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Have you seen the movies: The Minority Report, The Terminator Series, The Net, and Live Free or Die Hard (Die Hard 4.0). This book is a print version of all those movies and numerous other flicks rolled into one. Sure, its written by the head honchos of Google, so I guess it deserves (or rather expects) to be read by people all over. But it could have just as well been written by someone anonymous down the street. The reason I say that is unless you have been living under a rock, it is common knowledge that there are no disconnected devices or disconnected individuals, at least in the developed world. And in the developing world, generations of people are leap frogging into the connected era with smart phones by the virtue of having entirely skipped the personal computer revolution. We are already in the era of smart money (bitcoins), smart homes, smart phones, smart cars, hyper-loop and Mars colonization in the horizon, Amazon echo, Apple Siri, and whatever else Schmidt and his team at Google are thinking up.
Don’t get me wrong, it is a decent book to understand the inherent dualities when it comes to everything around us going digital. Each chapter of the book examines how the many facets of our lives will be fundamentally transformed: ourselves, the people around us, institutions, and governments. Schmidt and Cohen also theorize on how the digitized world would influence terrorism and counter-terrorism efforts, how it can influence repressive regimes and the people who would rebel. There is also a dedicated chapter about how environmental and man-made catastrophes in the digitized world can unleash innovation to speed up the reconstruction efforts. A chapter that stood out was the one on the “Future of Revolution.” It discusses how ordinary citizens in the Arab Spring used technology to spread the message of freedom and brotherhood, and to coordinate peaceful protests despite technological and physical oppression by their respective regimes.
Each chapter in the book examines the pros and cons of the digital world. Each chapter has a “protagonist:” ourselves, or governments, good people, and bad people. By the end of Chapter 2 or 3, it gets rather repetitive and quite frankly, a little depressing. I am sure the the book was intended to be thought-provoking, as we step into the connected digital future, and it did its job! At the end of the book, I was wondering if I should relocate to a small village in a serene corner of the world, disconnect from the internet, grow my own food, and live out a simpler life with my family.
My rating is 3.0/5.0. I just had to finish it since I started it. Was not a compelling read.
Vishnu Nanduri, Ph.D. 