That’s why I wasn’t surprised that when I asked Surgeon General Murthy what was the biggest disease in America today, without hesitation he answered: “It’s not cancer. It’s not heart disease. It’s isolation. It is the pronounced isolation that so many people are experiencing that is the great pathology of our lives today.” How ironic. We are the most technologically connected generation in human history—and yet more people feel more isolated than ever. This only reinforces Murthy’s earlier point—that the connections that matter most, and are in most short supply today, are the human-to-human ones.
Don’t get me wrong: technology has so much to offer to make us more productive, healthier, more learned, and more secure. I am awed by the intelligent assistance I discovered in researching this book and the potential it has to lift so many people out of poverty and discover talent and make it possible for us to actually fix everything. I am hardly a technophobe. But we will get the best of these technologies only if we don’t let them distract us from making these deep human connections, addressing these deep human longings, and inspiring these deep human energies. And whether we do that depends on all that stuff you can’t download—the high five from a coach, the praise from a mentor, the hug from a friend, the hand up from a neighbor, the handshake from a rival, the totally unsolicited gesture of kindness from the stranger, the smell of a garden and not the cold stare of a wall.
I realize that in the dizzying moment we’re experiencing right now, both blue-collar and white-collar workers in the developed and developing world feel like they are just one small step ahead of a machine or robot making their job obsolete. I understand that in such a transition it is much easier for humans to visualize what they will lose than all the benefits they will gain, or already have gained.
But it is impossible for me to believe that with so many more people now empowered to invent, compete, create, and collaborate, with so many more cheap and powerful tools enabling us to optimize social and commercial and governmental interactions, that we won’t develop the capability to solve the big social and health problems in the world and that, in the process, we won’t also find ways for humans to become even more resilient, productive, and prosperous as they are reinforced by intelligent machines.
Of course, that is hard to see right now. The most dangerous time to be on the streets of New York City was when cars were first being introduced but horses and buggies had not yet been fully phased out. We’re in that kind of transition now—but I am convinced that if we can just achieve the minimum level of political collaboration to develop the necessary social technologies to work through it, keep our economies open, and keep lifting learning for everyone, a better life will become more available than ever to more people than ever—and the second quarter of the twenty-first century could be an amazing time to be alive. The transition will not be easy. But human beings have made transitions like this before and I believe they can again. “Can” doesn’t mean “will,” but it also sure doesn’t mean “can’t.”
A Tree Grows in Minnesota
So let me truly end where I literally began.
On a research trip back home in the summer of 2015, I drove by our old house in St. Louis Park, at 6831 West Twenty-Third Street, where my parents first moved from North Minneapolis in 1956. I hadn’t done it for years, but decided on the spur of the moment to swing by. At one level the neighborhood’s tightly packed rambler homes looked remarkably the same as when I left mine for college and for work in the 1970s. Ours was still painted a light blue. But something also struck me as different, and I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. My old neighborhood was totally familiar, but slightly unfamiliar. It took me a while to figure it out—and then it finally dawned on me: it was the trees.
They were all small and scrawny when I was small and scrawny. Ours was a spanking-new neighborhood when I grew up there. And now, a half century later, all the trees had grown tall and thick, with long branches, and they were full of leaves—so much so that the neighborhood was considerably more shaded. The light had changed slightly and it caught my eye, because it contrasted with the much brighter mental image I had been carrying around for so long, like an old picture stuck in the back of my wallet.
Those trees and I had both grown up and out from the same topsoil, and the most important personal, political, and philosophical lesson I took from the journey that is this book is that the more the world demands that we branch out, the more we each need to be anchored in a topsoil of trust that is the foundation of all healthy communities. We must be enriched by that topsoil, and we must enrich it in turn.
