Book Description
In an unparalleled collaboration, two leading global thinkers in technology and foreign affairs give us their widely anticipated, transformational vision of the future: a world where everyone is connected—a world full of challenges and benefits that are ours to meet and to harness.
Eric Schmidt is one of Silicon Valley’s great
leaders, having taken Google from a small startup to one of the world’s
most influential companies. Jared Cohen is the director of Google Ideas
and a former adviser to secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and
Hillary Clinton. With their combined knowledge and experiences, the
authors are uniquely positioned to take on some of the toughest
questions about our future: Who will be more powerful in the future, the
citizen or the state? Will technology make terrorism easier or harder
to carry out? What is the relationship between privacy and security, and
how much will we have to give up to be part of the new digital age?
In this groundbreaking book, Schmidt and Cohen combine observation and
insight to outline the promise and peril awaiting us in the coming
decades. At once pragmatic and inspirational, this is a forward-thinking
account of where our world is headed and what this means for people,
states and businesses.
With the confidence and clarity of
visionaries, Schmidt and Cohen illustrate just how much we have to look
forward to—and beware of—as the greatest information and technology
revolution in human history continues to evolve. On individual,
community and state levels, across every geographical and socioeconomic
spectrum, they reveal the dramatic developments—good and bad—that will
transform both our everyday lives and our understanding of self and
society, as technology advances and our virtual identities become more
and more fundamentally real.
As Schmidt and Cohen’s nuanced
vision of the near future unfolds, an urban professional takes his
driverless car to work, attends meetings via hologram and dispenses
housekeeping robots by voice; a Congolese fisherwoman uses her smart
phone to monitor market demand and coordinate sales (saving on costly
refrigeration and preventing overfishing); the potential arises for
“virtual statehood” and “Internet asylum” to liberate political
dissidents and oppressed minorities, but also for tech-savvy autocracies
(and perhaps democracies) to exploit their citizens’ mobile devices for
ever more ubiquitous surveillance. Along the way, we meet a cadre of
international figures—including Julian Assange—who explain their own
visions of our technology-saturated future.
Inspiring, provocative and absorbing, The New Digital Age
is a brilliant analysis of how our hyper-connected world will soon
look, from two of our most prescient and informed public thinkers.
Chapters
CHAPTER 1 Our Future Selves
CHAPTER 2 The Future of Identity, Citizenship and Reporting
CHAPTER 3 The Future of States
CHAPTER 4 The Future of Revolution
CHAPTER 5 The Future of Terrorism
CHAPTER 6 The Future oF Conflict, Combat and Intervention
CHAPTER 7 The Future of Reconstruction