Cyberworld Order
Two Google visionaries forecast technology’s global impact.
The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business
By Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Knopf 2013, 315 pages
It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that innovative technologies will continue to permeate — and often determine — the course of our lives. But when the soothsayers are Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, the insights promise to be anything but predictable – and influential. Their conjoined experience includes advising secretaries of state, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the Council on Foreign Relations, Xerox, and Bell Labs. Indeed, what distinguishes this book from others currently forecasting technology’s future is the authors’ ambitious focus on statecraft, civil unrest, war, terrorism, and the tension between privacy and protection. While The New Digital Age giddily envisions such gee-whiz items as automated haircuts, holographic emails, and – of course – driverless cars, it is less concerned with gadgets and apps than with broader considerations of how societies will “interact with, implement, adapt to, and exploit technologies.”
In the future, rapidly evolving digital platforms will affect every aspect of society, the authors contend, “including politics, economics, the media, business, and social norms.” Yet as individuals across the globe increasingly migrate online for education, work, health care, entertainment, and social connections, states also will become more involved with – and more controlling of – our lives, off-line as well as online. Some control will arise out of necessity, as governments secure connectivity and cyberbenefits for their citizens and employ digital tools to manage, advance, and defend their countries. But to what extent will each of us have to relinquish privacy and personal data to participate in the civic life of our nations? As the Wikileaks and Edward Snowden controversies over America’s extensive digital eavesdropping demonstrate, the answers are not easy – and Schmidt and Cohen believe this is a good thing. Government intervention should be challenged, they argue, with awareness and debate ensuring accountability. That said, governments, individuals, and businesses will need to work together to address evolving issues of privacy and security.
The virtual will “complicate almost every behavior,” the authors argue. The most damaging foes will create disruptions through cyber, not physical, attacks that could paralyze power grids, wastewater treatment, or nuclear power plants – without putting themselves at physical risk. Terrorist training of the future will likely resemble “engineering boot camps,” predict Schmidt and Cohen, and engineers and hackers will become even more a target for jihadist, as well as government, recruitment. “What gives terror groups in the future an edge may not be their members’ willingness to die for the cause; it might be how good their command of technology is.”
The book explores individuals and their relationship with states, as well as conflict, combat, and intervention, with business woven into each discussion. The latter portion of the book catalogues shifts technology already has wrought – from Chinese espionage of U.S. businesses to YouTube self-promotion by Anwar al-Awlaki and other terrorists – as well as consideration of where trends are headed. Minority groups already harassed by hostile governments may find themselves increasingly isolated, for example, through campaigns of virtual discrimination: limited, disrupted, or highly controlled access to news, communication, and “platforms with economic or social value.”
Despite the grim portrait of impending tech warfare, Schmidt and Cohen remain optimistic. For every group bent on destruction, there will be armies of engineers, computer scientists, and researchers working to anticipate and defeat such threats. Already, tech companies are debating their role in combating radicalization, including at Google’s 2011 Summit Against Violent Extremism. The final chapter, “The Future of Reconstruction,” details ways mobile networks can provide crucial stabilization during crises – as has been experienced in Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In Somalia, “the world’s premier failed state,” for example, cellphones have become invaluable for money transfer, information exchange, and mobile health care systems. The authors’ faith in digital tools to alleviate suffering and destruction may strike some readers as unrealistic. The evolving impact of technology cannot be denied, however, and The New Digital Age helps map out many of the impending changes.
By Robin Tatu, Prism’s senior editorial consultant.