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 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 audiobook, 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.
