 Hi, I'm Rachel White. I'm the Interim President of the New America Foundation and it's a pleasure to welcome everyone here tonight We're expecting even more so as people come in they might be jostling for seats a little bit I want to thank our partners on this event McDermott Will and Emory who made their beautiful space available to us Politics and pros our bookseller who are sitting out in the lobby awaiting your book purchases After the event if you haven't purchased one already and of course random house without whom none of this would have been possible Not least publishing the book. So thank you to everyone who helped us make this possible It's really an honor for us to Host this event for Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen for their really important and timely new book the new digital age Eric Schmidt if you're not familiar is that among other things the chairman of the New America Foundation and you know In a place that's about new ideas and fresh talent He sort of embodies it from the top of the board and it goes all the way down to the junior staff It was actually a couple of years ago I remember now that Eric came into our office and casually gathered some fellows and staff and Bounce some ideas off of us received a little feedback said he might be writing a book and two years later It's it's just an honor for us to put that book alongside the book of our fellows and our staff up on our bookshelves Bob Wright who's moderating tonight is a long time New America person. He's been a Schwartz fellow He's now a future tense fellow. He's the author of several acclaimed books among them non-zero and the evolution of God He's one of the smartest and funniest people I know Eric and Jared you're in terrific hands tonight and Jared I want to take credit for because this is Washington and I should take credit for everyone who's standing up on the stage And I'm not sure that I can but I'm gonna do the very best job I can I'm gonna say that it's an accident of timing that Jared neither worked at New America or was a fellow there He's he's the director of Google ideas and was a member of the staff at the director at the office of policy planning at the state department He worked for Ann Marie Slaughter our incoming new president when she was director of policy planning and he was Succeeded by Emily Parker who took his job and is now a fellow at the New America Foundation So, you know, we really one way or another he'll probably come and work for us eventually But until then we're gonna take credit for his talent and his ideas, which we surrounded all along the way A few housekeeping notes right after this we're gonna go up to the roof It's a beautiful view and that's where the wine and the food is so you'll want to make your way up there We are live webcasting this event. So Keep that in mind and and don't forget to Don't forget to buy a book. Thanks so much and welcome to our speakers Okay, well, thank you all for coming And thank you too for writing the book. I've learned a ton from it And I mean, I haven't read it, but I've listened to the audio version and that's that's probably close enough I Was I was surprised by by one thing about it I'm generally when you know, you have a book that's authored or co-authored by a captain of technology, you know Bill Gates Eric Schmidt somebody you expect a Lot of technology evangelizing You know a lot of stuff about the wonders of technology and how glorious everything's gonna be and there's this book has You know a number of upbeat places But it it also, you know parts that are kind of scary unsettling dark to stuff about You know a perpetual side low-grade cyber war being the likely expectation, you know the the How technology may facilitate the kind of online persecution of minority groups stuff like that so You know, I'm just curious first of all Eric I'm not gonna I'm not gonna ask you whether it's an optimistic book or a pessimistic book cuz then you'll say it's a realistic book, right? So let's let's get that part, but I'm curious It's been out long enough for you to have gotten, you know some feedback. Are you How are people characterizing it along the upbeat downbeat spectrum and are you surprised by that? Well, you know when we were when we sat down to talk about this a few years ago we weren't quite sure where we would end up I guess I learned that's how books are done and We ended up with a generally optimistic view of what's going to happen is five billion people join the conversation if you will That the wiring of the world which is gonna happen in the next five years another five billion We already have two billion who we take you through why that's gonna happen is an unalloyed good. It's extraordinary with respect to Medicine and education and security and so forth for many of these people and we should be very very excited about it We also are quite optimistic about technological innovation in the short term here in the develop world We have examples of that in the book as well, but we also got into some pretty serious Possible outcomes because not all governments want everybody to be empowered Not all citizens are honest and effective and wonderful and clear and transparent and not lying and You put all that together and you end up with depending on a sort of the way you read the book Either you conclude it's an optimistic book with a whole bunch of scary stuff or you just conclude It's a scary book with some techno optimism But I think from our perspective and I think speaking for you Jared as well We think that this is an overwhelmingly good set of things that are gonna happen And there's a set of issues that are quite bad that we need to get organized about to address in Cybersecurity governance bulk of the nation of the internet terrorism privacy security the usual favorite subjects, okay? What if I could just add one one piece to this part of it is when we sat down to write the book We were somewhat tired of this debate around is technology good is technology bad It didn't one seem that prescriptive to it didn't seem to account for the inevitability of the five billion new people connecting And when you look at where they're coming online It's parts of the world where there's conflict where there's instability where the governments are reasonably autocratic sometimes very repressive And our view was let's have a responsible and honest conversation about the good and the bad that awaits us Because we don't believe any of the challenges in the future need to be intractable And if we don't actually have a willingness to talk about them How are we supposed to figure out ways that we can address them? And so that's why we talked about the good and the bad and we have us a funny kind of bias Which sometimes doesn't work in Washington where we think actually Existing zero-sum solutions in society can in fact be solved by technology And so we try to identify the ones that can be solved, but we also recognize that it creates some new ones Okay, good. I do want to get some to some of the part that I consider kind of grim and depressing But I want to start with something that is that will strike Most people is quite the opposite. It's one of the sunnier parts of the book also One of the more vividly futuristic. I mean this This part makes the the Jetsons look like the Flintstones. I would say and it's about It's about people in our demographic you might say a few decades hints And and you sketch how a day might proceed. Okay an average morning might look something like this There will be no alarm clock in your wake-up routine at least not in the traditional sense instead You'll be roused by the aroma of freshly brewed coffee by light entering your room as curtains open automatically And by a gentle back massage administered by your high-tech bed. I'm totally on board so far You're more likely to awake refresh because inside your mattress There's a special sensor that monitors your sleeping rhythms determining precisely when to wake you so as not to interrupt a rim cycle But I guess if you want to remember your dreams You can do it the other way where it wakes you during the rim cycle if the dream is bad You can have that memory erased presumed. Well that that may be another decade or two out Yeah, I just attribute it to me and I you can make as much money off as you want. Okay Your apartment is an electric is an electronic orchestra and you are the conductor With simple flicks of the wrist and spoken instructions You can control temperature humidity ambient music and lighting You're able to skim through the day's news on translucent screens while a freshly cleaned suit is retrieved from your automated Closet because your calendar indicates an important meeting today You head to the kitchen for breakfast in the translucent news display follows as a projected hologram hovering just in front of you using motion detection As you walk down the hallway Okay