Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

There’s a bit of time left before you need to leave for work—which you’ll get to by driverless car, of course. Your car knows what time you need to be in the office each morning based on your calendar and, after factoring in traffic data, it communicates with your wristwatch to give you a sixty-minute countdown to when you need to leave the house. Your commute will be as productive or relaxing as you desire.

Before you head out, your device reminds you to buy a gift for your nephew’s upcoming birthday. You scan the system’s proposed gift ideas, derived from anonymous, aggregated data on other nine-year-old boys with his profile and interests, but none of the suggestions inspire you. Then you remember a story his parents told you that had everyone forty and older laughing: Your nephew hadn’t understood a reference to the old excuse “A dog ate my homework”; how could a dog eat his cloud storage drive? He had never gone to school before digital textbooks and online lesson plans, and he had used paper to do his homework so rarely—and used cloud storage so routinely—that the notion that he would somehow “forget” his homework and come up with an excuse like that struck him as absurd. You do a quick search for a robotic dog and buy one with a single click, after adding a few special touches he might like, such as a reinforced titanium skeleton so that he can ride on it. In the card input, you type: “Just in case.” It will arrive at his house within a five-minute window of your selected delivery time.

You think about having another cup of coffee, but then a haptic device (“haptic” refers to technology that involves touch and feeling) that is embedded in the heel of your shoe gives you a gentle pinch—a signal that you’ll be late for your morning meeting if you linger any longer. Perhaps you grab an apple on the way out, to eat in the backseat of your car as it chauffeurs you to your office.

If you are a part of the world’s upper band of income earners (as most residents of wealthy Western countries are), you will have access to many of these new technologies directly, as owners or as friends of those who own them. You probably recognize from this morning routine a few things you have already imagined or experienced. Of course, there will always be the super-wealthy people whose access to technology will be even greater—they’ll probably eschew cars altogether and travel to work in motion-stabilized automated helicopters, for example.

We will continue to encounter challenges in the physical world, but the expansion of the virtual world and what is possible online—as well as the inclusion of five billion more minds—means we will have new ways of getting information and moving resources to solve those problems, even if the solutions are imperfect. While there will remain significant differences between us, more opportunities to interact and better policy can help blur the edges.

The advance of connectivity will have an impact far beyond the personal level; the ways that the physical and virtual worlds coexist, collide and complement each other will greatly affect how citizens and states behave in the coming decades. And not all the news is good. The coming chapters delve into how everyone—individuals, companies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), governments and others—will handle this new reality of existing in both worlds, and how they will leverage the best and worst of what each world has to offer in the new digital age. Each individual, state and organization will have to discover its own formula, and those that can best navigate this multidimensional world will find themselves ahead in the future.

1The Korean K-pop star Psy’s fame reached global proportions almost overnight as the video he created for his song “Gangnam Style” became the most-watched YouTube video ever within a span of three months.

2Robotic surgical suites are already in operation in hospitals in the United States and Europe.

CHAPTER 2

The Future of Identity, Citizenship and Reporting

In the next decade, the world’s virtual population will outnumber the population of Earth. Practically every person will be represented in multiple ways online, creating vibrant and active communities of interlocking interests that reflect and enrich our world. All of those connections will create massive amounts of data—a data revolution, some call it—and empower citizens in ways never before imagined. Yet despite these advancements, a central and singular caveat exists: The impact of this data revolution will be to strip citizens of much of their control over their personal information in virtual space, and that will have significant consequences in the physical world. This may not be true in every instance or for every user, but on a macro level it will deeply affect and shape our world. The challenge we face as individuals is determining what steps we are willing to take to regain control over our privacy and security.

Today, our online identities affect but rarely overshadow our physical selves. What people do and say on their social-networking profiles can draw praise or scrutiny, but for the most part truly sensitive or personal information stays hidden from public view. Smear campaigns and online feuds typically involve public figures, not ordinary citizens. In the future, our identities in everyday life will come to be defined more and more by our virtual activities and associations. Our highly documented pasts will have an impact on our prospects, and our ability to influence and control how we are perceived by others will decrease dramatically. The potential for someone else to access, share or manipulate parts of our online identities will increase, particularly due to our reliance on cloud-based data storage. (In nontechnical language, cloud computing refers to software hosted on the Internet that the user does not need to closely manage. Storing documents or content “in the cloud” means that data is stored on remote servers rather than on local ones or on a person’s own computer, and it can be accessed by multiple networks and users. With cloud computing, online activities are faster, quicker to spread and better equipped to handle traffic loads.) This vulnerability—both perceived and real—will mandate that technology companies work even harder to earn the trust of their users. If they do not exceed expectations in terms of both privacy and security, the result will be either a backlash or abandonment of their product. The technology industry is already hard at work to find creative ways to mitigate risks, such as through two-factor authentication, which requires you to provide two of the following to access your personal data: something you know (e.g., password), have (e.g., mobile device) and are (e.g., thumbprint). We are also encouraged knowing that many of the world’s best engineers are hard at work on the next set of solutions. And at a minimum, strong encryption will be nearly universally adopted as a better but not perfect solution. (“Encryption” refers to the scrambling of information so that it can be decoded and used only by someone with the right verification requirements.)

The basics of online identity could also change. Some governments will consider it too risky to have thousands of anonymous, untraceable and unverified citizens—“hidden people”; they’ll want to know who is associated with each online account, and will require verification, at a state level, in order to exert control over the virtual world. Your online identity in the future is unlikely to be a simple Facebook page; instead it will be a constellation of profiles, from every online activity, that will be verified and perhaps even regulated by the government. Imagine all of your accounts—Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google+, Netflix, New York Times subscription—linked to an “official profile.” Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance; even the most fascinating content, if tied to an anonymous profile, simply won’t be seen because of its excessively low ranking.