The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business
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 for
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Sophistry by Authors That Know Better -,
Authors Schmidt and Cohen have outstanding backgrounds that would help produce an very insightful and detailed book. Instead, we get non-stop pros and cons, and not even very insightful ones. It’s basically a summary of lots of bits and pieces that most readers are probably already familiar with – eg. background information about Moore’s Law, the rising number of people using the Internet and mobile phones, and how photonics is doubling the data coming out of fiber-optic cables every nine months, but no insight as to when Cox Communications (my local source of Internet frustration) and others will replace cable Internet with fiber-optics.
Continuing, we get one small example of some third-world residents are using cell-phones to improve profits (fishermen in the Congo), a quick reference to Xbox 360 capabilities, extremely superficial comments about the future of robots, Khan Academy, and 3D-printers, but nothing about the revolutionary potential for MOOCs in our colleges and universities, or the obvious limitations of 3D-printers (materials used, size, speed).
Then there’s babbling about improved physician-patient feedback for the health care sector – a tiring topic because that’s the least of the problems in American health care. The #1 problem in American health care is extremely high costs caused by lack of government regulation, thereby allowing providers to take advantage of the extremely inelastic demand for health care and bleed patients and payers to the point where we spend far more than every other nation – 18% of GDP, vs. 8% for Taiwan and Japan, 4% for Singapore.
Citizen participation in government is another topic they excite over – except Gavin Newsom already beat that topic to death while also ignoring the obvious data showing people just aren’t interested in doing so. Facebooking with friends is much more fun. (We can’t even get half the population to take a few minutes and vote using painless absentee ballots.) Then there’s an allusion to new technology bringing more jobs – except it hasn’t to date, compared to the jobs lost to new technology. (The authors should have read Martin Ford’s ‘The Lights in the Tunnel,’ written four years ago.)
Then there’s their seeing terrorists as becoming ‘far more vulnerable than they are today.’ Seems I just read something about the Boston Marathon terrorists using the Internet to become sold on jihad, and to learn how to make their bombs (they were caught primarily because of a local department store security camera); bin Laden learned years ago to cast off his satellite phone. Meanwhile, governments have learned to respond to Arab Spring-like groups by infiltrating groups and monitoring sites and Twitter feeds.
Finally, Schmidt pontificates and pumps his chest over China – seeing its imminent collapse thanks to an aroused public using the Internet and cell phones. Get in line Mr. Schmidt – you’re about #101,000 to make that call, and it hasn’t happened yet.
Bottom-Line: Schmidt and Cohen did themselves and the public no good with this book.
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|Oversight or Willful Reduction of Complexity and Humanity? see pg. 19 and pg. 66,
As an Afghan war veteran and an historian of technology, I found this book both important and valuable, but also disturbing in places.
Important and valuable for one overriding reason: for alerting a mass readership of the current and accelerating social-economic-military-political disruptions arising from the expansion of the internet.
Disturbing: for bias and the dangerous reduction of complexity that I found in the book, in several key instances. One example of this illustrates my concerns: see discussion of “More Innovation, More Opportunity”, starting page 18 and the key sentence, pg 19, two lines from bottom of the page. (I will discuss pg 66 and the claim that technology is neutral in the “PS” section, at bottom of page)
The issue in these two pages (18-19) was that of globalized competition for jobs, wherein borders and community boundaries fall in the face of internet outsourcing of jobs. Schmidt and Cohen celebrate that workers in Orange County must compete with workers in Uruguay….. and this is a good thing, they assert. But they oversimplify: what is the cost of living for a working family in Orange County compared to an overseas location? What are the working conditions of any number of overseas labor markets.
But the most striking case of bias and simplication(or even ‘objectifying’?) the working humans is this key sentence, near bottom of page 19:
“Globalization’s critics will decry this erosion of local monopolies, but it should be embraced, because this is how our socieities will move forward and continue to innovate.”