First of all, I should say I think my job Tonight is when you guys are being sunny try to rain on your parade and when you're seeming to downbeat try to try to pick You up. Okay, so let me let me um Let me complain about this situation But the fact of the matter is everything you've just described. Yeah is either in development or available today in technology and you think The average person will choose to use at all. It's entirely up to them. It's a consumer society Personally, I would prefer to be woken up at the correct part of my REM cycle. I Would I would go for I would go for dream interruption myself And maybe that's why you're rich and I'm not But my my dreams who are not interrupted and yours were yours yours yours yours were yeah Your ears were realized and mine remained Divided dreams But I'm totally over that. I'm not bitter. I don't hold But actually I do you said it's a matter of choice and here is here is something that That maybe kind of bothers a person like me, okay It's this hologram hovering in front of me as I walk down the hallway. Okay, and and filling my head with information as soon as I get up what What kind of bothers me is the pressure is the pressure to make use of it whether I want to or not You know later in the same in this same scenario you you talk about how I'm you know You're about to interact with foreign clients through automated translation You say you take another sip of coffee feeling confident that you'll impress your clients Well, I'm only confident if I've used that hovering hologram to learn as much about right if I haven't I'm toast And my competitor will impress them and I won't I mean there is it there is a serious point here I think this is a metaphor The what happens when you wake up in the in the future is the system around you will adapt to the problems you have at hand and The next generation of computers and this is all opt-in and with your permission if you don't like it You can turn it off is going to anticipate what you need to know anticipate what problems you are and help you be more efficient In that sense the sort of duality of what do computers do well and what do humans do well will become fully realized It's important that these these examples that we use which are a speculation, obviously Are really about making you more productive There is an odd on off button in all of these scenarios and because you're a sophisticated consumer You've decided to opt into these things if it doesn't work not only going to turn it off. You're gonna get set it back to the manufacturer Okay, I mean I guess what I mean is there there you own I mean so many of these things are competitive assets in your profession I mean you almost have like in my business Journalism no choice but to do Twitter which I kind of like Twitter actually but if I didn't I'd still have to do it Which is what there's going to be an explosion of these new AI systems of one kind or another And there's gonna be huge competition from new firms that haven't even been found founded to try to capture your attention to solve The problems that you have most people would prefer to have an infinitely intelligent assistant that Organized their phone calls their problems told them what issues they had to become familiar with and then figured out how to answer Questions so that they could actually have a little bit more free time When you put it that way I'm warming up to it actually an infinitely intelligent assistant Okay So Privacy You you that that's a place where I got like mildly freaked out you you I mean the idea seems to be you'll live more and more of your life online and So more and more of it will be recorded and you you put a little emphasis on how hard it's going to be to expunge Any of it right the difficulty with actually deleting data Is is are most of us underestimating how easy it is to escape I mean Is the scenario right? We're just You know I you might as well assume that everything you know a higher and higher percentage of my daily behavior will be on the record forever Well, yeah, I mean it so let me make one point before we get into the details of your question Which is when we sat down to write what in essence is a full chapter on the future of privacy and security and Your identity we made a deliberate decision to look not just at the first two billion people who are already connected to the internet We wanted to really understand How are the next five billion people going to think about privacy and security and turns out when you go to places like Myanmar and Libya and Afghanistan and Pakistan there's really very little if any distinction between those two concepts and we came back from this profound sense of the these two topics being deeply intertwined and We we argue at Google and personally as well as in the book that it's the ultimate shared responsibility Everybody has a role to play obviously companies need to put tools in the hands of users that Safeguard their privacy and security and make it easy to understand how to use those tools Governments have a role but what we really focused on is the role of the individual now one of things that I've been shocked about is Parents put sonograms of their their children online, which means that your identity actually starts before you're born And this is actually the direction that that we're going in and I give that as the extreme example of the best way to safeguard Privacy and security in the future is to start earlier and younger than you can possibly imagine So we've talked to parents in every single one of the 30 countries that we've been do together And our view is parents need to talk to their kids About online privacy and security years before they talk to them about sex years before they talk to them about the Importance of staying away from drugs and you know responsible use of whatever else in fact one of the themes that you keep bringing up Jared is that Teenagers and physical maturity has always been an issue in society You know terrorism and young men and all that kind of stuff and now all of these tools are becoming available to Very very young people Who will in fact make mistakes for example and those mistakes will allow them to be apprehended by the police If they're doing something evil They also may make mistakes that they're going to regret when they've grown up and parents have a very important role to play in Of course you and I have been talking about this in the context of terrorism specifically Which is we've been arguing there's a long tradition of young people making mistakes And if you think about who most terrorists and criminals are it's gonna be the same in the future as it is today Which is they're largely young people under the age of 30 maybe a little bit older So two things will not change terrorists will still be young and terrorists will still make youthful mistakes The difference is they're gonna have technology and so the room for error goes up The digital trail Exists throughout their mistakes throughout their sort of responsible interactions, but either way mistakes get documented And the plot has a better chance of coming unraveled Okay, so speaking of terrorism now first of all you wrote a book about terrorism called children of jihad Is that right based on your travels in the Middle East and elsewhere? I think And there's a there's a part of the book where you describe using The online world using smartphones actually to make people less likely to become terrorists, right? I mean youths who might be disaffected and in danger of going that route and what we know of the Boston bombing suggests that Disaffection was was part of the process. Can you talk about that a little? Well, if you think about the old model in which young people were radicalized They were in back alley religious madrasa. They were in an environment where? The only information they had was rote memorization through the only teacher Who they interacted with in an era where Afghanistan comes online Pakistan comes online all of Saudi Arabia comes online Everything changes every single environment where individuals and particularly young people have mobile devices gives them an opportunity to challenge Rote memorization with critical thinking gives them an opportunity to challenge violent radical ideology with critical thinking It doesn't mean that young people won't still become radicalized Terrorism is going to continue well into the future But the ability to plant a seed of doubt in Communities is going to be easier than any other time in history and options and choices at the end of the day are our best Chance of diverting at risk young people away from recruitment into violent extremism I mean the conventional wisdom is kind of the opposite almost right the idea that technology tends to you know cocoon people into their tribes and and and you guys take issue But I think I think people are just making that up I mean the evidence