Between the year 2000 and 2010, the number of people using the internet around the world increased from 350 million to more than 2 billion. That number, of course, is only expected to increase further in the coming years.
According to Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, the hyperconnectivity of the future is a good thing. “The arrival of more people in the virtual world is good for them, and it’s good for us,” they write in their new book, “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Businesses.”
Schmidt and Cohen argue that the growth of connective technology will bring big changes in how we manage everything from our governments to our own identities — and they say these changes come with huge opportunities.
“Every individual is going to get more bang for their identity in the future in the sense that every citizen is going to have multiple identities online; they’ll have multiple emails, multiple chatting services,” says Cohen. “The virtual populations of countries will far exceed their physical populations.”
But technology advancements can also pose huge risks. For instance, Schmidt and Cohen argue that we are in the midst of a new technological Cold War that is going to get worse before it gets better. “We’re in a situation where countries can have perfectly reasonable physical space interactions – look at the U.S. and China, where there is lots of trade and bilateral relations – and then brutal attacks in the online space.”