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From Microsoft's president and one of the tech industry's broadest thinkers, a frank and thoughtful reckoning with how to balance enormous promise and existential risk as the digitization of everything accelerates.
“A colorful and insightful insiders’ view of how technology is both empowering and threatening us. From privacy to cyberattacks, this timely book is a useful guide for how to navigate the digital future.” —Walter Isaacson
Microsoft president Brad Smith operates by a simple core belief: When your technology changes the world, you bear a responsibility to help address the world you have helped create. In Tools and Weapons, Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne bring us a captivating narrative from the top of Microsoft, as the company flies in the face of a tech sector long obsessed with disruption as an end in itself, and in doing so navigates some of the thorniest issues of our time—from privacy to cyberwar to the challenges for democracy, far and near.
As the tumultuous events of 2020 brought technology and Big Tech even further into the lives of almost all Americans, Smith and Browne updated the book throughout to reflect a changed world. With three new chapters on cybersecurity, technology and nation-states, and tech in the pandemic, Tools and Weapons is an invaluable resource from the cockpit of one of the world’s largest tech companies.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 10, 2019 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781984877727
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781984877727
- File size: 1328 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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July 1, 2019
A survey of the dangers and possibilities of the information age, four decades on. "Companies that create technology must accept greater responsibility for the future." So argues Microsoft president Smith, writing with communications director Browne, in this overview of some of the ways in which their industry has changed the world for better or worse. For worse: The computer age is tremendously costly in terms of energy. The authors open with a vision of a single data center about 150 miles inland from Seattle, with 2 million square feet of space housing "hundreds of thousands of server computers and millions of hard disks," girded by rows of 20-foot-tall emergency generators should the nearby hydroelectric plant on the Columbia River fail. More is to come: As the authors note, the automobile of a decade hence will be a rolling computer, perhaps autonomously driven, consuming huge quantities of data on the cloud. Who benefits? Whether tech or automotive, in that instance, corporations benefit--and corporations, suggest the authors, can't be counted on to regulate themselves alone. Smith and Browne consider some of the more vexing issues that technology has raised--e.g., facial recognition software, the gathering of personal data, increasing governmental demands for the release of personal information, the use of social engineering and available tools to manipulate popular opinion and elections ("one of our biggest challenges was how to talk publicly about the threats" since no one wants to tick off the Russians--or Donald Trump), and always the specter of artificial intelligence becoming so self-directed that the singularity arrives, that long-imagined scenario where machines find that there's no real need for people to gum up the works. The authors also discuss the Snowden affair and the need for open data, stressing how important it is that "data not become the province of a few large companies and countries." Though it raises more questions than answers, a book for technologists and future-watchers to ponder.COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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