The future according to Google

Executives make dizzying and disturbing predictions, from terrorism and conflict to future of states

Nothing has changed our lives more than the digital revolution.

And while countless books have been written on the subject, none has created such buzz as the recently released The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Justly so; this is for your must-read list.

Schmidt is the chairman of Google and its former CEO. He is credited with building one of the most important companies in history. Cohen is director of Google Ideas and a former adviser to secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. Time magazine recently chose him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

The book takes an old idea — that there are both digital and physical worlds — and extends it, arguing that today nothing less than two civilizations have arrived. One developed over thousands of years and the other is in its infancy. One is a world of old cultures, nation states, governments, institutions, power structures and laws. The other is a dynamic, ungoverned, even anarchistic world where boundaries are porous, rules are unclear and power is resilient and distributed. While these two coexist, each restraining the negative aspects of the other, they increasingly come into conflict.

In the next 10 years, the number of Internet users will grow from two billion to seven billion. We should prepare for massive disruption.

As Google executives, it would surely cause them and the company grief to take positions on the controversial issues involved. So the authors have chosen to predict the future rather than polemicizing about how to achieve it.