Tools and weapons : the promise and the peril of the digital age /
Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne.
- xiv, 434 pages ; 20 cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Introduction - THE CLOUD: The World's Filing Cabinet --
1. CYBERSECURITY: A Moment of Reckoning --
2. SURVEILLANCE: A Three-Hour Fuse --
3. TECHNOLOGY AND PUBLIC SAFETY: "I'd Rather Be a Loser Than a Liar" --
4. PRIVACY: A Fundamental Human Right --
5. NATION-STATE ATTACKS: A Wake-Up Call for the World --
6. PROTECTING DEMOCRACY: "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" --
7. SOCIAL MEDIA: The Freedom That Drives Us Apart --
8. DIGITAL DIPLOMACY: The Geopolitics of Technology --
9. CONSUMER CONCERNS: "The Guns Will Turn" --
10. RURAL BROADBAND: The Electricity of the Twenty-first Century --
11. THE TALENT GAP: The People Side of Technology --
12. AI AND ETHICS: Don't Ask What Computers Can Do, Ask What They Should Do --
13. AI AND FACIAL RECOGNITION: Do Our Faces Deserve the Same Protection As Our Phones? --
14. AI AND THE WORKFORCE: The Day the Horse Lost its Job --
15. DEMOCRATIZING THE FUTURE: The Need for an Open Data Revolution --
16. THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA: A Bipolar Tech World --
17. TECH AND THE NATION-STATE: Europe and the Future of Digital Sovereignty --
18. TECH IN A PANDEMIC: Digital Tools and Weapons in the Battle with COVID-19 --
19. CONCLUSION: Managing Technology That Is Bigger Than Ourselves --
A frank and thoughtful reckoning with how to balance enormous promise and existential risk as the digitization of everything accelerates. 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. This might seem uncontroversial, but it flies in the face of a tech sector long obsessed with rapid growth and sometimes on disruption as an end in itself. The world has turned information technology into both a powerful tool and a formidable weapon, and new approaches are needed to manage an era defined by even more powerful inventions like artificial intelligence. Companies that create technology must accept greater responsibility for the future, and governments will need to regulate technology by moving faster and catching up with the pace of innovation. Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne bring us a captivating narrative from the cockpit of one of the world's largest and most powerful tech companies as it finds itself in the middle of some of the thorniest emerging issues of our time. These are challenges that come with no pre-existing playbook, including privacy, cybercrime and cyberwar, social media, the moral conundrums of artificial intelligence, big tech's relationship to inequality, and the challenges for democracy, far and near. While in no way a self-glorifying "Microsoft memoir," the book pulls back the curtain remarkably wide onto some of the company's most crucial recent decision points as it strives to protect the hopes technology offers against the very real threats it also presents. Now revised with a new chapter on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
9781529351583 9.99
Microsoft Corporation.
Information technology--Social aspects. Technological innovations--Social aspects. Information technology--Moral and ethical aspects. Technological innovations--Moral and ethical aspects.