so far is that people who use the internet spent a lot of time learning new things on it and It's I'm sure that the difference between sitting in your madras with the sky pounding this information into you It just doesn't make sense to me that people would would use the internet in the same way the internet is is always interesting It's always colorful people are naturally curious people get distracted. They learn something new Issues are called in questions It's sort of core belief we have is that the internet allows people to see choices and To understand that there's another way of thinking about things And again people will say oh, you know what's happening is there's this thing called a filter bubble and everything is becoming narrow and so forth I think the one the data doesn't support that and to that those arguments do not apply to terrorists who are sitting in madrasas So to me the core argument is what are you going to do with somebody who's being prostitized? Well connect him to the internet Okay, the um, I think you go beyond kind of expecting the online world to be helpful in this sense You're you're you talk about an actual kind of proactive effort I guess from NGOs or something to The discussion of you know certain kinds of apps or something that that that might be preemptively useful Can you talk about that little think about it this way? So it's always been the case that the number of people in the world that are against violent extremism has vastly outnumbered That's small albeit very loud minority that's in favor of it But for the first time if everybody has mobile phones There's actually something that they can potentially do about it and that could be as simple as speaking out But if you look at the environments that are coming online Those are environments that one could build apps for that touch on education that touch on health that touch on a lot of the very basic Social and political grievances that drive people into situations where they might end up in a violent extremist group Now again, it's important to say we're not arguing technologies a panacea for Combating violent extremism, but we're arguing that it gives us an end into communities that never existed before and it also Creates an opportunity for those that have made the decision to become violent extremists to be you know Essentially on the grid whether they want to be or not and there's one of the sort of arguments we make in the book Is that it's essentially impossible to be off the grid? So an example would be that if you're looking for somebody who's trying to evade Government and the police for whatever separate reasons a newly built house that has no internet connection In an expensive neighborhood might be in fact no connectivity whatsoever might be an indication that maybe something's going on there They they don't want people to know about this is the case of Osama bin Laden, of course If you take a look at in Boston, right the two the two young evil men In fact, we're tracked down using a whole bunch of technological solutions including extremely good police work and people make mistakes So it may very well be what one of the questions to ask about these things is why do they not occur more often? Given that there's more than two evil people in the United States There's must be a couple more right and the answer of course when you talk to the police is that they're constantly foiling Prototypical plots, you know crazy people with too many guns and bombs and so forth and you read about them Because of the nature of the technology It's easier to find these people if you're the police and and foil this ahead of time So we would argue that the connectivity while certainly empowering the knowledge revolution Also allows the legitimate police to go and stop these things before they happen. Mm-hmm. Okay Let me try out on you an argument about a connection between technology and terrorism that you don't entertain in the book But that I'm kind of persuaded by So there was a pretty much discussed article in the Guardian After the Boston bombings by Glenn Greenwald, where he noted that pretty much all the prominent homegrown terrorists and would be Homegrown terrorists site aspects of American foreign policy As as causal or as motivating, you know troops in Muslim countries Civilian casualties in drone strikes and so on and it does seem to me this this reflects Something that has changed in the technological environment. I mean if you go back to say Vietnam, you know, remember the Milai massacre, okay? First of all, it was probably rare that things like that even came to light The world just wasn't nearly as transparent. Secondly, there was no danger that anything bet You know that anyone was gonna mobilize, you know, there were people who hated America But but it wasn't the case that it was easy for a relatively small number of them to recruit online to organize online and even to reach into America and You know and and encourage and convince people to commit terrorism So it does seem like blowback from American foreign policy is for technological reasons arguably a bigger risk Then it used to be But that it's but your argument is not necessarily a causal argument There are plenty of countries that have terrorism problems, which don't have foreign policies at all Right, but but then there are other grievances I mean, but but there are and I might say I don't I want to be clear that my view is that if you randomly kill innocent people You're just making something up, right as to your reason. You're just ill evil and insane, right? Let's start from that premise. Well, there must be you don't think there's anything causal at all That's a much broader question than the book But it just seems to me that that there are in fact people who are sort of criminally insane do not appreciate that they're not actually Achieving the objective. They can't think things through. This is why we have prison I think it's a very dangerous and dangerously prescriptive argument to Suggest that people join violent extremist groups strictly because of foreign policy I believe that grievances around foreign policy can exacerbate existing grievances I believe that it serves as a justifying excuse, but I've spent time interviewing a broad range of Violent extremists both current and former I've interviewed a number of gang members. I've interviewed, you know various white supremacist Members and they all join for very similar reasons. It's a lack of belonging a lack of status some kind of you know Humiliation or alienation and then I believe that chance matters a lot Who do you happen to meet by chance on the street? Who do you go to school with do you live next to this mosque, or do you live next to this street corner? and ultimately You know if somebody comes to you and says no your life is in shambles because of something related to the Israeli Palestinian conflict not because of something that that's more directly related to your actions or your family's actions That's a much more powerful cause to adopt and so I believe it eventually becomes about that but at its core These are sent these are more broken souls with dangerous toys than they are politically motivated violence And I should emphasize that this argument is not inconsistent with your diagnosis that it's often about Disaffection people who become unstable are going off the rails for some reason the question is kind of what sort of outlet Does that find and the more compelling a narrative you allow the recruiters to you know to construct the more likely It is to be to be terrorism let me let me ask you about a sentence to get back to the Question of the lives of people like this in the future online world. This is this is a very kind of Powerful sentence that I think merits unpacking the shift from having one's identity shaped offline and projected online To an identity that is fashioned online and experienced offline will have implications for citizens states and companies what Can you flesh that out? We make it a sort of core argument that There's sort of two different kinds of societies. There's the physical world Which we're all obviously familiar with we're all citizens of countries There's police and laws and so forth and there's also cyberspace in cyberspace You'll have by our count multiple identities multiple names multiple so forth and for various reasons you probably have more than one And the identity that you have there will also be constrained by the physical world So for example if you start doing things which are completely illegally inappropriate In cyberspace somebody in the physical world is going to come visit you because they're gonna get a subpoena get your IP address Similarly, if you're in the physical world and you're a terrible dictator you're busy doing terrible things to your citizen People in cyberspace will use that to put enormous pressure on you to accuse you of genocide