Ringling College Library Association presents Jared Cohen

Jared Cohen has been to North Korea, but not South Korea.

"Which gives you an idea of my travel habits," he told the Ringling College Library Association Town Hall Lecture audience Feb. 20 at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Center. 

The President of the think tank Jigsaw, formally called Google Ideas, spoke on the intersection of technology and international politics. He said he has travelled to over 100 countries, many of them centers of conflict. Yet, even in these remote areas, technology maintains a vital foothold in people's lives. 

"The developed world may have created technology, but the developing world teaches us to use it," Cohen said. 

He told the audience how he has seen phones change the way farmers in rural Kenya decide which market to go to and how the internet has allowed victims of acid attacks to resurrect their identities. 

In North Korea, where the punishment for possessing a smuggled smart phone could be death, Cohen said the technology is still prevalent. 

"They know what that phone offers them that they wouldn't otherwise be able to have," he said. 

However, Cohen cautioned that just as technology changes the way people navigate their everyday lives, it also changes the way countries communicate and even engage in conflict. 

"We all watch the news and we all see the world," he said. "The world is unpredictable and this is the era technology becomes ubiquitous, (so) what affect does that have on geopolitics?"

For some in the audience, the answers were eye opening. Guests occasionally murmured as Cohen weighed in on the complications of cyber warfare. 

"The biggest challenge with all this chaos is there is an absence of rules," he said. "There are no deterrents in the cyber domain."

But Cohen said he didn't want to intimidate listeners, instead he said he wanted to motivate the audience to understand their lives as a combination of both digital and physical experience.

For example, he asked audience members to consider their health.

"How healthy we are is an aggregate of our digital and physical environments," he said.

Just as one would be unlikely to take a 10% chance of contracting a physical virus, people should be aware of the kind of risks they are taking online. 

"Everything that I said to you should incentivize you to stay safe online in the same way you would offline," Cohen said.