Thank You for Being Late

by Thomas L. Friedman

  Paul Jacobs recalls the exact moment when he knew a revolution was about to happen. It was Christmas 1998 and he was sitting on the beach in Maui. “I took out a prototype of the pdQ 1900 they had sent me and I typed in ‘Maui sushi’ into the AltaVista search engine. I was wirelessly connected using Sprint. Up came a sushi restaurant in Maui. I don’t remember the name of the restaurant, but it was good sushi! I knew viscerally right then that what I had theorized—having a phone with the connectivity of a Palm organizer connected to the Internet—would change everything. The day of the disconnected PDA was over. I searched for something I cared about that had nothing to do with technology. Today it seems obvious, but back then it was a novel experience—that you could sit on the beach in Maui and find the best sushi.”

  Paul Jacobs doesn’t mince words: “We made the smartphone revolution.” But Jacobs is quick to add that they were ahead of their time—and behind it. The early device they created was rather clunky: it had none of the easy user interfaces and beautiful design that Steve Jobs’s Apple iPhone would eventually offer in 2007, and it came out before there was the Internet bandwidth to do many things.

  So Qualcomm went back to concentrating on making everything inside the smartphone. Qualcomm gets its improvements by using software and hardware techniques to more densely pack and compress bits, and Jacobs believes it can improve further—maybe another thousandfold—before it reaches its limit. Most people think that they can watch Game of Thrones on their cell phone because Apple came out with a better phone. No, Apple gave you a larger screen and better display, but the reason it is not buffering is because Qualcomm and AT&T and others invested billions of dollars in making the wireless network and phones more efficient.

  To review this acceleration: 2G was voice and data, with simple texting but not through the Internet; 3G was connecting to the Internet but at a level of speed and clumsiness that recalled the days when you needed a dial-up modem to get online; 4G wireless, the current standard, is as seamless as broadband connectivity over a landline, with particularly seamless access for data-hungry applications such as video. What will 5G be like? The Qualcomm engineers describe it as the stage when the pronouns go away—“you,” “me,” “I”—and the phone learns who you are and where you like to visit and who you like to connect with, and then can anticipate much of that and just do it all for you.

  As Chris Anderson, the technology writer, told Foreign Policy magazine on April 29, 2013:

  It’s hard to argue that we’re not in an exponential period of technological innovation. The personal drone is basically the peace dividend of the smartphone wars, which is to say that the components in a smartphone—the sensors, the GPS, the camera, the ARM core processors, the wireless, the memory, the battery—all that stuff, which is being driven by the incredible economies of scale and innovation machines at Apple, Google, and others, is available for a few dollars. They were essentially “unobtainium” ten years ago. This is stuff that used to be military industrial technology; you can buy it at RadioShack now. I’ve never seen technology move faster than it’s moving right now, and that’s because of the supercomputer in your pocket.

  And as far as Irwin Jacobs is concerned, you have not seen anything yet. Before I left he told me: “We’re still in the era when cars had fins.”

  The Cloud

  If today’s exponentially growing technologies are to keep accelerating at a multiplying rate, it will owe much to the fact that they are all melding together into something that has come to be called the cloud, which amplifies all of them individually and collectively. The cloud is not a distinct place or building. The term refers to software and services that run on the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive. Netflix, for instance, or Microsoft Office 365, runs off the cloud. The beauty of the cloud is that if all of your software applications reside there and all of your “stuff” is stored there as opposed to on your computer or phone—that is, your favorite photos, health records, the book draft you’re working on, your stock portfolio, the speech you are about to give, your favorite mobile games and design or writing applications—then you can access them from any computer, smartphone, or tablet anywhere as long as it has an Internet connection.

  To put it another way, the cloud is actually a vast network of computer servers spread all over the world that can be reached through companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, HP, IBM, and Salesforce and that acts like a giant utility in the sky. And because the services and applications the cloud offers—like Google Photos—are stored there and not on your hard drive or smartphone, they can be constantly updated by the providers. APIs permit each component to seamlessly feed off the others with incredible efficiency. All this means that anyone with a smartphone, anywhere, now has access to a constantly updated toolbox of the best software and storage to perform virtually any task. So the cloud is a real force multiplier.

  It can be hard—understandably—for many people to conceptualize how all this power can be downloaded from this cloud out there in the ether. That’s why a 2012 national survey by Wakefield Research, commissioned by Citrix, found that “most respondents believe the cloud is related to weather … For example, 51 percent of respondents, including a majority of Millennials, believe stormy weather can interfere with cloud computing,” Business Insider reported on August 30, 2012. Only 16 percent understood that it was a “network to store, access and share data from Internet-connected devices.”