and sort of hurting your people and all that and Provoke an international reaction the two have slightly different rules and they keep each other in check But of course that there's a lighter side of this too If we accept the fact that with five billion new people coming online in the next decade every individual in the world will Increasingly split their time between the physical and the digital environments think about all the people in the world Who for a variety of reasons have lost the opportunity to function in a physical world the internet gives them a second chance And let me give what I think for both of us we would agree is the most powerful example of this which is we were in Pakistan and Met a group of women who had acid thrown on their faces by the Taliban It's the worst thing that probably either of us have ever seen and through no fault of their own It's a result of local norms women who bear physical scars on their face as a result of such an atrocity Have to live with a stigma in the physical world that essentially doesn't allow them to work doesn't allow them to get married Essentially does not allow them to function in society in any meaningful way So they all lived in this house together and they were being trained in entrepreneurship They'd become reasonably tech savvy. They had smartphones and they were able to essentially have a second life. No pun intended online They were running businesses one of them met somebody and eventually was able to get married because the internet knows no scars The internet gave them an opportunity to function in society based on the merits of what they were doing and saying and that's an extraordinarily powerful thing okay This would conversation wouldn't be complete without some reference to Google Glass I would say you exercise admirable restraint in the book You know a great opportunity to promote Google Glass. You don't mention it that much So I'm gonna kind of force it into the conversation through Reference to a couple of recent things One I would call favorable publicity one less. So the favorable a Robert Scoble Well-known tech writer with it with is highly respected says I will never let he's tried it You know and he says I will never live a day of my life from now on without it Or a competitor he says so you will you will want to keep the updates coming I guess and then on the other hand from the the Daily Mail and Britain which is You know doesn't shy away from dramatic and some would say sensationalistic headlines Google's sinister glasses will turn the whole world into search giants spies Now would you like to either confirm or deny that for starters? Or Actually the question I kind of have Daily mail is always did they in fact get a copy of Google Glass to write that review or did they just sort of write if you're Familiar with British journalism. You know that the answer is that was not necessary The But the question is you know you've talked I think you've talked about the creepiness line or something The idea that you know There's this this vague place where things just get too creepy and a company shouldn't go there It's probably not in the company's interest to go there It goes up to that point naturally enough, but I'm I'm I'm curious You know in the context of privacy and and all these other issues Are there things with Google Glass that you're choosing not to operation lies to keep it from getting too creepy or You're just gonna let it go Well, we're acutely aware of these sort of questions and So I have a copy of Google Glass And it's a phenomenal product the way it works is it For somebody with glasses it fits over your current glasses and they'll fix that over time but if you don't have glasses just normal glasses looking and There's a screen up here in your upper right hand corner and you can look up and you can actually see the equivalent of a full screen And you talk to the Google Glass So you say hello, you know basically hello Google Glass and it will respond back So it's not only a triumph of technical engineering at the hardware level But it's also a good proof point of how good our voice recognition Software is and our voice synthesis stuff there because there's no other way to talk, you know to program the thing So it'll do things like you know take photographs It will you know show you videos and it will answer your questions the people are particularly excited about the fact that it's an essentially an Android based platform is should everything be right and So this particular variant of this platform is Extensible and so we have a developer program and starting about a week ago We started to give these copies out which is how Robert got his and a few others These were the early Google I o users and what we've told them is that we want them to build applications and we want to see what kind of apps they build and The sum of all of that will then guide what we do, you know How do how do we bring the product forward? So at the moment? I would say that this is an extraordinary technological leap It's fascinating to use There are obvious issues, right which anybody in the room could think about And I would also further argue that that is these things become general but sort of body wearable computers There'll be a new social etiquette, you know, when is it appropriate to to have these things on and off? Etc. Mm-hmm But so the answer to your question is we're going to see how the next some months goes We see how people really use it. It's too new a thing to call a question I do find the people who announce with the same kind of headlines as the Daily Mail that this stuff should be banned Innovation is all about trying to invent new things Let's allow the innovation to actually be used a little bit before you attack it America is all about innovation. It is the salvation over our economy guys Okay, have you tried Google Glass? I have and of course I always think of things through the the geopolitical lens and for some reason I when I tried it found myself thinking about wearables in Saudi Arabia Go figure and you know, it's interesting when you when you think about Google Glass You also can think about watches you can think about various types of Shoes very various types of smart wearables and Saudi Arabia the Mojhabarat basically spend all day and You know very noticeable outfits trying to follow women around to catch them doing quote un-Islamic things and and punishing them as a result It's a tragic story of What's playing out there gender-wise, but you can imagine in the future Saudi women having wearable watches that look like normal watches that have an anti Mojhabarat app that functions much like uber in the sense that with uber you can watch the taxis sort of approaching you So the women in Saudi using you uber too long. It's very I like uber I find it very useful So you can imagine you know that women will be able to look at their watches and see where the Mojhabarat are and where they're Moving and when one is close by they can send a pulse to somebody Nearby to let them know you better sort of kind of a heads up and in a more serious example when we were in I think it's serious You agreed with me that it was I do agree. I do agree. I like your idea And an even more serious example How about that when we were in Libya? We met with a set of school children who had used Google Maps to plot the locations of the NATO bombings Because they figured that's where the bombings would be so they can get themselves to school not get killed So you sit there and you wonder how important are these technologies? Well, and somebody like using Saudi Arabia's example. It's incredibly important. Can I give an even more serious? So so we were in Iraq in Afghanistan where you have huge IED problems and the problem with IEDs It's essentially a game of whack-a-mole for Devices that don't cost very much to make and there's very little being done to address the supply So you can imagine a situation where people in the village who are trying to avoid these They know where people are placing them and so they avoid a particular bridge or they avoid a particular location So you can imagine wearable devices being used to also plot and track Where IEDs are being laid so that way people in the village can warn each other Let's say you see somebody in the distance who's walking near one Maybe they don't have access to the same screen that you do but they have a device You can send them sort of an alarm pulse saying no don't walk in that direction We know David Brennan his book the Transparent Society many years ago talked about I think people with you know cameras mounted on their On their hats or something and noted that if you're somebody who wants to commit a crime against somebody that is a real deterrent And if you imagine a world in which you know for all you know Anyone has Google Glass or maybe anyone with glasses has Google Glass or someday presumably