So, where are the problems? Look closely to the subtle bias in this sentence, at least two instances, that can slip into the reader’s subconcious. Exhibit one: to use the word “MONOPOLIES” when referring to local workers is a needlessly perjorative phrase, especially in the US. Are all local workers monopolies? For example, is a locally owned franchise insurance agent, who pre-internet typically would meet his clients ‘face to face’, is he/she a local monopolist? Does it improve our society when this local worker is undercut by an internet insurance wholesaler from, say, Mumbai? Exhibit Two: doesn’t this sentence need clarification and a nod toward complexity when the authors assert this borderless competition is good, that “this is how our societies move forward”? Let us stop and think about this phrase…what society? the local society which has now lost the insurance agent’s job? What about the EXTERNALITIES working here, for example, what if the insurance agent was also the coach for the Little League Team? Is the internet insurance wholesaler in Mumbai flying into Orange County to coach the team? How does society capture these exerternalities, by taxing internet commerce, perhaps?
We need our corporate leaders (Schmidt and Cohen) to be a bit more fair on these topics, to avoid imbedding loaded language and phrases and simplifications in such an important work.
But in the end… we all should read this, with a CRITICAL EYE. It is our society, our local society, that is in being “reshaped”.
PS: I have received a surprising number of direct emails or responses to my review. Some asking for greater expansion on my thoughts. So, here they are. I mention my experience both in Afghanistan and as an historian of technology. Why? Part of my job in Afghanistan was helping to put back together a society that was ‘reshaped’ too quickly, in Afghanistan’s case, by war. I realize the difficulty of putting societies back together after they are disrupted by war, OR technology. The reference to historian? I served many years in technical fields, from nuclear reactors to networks, and then was given the gift of years of study and reflection, leading to an advanced degree in history of technology. Such years of study help me to see this New Digital Age through a lens of long term, socio-technical change. There is an argument to not stray to far from our natural, human, physical roots… and I believe the debate over that distance we can safely move beyond the ‘natural’ may be the debate of our time. (for more, see naturalworldwideweb.com)
A question asked: why did I mention in the title that certain parts of this book could be a willful reductionism. Isn’t reductionism just a form of simplification? Isn’t that what authors often must do? True…. but for authors of such stature, on such an important issue, over simplification when presented to a mass audience can, in my mind, be a form or recklessness (and, I grant, this may be the result of page counts and the deadlines, editorial pressures which Eric Schmidt missed completely).
But let me show again another example of this Reductionism? See Page 66… this might be the more significant example. Here the authors assert that “The central truth of the technology industry–that technology is neutral but people are…
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|Business was misplaced in title,
What persuaded to buy this book was two things
1) The sub-title “Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business” (Mostly the word “Business”)
2) Richard Branson’s and Walter (Steve Jobs) Isaacson’s quotes.
On this basis it would be be fair to assume that the publisher had done their job and fairly named the book.
You would think that on the basis of this you would get at least a third of the book relating to business as it third of the title.
Especially when such high profile entrepreneur related people were profiled up front.
Not so. There is very little about the future of business in this book. Very disappointing.
In many ways it is a guide to revolutionaries, combatants and oppressed citizens as to how their genre will change in the future.
The book roams around the world’s conflict zones, hot spots and politically oppressive states giving pointers as to how they will be affected in the future.
Business? Barely mentioned. Cannot understand why the word business is in the title and why they put the two quotes they did up front.
The quotes on the front cover should have been Kissenger and and Tony Blair. That would be fairer to shoppers.
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|A good watch,
Purchased because I travel a lot and change time zones, I wanted something with large digits that I could see easily and this fits the bill. At first, it seemed like the contrast was low between the numbers and the background but over time I found it acceptable. My only complaint is the crystal scratched fairly easily, I wish manufacturers would start to use the gorilla glass made popular by smartphones. All in all, a nice watch, I have received several compliments on its style.
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|I love it,
Great watch, it is a good size the face is almost 1.75 ” across. Makes a nice statement with out being to over the top. The watch dose a lot of stuff. I wanted world time,countdown timer and nice for me and added plus was also have daylight saving function so you can move time by one hour with out having to reset the watch. So far the only bad thing I can say and it is not about the watch and that is that the picture makes the numbers brighter than what they are. They are not hard to read but just beware.
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|I do not like it,
I do not like the watch at all
1) The display is very dim, way dimmer than what you see on the photo, so often that I have to press the light button to see the time.
2) Accidentally touch the DST button at any time, you will change the time by 1 hour without even knowing it. (the DST indicator is hardly visible)
3) Display can not stay at other time zones at all, it automatically goes back to your local time in few minutes, you can easily get into trouble buy reading the wrong time zone.
Got a Casio for $16 as a back up, works 10x better!
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