  I know exactly what the cloud is, but I don’t like to use the term anymore. Not because it is confusing but because it connotes something so soft, so light, so fluffy, so passive, so benign. It reminds me of a Joni Mitchell song: “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now / from up and down, and still somehow / it’s cloud illusions I recall / I really don’t know clouds at all.”

  That imagery in no way captures the transformational nature of what has been created. When you combine robots, big data, sensors, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology and seamlessly integrate them into and power them off the cloud, it starts to feed on itself—pushing out boundaries in multiple fields at once. And when you combine the power of the cloud with the power of wireless or fixed-line broadband connectivity, the resulting mix of mobility, connectivity, and steadily increasing computational power is without precedent. It creates a tremendous release of energy into the hands of human beings to compete, design, think, imagine, connect, and collaborate with anyone anywhere.

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

  Twenty years ago, you needed to be a government to access this kind of computing power in the cloud. Then you needed to be a business. Now you need only a Visa card, and it’s yours for the renting. Today, there are already more connected mobile devices on the planet than there are people, though that is partly due to the fact that many people in the developed world own two. About half the world’s population still has no cell phone, smartphone, or tablet. But that number is shrinking every day. Once everyone is connected, and we will see such a day within a decade, I am sure, the collective brainpower that will be generated will be staggering.

  This ain’t no cloud, folks!

  And so, instead of calling this new creative energy source “the cloud,” this book will henceforth use the term that Craig Mundie, the computer designer from Microsoft, once suggested. I will call it “the supernova”—a computation
al supernova.

  The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) defines a supernova as “the explosion of a star … the largest explosion that takes place in space.” The only difference is that while a star’s supernova is a one-time incredible release of energy, this technological supernova just keeps releasing energy at an exponentially accelerating rate—because all the critical components are being driven down in cost and up in performance at a Moore’s law exponential rate. “And this release of energy is enabling the reshaping of virtually every man-made system that modern society is built on—and these capabilities are being extended to virtually every person on the planet,” said Mundie. “Everything is getting changed, and everyone is being impacted by it in positive and negative ways.”

  No, no, no: This ain’t no soft, fluffy cloud.

  FOUR

  The Supernova

  I sense a disturbance in the Force.

  —Luke Skywalker to Kyle Katarn in the video game Star Wars: Jedi Knight

  You always sense a disturbance in the Force. But yeah—I sense it, too.

  —Katarn to Skywalker

  Yeah—and I sense it, too.

  On February 14, 2011, a turning point of sorts in the history of humanity was reached on—of all places—one of America’s longest-running television game shows, Jeopardy! That afternoon one of the contestants, who went by just his last name, Watson, competed against two all-time great Jeopardy! champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Mr. Watson did not try to respond to the first clue, but with the second clue he buzzed in first to answer.

  The clue was: “Iron fitting on the hoof of a horse or a card-dealing box in a casino.”

  Watson, in perfect Jeopardy! style, responded with the question “What is ‘shoe’?”

  That response should go down in history with the first words ever uttered on a telephone, on March 10, 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor, called his assistant—whose name, ironically, was Thomas Watson—and said, “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” In my mind, “What is ‘shoe’?” is also up there with the first words uttered by Neil Armstrong when he set his foot down on the moon, on July 20, 1969: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

  “What is ‘shoe’?” was one small step for Watson and one giant leap for computers and mankind together. Because Watson, of course, was not a human but a computer, designed and built by IBM. By defeating the best human Jeopardy! champions in a three-day competition, Watson demonstrated the solution to the problem that “artificial intelligence researchers have struggled with for decades”: to create “a computer akin to the one on Star Trek that can understand questions posed in natural language and answer them” in natural language, as my colleague John Markoff put it in his February 16, 2011, New York Times story summing up the competition.

  Watson, by the way, won handily, showing great facility with some pretty complex clues that might easily stump a human, such as this one: “You just need a nap. You don’t have this sleep disorder that can make sufferers nod off while standing up.”

  Watson buzzed in first—in less than 2.5 seconds—and replied, “What is ‘narcolepsy’?”

  Reflecting on Watson’s performance and its advances since that day, John E. Kelly III, IBM’s senior vice president for cognitive solutions and IBM Research, who oversaw that Watson project, put it to me this way: “For many years there were things I could imagine but I never thought were possible in my lifetime. Then I started to think, well, maybe I will see them after I retire. Now I realize I am going to see them before I retire.”

  Craig Mundie put it even more succinctly, in words that called to mind Astro Teller’s graph: “We’ve jumped to a different curve.”

  What Kelly and Mundie are talking about is how this thing we call the cloud, and that I call the supernova, is creating a release of energy that is amplifying all different forms of power—the power of machines, of individual people, of flows of ideas, and of humanity as a whole—to unprecedented levels.

