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A conversation with Thomas Friedman

Wigner Lecturer

Thomas Friedman is an award-winning journalist and author. In nearly four decades with the New York Times, he has won three Pulitzer Prizes, the first in 1983 for coverage of the war in Lebanon, the second in 1988 for coverage of Israel, and the third in 2002 for commentary on the impact of terrorism.

Friedman graduated summa cum laude from Brandeis University in 1975 and earned a master of philosophy in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Oxford in 1978. He currently writes a weekly column for the New York Times and has published seven books, including 2016’s Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations.

Friedman delivered the Eugene P. Wigner Distinguished Lecture May 10, 2017, on the topic “Thank You for Being Late: A Discussion of the Social, Political, Ethical, and Economic Implications of the Age of Accelerations.”

This is an edited transcript from his question-and-answer session with lab staff.

1. The acceleration of new technology has created a lot of anxiety across the economy. Where will jobs be in the coming decades?

If horses could have voted, there never would have been cars, so we have been here before, but not at the scale and scope of both white-collar and blue-collar work.

There’s definitely a much bigger challenge going on now, but I would say a couple of things. One is, I’m always impressed at the creativity of human beings to find and spawn work of value. I was at a conference last September, and a woman there said her job was tagging sharks for Twitter. I thought to myself, “Who in the world knew there was a job tagging sharks for Twitter?” It’s probably a good middle-class job.

Number two, what was one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in 2015? According to Entrepreneur magazine it was a restaurant called Paint Nite. What is Paint Nite? It’s paint-by-numbers for adults in bars. Adults like to get together in bars where an artist draws up a sketch and leads them in painting while they have a few drinks together. Who knew? By the way, those artists make about $50,000 a year for three hours of work, five nights a week.

This falls into a category I wrote about a couple of months ago with my friend Dov Seidman. The column was called, “From Hands to Heads to Hearts.” His argument is basically that in the age of acceleration we’ll work with our hearts—the one thing machines do not and cannot ever have—and connect hearts to hearts.

I coined a term in the book called “STEMpathy,” because I think the best jobs going forward—and there’s data on this now—are those that combine science, technology, engineering and math, and human empathy. It’s the STEMpathy jobs that are, I think, going to be the great jobs of the 21st century.

2. How can people prepare for these new opportunities?

Every problem I describe requires more skill. It requires more computational skill, because every job is becoming a data job, and it requires more critical thinking.

At the same time, it requires more lifelong learning. What’s new today is that to get a job and hold a job requires more learning up front and more learning across your lifetime. A lot of very good people aren’t built that way; they like to come to work, do an honest day’s work, and go home, and actually be told what to do.

3.Technology now guides many areas of our lives, whether through Google Maps or dating websites. What will be the role of people in an age of algorithms?

The book is not called Thank You for Being Late for nothing; it’s a celebration of everything old and slow. And the subtext of the book is that I believe all the things that are important today are things you cannot download. You have to upload them the old-fashioned way, from good parent to good child, good teacher to good student, good mayor to good community, good leader to good institution. The faster the world gets, the more all that old stuff matters.

Look at fake news. We have fake news because the internet is an open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information. It’s full of diamonds and gold nuggets and silver, we all know that, but it’s also full of rusty nails, broken glass, tin cans and fake news. If we don’t build the internal filters into our citizens and our students and our kids the old-fashioned way, under the olive tree, we’re going to have a real problem.

Look at opioid addiction. It’s not a law-enforcement problem; it’s a community problem. You’re only going to fix that when people are embedded in a healthy community.

I want to understand technology, I want to get the most out of it, but I’ve come back to the thing that really matters, and that’s community. For every problem I come up against, community is the answer. In the age of acceleration, national governments are too slow and the single family is too weak, especially since too many are led by single parents. It’s going to be the healthy community that’s going to be the ideal government unit for the age of acceleration.

4. What do you see as the role for national laboratories such as ORNL?

Our national labs are one of the great pillars of our society, but they’re so underbranded in terms of the technologies and breakthroughs they’ve spun off, from medicine to the auto industry. But they’re what make us unique.

In an age of acceleration, you have to accelerate learning too. That’s why what you’re doing is so important. Finding a way to communicate that to people is a real challenge, but I think it’s doubly important now, when small errors in navigation can have such huge negative consequences.