That prescription is easier to write than to fill, but it is the order of our day—the real über-task of our generation. It is so much easier to venture far—not just in distance but also in terms of your willingness to experiment, take risks, and reach out to the other—when you know that you’re still tethered to a place called home, and to a real community. Minnesota and St. Louis Park together were that place for me. They were my anchor and my sail. I hope this book will inspire you to pause in stride and find yours.
And don’t worry if it makes you late …
Acknowledgments
So many people were generous in sharing their time and insights to make my writing this book possible. I want to do my best to acknowledge each of them.
First and foremost, I need to—once again—thank the New York Times chairman and publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and Andy Rosenthal, the editorial page editor when I was working on this book, for allowing me to cut my column-writing duties in half in order to do all the research and interviews that were the foundation for this work. It would not have been possible otherwise. I joined The New York Times in 1981. It remains the greatest newspaper in the world, and my many and varied assignments there have given me a front-row seat to so much history and the opportunity to travel and learn in so many different settings. I am forever indebted to Arthur and his late father, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, for affording me that opportunity for nearly four decades.
I have been fortunate over my career to have developed a small group of friends who are the most amazing posse one could partner with to toss up ideas, bat them back and forth, sharpen them, and eventually bring them to a point where they can form the spine of a book. While I have dedicated this book to all of them, this particular book benefited in some specific ways that demand extra acknowledgment.
No one was more generous with his time, insights, and encouragement in helping me assemble this book than my friend and teacher Dov Seidman, the CEO of LRN and the author of the book How. Dov is a truly unique observer of the human condition, and I have learned so much from him about people and organizations and values, which is why he is quoted more than anyone else in this book. But his influence in shaping my thinking goes well beyond those quotes. Ideas that Dov first articulated through our endless walks and talks are suffused throughout this book. Lucky is the person who has Dov Seidman for a friend.
Once again, my teacher and friend Craig Mundie, the former senior executive at Microsoft and now an executive coach, stepped up to guide me through the latest generation of technology and make sure that I not only understood it well enough to explain it, but also, better yet, could explain it accurately! This is the fourth book of mine that Craig has helped with. To have Craig Mundie as your technology tutor is to have Babe Ruth as your batting coach.
Speaking of longtime tutors, this is the seventh book to which my friend Michael Sandel has contributed his insights, but this one was particularly fun, since he was present at the creation back in Minnesota when we were young boys in the same Hebrew school class. Michael’s thoughts on the civic virtues that enrich and are enriched by a healthy community were particularly valuable.
Michael Mandelbaum, my coauthor on my last book and almost daily partner in chewing over the news and trying to understand it, has been sharing his ideas with me and sharpening my own for more than two decades. He listened to the reporting that went into th
is book, as he has for five previous ones, and always generously helped me think through the ideas.
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, authors of Race Against the Machine and The Second Machine Age, had a big impact on my thinking as well, as I note in the book, and generously shared their insights with me.
And, of course, a heartfelt thanks goes to Ayele Bojia, the parking attendant at the underground public parking garage in Bethesda, Maryland, whose stopping me to ask about how to improve his blog set this whole book in motion! He is a good man, always struggling to make Ethiopia, the country of his birth, a better place for all.
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Marina Gorbis was one of the very first people I talked to about the ideas in this book and the first to host me for a roundtable on the themes at her little jewel box, the Institute for the Future, in Palo Alto. She was always generous with her insights and her time.
Johan Rockström was kind enough to walk me through all the planetary boundaries while on a visit to his wonderful research center in Stockholm; he also proofed some of this text. There is no better teacher on the environment. My thanks as well to Hans Vestberg for hosting me at Ericsson on that same trip to Sweden.
John Doerr and his colleague Bill Joy were, as always, open to sharing their insights and improving mine on cross-country ski runs and hikes. Yaron Ezrahi, also on his seventh book with me, never failed to teach me something new and force me to think deeper about what I had already written. Alan Cohen never tires of tutoring me on the cutting edges of technology, and Moshe Halbertal does the same when it comes to the Middle East.