contact lenses, right? So so for all you know anyone has it I guess As I said, we're now in the realm of speculation We don't know how society will respond to all of these kinds of technologies I can tell you that many many American citizens are happy that the police now have police cameras in the cars Recording the traffic stops. It's protection for the citizen. It's protection for the police All right, so there's an example where it's a net win for everybody Okay, and by the way one more thing on Google Glass, you know Eric. I think a few years ago I heard you on the radio getting Supervisionary as I recall there was some reference to some day when you might have you know We're Google or some other search functionality might directly interface with your brain I don't think you were advocating it necessarily But let me let me just that was actually a joke. Okay. Well, it shouldn't be but it shouldn't be you know We're maybe closer than you realize according to the New York Times You know Samsung is working on this this thing You know people put this thing on the head It'll have electrodes and they will be able to control their tablets This is a really stylish look electrodes coming out of your head looks like you're walking down the street You would look better if you had actual hair curlers in your hair I would say then you look in the thing if you've seen the picture But anyway, the Times wrote that you could in principle hook that up to Google Glass so that you know Your commands are actually given to you too. That's where you're ready. You've already got that on a joke That was a joke. Okay, Bob. You could imagine again I like the idea of ending on a positive note with glass you could imagine a scenario in environments where Young people are not allowed to go to school by their by their parents because they have to work in the field or You know work at home. This is a constant problem You could imagine in that scenario those children working in the fields or working at their parents store wearing Google Glass and Absorbing content as part of a multitask education and work exercise Obviously not as optimal as going to school first time But this fits the theme of our book which is in the future despite all the challenges with more technology People have more options and more choices I think the trend again the general answer to Google Glass and these others is that people have an enormous Thirst for information and entertainment And that all of these technologies will be driven by consumer demand for that And I think that's roughly a summary of what's what much of what we'll see people also want to be more productive, right? They want they want this infinitely intelligent assistant and so forth and to the degree that you can combine all those in New products and services our industry will move very much forward. Okay, so back to the world abroad You talk a lot about revolutions. I mean, we're all familiar with the Arab Spring And your sense is that partly for technological reasons It is going to be easier and easier to start revolutions, right, but then What happens next what we say that it's easier to start but harder to finish right Jerry's looked at this And he makes the point now over and over again that it takes decades For people to develop the skills the human skills the leadership skills So to actually run a country right these complicated, you know human systems And so the techno optimist would say oh, you know, let's empower everyone leaders emerge and everyone will you know We'll all go by a moment in practice. What happens is sort of the inverse You end up with the apparent nature of revolution along with a lot of increases of expectation You have transitional the leaders who are facing an almost impossible job They don't have systems of government and they have very high expectations of their citizens While we're trying to find that the leaders that have spent the time to learn how to lead how to inspire You know all the things that we expect out of a modern leader and we talk a lot in the book about You know how these revolutions will play out outside of the Middle East in North Africa And we made it this was all happening so fast while we were writing this book that we made the decision In the chapter on future of revolutions to start with a statement We know the story of the Arab Spring the you know Let's look at what happens next in another parts of the world and to add to Eric's point about the Challenges of how technology for all that's extraordinary about it can't invent leaders that aren't there and can't create institutions that have never been developed If you think about the 57% of the world's population that lives under an autocracy What that populate with those populations will have an ability to do in the future is to provoke in ways that we've never seen before And the way to think about this is let's take a country like Iran Iran is 72 million people clearly a dictatorship In the physical world in the future They'll still be roughly 72 million people But there might be 500 million voices online because every one of them will have multiple emails multiple social networking profiles multiple, you know video chat Services, etc. And this creates a lot of noise and a lot of activity So why does this create a dilemma for dictators in the future, which by the way is a good thing? It creates a dilemma because dictators in the future are going to have a hard time distinguishing between what's noise and what's real and they're going to overreact They're going to underreact and where they do so it's going to get people into the streets But it's very hard to tell whether you're dealing with a social movement of million people or three guys Tom Dick and Harry we're just really good at marketing themselves right in the virtual world So here you are and you're this befuddled dictator and you're not quite sure because if you go and you actually attack these Three or a million you're not quite sure you might actually cause the whole thing to happen because now they've got martyrs and off they go So this distinction between the physical nature the kinetic nature of the world Versus the online world makes it almost impossible to understand what the truth is if you're trying to have a command and control economy And going back to our theme of choices and options We don't love the term cyber dissident because it gets thrown around all the time in our view is if somebody's a dissident that implies Taking a physical risk but what you have in the future is the option for individuals to be virtually courageous in Support of those people who are dissidents on the street taking risks And so you have the ability to be an activist on your lunch break You have the ability to be an activist online But not a dissident in the street and so it gives more people and more citizens under autocracies an Opportunity to play a role in that collective action is what's missing in today's world where people are not yet connected And Eric you alluded to something that I found interesting in the book You know we think of the modern age as an age of growing transparency where it's harder to keep you know Anything unknown But you note that in the virtual world when it comes to things like cyber attacks Locating the origin of the attack is often very hard and you know in the in the realm of kind of things that have appeared in the news That more or less fulfill prophecies in the book since the book went to press you've probably thought of this Syrian electronic Army thing where somebody supposedly in the name of you know pro-Syrian government grassroots Sentiment is is you know hacking Twitter feeds whatever they're doing Some people say no, no, it's it's the Syrian government Actually for all we know it's a false flag operation. It's al-Qaeda. I mean you know He's right. You just don't know and you there are many many interesting thought experiments So we know for example with respect to cyber attack and Jared makes the argument by the way that It's perfectly possible that you can have two countries that have good physical relations actually having Mutual cyber war between the two attacking each other. It's called espionage, right? We have had that for years in society It's just a different form of it to imagine a scenario where? You have a some form of a cyber attack which leaks into a physical attack In other words, somebody makes a mistake and this could occur and this is obviously speculation So let's say somebody gets hurt because somebody was screwing around with something and it sort of got out of out of control And all fingers point to China because they're the guilty party in today's you know zeitgeist according to who to the US say so now what happens is The US is trying to decide whether this is an act of war and whether they should retaliate so the president of China calls up and says Sorry, we didn't do it We're actually not