By 2025, the majority of the world’s population will, in one generation, have gone from having virtually no access to unfiltered information to accessing all of the world’s information through a device that fits in the palm of the hand. If the current pace of technological innovation is maintained, most of the projected eight billion people on Earth will be online.
At every level of society, connectivity will continue to become more affordable and practical in substantial ways. People will have access to ubiquitous wireless Internet networks that are many times cheaper than they are now. We’ll be more efficient, more productive and more creative. In the developing world, public wireless hot spots and high-speed home networks will reinforce each other, extending the online experience to places where people today don’t even have landline phones. Societies will leapfrog an entire generation of technology. Eventually, the accoutrements of technologies we marvel at today will be sold in flea markets as antiques, like rotary phones before them.
And as adoption of these tools increases, so too will their speed and computing power. Moore’s Law, the rule of thumb in the technology industry, tells us that processor chips—the small circuit boards that form the backbone of every computing device—double in speed every eighteen months. That means a computer in 2025 will be sixty-four times faster than it is in 2013. Another predictive law, this one of photonics (regarding the transmission of information), tells us that the amount of data coming out of fiber-optic cables, the fastest form of connectivity, doubles roughly every nine months. Even if these laws have natural limits, the promise of exponential growth unleashes possibilities in graphics and virtual reality that will make the online experience as real as real life, or perhaps even better. Imagine having the holodeck from the world of Star Trek, which was a fully immersive virtual-reality environment for those aboard a ship, but this one is able to both project a beach landscape and re-create a famous Elvis Presley performance in front of your eyes. Indeed, the next moments in our technological evolution promise to turn a host of popular science-fiction concepts into science facts: driverless cars, thought-controlled robotic motion, artificial intelligence (AI) and fully integrated augmented reality, which promises a visual overlay of digital information onto our physical environment. Such developments will join with and enhance elements of our natural world.
This is our future, and these remarkable things are already beginning to take shape. That is what makes working in the technology industry so exciting today. It’s not just because we have a chance to invent and build amazing new devices or because of the scale of technological and intellectual challenges we will try to conquer; it’s because of what these developments will mean for the world.
Communication technologies represent opportunities for cultural breakthroughs as well as technical ones. How we interact with others and how we view ourselves will continue to be influenced and driven by the online world around us. Our propensity for selective memory allows us to adopt new habits quickly and forget the ways we did things before. These days, it’s hard to imagine a life without mobile devices. In a time of ubiquitous smart phones, you have insurance against forgetfulness, you have access to an entire world of ideas (even though some governments make it difficult), and you always have something to occupy your attention, although finding a way to do so usefully may still prove difficult and in some cases harder. The smart phone is aptly named.
As global connectivity continues its unprecedented advance, many old institutions and hierarchies will have to adapt or risk becoming obsolete, irrelevant to modern society. The struggles we see today in many businesses, large and small, are examples of the dramatic shift for society that lies ahead. Communication technologies will continue to change our institutions from within and without. We will increasingly reach, and relate to, people far beyond our own borders and language groups, sharing ideas, doing business and building genuine relationships.
The vast majority of us will increasingly find ourselves living, working and being governed in two worlds at once. In the virtual world we will all experience some kind of connectivity, quickly and through a variety of means and devices. In the physical world we will still have to contend with geography, randomness of birth (some born as rich people in rich countries, the majority as poor people in poor countries), bad luck and the good and bad sides of human nature. In this book we aim to demonstrate ways in which the virtual world can make the physical world better, worse or just different. Sometimes these worlds will constrain each other; sometimes they will clash; sometimes they will intensify, accelerate and exacerbate phenomena in the other world so that a difference in degree will become a difference in kind.
On the world stage, the most significant impact of the spread of communication technologies will be the way they help reallocate the concentration of power away from states and institutions and transfer it to individuals. Throughout history, the advent of new information technologies has often empowered successive waves of people at the expense of traditional power brokers, whether that meant the king, the church or the elites. Then as now, access to information and to new communication channels meant new opportunities to participate, to hold power to account and to direct the course of one’s life with greater agency.
The spread of connectivity, particularly through Internet-enabled mobile phones, is certainly the most common and perhaps the most profound example of this shift in power, if only because of the scale. Digital empowerment will be, for some, the first experience of empowerment in their lives, enabling them to be heard, counted and taken seriously—all because of an inexpensive device they can carry in their pocket. As a result, authoritarian governments will find their newly connected populations more difficult to control, repress and influence, while democratic states will be forced to include many more voices (individuals, organizations and companies) in their affairs. To be sure, governments will always find ways to use new levels of connectivity to their advantage, but because of the way current network technology is structured, it truly favors the citizens, in ways we will explore later.
So, will this transfer of power to individuals ultimately result in a safer world, or a more dangerous one? We can only wait and see. We have only begun to encounter the realities of a connected world: the good, the bad and the worrisome. The two of us have explored this question from different vantage points—one as a computer scientist and business executive and the other as a foreign-policy and national security expert—and we both know that the answer is not predetermined. The future will be shaped by how states, citizens, companies and institutions handle their new responsibilities.
In the past, international-relations theorists have debated the ambitions of states—some arguing that states maintain domestic and foreign policies that aim to maximize their power and security, while others suggest that additional factors, such as trade and information exchange, also affect state behavior. States’ ambitions won’t change, but their notions of how to achieve them will. They will have to practice two versions of their domestic and foreign policies—one for the physical, “real” world, and one for the virtual world that exists online. These policies may appear contradictory at times—governments might crack down in one realm while allowing certain behavior in another; they may go to war in cyberspace but maintain the peace in the physical world—but for states, they will represent attempts to deal with the new threats and challenges to their authority that connectivity enables.
For citizens, coming online means coming into possession of multiple identities in the physical and virtual worlds. In many ways, their virtual identities will come to supersede all others, as the trails they leave remain engraved online in perpetuity. And because what we post, e-mail, text and share online shapes the virtual identities of others, new forms of collective responsibility will have to come into effect.