The New Digital Age
The New Digital Age
Jared Cohen
Eric Schmidt
Advance praise for
The New Digital Age
“This is the most important—and fascinating—book yet written about how the digital age will affect our world. With vivid examples and brilliant analysis, it shows how the internet and other communications technologies will empower individuals and transform the way nations and businesses operate. How will different societies make trade-offs involving privacy, freedom, control, security and the relationship between the physical and virtual worlds? This realistic but deeply optimistic book provides the guideposts. It’s both profoundly wise and wondrously readable.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs
“Every day, technological innovations are giving people around the world new opportunities to shape their own destinies. In this fascinating book, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen draw upon their unique experiences to show us a future of rising incomes, growing participation and a genuine sense of community—if we make the right choices today.”
—Bill Clinton
“Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have produced a searching meditation on technology and world order. Even those who disagree with some of their conclusions will learn much from this thought-provoking volume.”
—Henry A. Kissinger
“This is the book I have been waiting for: a concise and persuasive description of technology’s impact on war, peace, freedom and diplomacy. The New Digital Age is a guide to the future written by two experts who possess a profound understanding of humanity’s altered prospects in a wireless world. There are insights on every page and surprising conclusions (and questions) in every chapter. For experts and casual readers alike, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have produced an indispensable book.”
—Madeleine Albright
“The New Digital Age is must-reading for anyone who wants to truly understand the depths of the digital revolution. Combining the skills of a social scientist and a computer scientist, Schmidt and Cohen blend the technical and the human, the scientific and the political, in ways I rarely saw while in government. They challenge the reader’s imagination on almost every page.”
—General Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA
“This is a book that describes a technological revolution in the making. How we navigate it is a challenge for countries, communities and citizens. There are no two people better equipped to explain what it means than Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen.”
—Tony Blair
“Few people in the world are doing more to imagine—and build—the new digital age than Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. With this book, they are looking into their crystal ball and inviting the world to peek in.”
—Michael R. Bloomberg
“Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s thoughtful, well-researched work elucidates the staggering impact of technology on our daily lives, as well as what surprising and incredible developments the future may hold. Readers might be left with more questions than answers, but that’s the idea—we are at our best when we ask ‘What’s next?’ ”
—Elon Musk, cofounder of Tesla Motors and PayPal
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2013 by Google Inc. and Jared Cohen
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress
eBook ISBN: 9780307961105
Hardcover ISBN: 9780307957139
Cover design by Peter Mendelsund
v3.1
For Rebecca, to whom we are grateful for her ideas and support, and Aiden, of whom we are envious for the technology he will get to see
We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.
—CHARLES F. KETTERING,
American inventor and businessman
CONTENTS
Advance praise for The New Digital Age
Introduction
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
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Introduction
The Internet is among the few things humans have built that they don’t truly understand. What began as a means of electronic information transmission—room-sized computer to room-sized computer—has transformed into an omnipresent and endlessly multifaceted outlet for human energy and expression. It is at once intangible and in a constant state of mutation, growing larger and more complex with each passing second. It is a source for tremendous good and potentially dreadful evil, and we’re only just beginning to witness its impact on the world stage.
The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history. Hundreds of millions of people are, each minute, creating and consuming an untold amount of digital content in an online world that is not truly bound by terrestrial laws. This new capacity for free expression and free movement of information has generated the rich virtual landscape we know today. Think of all the websites you’ve ever visited, all the e-mails you’ve sent and stories you’ve read online, all the facts you’ve learned and fictions you’ve encountered and debunked. Think of every relationship forged, every journey planned, every job found and every dream born, nurtured and implemented through this platform. Consider too what the lack of top-down control allows: the online scams, the bullying campaigns, the hate-group websites and the terrorist chat rooms. This is the Internet, the world’s largest ungoverned space.
As this space grows larger, our understanding of nearly every aspect of life will change, from the minutiae of our daily lives to more fundamental questions about identity, relationships and even our own security. Through the power of technology, age-old obstacles to human interaction, like geography, language and limited information, are falling and a new wave of human creativity and potential is rising. Mass adoption of the Internet is driving one of the most exciting social, cultural and political transformations in history, and unlike earlier periods of change, this time the effects are fully global. Never before in history have so many people, from so many places, had so much power at their fingertips. And while this is hardly the first technology revolution in our history, it is the first that will make it possible for almost everybody to own, develop and disseminate real-time content without having to rely on intermediaries.