guilty this time and I'm telling you the truth this time as opposed to the previous conversations How do we know? Because a proxy setup can be done that a third party can create the impression that it was China Even though they're in fact not guilty this one time and is this mainly a short-term problem and kind of in the long run We usually find out I mean kind of know who did Stuxnet the New York Times knows that the attacks came from China So is it a short-term problem or an enduring problem with? It all of these things are races between one group and another It's very hard to very well to very well cover your tracks when Google was attacked We were able to figure out that it was the Chinese government or government-sponsored activities Through a series of very very subtle ways to find out how they had masked themselves So it's probable that you could figure it out, but only with a lot of work Right, and so it would there would be a delay. Well, you'd actually figure out who really did it It's technically possible to fully mask where you come from And there's two other points that that are particularly Alarming about the nature of cyber warfare or cyber terrorism in the direction that it's going We've seen a lot of different versions of cyber attacks a lot of Gradual escalations of cyber attacks what we still don't know is at what point does a cyber attack become so problematic That it results in a physical world response for instance Could you imagine a drone strike against a cyber terrorist if you had evidence that that cyber terrorist was preparing to do something? Particularly destructive and had a track record of doing so and we should be clear that that these cut this sort of leaking into the physical space They're called SCADA attacks SCADA And it's where the boundary between the internet transfers to something that we are it's life critical for us The electric power grid the water system or a more likely scenario something involving banking or financial those kinds of systems We talk about it in the book But I also want to say before we scare people too much that people are working very very hard To fix these problems and fix these vulnerabilities So it's not like this isn't this isn't this is not necessarily a likely scenario. It's a possible scenario And I'll say one more scary thing and then make a positive point as well. I just to keep the trend going And we talk a lot about coordinated physical attacks in one conversation with one type of expert And then we talk a lot about what people in the technology sector describe as a cyber Pearl Harbor And these are isolated conversations But you know the real coordination we should fear is a cyber attack that makes it easier to conduct a physical attack and And that's that's sort of the the future nightmare scenario the good news is that yes in the future it might be easier for An individual to be involved in low-grade mischief or low-grade Cyber attacking but to do the the caliber of attack that we're describing Requires the types of coordination and planning that terrorists in the future will have to use the internet and have to be Connected to do and you know We believe that it's going to be very hard to go through all the steps without at some point making a mistake Or somebody in the network making mistake and the example want one example We like to pull on we had an interview with a group of Navy SEALs About a senior al-Qaeda commander in Pakistan that they've been following for a number of years and then lost track of he'd been very good about discarding phones discarding SIM cards and then one day he popped up again Because he had a 45-minute conversation with the same phone using the same SIM card with his cousin in Afghanistan To tell him how excited he was to attend his wedding So he had been careful professionally but screwed up socially and that unraveled the whole plot by the way He was 26 years old younger than both of us Don't remind me The I mean the reason I ask about You know the ability to ultimately trace these things is you know, this is it's pretty scary stuff I mean you're right that maybe the worst thing is a cyber attack that paves the way for a physical attack But with Stuxnet when you start them, you know, you're doing physical stuff inside a nuclear Processing facility you you can imagine a cyber attack That by itself does some pretty bad stuff. So I wonder about the prospects of it of a treaty And and it seems to me it hinges very much on the question of whether there is there is at least in the long-run Accountability you would need a verify in order to have a proper functioning treating you'd have to have verifiability That's the core aspect of all of the nuclear treaties is that there's a mechanism the IEA in Vienna Austria, which I in fact visited at Jared's suggestion Actually exists for precisely this purpose It's unclear to me how you'd structure that today, but we can be hopeful that you would be able to of course You could imagine the equivalent of NATO for cyberspace that there's a certain caliber of cyber attack that Signatories agree is so destructive to critical infrastructure that if one nation is attacked all the nations involved in this cyber NATO Would it would agree to you know do something? Well in general it's it's interesting the way you you talk about the possibility of Kind of multi-state groups with a common interest coalescing in cyberspace For purposes of doing stuff on on cyberspace and you know good guys bad guys authoritarian governments We have lots of examples. We talk a little bit about the diaspora and a lot of the world is organized around diasporas You know that this group over here was displaced 100 years ago. They have common language and history and so forth We worry by the way that this will is one of the things that will lead to Balkanization, but we also recognize that that diaspora provides connectivity wealth transfer culture and protection You know of the history in a bad situation Okay, we're gonna go to questions From the audience. I want to ask a final thing very very much related to this in terms of Ethnic minorities there's there's there's something hopeful and something scary in the book Scary thing has to do with what you could call virtual apartheid The idea that okay, maybe you're not repressing groups in the physical world as you traditionally might but you you do things to disenfranchise or disempower them in the cyber world flipside is virtual statehood where you imagine it you imagine I think you imagine the Kurds using cyberspace to you know to realize some some approximation of Nationalist aspirations, which could could be a positive thing depending on how played out You want to just talk about that a little and then we'll go to the audience Yeah, well when we Eric Eric mentioned the Balkanization of the internet is one possible possible challenge But one thing as you mentioned that we also touch on in the book is in the future and this is a good thing by the way It's gonna be impossible for bad regimes to attack their people in the physical world Without the world seeing it doesn't mean they won't still do it But everything will be caught on camera and be fed into data permanence Regardless so while some dictators may still crack heads in the physical world other dictators may decide it's not worth Paying the international price for this It's you and I would say that the oversight the the sort of fact that these things are being recorded is a Significant sort of reason why people will be a little bit less deadly Because they know that we can start the trial the war crimes trial while they're still killing people and we do fundamentally by the way I believe there's less Autocrats in the world willing to do it with the world watching than there are with the world not watching so the the sort of plan B For some of these dictators in the future when everybody's connected as you can imagine them slowing down the internet connection of Particular group possibly cutting them off every time they try to do a financial payment It shows up as fraud DDoS attacks malware all these things and it make it look like technical difficulties now The challenge of this is it's incredibly disruptive to these people's lives And it's not going to evoke the same emotional reaction from the world Especially when they make it look like technical difficulties now the flip side of this is again going back to the theme of more options more choices presumably You know different ethnic religious and other minority groups will have more ways and more people helping them So in the book we talk about transnational medallers These are altruistic people around the world who in cyberspace choose to take up the plight of a particular group That's being discriminated against and there's lots of people who want to help and lots of people who can't help Okay, all right. We're ready to take questions. We have a couple of