Exclusive media partner: The New York Times

Newsletter

Receive regular updates about forthcoming events and other news from Intelligence Squared

Thanks

You have been added to our mailing list and will now be among the first to hear about events.

Play video1:25:11

Watch

Thomas Friedman on Thriving in the Age of Acceleration

As technology gallops ahead, how should we update our companies, governments and educational institutions? How can we retool ourselves for a rapidly changing jobs market?

He has been called ‘the most influential columnist in America’, and is read by everyone from small-business owners to President Obama. As a star columnist of The New York Times, Thomas Friedman has won the Pulitzer Prize three times. Although he has been dubbed ‘the high priest of globalisation’, Friedman is well aware that it is the tensions created by globalisation which have paved the way for the election of Donald Trump. Nevertheless, when he came to the Intelligence Squared stage, Friedman argued that contrary to Trump’s promises of walls and tariffs, it is openness to trade and ideas that will allow us all to thrive amid the rapid, startling changes sweeping through the world.

Given the dizzying whirlwind of technological change which has wiped out jobs and transformed workplaces, it is no wonder that electorates have reached for Trump’s protectionist solutions in the US and nativist retrenchment in the UK. But, as Friedman argued, the forces of globalisation needn’t spell disaster. Instead, it is how we respond to these accelerating changes that will determine whether we falter or flourish. Both the EU referendum and the US presidential election were contests not between left and right, but between what Friedman calls ‘Wall People’ — those who feel their identity threatened by globalisation — and ‘Web People’: those who instinctively embrace the current pace of change and are keen to collaborate in a world without walls.

In this major event, Friedman offered his guide to updating our lives and institutions for the accelerating changes of the 21st century. For example:

  • We need to innovate not just technologically, but politically: moral leadership in a complex world is becoming ever more essential
  • Political leaders should be accelerating local start-ups in both the economic sector and the social sector, to build resilient and prospering citizens
  • The ideal skill set for the jobs of the future is ‘stempathy’: science, technology, maths — and empathy

He explained how the new asset class is not information but ‘human capital talent’, and how we can all thrive in the age of acceleration.


Speakers

Chair

Emily Maitlis

Lead presenter of BBC Newsnight and one of the UK’s best known broadcasters


Lead presenter of the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight. She presents general elections for the BBC and covers US politics for the programme from across America. She has won plaudits for her longer form interviews for Newsnight, for which she has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Clinton and the Duke of York. 
Featuring

Thomas Friedman

Author, reporter, and op-ed columnist for the NYT


Foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times. His books include The World Is Flat (2005), which won the first Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award; Hot, Flat, and Crowded (2008); and Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations (2016), which was shortlisted for the FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year.