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We made public the fact that we were calling on the attorney general to personally take action to permit Microsoft and other companies to share publicly more complete information about the national security warrants and orders we received and how we handled them.
we] comply with our legal obligations to disclose customer information in response to valid, compulsory legal process. At the same time, we place a premium on protecting our customers’ privacy, and therefore have set up rigorous processes to review all disclosure demands we receive to ensure that they fully comply with applicable law.”
Expanding the effort even further, we joined with AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Yahoo in forming an alliance called Reform Government Surveillance.
The FBI, in Apple’s view, was threatening data security by seeking to establish a precedent that the U.S. government could use to force any technology company to create software that would undermine the security of its products. Other technologists backed Apple’s position.
With public anxiety about terrorism running high, it would have been easy for Microsoft to support the government’s position or simply distance itself from the debate.
At the same time, we recognized that the solution to this problem was too important to be left to a bunch of tech CEOs. So we also called for a multi-constituent body to debate the problem and work toward a real legislative solution—one that protects security while also allowing for law enforcement access when appropriate.
Customers must trust that we will protect their privacy, but we must be transparent about the legal conditions in which we won’t. Similarly, public officials must trust that we can be counted on to help them protect public safety, so long as the rules protecting individual freedom are clear and followed consistently.
Based on this experience, Hazelwood speaks of trust as being like holding a small bird in your hand. If you hold it too tightly, you will crush the bird; hold it too loosely, and it will fly away.
E + SV + SR = T/t Empathy + Shared values + Safety and Reliability = Trust over time When we were in the midst of negotiating the acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016, their CEO Jeff Weiner turned to me and said, “Consistency over time is trust.” That
Trust is more than a handshake. It’s the agreement, the bond, between users of digital services and the suppliers of those services that enables us to enjoy, be productive, learn, explore, express, create, be informed.
Economist Douglass North, who was co-recipient of a Noble Prize, examined this very question. He found that technical innovations alone are not enough to drive an economy to success. Legal tools like courts that will fairly enforce contracts are necessary—how else to ensure some random warlord doesn’t come along and take away your property?
Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans against unreasonable search and seizure, is based on timeless values that must be upheld through enforcement laws that require continual updating in the face of social, political, economic, and technological change.
It’s fascinating to see how the messaging service Snapchat, created by a twenty-three-year-old, has exploded in popularity thanks to its ingenious value proposition: Snapchat lets you share a photograph with friends knowing that the photograph will disappear from the Internet after twenty-four hours.
Some futurecasters predict that the so-called singularity, the moment when computer intelligence will surpass human intelligence, might occur by the year 2100
humans and machines will work together—not against one another. Imagine what’s possible when humans and machines work together to solve society’s greatest challenges—disease, ignorance, and poverty.
Three Laws of Robotics to serve as an ethical code for the robots in his stories. Asimov’s Laws are hierarchical, with the first taking priority over the second and the second taking priority over the third.
First, robots should never harm a human being through action or allow harm to come to a human being through inaction. Second, they must obey human orders. Third, they must protect themselves.
And computer pioneer Alan Kay quips, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” In the AI context, he’s basically saying, Stop predicting what the future will be like; instead, create it in a principled way.
Bill Gates’s Internet Tidal Wave memo, which he published in the spring of 1995, foresaw the Internet’s impact on connectivity, hardware, software development, and commerce.
Cynthia Breazeal at the MIT Media Laboratory has devoted her life to exploring a humanistic approach to artificial intelligence and robotics, arguing that technologists often ignore social and behavioral aspects of design.
We want not just intelligent machines but intelligible machines; not just artificial intelligence but symbiotic intelligence.
AI must have algorithmic accountability so that humans can undo unintended harm. We must design these technologies for the expected and the unexpected.
we shouldn’t think of technological intelligence as artificial, but rather as intelligence that serves to augment human capabilities and capacities.
from the mid-1990s to 2004, the PC Revolution did help to reignite once-stagnant productivity growth.
productivity data fail to measure many of the ways technology has enhanced human life, from improvements in health care to the way tools like Wikipedia have made information available to millions of people anytime, anywhere. Think
Would you prefer to have $100,000 today or be a millionaire in 1920?
Belgium dramatically increased its industrial production to a level rivaling that of the United Kingdom by leveraging key British innovations, investing in supporting infrastructure like railroads, and creating a pro-business regulatory environment.
industrial productivity in Spain significantly lagged the rest of Europe as a result of Spain’s slow adoption of outside innovations and protectionist policies that decreased its global competitiveness.
that differences between rich and poor nations can largely be explained by the speed at which they adopted industrial technologies.
YouthSpark initiative, which has helped more than 300 million young people intensively access computer science and entrepreneurial training.
One team had decided to help some of the 115,000 refugees from war-torn Syria who had poured into Egypt since 2013. They’d built an app to help them find assistance upon their arrival in Egypt.
combination, they reminded me very much of Zocdoc, a New York City–based company that provides similar health-care services. Zocdoc became one of the celebrated American unicorns—nonpublic tech startup companies worth $1 billion
Unfortunately, in many underserved parts of the world, public and private attention is focused on attracting Silicon Valley companies rather than on growing local tech entrepreneurs. Successful entrepreneurs in developing nations often tell me they can’t even get meetings with their president or prime minister.
The right policy framework can help give their ideas flight.
government leaders sometimes cite security, privacy, complexity, control, and latency (delayed processing) as reasons for building their own proprietary cloud rather than adopting an existing technology that has been made affordable by multinational demand.
∑ (Education + Innovation) × Intensity of Tech Use = Economic Growth
Internet penetration is close to 100 percent in Korea, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, but below 2 percent in a number of sub-Saharan African nations.
Germany provides an excellent example of the productive use of new technologies. Germany and the United States both invest heavily in R&D, but Germany has enjoyed greater rates of productivity
One explanation is the German system of vocational training through apprenticeship, which makes cutting-edge technologies available to the workforce quickly through vocational schools that have close relationships with industry.
Kent International, maker of Bicycle Corporation of America–branded bikes, which made news early in 2017 when it moved 140 jobs from China back to Manning, South Carolina, where the company had invested in robotics to automate many of the tasks once performed by people.
“Entrepreneurs contribute to economic growth far more than the narrow word ‘innovation’ can convey,” he writes. And education, he further notes, is innovation’s closest cousin in fueling growth.
“Business is humanity’s most resilient, iterative, and productive mechanism for creating change in the world.”
In fact, their research found that it is education more than income that explains increases in mortality and morbidity among whites in midlife.