circulating microphones. I think so I guess we'll start right here Just started my question for Eric. What was the division of labor on the book the Guardian recently had a review of And it was basically a positive Review but then when it hypothesized it has negative things It suggested that there were interns that were working on the book and they did a substantial part It said each chapter goes into relentless almost mind-numbing detail Which leads went to guess that the first drafts were the product of teams of those smart endlessly obliging Ivy League interns Who are filling in time before becoming Fulbright or road scars and then it develops that and every time it doesn't like This conversation we had earlier about in the British press Okay, the people who wrote this book were Jared me and my daughter Sophie Who's not an intern and well credited in the book. Is that a clear answer? Yeah, okay We also use Google Docs and we traveled to 30 plus countries And and so the way we actually wrote it is that we use Google Docs and if you haven't used it It's a phenomenal way to write a book Because basically we would just sit there and have conversations and I would be editing and he'd be editing at the same time It didn't matter where we were we would often do this next to each other yelling at each other as we were typing sometimes throwing things but and So anyway, I could say enough things about Google Docs, so I hope that's a clear answer and I found their comments sort of offensive Because they just made it up and you know if you're gonna write a review don't make stuff up Right here Hi, I I taught school for 30 years, and I got out just at the point at which Technology was beginning to truly make an impact which meant that the kids knew more than the teachers do And that's probably true today to an even greater extent. Let me ask you this Do you see the school's responsibility in terms of dispensing access to information Knowing that kids have these things at home, and they're going to look at stuff anyway Do you see that as expanding or contracting? Yes, and do you see? Yeah You understand what I'm getting at should they draw the line lower or higher with respect to you allowing Kids within their institutions to access information. Let's say a kid wants to look up or do research on Al Jazeera That might in some communities get that kid into some trouble because they've you know They're their philosophy is to let you know what the other side's thinking I don't want to minimize the issues of terrorism, but we're talking about education in general, right and The role of the teacher becomes more important when there's infinite information not less So you would conclude from reading our book that we believe that teachers and particularly human teachers and judgment are more Important in the presence of all this information and that we are delighted that all of this tools and techniques and so forth will get there But the best scenario by far is an empowered teacher and excited student and an infinite amount of information I don't think you'll find an argument any argument counter to that and up from our perspective Okay, the woman in black right there in the aisle seat Hi, thank you It's a really interesting talk and I look forward to reading your book I have two questions. The first one is about Information processing so obviously with all this technology and the access to information that it brings There's a lot of information out there And so there's a real question about who processes that information and how they do it So with the Boston bombings as you probably know on reddit There was a lot going on a bunch of people One of whom turned out to actually Have been dead were accused within these forms of being responsible for the bombings So the first question is so how do we think about information processing? And how does that affect how we think about the limits of technology and then the second question is about Google ideas So I've been fascinated by your organization. Let's do let's do one at a time Okay On the first one, I think Everybody remember Richard Joule and the Olympics Right this poor fellow was was terribly maligned by the traditional media So this notion of a rush to judgment is not a new concept. We saw it in this, you know, horrific bombing And I would when I look at what happened in Boston I see it as an almost perfect example of how the online community and the police should work together The police worked very quickly and under enormous pressure to identify videotapes, which they released to the public at the point At which the videotapes were released to the public the the speculation which was sort of random and interesting Right, which is based on crowdsourcing had some facts and with those facts within an hour or two If you go through the sequence that the two the two bombers Freaked out went and they eventually do a carjacking. They take this poor guy drive him around for an hour and a half He escapes and cleverly or because he's terrified leaves his cell phone in the car And the police then using that information track the car Which ultimately leads to the death of one and the injury of the other who ends up in the boat and is now captured So to me it doesn't get much better than that in terms of responsiveness and everybody working together What you learn about with the reddit example, and this is true in general is Take a breath Right consider. There's all there are choices the Internet is not a perfectly accurate or an insincenious basis You saw this with the AP Twitter example where the way it worked was that the trading machines were actually programmed to take the tweet And act on it without comparing these are computers by the way not humans because a millisecond in that world is you know Billions of dollars or profits well in this case they fail to consider an alternative in their computer and therefore they made a trade That was inappropriate So the fact of the matter is that that there's no substitute for human judgment and human judgment does not occur in a Millisecond you have to actually look at it to think about it And this problem is not going to go away and hopefully we're going to learn to actually not jump on people within a second So quickly about Google ideas So as I said a really interesting organization, but it's not easy to find a lot of information about what you guys do online And so I'd love to hear a little bit more maybe you talk about in the book But a little bit more about what Google ideas do does And how the rest of the Google platform particularly, you know all the technology you have that gathers all that information Feeds into what you do. Well first of all you can go to Google.com slash ideas And I want to I'll give a quick answer because I want to I want to give other people a chance to ask questions But the if you think about how technology companies Look at look at the world. There's core business. There's philanthropy and there's public policy If you think about the next five billion people coming online They live in environments where they encounter a set of challenges that don't fall neatly in any of those first three boxes Typically challenges related to violence. So Google ideas looks to build data visualization tools and actually visualize data That helps expose math and disrupt some of the illicit networks that are perpetuating that violence, you know everything from pirate groups to You know organizations Distributing malware, etc. And then we go out and build products that are designed to help address them We also just did a refresh of the site last week. So take a look at it again In the black and white horizontal stripes Hi In a world where here in DC, we don't even get our cell phone coverage How do you think on we can get the infrastructure given the political dialogue on even the infrastructure Bank on to realize your visions about even Google Glass or other ideas that you have The reason your cell phone coverage doesn't work very well here is a combination of regulatory issues a lack of competitive carriers Etc. I'm a member of the White House science group And we actually released a proposal a year ago to solve this problem in a different way using technology sharing of spectrum So I think there are good technical solutions coming and unfortunately, they won't occur fast enough given the rate at which people are using Digital devices laptops and so forth your question is particularly appropriate because The the adoption of these mobile devices is happening so much faster than everyone expected and the networks are themselves not scaling And there's great concern that the in the United States that there's going to be a running out of bandwidth problem in aggregate in the next Few years people are working very hard on it The right there in the in the aisle Thanks. Hey, um, so you talked at length about how Modern technology and particularly the