And we’ve barely left the starting blocks.
The proliferation of communication technologies has advanced at an unprecedented speed. In the first decade of the twenty-first century the number of people connected to the Internet worldwide increased from 350 million to more than 2 billion. In the same period, the number of mobile-phone subscribers rose from 750 million to well over 5 billion (it is now over 6 billion). Adoption of these technologies is spreading to the farthest reaches of the planet, and, in some parts of the world, at an accelerating rate.
By 2025, the majority of the world’s population will, in one generation, have gone from having virtually no access to unfiltered information to accessing all of the world’s information th
rough a device that fits in the palm of the hand. If the current pace of technological innovation is maintained, most of the projected eight billion people on Earth will be online.
At every level of society, connectivity will continue to become more affordable and practical in substantial ways. People will have access to ubiquitous wireless Internet networks that are many times cheaper than they are now. We’ll be more efficient, more productive and more creative. In the developing world, public wireless hot spots and high-speed home networks will reinforce each other, extending the online experience to places where people today don’t even have landline phones. Societies will leapfrog an entire generation of technology. Eventually, the accoutrements of technologies we marvel at today will be sold in flea markets as antiques, like rotary phones before them.
And as adoption of these tools increases, so too will their speed and computing power. Moore’s Law, the rule of thumb in the technology industry, tells us that processor chips—the small circuit boards that form the backbone of every computing device—double in speed every eighteen months. That means a computer in 2025 will be sixty-four times faster than it is in 2013. Another predictive law, this one of photonics (regarding the transmission of information), tells us that the amount of data coming out of fiber-optic cables, the fastest form of connectivity, doubles roughly every nine months. Even if these laws have natural limits, the promise of exponential growth unleashes possibilities in graphics and virtual reality that will make the online experience as real as real life, or perhaps even better. Imagine having the holodeck from the world of Star Trek, which was a fully immersive virtual-reality environment for those aboard a ship, but this one is able to both project a beach landscape and re-create a famous Elvis Presley performance in front of your eyes. Indeed, the next moments in our technological evolution promise to turn a host of popular science-fiction concepts into science facts: driverless cars, thought-controlled robotic motion, artificial intelligence (AI) and fully integrated augmented reality, which promises a visual overlay of digital information onto our physical environment. Such developments will join with and enhance elements of our natural world.
This is our future, and these remarkable things are already beginning to take shape. That is what makes working in the technology industry so exciting today. It’s not just because we have a chance to invent and build amazing new devices or because of the scale of technological and intellectual challenges we will try to conquer; it’s because of what these developments will mean for the world.
Communication technologies represent opportunities for cultural breakthroughs as well as technical ones. How we interact with others and how we view ourselves will continue to be influenced and driven by the online world around us. Our propensity for selective memory allows us to adopt new habits quickly and forget the ways we did things before. These days, it’s hard to imagine a life without mobile devices. In a time of ubiquitous smart phones, you have insurance against forgetfulness, you have access to an entire world of ideas (even though some governments make it difficult), and you always have something to occupy your attention, although finding a way to do so usefully may still prove difficult and in some cases harder. The smart phone is aptly named.
As global connectivity continues its unprecedented advance, many old institutions and hierarchies will have to adapt or risk becoming obsolete, irrelevant to modern society. The struggles we see today in many businesses, large and small, are examples of the dramatic shift for society that lies ahead. Communication technologies will continue to change our institutions from within and without. We will increasingly reach, and relate to, people far beyond our own borders and language groups, sharing ideas, doing business and building genuine relationships.
The vast majority of us will increasingly find ourselves living, working and being governed in two worlds at once. In the virtual world we will all experience some kind of connectivity, quickly and through a variety of means and devices. In the physical world we will still have to contend with geography, randomness of birth (some born as rich people in rich countries, the majority as poor people in poor countries), bad luck and the good and bad sides of human nature. In this book we aim to demonstrate ways in which the virtual world can make the physical world better, worse or just different. Sometimes these worlds will constrain each other; sometimes they will clash; sometimes they will intensify, accelerate and exacerbate phenomena in the other world so that a difference in degree will become a difference in kind.
