Future through the eyes of Eric Schmidt: “The New Digital World”

Eric Schmidt - Chairman of the Board of Directors of Google, has long held the position of executive director of the company. Sergey Brin and Larry Page invited him, because Eric Schmidt perfectly understands the direction of technology development, where all of humanity moves with them. During the years of managing the company, he did not have time to travel around the world, read, talk to people (such as Julian Assange) to comprehend what he saw - and write his own book. Now he has this time. It is very remarkable that the just-released book by Eric Schmidt “The New Digital World. How technologies change people's lives, business models and the concept of states were quickly translated into Russian.

Reading Eric Schmidt’s reasoning about the future is very unusual. Because he himself is one of those who embodied and embodies this future into reality. We read not just a forecast, but a plan of action, a program for the development of technologies, as it is seen by Eric Schmidt and his like-minded people Larry and Sergey.

The book begins with a household and detailed description of what the morning of a simple person, “a young professional living in an American city” looks like in a few decades.

Morning awakening will not be accompanied by an alarm clock, at least in its traditional sense. Instead, you will be awakened by the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, the sunlight that burst into the room after the automatic curtains opened, and the gentle back massage that will make you a high-tech bed. When you wake up, you will surely feel rested, because the special sensor built into the mattress tracks the rhythms of your brain and determines exactly at what moment you can be awakened without interrupting the REM sleep.
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Your apartment is a real electronic orchestra, which you conduct. A few hand movements and voice commands - and you adjust the temperature and humidity, turn on the music and light. Waiting until a cleaned and ironed suit appears from the automatic wardrobe - judging by the electronic calendar, today is an important meeting - you are viewing the latest news on translucent screens. Then head to the kitchen for breakfast, without stopping to watch the news, because one of the holographic images thanks to the motion sensor is projected all the time in front of you as you walk down the corridor. Take a cup of coffee, a hot bun, just baked perfectly in your oven with a moisture control function, and look at the new emails on the holographic “tablet” projected right in front of you. The central computer brings to your attention a list of household chores that robots are going to tackle today, and you approve of it.

... Moving through the kitchen, you - damn! - hurt your foot on the corner of the cabinet. Immediately grab a mobile device and run the diagnostic application. Inside the device there is a tiny microprocessor that scans your body with submillimeter waves like x-rays, but with a lower level of radiation. A quick analysis shows that the toe is not broken, it is just a bruise. And you refuse to offer the device to request a medical report from the nearest doctor.

You have quite a bit of time left before the moment when you need to go to work - naturally, on an unmanned vehicle.

In this description, some of the augmented reality technologies implemented in Google Glass, as well as unmanned vehicles, which most Americans are now ready to buy from Google rather than Ford or General Motors, are already showing up, because Google has more confidence than automakers .

Do not have a cup of coffee? But the tactile alarm clock built into the heel of your boot is already gently squeezing your foot - a signal that if you delay, you will be late for the morning meeting.

“If you are among the people with the highest incomes in the world (and this is the majority of people in rich western countries), then many of these technologies will be at your disposal. Probably, with some you have already dealt. Of course, someone will be able to give up cars and fly to work on unmanned helicopters, ”the author writes.

From home comfort, Eric Schmidt moves on to the future of state and personal data. This part is largely based on his interview with Julian Assange, the full text of which was published on Wikileaks in April 2013.

We met with Assange in June 2011, when he was kept under house arrest in the UK ... In the course of the interview, Assange shared with us his two main considerations on this topic, with both assumptions related to each other. First: human civilization is based on the totality of the results of our intellectual activity, therefore, it is correct to record these results as carefully as possible in order to provide information to the next generations of people. Secondly, since different people will always try to destroy or hide part of this common story in their own interests, the goal of every person who values ​​truth and strives for it is to record as much information as possible, prevent its destruction, and also make it as accessible as possible to all residents. the planets.

“Why do government organizations seek secrecy?” He asks a rhetorical question. And he answers it himself: because their plans, if they become known to the general public, would be rebuffed, and secrecy helps them to embody them. He whose plans do not contradict the interests of society, does not meet with opposition, and he has nothing to hide, he adds.

Hardly anyone would argue that Google and Wikileaks, by and large, have the same mission in this world. Both of these organizations "declassify" information, making it available instead of a limited circle of people to a large number of people.

In his book, Eric Schmidt devotes a lot of influence to politics and analysis of repressive dictatorial regimes, the activities of the opposition, including in Russia. He talks a lot about how dictatorial regimes can also use new technologies for their own purposes: “hack” mobile devices before they are sold, collect more information about their citizens than before the digital era, “calculate” those who installed application devices to circumvent censorship.

Representatives of the state will conduct occasional random checks and searches of computers for the presence of encryption programs and proxy applications, the possession of which will be punished with fines, imprisonment, or mean that they are included in special lists of offenders. And after everyone who downloaded and installed funds to circumvent censorship, suddenly life becomes more complicated: he cannot get a bank loan, rent a car, or pay through the Internet without encountering any problems. The agents of the special services will go to school auditoriums of schools and universities in the country and seek to exclude everyone whom the tracking system for online activity found to download prohibited software onto their mobile phones. At the same time, repressions may spread to acquaintances and relatives of these students in order to discourage such behavior from as many people as possible.

In general, residents of authoritarian states will have a hard time. Moreover, the governments of such countries act very intellectually, using more subtle forms of control over society.

