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The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business
by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Knopf, 2013 ($26.95)

Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, and Cohen, director of Google Ideas and a foreign policy wonk who has advised Hillary Clinton, deliver their vision of the future in this ambitious, fascinating account. For gadget geeks, the book is filled with tantalizing examples of futuristic goods and services: robotic plumbers; automated haircuts; computers that read body language; and 3-D holographs of weddings projected into the living rooms of relatives who couldn't attend. Not surprisingly, the authors are bullish on how connectivity—access to the Internet that will soon be nearly universal—will transform education, terrorism, journalism, government, privacy and war. The result, they argue, though not perfect, will be “more egalitarian, more transparent and more interesting than we can even imagine.”

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Anna Kuchment is a contributing editor at Scientific American and a staff science reporter at the Dallas Morning News. She is also co-author of a forthcoming book about earthquakes triggered by energy production.

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Scientific American Magazine Vol 308 Issue 4This article was published with the title “Recommended: The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 308 No. 4 (), p. 84
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0413-84b

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