What is the connection between technology and democratic principles? In March, the former U.S. secretary of state and Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Condoleezza Rice met with Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen at the school to discuss their new book, Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business, open a new window, that explores communication technology, foreign policy, and geography. Schmidt is the executive chairman of Google, and Cohen is the director of Google Ideas. Here are some excerpts from their conversation:
Condoleezza Rice, You said this was a book on technology. It’s also a book that is about people. What inspired you to write the book, and what motivated you two to collaborate on it?
Jared Cohen: Eric and I met in Baghdad in 2009. He wanted to know what it was to travel in a warzone and if technology was even relevant. We traveled to over 40 countries after the Iraq trip to see how technology was disrupting autocracies and changing the nature of violence on the ground.
Eric Schmidt: I would like you to imagine a Secretary Of State. Imagine having a technology department that could actually implement technology to fix the problems that you were facing, such as censorship, communication, and the empowerment of citizens and women. You had a problem on your mind, and all you could do was use the tools of foreign affairs.
In our industry, it seems that we should have a higher purpose. Why can’t the tech industry solve these problems? I was shocked by the horrible situation in which most people find themselves in the world. This was in terms of governance, how women are treated horribly, and the corruption in every level of government.
The book is based on the question, “Why not identify both what will happen to them and what the bridges are?” I’d say that after two years, the message we have in the end is a very optimistic one.
We can discuss the fiber optics and computation that will be available to the well-off world. In the developing world, we don’t have any connectivity.
It is amazing how the arrival of smartphones has changed the lives of people who didn’t have electricity or running water.
Solve their health problems and their business problems. We can meet all of their needs, and in the next five to ten years, three or four more billion people will be joining us.
Rice: I’ll name a few countries. Please tell me what you think about the impact of technology on those countries and how it will affect foreign policy. North Korea is one of… the most difficult cases that I can imagine. What on earth were you doing in North Korea?
Schmidt: They have 22 million people and a million mobile phones. It’s an extremely poor country with a horrible, horrific government. If we could only get them to turn on just a little about the Internet, maybe we could start to open up this country.
The only way to open a closed country without a revolution – which is very difficult – is for the leader to decide that the government is more in need of information than the conflict new ideas would bring.
We concluded that you only need to create doubt. North Korea is the only true autocratic country […]. From birth, they believe that their leader is God, King, Religion, etc. We only need to create a little doubt, and the country will collapse.
Cohen: In the future, there will still be autocracies and horrible societies. The Internet has literally eliminated the true cults, which are totalitarian societies. This is similar to how scientists managed to eradicate smallpox. You won’t see a cult again once North Korea has changed, as the ability to create societies without doubt is no longer possible.
Rice, you also have regimes that are more integrated into the international system but that do terrible things to their people. Let’s look at the suffering in Syria. Can technology help a Syrian refugee?
Cohen: I just came from the Syrian border about three weeks back. I visited a few refugee camps located in northern Lebanon. It turns out that one of the most difficult problems for refugees is the bureaucracy within refugee organizations. The bureaucracy is so difficult and frustrating that many refugees have to go back to Syria in order to obtain documentation.
Syria is a major bug for our technology optimism because there are literally thousands of videos coming out of Syria. Each one is more horrifying than the last. It doesn’t increase the political will of states to act. The horror will not stop without some state-led intervention.
My Syrian friends told me some horrifying stories that I had not heard since 2004 or 2005 when I lived in Syria about government checkpoints, where they stopped you and asked for your phone. They put a gun on your head and demand your login details. Then, they look at the posts you have made on your wall or those of others.
My friend said that their brother was shot in the head after posting a page supporting the revolution on his social media platform.
The technology can’t solve this problem. It’s a brutal regime that’s doing horrible things. We need to understand that we are far from that out here and that there are limitations. This is a solution, but states are the dominant unit of the international system and must take the lead.
Schmidt: We all begin with the idea that individuals are empowered, but what’s new is that citizens from around the globe have been assigned. It’s the first time that people have been so designated. It’s mostly good, but there are some negatives as well. Where does it break down?
In these countries, they have shut down Internet access because they are at war. That’s always bad. Knowledge and awareness are not the same as shooting guns. If you want to be able to predict the future and know everything about it, then we will know all of these massacres. We will learn all the horrors. It’s still going to be necessary to find a way to stop it.
You can now do it by using an international [cry out]. We write in the book that you can start the criminal trials of war criminals while they are fighting the war. There’s also evidence that such awareness reduces the number of deaths. It would be cynical to talk about Ukraine by saying that only 78 were killed in the square, and they now have a new government. You can imagine that if there had been 10,000, 20,000, or 30,000 deaths. Awareness and knowledge may reduce the number of deaths and limit the behavior of despots, but they don’t stop them. This is the question that I have about our foreign policy. Is there a solution to this problem other than traditional foreign policies?
