The New Digital Age
By Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
By Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
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Published on Apr 23, 2013 | 336 Pages
Published on Apr 23, 2013 | 336 Pages
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.
Author
Eric Schmidt
Eric Schmidt is the executive chairman of Google, which he joined in 2001. From 2001 to 2011, he served as Google’s chief executive officer, overseeing the company’s technical and business strategy alongside founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Dr. Schmidt was previously the chairman and CEO of Novell and chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems, Inc., and served on the research staff at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Bell Laboratories and Zilog. He is a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology in the United Kingdom and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as a fellow in 2007, he also chairs the board of the New America Foundation, and since 2008 has been a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He lives in California.
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Jared Cohen
Jared Cohen is the founder and director of Google Ideas. He is a Rhodes Scholar and the author of two books, Children of Jihad and One Hundred Days of Silence, and has written for The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Policy Review, SAIS Review, Hoover Digest, The Washington Post and The International Herald Tribune. From 2006 to 2010 he served as a member of the secretary of state’s Policy Planning Staff and as a close advisor to both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, and is now an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2013, TIME Magazine named him to its list of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” He is also a member of the National Counterterrorism Center’s Director’s Advisory Board. He lives in New York City with his wife.
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