Dobson lists a variety of means by which modern dictators concentrate power in their hands, while creating the appearance of democracy: a pseudo-independent judicial system; tame "popularly elected" parliament; wide interpretation and selective application of laws; media landscape, allowing the existence of opposition media, but only as long as opponents of the regime recognize the existence of tacit boundaries that can not be crossed. According to Dobson, unlike dictatorships and rogue states of the past, modern authoritarian states are "consciously and skillfully created projects that are carefully constructed, strengthened and constantly improved."

What should citizens do in such conditions? This is what the chairman of Google recommends.

Even in countries with repressive regimes, where spyware is used to the full, virtual persecution of dissidents and distribution of phones with pre-installed spyware programs, goal-oriented people will find ways to send their message out of the country. This can be done using smuggled SIM cards, clandestine “mesh networks” (i.e., a set of wireless devices, each acting as a router, resulting in a data network with many intermediate nodes and not one central hub) or “invisible “Phones whose design does not involve recording conversations (for example, in the case when all voice calls are made using VoIP technology) and allows you to use Internet services anonymously.

As the different states control and filter the Internet more and more within their national borders, a kind of network fragmentation will occur, said Eric Schmidt.

What began as the world wide web will begin to resemble the world itself, divided into parts and filled with mutually exclusive interests. On the Internet, it will be necessary to obtain a certain equivalent of visas. This can be done quickly, in electronic form: the mechanism ensuring the transfer of information in both directions will start after a user who wants to get on the Internet of a particular country, registers and accepts certain conditions. If China decides that all foreigners need a visa to access the Chinese Internet, human relations will sharply weaken, it will become more difficult to engage in international business and conduct analytical research. And if we add to this internal restrictions, in the 21st century there will emerge an analogue of the Japanese doctrine of Sakoku (“closed country”) known in the seventeenth century, aimed at the almost complete isolation of the country.

Of course, this is the worst scenario that I would like to avoid. But one thing that cannot be avoided in any way is large-scale cyber warfare, that is, espionage and sabotage operations in computer networks conducted on the instructions of government services. These operations have already begun now, and in the future their scale and consequences will only grow.

Today, very few countries have the ability to conduct large-scale cyber attacks (the rest are hampered by the lack of fast communication channels and technical talents), but in the future dozens of new participants, both attackers and defenders, will be drawn into these actions. Many experts believe that a new arms race has begun, in which the United States, China, Russia, Israel, Iran and other countries are actively investing in building up their technological capabilities and maintaining high competitiveness. In 2009, at about the same time that the Pentagon issued a directive on the creation of the US Cyber ​​Command Command (USCybercom), Secretary of Defense Robert Gates proclaimed cyberspace as the “fifth area” of military operations along with land, sea, air and space. Perhaps in the future in the army will be a virtual analogue of the elite special forces "Delta", and the new administration will include the Ministry of Cyber ​​War. If this seems to be too much of a stretch, think of the creation of the Ministry of National Security as a reaction to the September 11 attacks. All that is needed is one serious case of national scale, and the government will have vast resources and a mandate for all the necessary actions. Remember how, as a result of the terrorist attacks of the Irish separatists, video surveillance cameras appeared in every corner of London, which most of its inhabitants approved? Of course, there were people who were dissatisfied with the fact that their every step on the street would be recorded and saved, but at the moments when the nation is in danger, the opinion of the “hawks” always prevails over the opinion of the “pigeons”. Post-crisis security measures have traditionally been extremely costly, since the authorities are forced to act quickly and make additional efforts to ease the anxiety of the population. Some experts estimate the annual budget of the new “cyber industry complex” in the range of $ 80–150 billion.

New technologies will help and terrorists.

Most likely, a weapon of the terrorists of the future will be some combination of a domestic unmanned aerial vehicle (“drone”) and a mobile IED. Such a drone can be purchased online or at any toy store. On the market now there are simple helicopters with remote control. On the eve of Christmas 2011–2012, one of the most popular gifts was the Parrot toy quadrant AR.Drone. It is equipped with a video camera, and is controlled by a smartphone. Imagine its more complex version: with a Wi-Fi network generated “on board”, armed with a homemade bomb ... This is a completely new level of local terrorism, moreover, it is not far off. In the near future, practically everyone will have access to the knowledge, resources and technical skills necessary to assemble such an apparatus. Thanks to autonomous navigation systems, which we have already talked about (and you can buy them everywhere), it will become easier for terrorists and criminals to carry out attacks with the help of drones that find the target without human intervention.

Although new technologies bring new risks, we can protect ourselves against them with the help of the same new technologies. For example, if we are afraid for our government, then you can just simply make a backup, writes Eric Schmidt, although it looks somewhat naive.

In the future, people will begin to create not only backup copies of their data, but also government backups. In the gradually emerging prototype of reconstruction, in parallel with real institutions, virtual ones will exist, at the same time fulfilling the role of their backup copy - just in case. And instead of a building, it would be enough for the ministry to have a cloud-based information repository and an online platform for physical storage of documents and state functions. If the city destroys the tsunami, all the ministries will continue their work in the virtual space until their activity is fully restored.

For such a future to become real, Schmidt writes, we need fast, reliable, and secure networks, technically advanced platforms, and 100% public access to the Internet. Sooner or later, all this will become a reality.