The New Digital Age

Conclusion

As we look into the future—its promises and its challenges—we are facing a brave new world, the most fast-paced and exciting period in human history. We’ll experience more change at a quicker rate than any previous generation, and this change, driven in part by the devices in our own hands, will be more personal and participatory than we can even imagine.

In 1999, the futurist Ray Kurzweil proposed a new “Law of Accelerating Returns” in his seminal book The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. “Technology,” he wrote, “is the continuation of evolution by other means, and is itself an evolutionary process.” Evolution builds on its own increasing order, leading to exponential growth and accelerated returns over time. Computation, the backbone of every technology we see today, behaves in much the same way. Even with its eventual inevitable limitations, Moore’s Law promises us infinitesimally small processors in just a matter of years. Every two days we create as much digital content as we did from the dawn of civilization until 2003—that’s about five exabytes of information, with only two billion people out of a possible seven billion online. How many new ideas, new perspectives and new creations will truly global technological inclusion produce, and how much more quickly will their impact be felt? The arrival of more people in the virtual world is good for them, and it’s good for us. The collective benefit of sharing human knowledge and creativity grows at an exponential rate.

In the future, information technology will be everywhere, like electricity. It will be a given, so fully a part of our lives that we will struggle to describe life before it to our children. As connectivity ushers billions more people into the technological fold, we know that technology will soon be intertwined with every challenge in the world. States, citizens and companies will make it part of every solution.

Attempts to contain the spread of connectivity or curtail people’s access will always fail over a long enough period of time—information, like water, will always find a way through. States, citizens, companies, NGOs, consultants, terrorists, engineers, politicians and hackers will all try to adapt to this change and manage its aftereffects, but none will be able to control it.

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.

The case for optimism lies not in sci-fi gadgets or holograms but in the check that technology and connectivity bring against the abuses, suffering and destruction in our world. When exposure meets opportunity, the possibilities are endless. The best thing anyone can do to improve the quality of life around the world is to drive connectivity and technological opportunity. When given the access, the people will do the rest. They already know what they need and what they want to build, and they’ll find ways to innovate with even the meagerest set of tools. Anyone passionate about economic prosperity, human rights, social justice, education or self-determination should consider how connectivity can help us reach these goals and even move beyond them. We cannot eliminate inequality or abuse of power, but through technological inclusion we can help transfer power into the hands of individual people and trust that they will take it from there. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.