  For instance, the power of machines—whether they are computers, robots, cars, handheld phones, tablets, or watches—has crossed a new line. Many are being endowed with all five of the senses that humans have, and a brain to process them. In many cases, machines can now think on their own. But they also have sight—they can recognize and compare images. They have hearing—they can recognize speech. They have voices—they can be tour guides and interpreters and translate from one language to another. They can move and touch things on their own and respond to that touch; they can act as your chauffeur or lift your packages or even manifest the dexterity, via a 3-D printer, to print a whole human organ. Some are even being taught to recognize smells and tastes. And we humans can now summon all of these powers with a single touch, gesture, or spoken word.

  At the same time, the supernova is vastly expanding and accelerating the power of flows. The flows of knowledge, new ideas, medical advice, innovation, insults, rumors, collaboration, matchmaking, lending, banking, trading, friendship-forging, commerce, and learning now circulate globally at a speed and breadth we have never seen before. These digital flows carry the energy, services, and tools of the supernova all across the world, where anyone can plug into them to power a new business, participate in the global debate, acquire a new skill, or export their latest product or hobby.

  All of that, in turn, is vastly amplifying the power of one. What one person—one single, solitary person—can now do constructively and destructively is also being multiplied to a new level. It used to take a person to kill a person; now it is possible to imagine a world where one day one person could kill everyone. We certainly learned on 9/11 how nineteen angry men, super-empowered by technology, could change the whole direction of American history, maybe world history. And that was fifteen years ago! But the flip side is also true—one person can now help so many more people—one person can educate millions with an Internet learning platform; one person can entertain or inspire millions; one person can now communicate a new idea, a new vaccine, or a new application to the whole world at once.

  And, finally, this same supernova is amplifying the power of many. That, too, has crossed a new line. Human beings as a collective are now not just a part of nature; they have become a force of nature—a force that is disturbing and changing the climate and our planet’s ecosystems at a pace and scope never seen before in human history. But again, the flip side is also true. Amplified by this supernova, the many—all of us acting together—now have the power to do good at a speed and scope we’ve never seen before: to reverse environmental degradation or to feed, house, and clothe every person on the planet, if we ever set our collective minds to doing so. We’ve never had such collective power as a species.

  In sum, human beings have steadily built themselves better tools, but they have never ever built a tool like this supernova. “In the past,” said Craig Mundie, “some tools had reach but were not rich in capability; others were rich in capability but had a limited number of people who could use them—i.e., they had no reach.” With the emerging supernova, “we have never had this much richness with this much reach.”

  And people can feel it even if they can’t fully understand it. It’s why in researching this book, the phrase that I heard most often from engineers was “just in the last few years…” So many people explained to me something that they had done or that was being done to them that they never could have imagined—“just in the last few years.”

  This chapter will explain exactly how the supernova made that happen and, in particular, how it fueled—and is fueling—some stunning advances in what individuals and individual companies can do with technology. The next two chapters after this will discuss how this same supernova is amplifying and accelerating global flows in the Market and human impacts on Mother Nature. Together, all three chapters will show how these accelerations of technology, globalization, and the environment constitute the Machine that is reshaping everything—not just game show
s.

  Complexity Is Free

  I have found that the best way to understand how and why the supernova is amplifying the power of machines, individuals, humanity, and flows is by getting as close to the leading edge of it as possible, as if you were approaching a volcano. For me that involves getting inside big, dynamic multinationals. Unlike governments, these companies cannot go into gridlock, or just shut down out of pique like the Congress, or miss a single technology cycle. If they do, they die—and they die fast. As a result, they stay very close to the edge of the supernova. They draw energy from it and they also drive it forward. They feel its heat first and they wake up every morning and read the financial obituaries to make sure that they aren’t being melted down by it. So you can learn an enormous amount about what is coming in terms of new technologies and services, and about what is already here and how it is changing things, by interviewing the engineers, researchers, and leaders of these companies.

  Indeed, when I visit their labs I feel like James Bond going to visit “Q” in his British Secret Service research lab at the start of every Bond movie, where 007 gets outfitted with the latest poison pen or flying Aston Martin. You always see things you had no idea were possible.

  I had that experience in 2014, when I decided to write a column about General Electric’s research center in Niskayuna, New York. GE’s lab is like a mini United Nations. Every engineering team looks like one of those multiethnic Benetton ads. But this was not affirmative action at work; it was a brutal meritocracy. When you are competing in the global technology Olympics every day, you have to recruit the best talent from anywhere you can find it. On that trip I was given a tour of GE’s three-dimensional manufacturing unit by its then director, Luana Iorio. In the old days, explained Iorio, when GE wanted to build a jet engine part, a designer would have to design the product, then GE would have to build the machine tools to make a prototype of that part, which could take up to a year, and then it would manufacture the part and test it, with each test iteration taking a few months. The whole process, said Iorio, often took “two years from when you first had the idea for some of our complex components.”