New Orleans – MDRT's annual meeting started strong Monday morning with New York Times columnist and three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Friedman. Friedman, perhaps best known for his book "The World Is Flat," spoke to the thousands of attendees about a series of dramatic shifts that are currently taking place worldwide.
"The world is not only flat, but it's getting so fast that we all need to pause and figure out exactly where we are," Friedman told the thousands of attendees from the main stage. The world is being "fundamentally reshaped right before our eyes."
Friedman noted that as a columnist for The New York Times, he needs a framework to understand the world. And back in 2004, he came up with an idea that he thought would serve him for the rest of his career: the world is flat. The basic argument is based on three giant forces that came together around the year 2000:
1. The personal computer: allowed individuals to create their own content (words, data, photos, music, video, etc.)
2. Workflow software: allowed people to share their content with others
3. The Internet: allowed people to collaborate with anyone in the world
The combination of these three elements aligned to create an unprecedented global platform where more people compete, connect and collaborate than ever before.
And for a while, Friedman said, his concept held true.
But around 2011, Friedman said he "started to get the feeling something was changing. My framework wasn't quite capturing it." Friedman realized that just seven years before, when he wrote his book declaring that everyone was connected, "Facebook didn't exist; Twitter was still a sound; the Cloud was still in the sky; 4G was a parking place; LinkedIn was a prison; an application was what you sent to college; Big Data was a rap star; and Skype was a typographical error. All of that changed in just seven years."
Friedman began to reshape his idea when he read a book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee called "The Second Machine Age." During the first machine age, Friedman noted, humans were needed to direct machines. But the book's authors believe we are now in the second machine age, driven by Moore's Law, which says the speed and power of microchips will double every 24 months. Noting that we just reached the 50th anniversary of this concept, Friedman explained that doubling a number every two years eventually leads to some really high numbers.
To illustrate, he told the story of a man who invented chess and then gave the game to a king. The king loved it so much, he promised to reward the man by giving him whatever he wanted. The inventor said, "Your Highness, I just want to feed my family. Please take a kernel of rice and put it on the first square of this chessboard I made for you. Then put two on the second, four on the next, eight on the next and so on. My family will be fine." The king agreed, but didn't realize that if you double something 63 times, the number you get is 18 quintillion — more rice than existed in the whole world.
Friedman said that when it comes to computing and Moore's law, we just entered the second half of the chessboard, "where you start to see some really funky stuff. At this point, you start to see computers that can beat any human in chess or Jeopardy and self-driving cars." Computers are no longer simply a tool that we apply, they are instruments that learn along with us and can increasingly supplant us, Friedman said.
"We're at the beginning of an incredible change and it's happening all over the place," Friedman said. While attending a conference in Europe last year, Freidman heard someone declare that Garry Kasparov, the great Russian chess master, was the last human chess champion. "I think we're on the cusp of seeing the last human a lot of things," Friedman warned.
