Can higher education meet the challenge of "the Age of Acceleration"

The book I'm currently 'reading' on my commute to and from my university is Thomas Friedman's Thank You for Being Late.  The book's subtitle is "An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations."

       I have no doubt that Mr. Friedman is thriving and therefore has every reason to be an optimist.  However, he is failing to persuade me.

       First a word about his writing.  It may be that his style reflects his background as a reporter.  Or it may be --- as a colleague of mine who met him observed --- "he's really full of himself."  Or a bit of both.  Whatever, I find all his name dropping gets in the way of his narrative.  I'd prefer that he graduate from reporter and columnist to real scholar: digest the material, become yourself the expert, Mr. Friedman, and use footnotes to support your observations.

      That aside, the "gee whiz" nature of this book really annoys me.  One example: he describes how a museum curator and his staff in the 1980s spent two years developing an animated replica of a dinosaur  That same curator recently was able to use his smart phone to accomplish the same task in minutes.  How wonderful, gushes Friedman.  My question: what is the team doing now that their services on such projects is redundant, inefficient, unwanted and unneeded?

       We humans like to think that we are better than the dinosaurs that curator was modeling.  But are we indeed?  While the geniuses among us are charging relentlessly toward an AI-run world for their own reasons: fame, fortune, curiosity, etc. --- what is to become of the millions whose jobs are daily disappearing?  Sure, technology makes the best and brightest among us enormously efficient.  But what of the not-so-bright who once could make a living--- a good middle-class living --- on an auto assembly line or in a steel mill?  They now are baristos at Starbucks, as are all too many college grads, I'm afraid. If Friedman is right --- and I'm sure he is --- even the baristos will soon be redundant.

      And there is no way we can stop this from happening.  It is outside of our control.  Just as population growth is outside our control.  The growth is the uncontrolled and unintended result of billions of 'rational' decisions made by couples across the globe day after day and night after night.  Rational though every one of them may be (a doubtful generalization, of course), the cumulative effect is non-rational... as non-rational and uncontrollable as climate change and the rise of rodents was to the dinosaurs.

       We in higher education should and no doubt will help as many of our students to thrive in the age of acceleration.  But what of the billions we will never reach for myriad reasons? And what of the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, we do reach, but who fail to thrive anyway?

       I guess Hot, Flat, and Crowded is Friedman's pessimistic book (although not really, since there "Friedman proposes... an ambitious national strategy—which he calls 'Geo-Greenism'.” An optimist, indeed!).  

       Call me the raven ala Edgar Alan Poe.  But it all sounds pretty pessimistic from the average Jane and Joe perspective.