Thomas Friedman – acclaimed New York Times journalist, 3-time Pulitzer winner, best-selling author, and legendary global trend-spotter – has an alarming diagnosis: we as a race have simultaneously opened two Pandora’s boxes: AI and climate change. And are frighteningly unprepared for the consequences.
One could toss this aside as the weekly alarm cycle of news media, except Friedman has a formidable and hard-earned reputation for getting (most) things right.
In 2005, in The World is Flat, he famously identified a trifecta of forces that would shape the decades to come: the rise of the internet, arrays of new software, and an optimism around globalisation that would enable people across geographies to connect and collaborate in shiny new entrepreneurial endeavours. This made the world accessible, smaller, flat. But it also brought new anxieties in its wake.
Markets. Mother Nature. Moore’s Law.
Friedman foresaw some of these trends in his 1999 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, and revisited them in That Used to be Us (2011) and Thank You for Being Late (2016). Common in these is an examination of the dual-edged impacts of technology and globalisation. Immense potentialities on the one hand; depleting resources, anxieties, and shifting geopolitics on the other. In Hot, Flat and Crowded (2008), he laid out another crucial theme: the urgent need for a green revolution in energy. (And how to make that an emotional rallying point for America.)
Friedman’s tryst with journalism – and a 40-year career of reading people, places, and politics – was triggered by a high-school teacher, and a family trip to Israel was catalytic in getting him to puzzle out the Middle East. He won his first two Pulitzers from the frontlines – reporting conflicts in Beirut and Israel in the 1980s, mapping faultlines that continue to dominate global politics today. His third Pulitzer was awarded for his columns on 9/11. As he said in his inimitable way: “If you don’t visit the bad neighbourhoods, the bad neighbourhoods are going to visit you.”
Friedman’s folksy, colloquial, explanatory style – which he himself calls “translating English to English” and which some detractors decry as banal – masks an arena of giant influence and wide impact. His wide-ranging columns are read by spectrums straddling freshman students to presidents and dictators. His book From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989) is still taught in classrooms globally and is considered an exemplary treatise on foreign policy. And every week, he continues to decode an increasingly complicated world – from China to Connecticut – with pithy phrases and sharp common sense, often carriers of explosive insight. He’s now working on a new book on how to write a column.
If one were to encapsulate Friedman’s vast canvas of enquiry in one of his own phrases, one could say “applied optimism” is his default metier. In an age of dizzying acceleration.
With globalisation on a tailspin, and the Middle East, Mother Nature, and technology now collectively on fire, Friedman will offer a crucial diagnostic of our times at SYNAPSE. He once likened our era to “dancing in a hurricane.” We’re hoping his insights at the conference will help us all goose-step away from the eye of the storm.
