The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business

In collaboration, two leading global thinkers from in technology and foreign affairs from Google give readers 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 ...In collaboration, two leading global thinkers from in technology and foreign affairs from Google give readers 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. 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? In this they combine observation and insight to outline the promise and peril awaiting us in the coming decades. This is a forward-thinking account of where our world is headed and what this means for people, states and businesses.

On individual, community and state levels, across every geographical and socioeconomic spectrum, they reveal the dramatic developments both 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 their 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. This book is an analysis of how our hyper-connected world will soon look.