Eric Schmidt Predicts China's Hacker War
This week the soon to be released book "The New Digital Age" authored by Google's Eric Schmidt has been reviewed and spilled early by the Wall Street Journal. Their review includes words from the author regarding the future digital dominance of China across our planet, especially as it pertains to the United States in the very near future. This is not the first time Schmidt has predicted political waves crashing in before they've gone ahead and happened – an essay by Schmidt and colleague Jared Cohen called "The Digital Disruption" (published in 2010) correctly predicted Arab Spring (more or less). Could this be the next great digital high tide coming towards us?
Speaking back in the essay from 2010, Schmidt and Cohen let it be known that soon "governments will be caught off-guard when large numbers of their citizens, armed with virtually nothing but cell phones, take part in mini-rebellions that challenge their authority." This prediction essentially became a hard and fast real-world situation when events such as the Free Iran movement spread and were maintained by and with social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Everyone knew what the green flags meant because the internet let them know it.
In the new book authored by Schmidt, "The New Digital Age" is a chapter in which it's detailed how the next generation will see the information age take full hold of political uprisings and movements between countries across the planet. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Schmidt also make clear that he believes China will be a "dangerous and menacing superpower" in the not-to-distant future. This book is also go-authored by Schmidt's 2010 cohort Cohen, the book saying similar things to the article back then. This new text notes that they believe "the disparity between American and Chinese firms and their tactics" will be putting the USA at a real disadvantage when it comes to future business and politics.
Cohen and Schmidt assirt that the United States will be at a disadvantage against China because the country is not willing to "take the same page of digital corporate espionage" for two reasons: moral values and laws. The "American sense of fair play" will be the reason China gains an upper hand because in the USA "the laws are much stricter (and better enforced)". In addition to being able to dominate the USA in several digitally-influenced ways quite soon, Schmidt and Cohen note that China will be seeing "some kind of revolution in the coming decades". What that revolution will be is anyone's guess. Schmidt's book will be released in full with details galore this April – can't wait!