Friedman 2016 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
| Friedman TL (2016) Thank you for being late. An optimist's guide to thriving in the age of accelerations. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 486 pp. |
Friedman TL (2016) Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
Abstract: In his most ambitious work to date, Thomas L. Friedman shows that we have entered an age of dizzying acceleration – and explains how to live in it. Due to an exponential increase in computing power, climbers atop Mount Everest enjoy excellent cell-phone service and self-driving cars are taking to the roads. A parallel explosion of economic interdependency has created new riches as well as spiraling debt burdens. Meanwhile, Mother Nature is also seeing dramatic changes as carbon levels rise and species go extinct, with compounding results.
How do these changes interact, and how can we cope with them? To get a better purchase on the present, Friedman returns to his Minnesota childhood and sketches a world where politics worked and joining the middle class was an achievable goal. Today, by contrast, it is easier than ever to be a maker (try 3-D printing) or a breaker (the Islamic State excels at using Twitter), but harder than ever to be a leader or merely “average.” Friedman concludes that nations and individuals must learn to be fast (innovative and quick to adapt), fair (prepared to help the casualties of change), and slow (adept at shutting out the noise and accessing their deepest values). With vision, authority, and wit, Thank You for Being Late establishes a blueprint for how to think about our times.
Thank you for some quotes
- The open source community
- There is something wonderfully human about the open-source community. At heart, it's driven by a deep human desire for collaboration and a deep human desire for recognition and affirmation of work well done - not financial reward. It is amazing how much value you can create with words "Hey, what you added is really cool. Nice job. Way to go!" Millions of hours of free labor are being unlocked by tapping into people's innate desires to innovate, share, and be recognized for it. - «p 68»
- Software production is accelerating even faster now not only because tools for writing software are improving at an exponential rate. These tools are also enabling more and more people within and between companies to collaborate to write ever more complex software and API codes to abstract away ever more complex tasks - so now you don't just have a million smart people writing code, you have a million smart people working together to write all those codes. - «p 63»
- GitHub is the most popular platform for fostering collaborative efforts to create software. These efforts can take any form - individuals with other individuals, closed groups within companies, or wide-open open source. It has exploded since 2007. Again, on the assumption that all of us are smarter than one of us, more and more individuals and companies are now relying on the GitHub platform. It enables them to learn quicker by being able to take advantage of the best collaborative software creations that are already out there for any aspect of commerce, and then to build on them with collaborative teams that draw on brainpower both inside and outside of their companies. - «p 63»
- Quoting Chris Wanstrath (CEO of GitHub): "It is curated crowdsourcing. But ultimately you have an expert - the person who wrote the original program .. - who gets to decide what to accept and waht to reject. GitHub will show that I worked on this, but you get to control what is merged with your original version. Today, this is the way you build software." - «p 67»
- Global and big data
- Globality.com
- From Hadoop to a publication on Bigtable.
- The dysquality of acceleration
- Quoting Wayne Muller: "I am so busy." "We say this to one another with no small degree of pride, as if our exhaustion were a trophy, our ability to withstand stress a mark of real character ... To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset (or even to know when the sun has set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single, mindful breath, this has become a model of a successful life." - «p 5-6»