In addition, I had many rich conversations over the past two years, from which I benefited enormously, with Larry Diamond, Eric Beinhocker, Leon Wieseltier, Lin Wells, Robert Walker, K. R. Sridhar, Sadik Yildiz, P. V. Kannan, Kayvon Beykpour, Joel Hyatt, Jeff Bezos, Wael Ghonim, Nandan Nilekani, Gautam Mukunda, Rabbi Tzvi Marx, Rabbi Jonathan Maltzman, Russ Mittermeier, Glenn Prickett, Dennis Ross, Tom Lovejoy, Richard K. Miller, Jeffrey Garten, Moises Naim, Carla Dirlikov Canales, David Rothkopf, Jonathan Taplin, David Kennedy, Zach Sims, Jeff Weiner, Laura Blumenfeld, Kofi Annan, Peter Schwartz, Mark Madden, Phil Bucksbaum, Bill Galstos, Craig Charney, Adam Sweidan, and James H. Baker, director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. I thank each of them for the time they shared making me smarter about everything from politics to ethics to the climate to geopolitics.
A hearty thanks to Ian Goldin at the University of Oxford for hosting me for three really stimulating days at the Martin School, and to Gahl Burt for doing the same at the American Academy in Berlin. A shout-out of thanks as well to Nader Mousavizadeh and his colleagues at Macro Advisory Partners in London for always being up for doing jazz on any subject.
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I would not have understood the education-to-work channel without the generous and repeated tutoring of Byron Auguste, Karan Chopra, Stefanie Sanford, and David Coleman—the absolute A-team of thinkers on the nexus between education and work. And a special thanks to Alexis Ringwald for sharing her insights on that subject from LearnUp and to Eleonora Sharef for doing the same with all she learned cofounding HireArt—and more.
From Minnesota, I am deeply indebted to Vice President Walter Mondale, the late Bill Frenzel, Senator Al Franken, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Sharon Isbin, Wendi Zelkin Rosenstein, and Norman Ornstein for taking time to share their insights. And a huge and special thanks goes to Larry Jacobs of the Humphrey School at the University of Minnesota, for not only hosting me but educating me about Minnesota politics today and reading portions of the book. I am also deeply indebted to Tim Welsh and his colleague at McKinsey & Co. in Minneapolis, Julia Silvis, for all the introductions they made and all their help in reading portions, sharing ideas, introducing me to the right people—like MayKao Hang, Brad Hewitt, Michael Gorman, David Mortenson, and Mary Brainerd—and enabling me to understand the Itasca Project. Sondra Samuels patiently tutored me on the good works of the Northside Achievement Zone and her important partnership with Itasca. Rob Metz, the superintendent of schools in St. Louis Park, and Scott Meyers, the high school principal, were enormously helpful in getting me together with both their students and their colleagues and sharing their own insights.
Another very special thanks to Jeanne Andersen, the engine behind the St. Louis Park Historical Society. Jeanne got me together with interesting members of the community, I drew on her historical writings, and she was kind enough to review the final draft. I am deeply grateful for all her help. The same goes for Children First’s coordinator, Karen Atkinson, who introduced me to some great members of the Somali community in St. Louis Park and shared her insights, as did Paul and Susan Linee and other members of the Historical Society board.
My high school AP American history teacher, Marjorie Bingham, and my English teacher, Mim Kagol, are still teaching me four decades after I left their classrooms. I am so grateful for their helping me to understand St. Louis Park High then and now. How lucky am I to have had such extraordinary teachers and lifetime friends. The St. Louis Park mayors Jeff Jacobs and Jake Spano, the city managers Tom Harmening and Jim Brimeyer, and the technology leader Clint Pires were so much fun to talk to and to learn from.
