I have said it before and I will keep saying it as long as I have the breath: we are the first generation for whom “later” will be the time when all of Mother Nature’s buffers, spare tires, tricks of the trade, and tools for adapting and bouncing back will be exhausted or breached. If we don’t act quickly together to mitigate these trends, we will be the first generation of humans for whom later will be too late.
Sylvia Earle, the renowned oceanographer, puts it succinctly: “What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine the future—not just for us, but for all life on Earth.”
PART III
INNOVATING
SEVEN
Just Too Damned Fast
We’re entering an age of acceleration. The models underlying society at every level, which are largely based on a linear model of change, are going to have to be redefined. Because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the twenty-first century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress; organizations have to be able to redefine themselves at a faster and faster pace.
—Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google
My other vehicle is unmanned.
—Bumper sticker on a car in Silicon Valley
Now that we have defined this age of accelerations, two questions come to mind—one primal, one intellectual. The primal one is this: Are things just getting too damned fast? The intellectual one is: Since the technological forces driving this change in the pace of change are not likely to slow down, how do we adapt?
If your answer to the first question is “yes,” then let me assure you that you are not alone. Here is my favorite story in Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s book The Second Machine Age: The Dutch chess grandmaster Jan Hein Donner was asked how he’d prepare for a chess match against a computer, like IBM’s Deep Blue.
Donner replied: “I would bring a hammer.”
Donner isn’t alone in fantasizing that he’d like to smash some recent advances in software and artificial intelligence (AI). These advances are not only replacing blue-collar jobs but also supplanting white-collar skills—even those of chess grandmasters. Jobs have always come and gone, thanks to creative destruction. If horses could have voted there never would have been cars. But the disruptions do seem to be coming faster these days, as technological advances keep building on themselves, taking us from one platform to another and touching a wider and wider swath of the labor market.
I know, because as a sixty-three-year-old journalist I’ve lived through a bunch of these platform changes, and I’ve seen them coming faster and faster. I am already bracing myself for the day when I have grandchildren and one of them asks me: “Grandpa, what is a typewriter?”
Here is a short history of how I personally have felt the impact of the change in the pace of change of technology. I am sure many readers will recognize themselves.
Immediately after finishing a master’s degree in Arabic and modern Middle East studies from Oxford University, I was hired for my first job by United Press International (UPI), the wire service, in their London bureau on Fleet Street in the spring of 1978. To write my stories in that UPI London bureau, we used both desktop manual typewriters and early word processors. For those of you too young to remember, About.com explains that a “typewriter” was “a small machine, either electric or manual, with type keys that produced characters one at a time on a piece of paper inserted around a roller.” Wikipedia states that typewriters were invented “in the 1860s” and “quickly became indispensable tools for practically all writing other than personal correspondence. They were widely used by professional writers, in offices, and for business correspondence in private homes” up until the end of the 1980s, when “word processors and personal computers … largely displaced typewriters in … the Western world.”
Think about that for a moment: authors, businesses, and governments basically used the same writing machine—the typewriter—for more than a century. That’s three generations. That is how slow the pace of technological change was—although it was a whole lot faster than before the Industrial Revolution. Of course I didn’t know it at the time, but I was starting my journalism career at the very tail end of the Industrial Revolution—the very close of the typewriter era—and on the very eve of the information technology revolution.
And once the late twentieth century arrived, that progress started cascading considerably faster still. But having started in the Industrial Revolution, I first needed to learn how to type fast on a typewriter! So, after I was hired by UPI in 1978, the first thing I did was go to a night secretarial school in London to learn how to write shorthand and how to type fast with both hands. Most of my classmates were young women looking for starting secretarial jobs.
There were no cell phones then, either. Because of that I got my first big lesson in journalism. It came on the very first real news story UPI sent me out to cover, after I joined its London bureau. And that lesson was: Never ask your competition to hold the phone for you.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran was just unfolding. A group of pro–Ayatollah Khomeini Iranian students in London took over the Iranian Embassy there, ousted the shah’s diplomats, and then locked themselves inside the main embassy building. I managed to talk my way into the building to interview some of the student revolutionaries. I don’t remember what they said, but I was so excited by whatever it was that after filling my notebook I ran directly to the phone booth next to the embassy to call my story in to the bureau. It was one of those classic red English phone booths. There was a line of six or seven reporters—all grizzled Fleet Street veterans—waiting to use the phone to call in their stories. I patiently waited my turn. When, after about twenty minutes in line, I got inside the booth, I excitedly told my editors all that I had seen and heard from the Iranian students inside, flipping through pages of my notebook so as not to miss any details. At one point, the editor who was taking my dictation asked me a detail about the embassy building that I didn’t have. So, I said, “Wait a minute, I’ll check.”
I then opened the door of that red phone booth and said to the Fleet Street reporter who had been waiting in line behind me, “Do me a favor, hold the phone for me.” Then I dashed out of the phone booth to get that minor detail for my editor.