increasingly increasingly wiring parts of the world are Very advantageous to both terrorism and counterterrorism efforts and at the same time how Innovation for example the use of use of Google Maps to plot out the IED sites You know are helping people in parts of the world but by innovating using this technology to come together and Better themselves, but taking that away from abroad and taking it into the United States It seems like the laws here are rather antiquated when it comes to computer technology and just this week across the street a Senate committee just approved a resolution to the electronic communications privacy act so that a warrant will actually be required to receive an email or For investigators going to email and at the same time the computer fraud and abuse act of 1984 is being Called for reform by by tons of people especially in the wake of Aaron Swartz now when we're looking at trying to use Technology in places less modernized places across the world in order to bring about change What do you think needs to be done in the United States with current computer laws in order to ensure that innovation isn't going to be stifled at home? That's essentially a sort of Google public policy US question and the sort of the summary here is that In the book we don't talk too much about the specifics here Because we take the position that in a well-functioning democracy the democracies will sort of sort those issues out And that that you may see a difference in one country for another. I read a survey for example I'm not endorsing it that 75% of Americans now support street cameras, right? You can imagine the the people who are opposed to this and their arguments and how that will play out We've had That's right. So the facts of the matter is you but you but my point is without without going to specific policy prescriptions I think you can see that one coming You can see the arguments in favor and arguments against in a well-functioning democracy, which America certainly is With respect to a constitution and the rule of law and so forth will sort it out It's never perfect as you pointed out many of the laws in the 80s and 90s that they were written did not anticipate the kind of mobility You're sort of in version three of all of that, but they're relatively easily dealt with and I should also say that that When you come across an advocate for one thing, you know an advocate for security and advocates for privacy They're often arguing from a position without understanding that it's a two-edged sword So for example, very strong encryption would allow you and I to have a very very secure Communication if we were criminals if we were dissidents if we were martyrs or if we were just doing normal business So the question that you want to ask is this very strong encryption has been Has been invented Do you can if you could figure out a way to ban very strong encryption from evil people and only allow good people? And if there were sort of an E and a G on their foreheads then this would be easy But since we can't quite write the rule that way it becomes a very difficult public policy thing to find that balance Okay, we have time for one or two questions depending on how Concise they are. Are you concise? Okay It's been fascinating discussion. Oh, thanks. I'm not sure about the conciseness that was that strictly speaking absolutely necessary We have a very expensive connectivity model in this country For reasons you've already alluded to in one of your answers What are your thoughts on an open access model similar to our federal highway system where the federal government plans? Manages builds and pays for it Again a very complicated question today. The majority of wireless connectivity in America is on something called Wi-Fi It's actually not on the 3g and 4g networks Wi-Fi as you know does not roam whereas the 3g and 4g networks roam So it looks like so that's sort of fact number one The Obama administration is pushing hard for and in this president's speech late last year for an additional some number of hundred of megahertz of Frequency to be reallocated from what people like myself would say are poor or not very interesting uses to help solve this problem And that's caught up in all sorts of debates. The FCC has taken a position in favor of it So at the problem we have at the moment is that the government has decided to sell spectrum rather than give it away And by selling the spectrum they've concluded that they have a valuable good That then drives up the prices for us as citizens because it's a private sector purchase So you could imagine other models So for example in in many other countries which face the spectrum shortage I've said to them privately and in fact publicly that don't go to the auction model Because you're just raising the prices for in an economy which has a lot of very inexpensive people and the strategic value of getting everyone Interconnected in terms of economic growth and taxes and so forth Overwhelms any local specific money that you're going to make from these auctions My my personal intuition, which is not Google's position on this Google doesn't really take a position on it is that we're probably better off with many more Generalized open access models for spectrum taking some of the poorly used spectrum and Reserving it for these new uses and especially these share uses and I think the sum of that could produce a huge explosion in spectrum Okay, final concise question right there Thank you About planning a seat of doubt that perhaps there's a causal relationship between disseminating information around the world and promoting democracy But now we do leadership training with young people around the world Including your favorite hot spots Kyrgyzstan Iraq Pakistan Afghanistan Egypt, etc What we're seeing is you know that? Bubble you have where you don't have leaders prepared when you do cause the revolution You don't have the next generation prepared We're working with that and creating these new leaders But what we're hearing from them is their attraction to the old command and control economy that they see in China Because what they're looking for is economic stability. I mean that's the primary well capitalism is inherently unstable That's why it's called capitalism. It's the birth and death of other countries Maybe you could ask a question so the question is do you really think that the free flow of information is going to ultimately result in? democracies increasing around the world because Kids are just as well hearing about China in what a great model it is and China is actually having us do training Bring leaders from around the world there for training. So let me answer your question with With an anecdote from a trip that we took to Myanmar formerly known as Burma about a month ago So Myanmar has less than 1% of its population connected to the internet extraordinarily low number and until 18 months ago It was a horrible dictatorship and now it's a transition to something and I'll reserve judgment about whether that's democracy or not Despite the fact that less than 1% of the population has access to the internet everybody we've met had heard of it They understood what the internet was as a set of values as an idea and as a concept even though They'd never experienced it as a user or as a tool and their understanding of the internet was not the Chinese version of the internet Not the Iranian version of the internet was the internet that we know so then go back to the 57% of the world's population We alluded to before that's living under an autocracy as though if you follow that same model Where the populations know what the internet is and understand it in a western democratic context What happens when they come online with expectations of an internet that looks like that and instead find themselves Experiencing a filtered and censored internet. We don't know so I would answer this by saying that Societies as a group will organize themselves around the needs of the middle class of that society That it will not be possible to be a completely brutal command and control dictator anymore The only possible counter example of this will be North Korea and we're working on that We'll see what happens there, but aside from North Korea I think it's pretty clear that the middle class and the middle class will demand at least some amount of Choice economics some variant of capitalism some variant of trading with other partners and so forth So so you won't be able as a dictator to have complete control of the society if that's a step toward democracy I'll take it Okay, well, thank you all for coming. Are you gonna stick around sign? Okay, so so you can get books signed. Thank you I Would encourage you to read the book whether or not you get it signed. It's very rich I could have spent another couple of hours asking you questions about really important stuff So thanks for writing. Thank you all