Book Cover - Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Historic period
Past Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne, Foreword by Pecker Gates
Published by Penguin Press (September 10, 2019)
ISBN-ten: 1984877712
ISBN-xiii: 978-1984877710

"When your engineering changes the earth, you lot bear a responsibility to help address the world yous have helped create."

While sweeping digital transformation holds nifty promise, we take reached an inflection point. The world has turned information applied science into both a powerful tool and a formidable weapon, and new approaches are needed to manage an era defined past even more than powerful inventions like artificial intelligence. Companies that create engineering science must accept greater responsibleness for the future, and governments will need to regulate applied science by moving faster and catching upwards with the fast pace of innovation.

These are challenges that come with no pre-existing playbook, including privacy, cybercrime and cyberwar, social media, the moral conundrums of AI, large tech's relationship to inequality and the challenges for democracy, far and near.

While in no manner a self-glorifying "Microsoft memoir," the book opens up the drapery remarkably wide onto some of the company's almost crucial recent decision points, as information technology strives to protect the hopes technology offers against the very real threats it also presents. There are huge ramifications to communities and countries, and Brad Smith provides a thoughtful and urgent contribution to that effort.

Read More and Buy the Volume »
(Please support your local bookseller.)

A Look Inside Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age

A day nosotros've long predictable has finally arrived. Today, the new book that Carol Ann Browne and I have written, "Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Historic period," publishe[d] by Penguin Press and Hodder & Stoughton in North America and English languages around the globe. We chose the phrase "Tools and Weapons" to capture the paradox of technology. While tech companies like Microsoft create products and services to serve humanity, that same tech is being weaponized to inflict harm. And more indirectly, many of the issues people fence today, similar income equality, trade, immigration and globalization, are all enabled and fueled by technology.

These challenges affect united states of america all, no affair where we alive, fostering a new age of feet. Tools and Weapons starts with the proposition that if your technology changes the globe, yous bear a responsibility to help the globe navigate these changes. We wrote the book to make these bug more accessible to people and to examine ways to address them.

Equally we worked on the book, Carol Ann and I reflected on several stories drawn from electric current events, issues faced by Microsoft, and history. Why history? As we delved into the issues, we realized most have parallels from the past. The horse lost its job to the car, trains forced interstate regulation, the public revolted confronting the radio in the 1940s, and people feared that early cameras and the advent of street lamps would invade their privacy. But what's different today is the speed of change. In a style, the problems created past today's technology aren't unprecedented, things are but moving a lot faster.

Tools and Weapons opens with a tour of what has go the earth's filing cabinet – the cloud. While the cloud is the underpinning of near every aspect of society, most people don't empathize what information technology truly is: a massive fortress of concrete and steel. And while there is no cloud without a information heart, these complexes are shrouded in mystery. We realized that to sympathise how the world really works today, yous need to visit a data center. That's why we open the book past taking the reader on the type of bout that typically is bachelor only to a few industry insiders.

I hope that when people read this book, they volition proceeds not only a better understanding of the forces changing our earth, simply also a sense that in that location is a promising way forward. It is a path that requires the unabridged technology sector to change and accept on more responsibility. It's as well a path that requires governments to do more than, to move faster and change also. Fundamentally, information technology's a path that requires that we piece of work together in very concrete ways to bring together people who create technology, people who use technology, people who govern engineering science, and people who are impacted past information technology. Every bit the volume illustrates with concrete and colorful stories, we believe that this will provide the best approach to address bug that range from privacy and security to the development of bogus intelligence and the impact of engineering on our jobs and international relations betwixt nations, including the U.Due south. and Red china.

—Brad Smith, September x, 2019 on LinkedIn

Nearly the Authors:

Brad Smith. As Microsoft's president, Brad leads a team of more than ane,400 business, legal and corporate affairs professionals working in 56 countries. He plays a fundamental role in spearheading the company's work on critical issues involving the intersection of engineering and society, including cybersecurity, privacy, artificial intelligence, human rights, immigration, philanthropy and environmental sustainability. The Australian Fiscal Review has described Smith as "one of the technology manufacture's almost respected figures," and The New York Times has chosen him "a de facto administrator for the engineering manufacture at large."

Ballad Ann Browne is a Senior Director, External Relations and Executive Communications at Microsoft. She joined Microsoft in 2010 and is an experienced communicator with a wide background in writing, video, multimedia, and social media work. Browne and Smith accept collaborated on a broad variety of content, including their Today in Technology weblog series.

Tools and Weapons was The Globe Economical Forum's Volume Club pick for October, 2019.