Before I had taken two steps, the guy in line behind me slipped into the phone booth, slammed down the receiver, disconnected my call, started dialing his own newspaper, and turned to me to say two words I will never forget: “Sorry, mate.”
I’ve never asked my competition to hold the phone for me since.
Of course, in this age of ubiquitous mobile phones, no reporter in the world will ever have to learn—or teach—that lesson.
A year later, in 1979, UPI sent me off to Beirut as their number-two correspondent, in the middle of the civil war there. Here was my technology platform: I wrote my stories on a big desktop manual typewriter. I filed those stories to our London headquarters via telex, which, again for those of you too young to recall, is defined by Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as “a communication service involving teletypewriters connected by wire through automatic exchanges.” The way we filed our stories was that we first typed them out on plain white typing paper, double-spaced, and only three paragraphs at a time. Then we handed those three paragraphs to a telex operator, who punched them into telex paper tape and then fed that coded tape into a big clanking telex machine in our office. It then went out over global telephone cables from that end of the world, across the ocean, and was spewed out on a telex printer machine on the other end of the world—in my case, first at UPI headquarters in London, and later at the New York Times headquarters in Manhattan.
Writing a story three paragraphs at a time, without the ability to move paragraphs, delete, or spell check, can be a challenge. Try it sometime! The way I did it was to type out my whole story or news analysis from start to finish, then do the whole thing again, and then, once I was satisfied that the paragraphs were right and
in proper order, and I knew where the story was going, I would type it through a third time, in three-paragraph chunks, and hand it to the telex punch operator. The telex system in Beirut ran through the Lebanese PTT—Post, Telephone, and Telegraph—located in central downtown Beirut, right along the civil war dividing line.
In 1981, I went to work for The New York Times. I served as a business reporter in New York for a year, and in 1982 the Times sent me back to Beirut as its bureau chief. I went back with a portable typewriter. I remember it well. It was a German-made Adler with a white case. That Adler portable manual typewriter was the best you could buy back then, probably cost me three hundred dollars, and I remember thinking when I got it: “Now I am a real foreign correspondent!” I was so proud of that typewriter. There was a real firmness to the keys when you pressed them to create a letter.
So in writing this book, I Googled “Adler portable typewriter” to refresh my memory as to what it looked like, and the third item to come up caught my eye. It said: RARE VINTAGE ANTIQUE KLEIN ADLER PORTABLE TYPEWRITER GERMANY, for sale on eBay.
Ouch! Hard to believe that the writing device that I began my reporting career on almost four decades ago is now a “rare vintage antique.” That sounds like something from 1878. I wish I could show you a picture of mine, but, alas, I don’t have that typewriter any longer. It was blown up, along with the rest of my apartment in Beirut, in the first few days of the Israeli-Palestinian war in June 1982, when two groups of refugees from south Lebanon got in a fight over who would get the empty apartments in my building off Bliss Street. The group that lost destroyed the whole building, tragically killing my driver’s wife and two daughters, who were sitting in my home office.
I was in south Lebanon when Israel invaded in early June 1982 and stayed in Beirut the whole summer. My deal with The New York Times was that I would remain there until Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization fighters began departing by ships, which was eventually negotiated for August 21, 1982, from the Beirut port. I wanted those two six-column headlines as bookends for my scrapbook—“Israel Invades” and “Arafat Leaves.” Well, the day came. It was a beautiful morning. I stood in the port with Peter Jennings of ABC News and together we watched it all—truckloads of Palestinian guerrillas, firing their Kalashnikovs in the air, showering us in shell casings, leaving Beirut for Algeria and Tunisia and a future unknown. It was a dramatic, poignant, and incredibly colorful scene, and when it was over I went to the Reuters bureau in Beirut, where I had desk space, took out my portable typewriter, and started writing it all up, three paragraphs at a time—putting a summer’s worth of passion and energy into this closing chapter.
When the story was ready I handed it to the telex operator. He punched it into tape, but before he could feed it to the New York Times offices in New York City, all the communications between Beirut and the rest of the world were severed. Everything in those days went out through one cable switching box at the PTT, and for whatever reason it went down. I stayed up all night by the telex machine, waiting for it to come alive so that I could feed my story to New York. It never did. Yes, kids, there was a time and place when such things happened. No phone, no telex, no cell phone, no Internet, no nothing. I still have that punched telex tape in a shoe box in my basement. The next morning, August 22, 1982, The New York Times ran a banner headline about Arafat leaving Beirut, and the byline read: “By the Associated Press,” which had filed its story several hours before mine and before the PTT had melted down.
By the time I ended my tour in Beirut in 1984, the digital IT revolution was just starting to emerge and The New York Times sent me something called a TeleRam Portabubble, which was a suitcase-sized box word processor, with a tiny screen and cups on the top to insert a phone that transmitted your story by sound waves back to the Times’ first-generation computers in Times Square. From Beirut, I went to Jerusalem, from 1984 to 1988. At first I worked on TeleRam there, too, and eventually, in my last year or so, we got the first IBM desktops, with big floppy disks. The pace of change was starting to quicken a bit. My technology platforms were improving faster.
