Original Proposal

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Click here for the original proposal including extensive biographies of our authors, Eric Schmidt (Executive Chairman of Google, which he served as Chief Executive Officer from 2001 to 2011) and Jared Cohen, (Director of Google Ideas, Google’s NYC-based think tank).

The Reference Materials section below contains book reviews by the NY Times, The London Guardian/Observer and the London Telegraph as well as an interview of the authors about their new book by the Huffington Post.

Testimonials include --

BILL CLINTON -- "Every day, technological innovations are giving people around the world new opportunities to shape their own destinies. In this fascinating book, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen draw upon their unique experiences to show us a future of rising incomes, growing participation and a genuine sense of community -- IF we make the right choices today." (original emphasis on IF)

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT -- "This is the book I have been waiting for: a concise and persuasive description of technology's impact on war, peace, freedom and diplomacy. The New Digital Age is a guide to the future written by two experts who possess a profound understanding of humanity's altered prospects in a wireless world."

HENRY KISSINGER -- "Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have produced a searching meditation on technology and world order. Even those who disagree with some of their conclusions will learn much from this thought-provoking volume."

TONY BLAIR (Former UK Labor Prime Minister) -- "This is a book that describes a technological revolution in the making. How we navigate it is a challenge for countries, communities and citizens. There are no two people better equipped to explain what it means than Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen."
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johnkarls
Posts: 2034
Joined: Fri Jun 29, 2007 8:43 pm

Original Proposal

Post by johnkarls »

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The New Digital Age by Google's Erich Schmidt & Jared Cohen
Originally proposed by johnkarls » Sat May 04, 2013 5:48 am -- 57 views before being transplanted here


I propose we read “The New Digital Age: Reshaping The Future Of People, Nations And Business” by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen (Knopf 4/23/2013) – $15.48 from Amazon.com – 336 pages.

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ERIC SCHMIDT is Executive Chairman of Google, which he served as Chief Executive Officer from 2001 to 2011. A member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Schmidt also chairs the board of the New America Foundation and is a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ (an independent postgraduate center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry and home to such luminaries as Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, J. Robert Oppenheimer, George Kennan, and Noam Chomsky).

JARED COHEN is The Director of Google Ideas (a global initiatives think tank in NYC to apply technological solutions to problems faced by the developing world), an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Advisory Board of the Director of the U.S. Government’s Counterterrorism Center. Cohen is a former member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff 2006-2010 where he was one of the youngest members in history when he started under Condoleezza Rice and one of the few kept on by Hillary Clinton and where he focused on counter-terrorism, counter-radicalization, Middle East/South Asia, Youth, and Technology -- three months before he left to join Google 9/10/2010, he was reported to have the third largest number of Twitter followers in the U.S. Government behind President Obama and Senator McCain. Cohen is a former Rhodes Scholar 2004-2006 and the author of “One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide” (Rowman & Littlefield 2006) and “Children of Jihad: A Young American’s Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East” (Penguin 2007). According to the New York Times Magazine, he was one of the principal architects of what has become known as “21st century statecraft.”

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In an unparalleled collaboration, two leading global thinkers in technology and foreign affairs give us their widely anticipated, transformational vision of the future: a world where everyone is connected -- a world full of challenges and benefits that are ours to meet and to harness.

With their combined knowledge and experiences, the authors are uniquely positioned to take on some of the toughest questions about our future: Who will be more powerful in the future, the citizen or the state? Will technology make terrorism easier or harder to carry out? What is the relationship between privacy and security, and how much will we have to give up to be part of the new digital age?

In this groundbreaking book, Schmidt and Cohen combine observation and insight to outline the promise and peril awaiting us in the coming decades. At once pragmatic and inspirational, this is a forward-thinking account of where our world is headed and what this means for people, states and businesses.

With the confidence and clarity of visionaries, Schmidt and Cohen illustrate just how much we have to look forward to -- and beware of -- as the greatest information and technology revolution in human history continues to evolve. On individual, community and state levels, across every geographical and socioeconomic spectrum, they reveal the dramatic developments -- good and bad -- that will transform both our everyday lives and our understanding of self and society, as technology advances and our virtual identities become more and more fundamentally real.

As Schmidt and Cohen’s nuanced vision of the near future unfolds, an urban professional takes his driverless car to work, attends meetings via hologram and dispenses housekeeping robots by voice; a Congolese fisherwoman uses her smart phone to monitor market demand and coordinate sales (saving on costly refrigeration and preventing overfishing); the potential arises for “virtual statehood” and “Internet asylum” to liberate political dissidents and oppressed minorities, but also for tech-savvy autocracies (and perhaps democracies) to exploit their citizens’ mobile devices for ever more ubiquitous surveillance. Along the way, we meet a cadre of international figures -- including Julian Assange (Wiki Leaks) -- who explain their own visions of our technology-saturated future.

Inspiring, provocative and absorbing, The New Digital Age is a brilliant analysis of how our hyper-connected world will soon look, from two of our most prescient and informed public thinkers.

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