Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman spoke of how to thrive in an age of dizzying acceleration on Nov. 17 as Cornell College’s 2016 Delta Phi Rho lecturer.
President Jonathan Brand welcomed the author to the stage, pointing out the significance of hosting speakers for the community and the students.
“It is through these lectures that we are able to shed light on the events of the world and heighten the intellectual discourse on Cornell’s campus,” President Brand said.
Friedman’s talk before a nearly full house in King Chapel focused on his next book, “Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations,” which will be released Nov. 22.
He spent much of his time discussing the acceleration of technology and how much of it happened without us even noticing it.
“What’s going on is that 2007, friends, turns out to have been possibly the single greatest technological inflection point since Gutenberg invented the printing press, and we completely missed it because of 2008,” Freidman said. “So, right when the world makes this incredible technological leap forward, 2008 comes and we go into the great recession, the greatest economic recession our country has experienced since 1929 and basically politics freezes. It was like we were all on a moving sidewalk at the airport that suddenly went from five miles an hour to 35 miles an hour.”
Friedman pointed out that changes in everything from the climate to technology means we need to change too.
“They aren’t just changing the world, they are re-shaping it, and we need to, therefore, reimagine the workplace, we need to reimagine politics, geopolitics, ethics, and the community in the wake of these accelerations,” Friedman said.
He rounded out his speech sharing his thoughts on ethics. You can watch that portion in the two minute video clip below.
This is the seventh lecture funded by Cornell’s Delta Phi Rho Centennial Endowment. Previous speakers were Doris Kearns Goodwin, Bob Woodward, Fareed Zakaria, George Stephanopoulos, David Gergen, and Karl Rove with Dee Dee Myers. A group of Delt alumni created the lecture series to contribute to the intellectual capital of the college and the community.
