Instruments and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age

The moment New York Instances bestseller.

From Microsoft’s president and one of many tech business’s broadest thinkers, a frank and considerate reckoning with methods to stability monumental promise and existential danger because the digitization of every part accelerates.

“A colourful and insightful insiders’ view of how expertise is each empowering and threatening us. From privateness to cyberattacks, this well timed e book is a helpful information for methods to navigate the digital future.” —Walter Isaacson

Microsoft President Brad Smith operates by a easy core perception: When your expertise modifications the world, you bear a duty to assist handle the world you’ve helped create. This might sound uncontroversial, however it flies within the face of a tech sector lengthy obsessive about speedy progress and generally on disruption as an finish in itself. Whereas sweeping digital transformation holds nice promise, we’ve got reached an inflection level. The world has turned info expertise into each a robust instrument and a formidable weapon, and new approaches are wanted to handle an period outlined by much more highly effective innovations like synthetic intelligence. Corporations that create expertise should settle for better duty for the longer term, and governments might want to regulate expertise by transferring sooner and catching up with the tempo of innovation.

In
Instruments and Weapons, Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne deliver us a fascinating narrative from the cockpit of one of many world’s largest and strongest tech firms because it finds itself in the course of a number of the thorniest rising problems with our time. These are challenges that include no preexisting playbook, together with privateness, cybercrime and cyberwar, social media, the ethical conundrums of synthetic intelligence, huge tech’s relationship to inequality, and the challenges for democracy, far and close to. Whereas under no circumstances a self-glorifying “Microsoft memoir,” the e book pulls again the curtain remarkably extensive onto a number of the firm’s most important latest resolution factors because it strives to guard the hopes expertise presents towards the very actual threats it additionally presents. There are large ramifications for communities and nations, and Brad Smith supplies a considerate and pressing contribution to that effort.