A war breaks out in Ukraine, and a farmer in Argentina starts rationing diesel for his tractor.

A soldier presses a button, and several pagers blow up in sync, killing terrorists hundreds of miles away in another country.

At the same time as artificial intelligence starts to make art, thousands of people are getting displaced across the world, chased by wildfires, tornadoes, heatwaves.

Thomas Friedman – acclaimed New York Times journalist, 3-time Pulitzer winner, best-selling author, and legendary global trend-spotter – has upgraded his diagnosis. Today, the world is not just fast and fused, it’s also deep and dual. Everything happens at the click of a finger, pulling wires in a completely separate part of the world, fuelled by deep learning technology that makes things for more than one use. Think of a drone flying over your head, is it just a camera or a killer weapon? Hard to tell till the trigger is pulled.

With a 40-year career of reading people, places, and politics, Friedman is still attuned to the global pulse. For him, Russia-Ukraine is the actual first world war, in its truest sense. And the Israel-Palestine war, the real World War II. A post-post-ColdWar world order: where battlegrounds no longer have lines of control, where hackers can attack a country’s cyber defences without permeating borders. In fact, call it the World War Wired – as he does: technological connectivity and increased globalisation have lined us up like dominoes, where one chip falling can lead to the collapse of a seemingly unrelated chip thousands of miles away. Supply chain shocks. Smartphones to participate, witness, opine. From Canada to India to Chad. 

Friedman foresaw and recorded the unbridled growth of globalisation since the early days. His books are masterclasses in trendspotting, be it The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), That Used to be Us (2011) or Thank You for Being Late (2016). 

Today, he’s turning his eagle eye on, and writing a book about, AI, specifically “polymathic AI” – which is not just good at doing one thing, but several things at once – physics, chemistry, biology. Material sciences, mathematics, medicine. Astronomy, art, history. A manifold enhancement to human capacities. Giving us godlike powers, 

But in a hyper-connected world that has become a minefield of click-happy geopolitics that’s shaping a new world order, where will the arrival of AI lead us? Friedman sums it up: The problem is we have become Godlike without any agreement among us on the Ten Commandments – on a shared value system that should guide the use of our newfound powers.”

A domestically broken US. A rogue Russia. China that’s sprinting ahead, from EVs to renewables, robotics to quantum. A competition among regional and global powers for tech dominance. With AI in the mix, creating superintelligence will also create supervillains. What happens when bad actors gain access, or worse still, the AGI starts acting on its own? According to Friedman, “If competition and collaboration give way entirely to confrontation, a disorderly 21st century awaits.” Outgoing US president Biden and Chinese president Xi may have agreed that AI will never helm nuclear weapons, that the human will always be in the loop. But as states topple, as technocrats make policies, as corporates act as nation-states, as Mother Nature fumes at our heels, and as global actors engage in a race in everything from resources to governance – is it already too late to reign in the powerful tech we’re birthing? 

At SYNAPSE 2025, Thomas Friedman will once again make sense of a world in conflict, on fire, and in transition to a new world order. How “coalitions of inclusion” could cut through competition. The challenge from China. Whether the US can lead the way, even under Donald Trump. What role the Global South will play. And how – between bombs and blessings, apocalypse and creation – guardrailed, paradigm-shifting tech can protect what’s left of Mother Nature before it’s too late.

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