On the world stage, the most significant impact of the spread of communication technologies will be the way they help reallocate the concentration of power away from states and institutions and transfer it to individuals. Throughout history, the advent of new information technologies has often empowered successive waves of people at the expense of traditional power brokers, whether that meant the king, the church or the elites. Then as now, access to information and to new communication channels meant new opportunities to participate, to hold power to account and to direct the course of one’s life with greater agency.
The spread of connectivity, particularly through Internet-enabled mobile phones, is certainly the most common and perhaps the most profound example of this shift in power, if only because of the scale. Digital empowerment will be, for some, the first experience of empowerment in their lives, enabling them to be heard, counted and taken seriously—all because of an inexpensive device they can carry in their pocket. As a result, authoritarian governments will find their newly connected populations more difficult to control, repress and influence, while democratic states will be forced to include many more voices (individuals, organizations and companies) in their affairs. To be sure, governments will always find ways to use new levels of connectivity to their advantage, but because of the way current network technology is structured, it truly favors the citizens, in ways we will explore later.
So, will this transfer of power to individuals ultimately result in a safer world, or a more dangerous one? We can only wait and see. We have only begun to encounter the realities of a connected world: the good, the bad and the worrisome. The two of us have explored this question from different vantage points—one as a computer scientist and business executive and the other as a foreign-policy and national security expert—and we both know that the answer is not predetermined. The future will be shaped by how states, citizens, companies and institutions handle their new responsibilities.
In the past, international-relations theorists have debated the ambitions of states—some arguing that states maintain domestic and foreign policies that aim to maximize their power and security, while others suggest that additional factors, such as trade and information exchange, also affect state behavior. States’ ambitions won’t change, but their notions of how to achieve them will. They will have to practice two versions of their domestic and foreign policies—one for the physical, “real” world, and one for the virtual world that exists online. These policies may appear contradictory at times—governments might crack down in one realm while allowing certain behavior in another; they may go to war in cyberspace but maintain the peace in the physical world—but for states, they will represent attempts to deal with the new threats and challenges to their authority that connectivity enables.
For citizens, coming online means coming into possession of multiple identities in the physical and virtual worlds. In many ways, their virtual identities will come to supersede all others, as the trails they leave remain engraved online in perpetuity. And because what we post, e-mail, text and share online shapes the virtual identities of others, new forms of collective responsibility will have to come into effect.
For organizations and companies, opportunities and challenges will come hand in hand with global connectivity. A new level of accountability, driven by the people, will force these actors to rethink their existing operations and adapt their plans for the future, changing how they do things as well as how they present their activities to the public. They’ll also find new co
mpetitors, as widespread technological inclusion levels the playing field for information, and therefore opportunity.
In the future, no person, from the most powerful to the weakest, will be insulated from what in many cases will be historic changes.
We two first met in the fall of 2009, under circumstances that made it easy to form a bond quickly. We were in Baghdad, engaging with Iraqis around the critical question of how technology can be used to help rebuild a society. As we moved around the city meeting with government ministers, military leaders, diplomats and Iraqi entrepreneurs, we encountered a nation whose prospects for recovery and future success appeared to hang by a thread. Eric’s visit marked the first trip to Iraq by the CEO of a Fortune 500 technology company, so there were lots of questions about why Google was there. At the time, even we weren’t entirely sure what Google might encounter or accomplish.
The answer became clear instantly. Everywhere we looked, we saw mobile devices. That surprised us. At the time, Iraq had been a war zone for more than six years, following the fall of Saddam Hussein, who, in his totalitarian paranoia, had banned the use of mobile phones. The war had decimated Iraq’s physical infrastructure, and most people had unreliable access to food, water and electricity. Even basic commodities were prohibitively expensive. In some places, garbage hadn’t been collected in years. And, critically, the security of the population was never guaranteed, either for high-level officials or for everyday shopkeepers. Mobile phones seemed like the last item that would appear on the country’s dauntingly long to-do list. Yet as we came to learn, despite all of the pressing problems in their lives, Iraqis prioritized technology.
Not only did the Iraqis possess and value technology, they also saw its huge potential to improve their lives and the fate of their embattled country. The engineers and entrepreneurs we met expressed great frustration over their inability to help themselves. They already knew what they needed—reliable electricity, enough bandwidth for a fast connection, accessible digital tools and enough access to start-up capital to get their ideas off the ground.