The Internet continues to mutate, growing larger and more complex; it has “transformed into an omnipresent and endlessly multifaceted outlet for human energy and expression…a source for tremendous good and potentially dreadful evil.” (p.3) By 2025, the majority of the world’s population will have access to all of the world’s information through a device that fits in the palm of the hand. At every level of society, connectivity will continue to be more affordable. “We’ll be more efficient, more productive, and more creative.” (p.4) The vast majority, digitally empowered, will increasingly find themselves living, working, and being governed in two worlds, virtual and physical. “On the world stage, the most significant impact of the spread of communication technologies will be the way they help reallocate the concentration of power away from states and institutions and transfer it to individuals.” (p.6) Authoritarian governments will find newly connected populations more difficult to control, while democratic states will be forced to include many more voices. The seven chapters are all future-oriented. 1) Our Future Selves. “Soon everyone on Earth will be connected” (p.13), and everyone will benefit, but not equally. Instant language translation, virtual-reality interactions, and real-time collective editing will reshape how firms and organizations interact. Mobile phones will offer safe and inexpensive options for educating children, and IT will assist advances in health and medicine in many ways. “Connectivity benefits everyone. Those who have none will have some, and those who have a lot will have even more.” (p.28) 2) The Future of Identity, Citizenship and Reporting. “In the next decade, the world’s virtual population will outnumber the population of the earth,” (p.32) as nearly everyone is represented in multiple ways online. “Identity will be the most valuable commodity for citizens in the future, and it will exist primary online.” (p.36) Businesses will proliferate that cater to privacy and reputation concerns, and a new realm of insurance will protect online identity against theft and hacking, fraudulent accusations, or misuse. “Where we get our information and what sources we trust will have a profound impact on our future identities.” (p.47) New coping strategies will be needed for corporations, the law, civil society organizations, and peer-to-peer communications, especially as states collect more biometric information through voice-recognition and facial-recognition software. 3) The Future of States. On the balkanization of the Internet, state censorship or “filtering,” issues of defending freedom of information and expression, concerns about intellectual property (especially as concerns China), the decreasing importance of size (technology empowers all parties, and allows smaller actors to have outsized impacts), groups lacking formal statehood that may establish virtual sovereignty (e.g., the Kurds), cyber-attacks and cyber war (in the future, dozens of states will have the capacity to launch large-scale cyber-attacks), the new multi-polar Code War (where ideological fault lines will emerge around free expression and open data); “states will have to contend with the fact that governing at home and influencing abroad is far more difficult now” (p.120). 4) The Future of Revolution. “The noisy nature of the virtual world will impede the ability of state security to keep up with and crush revolutionary activity, enabling a revolution to start… as connectivity spreads and new portions of the world are welcomed into the online fold, revolutions will continually sprout up, more casually and more often…groups all around the world will seize their moment, addressing long-held grievances or new concerns…democratic societies will see more protests related to perceived social injustice and economic inequality, while people in repressive countries will demonstrate against issues like fraudulent elections, corruption, and police brutality…there will be few truly new causes, merely better forms of mobilization and many more participants.” (p.122) Future revolutions may change regimes, “but they will not necessarily produce democratic outcomes.” (p.148) 5) The Future of Terrorism. Technology is an equal-opportunity enabler, and “the unavoidable truth is that connectivity benefits terrorists and violent extremists too; as it spreads, so will the risks.” (p.150) There are clear advantages to cyber attacks for extremist groups: little or no risk of personal bodily harm, minimal resource commitment, and opportunities to inflict a massive amount of damage. The technical skills of violent extremists will grow as they develop strategies for recruitment, training, and execution in the virtual world. But despite these gains, IT in the digital age also makes terrorists far more vulnerable, and cyber terrorists will have less room for error (only one mistake or weak link can compromise an entire network). 6) The Future of Conflict, Combat and Intervention. “In the future, massacres on a genocidal scale will be harder to conduct, but discrimination will likely worsen and become more personal.” (p.184) Increased connectivity will provide practitioners of discrimination with new ways to marginalize minorities and other disliked communities (e.g., the Chinese government may target the troublesome Uighur minority in western China by eliminating all Uigher content online, or by curtailing Internet access). The landscape of future war will be nothing like it has been in the past, due to automation of warfare, unmanned systems for combat, virtualized conflict, and the need to maintain cybersecurity of equipment and systems. Ultimately, technology will complicate conflict. Aggressors will take more actions in the less risky virtual front, with hard-to-attribute cyber first-strike invasions. 7) The Future of Reconstruction. New technology can turn societies upside-down and even tear them apart, but it can also help to put them back together. “Reconstruction efforts will become more innovative, more inclusive and more efficient over time, as old models and methods are either updated or discarded…Just as future conflicts will see the addition of a virtual front, so too will reconstruction efforts.” (p.217) In the emerging reconstruction prototype, virtual institutions will exist in parallel with their physical counterparts and serve as a backup in times of need, with many government functions conducted on online platforms. Conclusions: 1) “the vast majority of the world will be net beneficiaries of connectivity, experiencing greater efficiency and opportunities, and an improved quality of life; but despite these almost universal benefits, the connected experience will not be uniform—a digital caste system will endure well into the future” (p.254); 2) technology alone is no panacea for the world’s ills, yet smart uses of technology can make a world of difference; 3) “the virtual world will not overtake or overhaul the existing world order, but it will complicate almost every behavior” (p.255); 4) states will have to practice two foreign policies and two domestic policies—one for the virtual world and one for the physical world; 5) citizens will have more power than ever before, “but it will come with costs, particularly to both privacy and security.” [COMMENT: The future world according to two leading Googlers may be hyped to some degree and slanted to more net gain than loss (could self-interested Google claim otherwise?), but the myriad forecasts herein deserve close attention. Many fresh and important ideas are provided on security (revolution, terrorism, conflict, reconstruction), but nothing whatsoever on sustainability (climate change, energy, ecosystems, population, etc.) or the downside of information hyper-abundance: chaotic infoglut. On the other hand, those thinking about sustainability almost universally ignore the disruptive threats and opportunities of the new digital age.]