The New Digital Age
Eric Schmidt has been a long time technology veteran having spent years at Sun Microsystems and then as CEO of Novell before becoming Chief Executive of Google in 2001 to the three year old firm run by two hundred employees. The founders had said that they wanted Schmidt to be around to provide “adult supervision”. Even now Schmidt has the aura of an oracle when it comes to technology and its evolution. The New Digital Age is the book that captures that wisdom.The book is a peek into the future of the world that is getting increasingly connected and completely dominated by technology. With 2 billion people online and another 5 billion who are rapidly coming online, this book could not have been better timed. The book explores the impact of the virtual world on the physical. Just imagine your life without your mobile phone for a day.For starters, that changes how power is distributed in society. Communication gives us the power to participate and hold the leaders accountable. Connected people are harder to suppress. Empowerment is more powerful when it goes digital. Being connected makes people feel equal even though the physical world has differences. For instance, we may have a different number of “friends” online than what we do in the physical world. The nature of our relationship with online friends can be very different.But being connected can mean different things to the rich than to the marginalized. Education can get highly impacted with highly interactive workshops replacing traditional lessons making it a more flexible experience. Kids with access to mobile devices will have the opportunity to experience virtual education that will be able to withstand turbulence in the real world. Entertainment can be made personal and immersive just like education.Jared Cohen is the coauthor of this book. This Rhodes Scholar is an expert on counter-terrorism. The heart of the book lies in exploring how technology will change the equation between the state and the individual. That’s where technology assumes a dark and almost sinister undertone. When the government creates a database of our identity, it also leaves the citizen immensely vulnerable to the people who are in political power. A rogue government or a terror attack may be far easier to execute in the digital world by wiping out digital identities of citizens or their bank balance or their land record.Terrorists will limit usage of their mobile when they avoid detection. Since a mobile can still continue to transmit information even when it is switched off, it continues to transmit the location of the owner. The photos taken by a mobile phone automatically embeds metadata that can easily give away more information than you plan to share.3D printing is making it possible to print a kidney for a patient or for the people in a rural village to print the spare part of a machine that needs replacement. The same technology has made it possible for more than a 100,000 people to download the blueprint that enables them to print a gun. This has already happened in US using a 3D printer. Imagine the implications of that for terrorist groups or deviants.Technology makes it much easier to share information among the connected. That makes it much easier to inform citizens and trigger an uprising. It is not surprising that the first thing dictators do is to disconnect access to the internet when they smell a revolution brewing.Technology makes it easier to start a revolution than finishing them. The leaders of the revolution may turn out to be people who are better at digital brand building without actual leadership capabilities needed to lead people through the change. Liking something on Facebook does not execute the idea.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39tvjOATrCAReading the book takes us through a journey that is truly fascinating. The last chapter explores the concept of reconstruction. How does technology make it easier to rebuild a society that has been devastated? Getting telecommunication – both voice and data has now become the first priority as soon as help reaches the site of disaster. That also changes the impact of telecom companies in society.Just as individuals back up their documents, music and photos, the government also needs to be backed up. A government in exile could still function as long as it has a way to keep all the digital records safe and encrypted, for the physical world is very dangerous. Imagine the server that runs education for the exiled government runs out of one country; while healthcare runs off a server in another country, making it much harder to silence that government.The first few pages felt like I was given access to the plot of a science fiction movie. Then the possibilities seemed to dazzle me. The discussions about how technology in the hands of the militia or oppressive regimes make it easier to digitally erase dissidents’ existence or alter their identities seemed so dark simply because we have already seen the early signs.Maybe the answers to questions of the virtual world lie in the physical world. The future will be shaped by how states, citizens and institutions handle their new responsibilities in the new digital age.Go read this awesome book.-----------Join me on Twitter @abhijitbhaduriRead my review of Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg.Hidden in Plain Sight is another book I liked. Click here to read my review