A special tip of the hat, though, goes to my childhood friend Fred Astren, for carefully reading and contributing to parts of the manuscript with his insights, as well as other members of the Pennsylvania Avenue Poker Club for their input and lifelong friendship—Mark Greene, Howard Karp, Steve Tragar, and Jay Goldberg. We have all been friends from St. Louis Park for more than fifty years. Brad Lehrman, who used to bowl with me on Sunday mornings with our fathers, was also very generous in sharing his thoughts about the old neighborhood and making sure that I never bowled alone.
And, as always, my best friend, Ken Greer, and his wife, Jill, listened to and encouraged this project from the very beginning, often while walking around one of the lakes in Minneapolis. There is nothing more fun for me than sharing ideas with them.
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On the corporate front, a huge thanks to Randall Stephenson, who heads AT&T, and his colleagues John Donovan, Ralph de la Vega, Bill Blase, and Krish Prabhu. Stephenson shared with me AT&T’s human resources policies—in ways that were extremely helpful to my understanding of the world of work today—and their latest thinking on technology. No matter where he was in the world, John Donovan answered my follow-up questions on, as he would say, the first ringy-dingy.
IBM’s Watson team—particularly David Yaun and John E. Kelly III—were incredibly generous in helping me navigate the wisdom of Watson on two visits to IBM.
At Google, I am particularly indebted to Astro Teller, who heads Google’s X innovation center. The little graph Astro sketched out for me on the spur of the moment became a central theme of this book, and his rigor—and that of his colleagues Courtney Hohne and Gladys Jimenez—in making sure that I got the argument right was truly impressive. And a huge thanks to Sebastian Thrun for all that he taught me about education in multiple visits to Udacity.
My friend Andy Karsner not only brought me together with Astro but has been an all-purpose idea generator for different parts of this book and many columns. Being able to do idea jazz with Andy is one of the great joys.
At Intel, Gordon Moore, Brian Krzanich, Bill Holt, Mark Bohr, and Robert Manetta could not have been more helpful. Elliot Schrage of Facebook and his colleagues Dan Marcus and Justin Osofsky were full of valuable insights. Tom Wujec and Carl Bass hosted me for an amazing day at Autodesk. From McKinsey & Co.’s Global Institute, James Manyika and his colleagues Susan Lund, Richard Dobbs, and Jonathan Woetzel, as well as Alok Kshirsagar from Bombay, provided wonderful research that enriched many aspects of this book. James, in particular, never failed to respond to an emergency call from me for insight into any number of subjects.
At Microsoft, Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, Brad Smith, and Joseph Sirosh all shared ideas with me along this journey that enriched my thinking. At Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Meg Whitman and Howa
rd Clabo were very generous in taking me inside their thinking and innovations. At General Electric, a big thanks to William Ruh and Megan Parker both for the ideas they shared and for all the GE engineers to whom they introduced me. At Walmart, Doug McMillon, Neil Ashe, Dan Toporek, and their colleagues showed me in exacting detail every digital interaction that happened behind the scenes when I tried to buy a television from Walmart’s mobile app. They also introduced me to the best ribs in Arkansas.
I am deeply indebted to Doug Cutting from Hadoop and Chris Wanstrath from GitHub for patiently walking me through the evolution of both of their companies and ensuring that I got every fact right. It took multiple visits and follow-ups with both for me to fully understand what they had each helped to create, and I am extremely grateful for their tutoring.
Qualcomm’s cofounder Irwin Jacobs did the same on my two visits to his campus. He, his son Paul, and their whole team were enormously generous with their time. I owe a particular thanks to Joe Schuman and Nate Tibbits from Qualcomm for going the extra mile.
Gidi Grinstein literally spent hours with me sharing his impressive work on strengthening communities in Israel. Gidi is a special thinker and a wonderful friend, and his ideas on community have influenced me a lot. I would say the same for my multiple conversations with Hal Harvey, another dear friend and truly original thinker. I could not have done the chapter on Mother Nature and politics without the physicist Amory Lovins, a great teacher, who always combines his good humor with precision thinking.
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