalition's come to my hometown of Minneapolis two and a half percent unemployment I mean really thriving they're not waiting for Washington DC because there's a much higher trust there and my my teacher Duff Seidman always says you know Trust is the only legal performance-enhancing drug okay so where there's trust in the room you can go really fast you can go at the speed of visits and when there's no trust like in Washington DC right now you can't move two inches so how do you make sense of this extremely complex and checkered reality I mean my job is much easier than yours because as a historian who looks mainly the past and also at long periods of centuries and thousands of years so the like that the main trains jumps jump at you yeah but how do you manage to make sense of such a complicated and contradictory reality and how do you know that you're not just you know following your biases and seeing what you want to see so it's a combination it's a very good question of data I mean I can show you the employment statistics you know the economies of these towns and I can show you the proliferation of them and then obviously reporting and then anything is going to be a guess you know but if I look at the country I see the National Statistics what's going on to me the question is and this I can't do I can only report on what's going on is what is the balance between these two trends but as I'm not a historian I'm a journalist what I'm trying to do is by highlighting the positive trend because I think one good example is worth a thousand theories that people will follow examples when they see people like them doing it so my idealism is to say here's what's working you know and these people are just like you so you can do it just like them I Israeli general loozy Diane you know once said to me Tom I know why you're an optimist I said why he said it's because you're short and I said I'm not that sure he said you can only see the part of the glass that's half-full okay so um I'm actually not that short but I I do believe in the Emil Evans the physicists who helped me with all the physics in my book you vote he likes to say when people say Aimee are you an optimist or a pessimist says I'm neither because they're just two different forms of fatalism everything will be great everything will be awful he said I believe in applied hope don't know if it's gonna work but I believe in applied hope yeah I'm very interested in how you ball has interrogated your optimism and optimism of course it'd be the natural note to end on but I want to care a tiny bit more about your pessimism and hopefully we can all think about how to walk out of here holding both of those ideas in our mind you wrote in sapience I believe that there's no that I'm sorry I have no proof human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along just a cheery thought for all of us as we wind down our time together I wonder if you could help us think about that what you've discussed this evening and and Tom's very convincing data rich argument that when you're doing yoga and standing on your head you really can see roots of communities pulling together even in this disorienting moment so help us leave here both pessimists and optimists well I try not to think in terms of pessimism and optimism it's just that history just doesn't unfold in such a way usually you have terrible things and wonderful things happening at the same time maybe in different places but happening at the same time usually the same revolution the same development it's very rare when you have a big revolution in history which is doing only good or which is doing only bad and of course you have the added problem that those who lose who lose the most and those who get extinct and those who disappear they are not there to tell their story so in history there is always a certain a certain bias towards the optimistic side here we are here so it couldn't have been that bad the people for whom it was very bad they are just not here but you know so and also is as somebody who tries to see the big picture and look at the global picture there is always the danger that you're always going to notice the agenda and the opinions and the interests of the of the hegemonic powers of the more powerful people and societies and in classes and whatever because they dominate the conversation so even if you oppose them even if you think you're they're wrong you're not going to miss their ideas you might object their ideas you might fight against them but you're not going to ignore them the problem of the people who are like push to the side or push down is that they are very often just ignored not that you don't agree with what they say not that you think their interests don't count you just don't remember to even notice their point of view or there are other interests so also the question of of pessimism and optimism it's always a question of who are you talking about I think one of the main problems in talking about the global agenda or the problems of humanity or and the kind of things that are that I try to doom is that maybe there is no single future for the whole of humankind maybe the basic understanding of the world is just that different groups are going to have very different futures maybe I mentioned earlier the question of what to teach your kids so if you live in one place and belong to a particular community or to a particular group so you teach your kids to be resilient and you teach your kids computer code and you teach your kids to play the violin and you live in another place maybe not very far away and the best thing to teach your kids is how to shoot a Kalashnikov and it's happening on the same on the same planet at the same time and what's more true or what's more important it's it's it's kind of an empty question it really boils down to the question of perspective so this I think is kind of a historical low or an historical truth that there never just a single story going around and part of the responsibility part of the difficulty I think of being a journalist or being a historian is how do you bring at least some justice to this situation and how do you give at least some attention to all the different viewpoints and not just to the to the dominant one um before you go close you will just talk a little bit about your next book and give us a little tease I want to hear I'm gonna be very sad for a second and then I'll do my so my next book is coming in August September it's called 21 lessons for the 21st century but it's not really a book of concrete lessons like do this go there whatever it's more an invitation to take part in the major debates and discussions of the world of the current moment continuing what I said earlier I think one of the problem problems that most people today face is that they just don't have the time and the energy to be part of the global debate of the debate about the future of humanity there are all these big questions of climate change and artificial intelligence and bioengineering and it's going to have an impact on the life of every single individual on the planet but most people they're too busy going to work and feeding their kids and taking care of elderly parents and so forth they just don't have it's a luxury to be able to think about these issues to investigate them to engage in the debate and the problem was in one of the problems again with history is that history never makes any concessions and never gives any discounts just because you're in difficulty oh just because you're poor or just because you're too busy taking care of your kids if you don't have the time and the energy and the really the luxury to be part of the debate it doesn't mean that you won't suffer from the consequences because in in this sense history's completely unfair and I see my job as a historian