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The Divide Between Order and Disorder Transcript The Divide Between Order and Disorder Thomas Friedman Columnist, The New York Times Chair: Lord Michael Williams of Baglan Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Chatham House 16 September 2014 The views expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the speaker(s) and participants do not necessarily reflect the view of Chatham House, its staff, associates or Council. Chatham House is independent and owes no allegiance to any government or to any political body. It does not take institutional positions on policy issues. This document is issued on the understanding that if any extract is used, the author(s)/ speaker(s) and Chatham House should be credited, preferably with the date of the publication or details of the event. Where this document refers to or reports statements made by speakers at an event every effort has been made to provide a fair representation of their views and opinions. The published text of speeches and presentations may differ from delivery. 10 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LE T +44 (0)20 7957 5700 F +44 (0)20 7957 5710 www.chathamhouse.org Patron: Her Majesty The Queen Chairman: Stuart Popham QC Director: Dr Robin Niblett Charity Registration Number: 208223 2 Transcript: The Divide Between Order and Disorder Chair: Lord Michael Williams of Baglan Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s a great pleasure to welcome you to the 2014 John Whitehead Lecture. I’m delighted that our speaker this evening is the distinguished American journalist and columnist Tom Friedman of the New York Times. This lecture honours John Whitehead for the many contributions that he has made over the decades to Anglo-American relations. It is perhaps appropriate that Tom Friedman has agreed to do this given your own long-standing association with the UK. As a student you came to St Anthony’s at Oxford where you were taught amongst others by the great Albert Hourani, and it was also here that you met your wife Ann, who was attending the somewhat more radical London School of Economics. I am tempted to say a long way to go to meet a girl from Des Moines, Iowa. Before gaining your MPhil you spent a year here in the Bureau of UPI, an agency sadly no longer with us, and then went to Beirut, to Lebanon, for the first time beginning a long association with that country. Two years later in 1981 you were poached by the New York Times; a paper you have now been associated with for more than three decades. During that time you have filled many roles from reporter to foreign correspondent to op-ed columnist and editor, including a brief stint as White House correspondent in the early years of the Clinton Presidency. A role you described as a ‘strange mix of reporting and baby-sitting’ - more on that later perhaps. While starting in the Middle East as a reporter Tom Friedman has gone on to write on an array of subjects including the environment and globalization. Producing books such as The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century and Hot, Flat, and Crowded fantastic title you know, on why we need a green revolution and how it can renew America. As well as maintaining a passion for golf, inherited from your father, although the New Yorker in the 2008 portrait quoted you as saying: ‘it’s the one place I can go and no one stops you to ask you what you think about the latest Israeli-Palestinian peace plan’. Tom has been the recipient of no less than three Pulitzer prizes, two of them for reporting from the Middle East. As well as the honorary title of OBE from Her Majesty the Queen. Tom is going to speak tonight – bravely some would say – on the subject of Britain and America’s Legacy in the Middle East. Ladies and Gentlemen, I ask you to join me in welcoming a commanding figure of American journalism – Tom Friedman Thomas Friedman Thank you, but I’m actually not speaking on Britain and America’s Legacy in the Middle East. I’m going to talk about Anglo-American relations but I’m going to get there via a very long way. Maybe something was lost in translation in the emails. What I’m actually going to do is speak about the world today, and my talk is called, for lack of a better title: ‘A Brief Theory of Everything’ – including the Middle East – and it will end up with Anglo-American relations and the centrality of them, which I really do subscribe to. Thank you so much for that introduction, it’s great to be here at Chatham House and I’ve always wanted to do this. This lecture is under Chatham House Rules – I always wanted to say that. No, it’s all on the record and it’s really a treat to be here. When future historians look back at the early 21st century, late 1990s-early 2000s and ask the question ‘what was the most important thing happening in the early 21st century?’, what will 3 Transcript: The Divide Between Order and Disorder they say? Will they say it was the sub-prime crisis? Will they say it was 9/11? Will they say it was the break-up of Brad and Jen? Or the marriage of William and Kate? What will they say? I would argue that what they will say is that the biggest thing happening in the 21st century, the thing that affected more other things, including Anglo-American relations, was that the world experienced exponential growth in three giant trends: the market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s Law. What I’m going to talk about tonight are the global implications of this exponential growth on those three trends. Now, in Silicon Valley they tell a very famous story about the man who invented chess, and the king he gave the game to loved this game. And after playing a few times he called the man in and he said ‘ I really want to reward you, what would you like’. The man said ‘I would just like to feed my family your highness’, and he said ‘it shall be done, what would you like?’. And he said ‘it’s very simple, I would just like you to take one kernel of rice, and put it on the first square of the chess board, and then two on the second on the next, and four on the next, sixteen on the next, and keep doubling and my family will be fine’. And the king said ‘for sure, it shall be done’ - not realising that when you double things 63 times, the number you get is 18 quintillion. Now that story is used to great effect by my friends Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee, in a brilliant book they wrote last year called the Second Machine Age and they used that story of the doubling to demonstrate the power of Moore’s Law. A law I am sure many of you are familiar with, coined by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel that says the power and speed of micro-chips will double every 18 to 24 months, this dates back to the early 80s I believe. And Brynjolfsson and McAfee use that story of the chess board because their argument according to Moore’s law, is that we just entered the second half of the chess board, when the doubling gets exponential and starts to get really big and you start to see some really funky things. You start to see computers that can win in Jeopardy. You start to see Robots that can milk cows. You start to see computers that can win in chess and you can even start to see self-driving cars. Now think about it, I’m 61, I can see a few people who are my contemporaries out there. And I grew up on the Jetsons cartoon, sci-fi, George Jetson. Always remember George Jetson flew his own flying saucer. The people who invented this science fiction cartoon could not imagine what we have today. That we’ve entered the second half of a chess board – a self-driving car. So Moore’s Law has now entered its exponential phase. I know a little about this as back in 2004, I sat down and wrote a book about just as it was entering the exponential phase called ‘The World is Flat’ and the simple theory of that book was that four things converged right around the year 2000 to basically flatten the global economic playing field. The first was the PC, built under Moore’s Law and what the PC allowed and enabled for the first time in the world, was for individuals to author their own content and create their own words, data, content, photo, spreadsheets, video, in digital form – in the form of bits and bytes. And once your content could be created in digital form it meant it could be manipulated in so many ways and so many more places. That converged with – it didn’t have to, but it did – with something called the internet which allowed me to not only offer digital form but also send it anywhere in the world virtually for free. This coincided with the emergence of something called workflow software, which allowed me to collaborate on my content with you and your content, from anywhere in the world and that happened to coincide with the emergence of something called Google, which allowed me to search my content and you your content and 4 Transcript: The Divide Between Order and Disorder vastly enhance our collaboration.
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