After my tour in Jerusalem, I moved to the Washington bureau, where I served as the New York Times diplomatic correspondent, starting in 1989. I had a front-row seat traveling with Secretary of State James A. Baker III for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. On those trips we used Tandy laptops to write and file over long-distance phone lines. We reporters became experts at taking apart telephones in hotel rooms around the world to directly fix the wires to our Tandys. You always had to travel with a small screwdriver, along with your reporter’s notepad.
When I shifted to covering the White House under a new president, Bill Clinton, in 1992, no one I knew had e-mail. By the end of his second term just about everyone I knew had e-mail. My last reporting job was as the New York Times international economics correspondent, from 1993 through 1994. I began as a columnist in January 1995. That very same year, on August 9, 1995, a start-up company called Netscape went public, selling something called an Internet “browser,” which would bring the Internet, e-mail, and eventually the World Wide Web alive on a computer screen, like nothing ever before. Netscape’s public offering—its shares were priced at $28, soared to $74.75 by midday, and closed at $58.25—would launch the Internet boom and bubble.
Since then, I have gone through an increasingly rapid succession of Dell, IBM, and Apple laptops and desktops, with faster and faster connectivity to the Web. Starting a decade ago, it became obvious that careers in the newspaper business were rapidly shrinking as more and more newspapers shut down and more and more advertising went to the Web and more and more people were reading the paper on mobile devices. I watched as reporters went from writing one story a day for the print edition of The New York Times to having to write multiple stories a day to keep the Web edition updated, as well as file tweets and Facebook posts, and narrate videos. It reminded me exactly of my days as a wire service reporter in Beirut—filing a breaking news story, filing a picture, doing a radio spot—all the hectic things you had to do at once that made me want to be a newspaper writer with only one deadline. Now newspaper reporters, just like wire service reporters, have a deadline every second.
With every passing year, I see my own industry, my own tools, and the tools of other white-collar workers changing faster than ever, thanks to the supernova. In May 2013, I found myself standing in the passport line at Heathrow Airport in London, waiting to get stamped into the country at immigration control. At one point the man in front of me turned around, told me that he was a reader, and engaged me in a friendly conversation. I asked him what he did. He said his name was John Lord and that he was in the software business.
“What kind of software?” I asked. He said that his company’s goal was to make “lawyers obsolete” wherever possible by creating software applications that enable individuals to do more and more legal work without the aid of an attorney. Indeed, Neota Logic, his company, says that its goal is to massively improve access to advice and justice for “the 40+% of Americans who can’t afford an attorney when they need one”—in order to produce wills and basic legal documents and even to handle crucial life events such as home foreclosure, domestic abuse, or child protection.
Neota Logic is part of a new strain of software called “expert systems” that aims to identify a large chunk of business that clients need, and that lawyers charge for, but that actually can be done by software: think TurboTax for the legal profession. The company’s website quoted one commentator complaining that Neota Logic’s technology cannot “read between the lines … [or] hold hands and wipe away tears.” To which Neota Logic responded: “You will surely see a press release when we can.” Lord later explained to me that “I have always had a special respect for trial lawyers and hope it will be a long time before algorithms replace them and juries.” Alas, he added, that is “not beyond the realm of possibility of course, but not yet Neota’s mission.”
; Suddenly I was glad my daughters were not planning to be lawyers.
But the hits just kept on coming—again and again, I found myself witnessing something I never dreamt I’d see, and it reminded me that the supernova was upending our world for good. In early 2015, I found myself reporting with my cell phone camera from the backseat of a car that had no driver! I was visiting Google’s X research and innovation lab and was given a ride in a driverless Lexus RX 450h SUV. In the front seat were two X staffers. The one in the passenger seat was a Google engineer with an open laptop in her lap. The other was a staffer sitting in the driver’s seat, but with no hands on the wheel. He was basically there as a prop to reassure other drivers who might pull up at a stoplight alongside us that someone was driving this car—even if he wasn’t! I was seated in the back.
Off we went, driving through the neighborhoods and commercial districts of Mountain View, California. The route was preprogrammed and the car drove itself—or, rather, its software drove. We were in “autonomous mode.” After five minutes watching the car calmly navigate every intersection, make perfect left turns, wait on pedestrians, and carefully pass bikers, I realized that I had crossed a line myself—something I never expected: I felt safer with the software driving than myself or any chauffeur.
And with good reason: the X website reports that thousands of minor accidents happen every day on typical American streets, 94 percent of them involving human error, and as many as 55 percent of them go unreported. Until 2016, though, Google’s fifty-three vehicles had autonomously driven more than 1.4 million miles and been involved in only seventeen crashes, none that were the fault of its vehicles and none that involved fatalities. Google has acknowledged, though, that more than a dozen times its human drivers had to intervene to head off an impending crash. (Alas, on February 14, 2016, a Google self-driving car, trying to avoid a sandbag in the road, sideswiped a bus while going less than two miles an hour. That’s a pretty good driving record for six years.)
Thank You for Being Late Page 22