Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google released a new book on Tuesday, which he co-authored with Jared Cohen, a former US State Department terrorism adviser who now heads up Google Ideas. In the Book, “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business,” the authors considered what the world would look like if everyone were to be connected online. They wrote:

This is a book about technology, but even more, it’s a book about humans and how humans interact with, implement, adapt to and exploit technologies in their environment, now and in the future …

For all the possibilities that communication technologies represent, their use for good or ill depends solely on people. Forget all the talk about machines taking over. What happens in the future is up to us.

These are the six predictions that Schmidt and Cohen make regarding the digital future.

1. Sex education classes will be taught alongside online privacy classes.

Parents will … need to be even more involved if they are going to make sure their children do not make mistakes online that could hurt their physical future. As children live significantly faster lives online than their physical maturity allows, most parents will realize that the most valuable way to help their child is to have the privacy-and-security talk even before the sex talk.

2. This one we have heard before, the entire world will be online by 2020.

What might seem like a small jump forward for some — like a smartphone priced under $20 — may be as profound for one group as commuting to work in a driverless car is for another,” they write. “Mobile phones are transforming how people in the developing world access and use information, and adoption rates are soaring. There are already more than 650 million mobile-phone users in Africa, and close to 3 billion across Asia.

3. There will be no more ‘breaking-news’ for news organisations, as it will become impossible to keep up with the real-time information sources like Twitter.

Every future generation will be able to produce and consume more information than the previous one and people will have little patience or use for media that cannot keep up.

News organizations will remain an important and integral part of society in a number of ways, but many outlets will not survive in their current form — and those that do survive will have adjusted their goals, methods and organizational structure to meet the changing demands of the new global public.

4. “Cloud” data storage will become the norm, which will change how we view privacy.

The possibility that one’s personal content will be published and become known one day — either by mistake or through criminal interference — will always exist. People will be held responsible for their virtual associations, past and present, which raises the risk for nearly everyone since people’s online networks tend to be larger and more diffuse than their physical ones.

Since information wants to be free, don’t write anything down you don’t want read back to you in court or printed on the front page of a newspaper, as the saying goes. In the future, this adage will broaden to include not just what you say and write, but the websites you visit, who you include in your online network, what you ‘like,’ and what others who are connected to you say and share.

5. With the expansion of the web, revolutions will sprout in nations that have oppressive governments, “more casually and more often than at any other time in history.”

With new access to virtual space and to its technologies, populations and groups all around the world will seize their moment, addressing long-held grievances or new concerns with tenacity and conviction. Many leading these charges will be young, not just because so many of the countries coming online have incredibly young populations … but also because the mix of activism and arrogance in young people is universal.

6. There will be increased use of technology for terror. Conversely, a web presence will make those terrorists easier to find.

Many of the populations coming online in the next decade are very young and live in restive areas, with limited economic opportunities and long histories of internal and external strife. … Terrorism, of course, will never disappear, and it will continue to have a destructive impact.

But as the terrorists of the future are forced to live in both the physical and the virtual world, their model of secrecy and discretion will suffer. There will be more digital eyes watching, more recorded interactions, and, as careful as even the most sophisticated terrorists are, even they cannot completely hide online.

[Source: CNN News]