Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

We believe the vast majority of the world will be net beneficiaries of connectivity, experiencing greater efficiency and opportunities, and an improved quality of life. But despite these almost universal benefits, the connected experience will not be uniform. A digital caste system will endure well into the future, and people’s experience will be greatly determined by where they fall in this structure. The tiny minority at the top will be largely insulated from the less enjoyable consequences of technology by their wealth, access or location. The world’s middle class will drive much of the change, as they’ll be the inventors, the leaders in diaspora communities and the owners of small and medium-sized enterprises. These are the first two billion who are already connected.

The next five billion people to join that club will experience far more change, simply because of where they live and how numerous they are. They’ll receive the greatest benefits from connectivity but also face the worst drawbacks of the digital age. It is this population that will drive the revolutions and challenge the police states, and they’ll also be the people tracked by their governments, harassed by online hate mobs and disoriented by marketing wars. Many of the challenges in their world will endure even as technology spreads.

So, what do we think we know about our future world?

First, it’s clear that technology alone is no panacea for the world’s ills, yet smart uses of technology can make a world of difference. In the future, computers and humans will increasingly split duties according to what each does well. We will use human intelligence for judgment, intuition, nuance and uniquely human interactions; we will use computing power for infinite memory, infinitely fast processing and actions limited by human biology. We’ll use computers to run predictive correlations from huge volumes of data to track and catch terrorists, but how they are interrogated and handled thereafter will remain the purview of humans and their laws. Robots in combat will prevent deaths through greater precision and situational awareness, but human judgment will determine the context in which they are used and what actions they can take.

Second, the virtual world will not overtake or overhaul the existing world order, but it will complicate almost every behavior. People and states will prefer the worlds where they have more control—virtual for people, physical for states—and this tension will exist as long as the Internet does. Crowds of virtually courageous people might be sufficient to start a revolution, but the state can still use brutal tactics in crackdowns on the street. Minority groups might pursue virtual statehood and cement their solidarity in the process, but if the venture goes badly, participants and their cause could end up worse off in both the physical and the virtual world as a result.

Third, states will have to practice two foreign policies and two domestic policies—one for the virtual world and one for the physical world—and these policies may appear contradictory. States will launch cyber attacks against countries they wouldn’t dream of targeting militarily. They’ll allow for the venting of dissent online, but viciously patrol the town square looking for vocal dissidents to crack down on. States will support emergency telecommunications interventions without even considering putting boots (or bots) on the ground.

Finally, with the spread of connectivity and mobile phones around the world, citizens will have more power than at any other time in history, but it will come with costs, particularly to both privacy and security. The technology we talk about collects and stores much personal information—past, present and future locations as well as the information you consume—all stored for a time for the systems to work. Such information has never been available before, and there is always the potential that it could be used against you. Nations will legislate much of this and their policies will differ, not just from democracy to autocracy, but even within countries that have similar political systems. The risk that this information may be released is increasing, and while the technology to protect it is available, human error, nefarious activity and the passage of time means that it will become only more difficult to keep information private. The companies responsible for storing this data have a responsibility to ensure its security, and that will not change. While the protection of individual privacy is also their responsibility, it is one that they share with the users.

We need to fight for our privacy or we will lose it, particularly in moments of national crisis, when security hawks will insist that with each terrible crime, governments are entitled to access more private, or formerly private, information. Governments have to decide where the new privacy line is, and stick to it. Facial recognition, for example, will keep people safe and ensure that they count in everything from a census to a vote, by making it easier to catch and capture illicit actors, discouraging would-be criminals and promoting public safety. But it can also empower governments to exercise greater surveillance of their people.

And what of the prospects for keeping secrets in the future, something equally important for the proper functioning of people and institutions? New abilities to encrypt secrets and spread pieces of information among people will lead to some unusual new problems. Separate groups—ranging from criminals to dissidents—will soon be able to take a secret (perhaps a set of codes or classified documents), encrypt it and then divide up the secret by allocating one part of the encryption key to each group member. A group could then consent to a mutually assured publication pact—that is, under certain circumstances, everyone combines his partial key to release the data. Such an agreement could be used to discipline governments or terrorize individuals. And if groups like al-Qaeda get their hands on sensitive encrypted data—such as the names and locations of undercover CIA agents—they could distribute copies to their affiliates with a common key and threaten to release the information if any one of their groups is attacked.

What emerges in the future, and what we’ve tried to articulate, is a tale of two civilizations: One is physical and has developed over thousands of years, and the other is virtual and is still very much in formation. These civilizations will coexist in a more or less peaceable manner, with each restraining the negative aspects of the other. The virtual world will enable escape from the repression of state control, offering citizens new opportunities to organize and revolt; other citizens will simply connect, learn and play. The physical world will impose rules and laws that help contain the anarchy of virtual space and that protect people from terrorist hackers, misinformation and even from the digital records of their own youthful misbehavior. The permanence of evidence will make it harder for the perpetrators of crimes to minimize or deny their actions, forcing accountability into the physical world in a way never before seen.

The virtual and physical civilizations will affect and shape each other; the balance they strike will come to define our world. In our view, the multidimensional result, though not perfect, will be more egalitarian, more transparent and more interesting than we can even imagine. As in a social contract, users will voluntarily relinquish things they value in the physical world—privacy, security, personal data—in order to gain the benefits that come with being connected to the virtual world. In turn, should they feel that these benefits are being withheld, they’ll use the tools at their disposal to demand accountability and drive change in the physical world.