as trying to help at least a few more people take part in the debate and this is the main purpose of the coming book so I guess I see my job is obviously you know reporting whatever situation I'm assigned to report to but I am always looking for examples of what's working and sharing them with people so so because I think there's a power in that and that's my version of idealism it's why I went into journalism young people often come to me say I want to do what you do you know what do I need to know and you know I say you build a type fast I can type real fast um actually went to London secretarial school to learn how to type back in on my day here but I think that the most important thing you need is a journalist today is that you have to be a good listener and for two reasons and the second reason is more important than the first the first is what you learn when you listen you know but the second reason is what you say when you listen listening is a sign of respect and my method to my madness if you travel with me is I really do try to listen to people whether on you know a little Jewish guy from Minnesota in the Arab world or I'm in Russia or I'm here because I find that if you just listen to people it's amazing what they'll let you say back and if you don't listen to them it's amazing you cannot tell them it's dark outside and that's why I've often said um before I retire I'm gonna change my business card it now says Thomas L Friedman New York Times Foreign Affairs columnist and I want to change it to Thomas L Friedman New York Times humiliation and dignity correspondent because I basically spent my whole career covering people acting out on their humiliation whether it's in the Middle East you know we all know the stories they're Russians feeling committable Chinese you know and questing for for dignity but I may add also diversity correspondent and that's where I would end you know Rachel too you know as a columnist sometimes you're in the right place at the right time and sometimes you're in the wrong place at the wrong time especially when you're a once a week columnist as I am now so less summer the head of the US Air Force invited me to join him on a tour of all America's air bases in the Middle East it's a great opportunity to see this perspective of the world in the military and I found myself an Altoid aid air base in Qatar the night Donald Trump was giving his press conference about the charlottesville disturbances and talking about how there were good white supremacist and bad white supremacist and like that's all the world or in America was talking about and I was in a load eight airbase at Qatar and my column was due in a few hours so I staring at a blank blank screen thinking about what do I write and then it just popped into my head I looked around at my traveling party the head of the US Air Force Dave goal find his Jewish we are traveling with the Air Force US Air Force secretary she's a woman Heather Wilson her chief executive officer is an African American woman Air Force lieutenant colonel there guards name was one the head of the air base and it was in Armenian American his deputy was a lebanese american and our intelligence briefers name was yang mr. trump which part of this sentence don't you understand okay that that is the real strength of America our ability to make out of many one you know and in a world where we're all getting so mixed up now I believe that virtue that strength is so important for every society now it's more important than ever and so I pray this man will be a one-term president because we can take four years of him we cannot take eight years of him he will destroy institutions in eight years but I know that underneath you know there's still a really powerful idea of America and diversity out there that I think even Donald Trump cannot crush and that's why I is it shared also by the average Trump voter I mean are you able also to listen to them and I don't think there is an average Trump voter and I think that because I think people came to him for so many reasons some people came because they were humiliated Hillary Clinton said you're deplorable I'm deplorable that I'm gonna wear a t-shirt that says I'm a deplorable okay some came because things you've talked about you've all they want a wall to stop the pace of change some came for many reasons but my way of approaching them because I'm a Wednesday columnist it means I write Tuesday for Wednesday means I have the first column after every election hmm so I had the column then I from one and I'm sorry the week before he won I wrote my last column and it was addressed to Trump voters and it began dear fellow Americans treat people with respect it's amazing you know if you start there how much you can peel peel back you know just listen to people and we have so many people broadcasting now you know and not listening particularly in politics that I think that that's truly the optimism so I don't feel we should go too deep into the 26 women yes well to comment actually about it one I think that I mean the the Trump voters of still the future of America I mean if you don't have them then America is going nowhere so if you need to be optimistic about something then you need to be optimistic about about them as well that I think they're they're all people that you could take somewhere with a different message not all but many of them and secondly I would say about about journalism I agree that it is immensely important especially today especially for the viability of liberal democracies because you know democracy is to some extent based on Lincoln's maxim that you can fool some people some of the time all the time and you can fool all the people some of the time but not all the people all the time and this is really just wishful thinking you can fool people I mean not for eternity nothing is for eternity but you can fool all the people for a very very long time and the the way to do it is to control the information they get with the basic idea of democracy is ok we elect a bunch of people to govern the country and if they do a bad job if they fail then sooner or later enough people will realize it and they will change the government and this works fine as long as you have free press and free journalism if the government controls in some way or the other directly or indirectly if it controls the media if it controls journalism then it can always blame somebody else for its failures it can always direct the attention towards all kinds of enemies either real or imaginary and there will never be a day of reckoning so in in this there is no future to democracy without a strong and free journalism I think yes journalism I was gonna say on behalf of the New York Times a rousing defense of a strong and free press works in very nicely to remind you that we were here heard this evening putting on this event what a luxury called it to engage in this debate and and to listen as Tom described is so important as we do figure out and make our way toward the future we are going to call in an evening here I want to thank all of you for joining us thank the New York Times and how to academy for putting a loss event and please of course thank you of all Harare and Thomas Friedman [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: New York Times Events

Views: 312,848

Rating: 4.710288 out of 5

Keywords: science, artificial intelligence, technology, philosophy

Id: 5chp-PRYq-w

Length: 85min 32sec (5132 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 22 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

thank you for this.

tdlr: big lean safety net; mostly unregulated markets.

sounds good

[u/berniesanders90210]

I think I will watch this video some time in the next 6 months

[u/WorldOfthisLord]

delet this

[u/RedErin]

Yuval is the bomb.