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

by Brad Smith

Although there would be times when we would need to go it alone, there would be many others—for example, when artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and cybersecurity are involved—when we all have much more to gain from working with one another.

This reminded me of the Peter Thiel theory (or at least quote) on crypto vs. AI: "“I think since the pendulum has swung back and forth so much over the last 50 years, there is no reason that that’s the future. And it’s actually a choice. Do we want it to be centralized? Do we want it to be decentralized? And what I think AI can mean many different things but if it means you have large databases that are controlled by large governments that can monitor people more effectively, it’s something that could make communism maybe more effective, certainly more scary, more totalitarian than it ever was in the 20th century. It’s not a coincidence along these lines that the Chinese communist party hates crypto and loves AI.”"

Some say that data has become the oil of the twenty-first century. But that understates the reality. A century ago, automobiles, airplanes, and many trains ran on oil. Today, every aspect of human life is fueled by data.

"Data is the new oil" as an UNDERSTATEMENT...something I had not considered but now that I see it in black and white (paperwhite) I am very seriously considering....

Coming up with something that is shorter and simpler is always more difficult.12

If I remember correctly he said this in the context of a friendly jab between marketing and lawyers. In my career the lawyers ALWAYS make my text longer and less simple. Often for legitimate reasons. I very much respect that as a lawyer he is willing to concede the point. (the "12" is surely a highlighting mistake on my part....

privacy, security, compliance, and transparency.

See below, this is the exception to the "lawyers make writing more complicated" note rule above...

I loved pointing out to the company’s marketing leaders that the lawyers had found a way to take a complicated topic and reduce it to four words. Not surprisingly, they were quick to point out that this was a first.

ha

While the Fourth Amendment was adopted to protect people in their homes, Roberts explained that modern phones “typically expose to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house: A phone not only contains in digital form many sensitive records previously found in the home;

Security professionals in almost any field are typically reluctant to talk publicly about what they do. In part, this is because their culture is about shielding rather than sharing information. And there’s always some risk that action will encourage retaliatory attacks.

This is true, it drives me batty as a product marketeer, and biases me towards sympathy towards the open source security community.

We decided to develop a specific program to better shield political candidates, campaigns, and associated groups from online meddling. We called the program AccountGuard. The service would be offered free of charge for the political groups and individuals using our Office 365 email and services. MSTIC would actively monitor nation-state activity and we would alert campaign staff with detailed information when an attack was detected.8

Does anybody know if this was effective or have any use cases or examples where this worked or did not work? I must admit I had not heard of it before I read the book, so I am skeptical that it had an impact...

solid indication that Strontium was not targeting Democrats alone and instead was focusing on both sides of the American political aisle.

Now we must ask whether the internet has created an asymmetric technology risk for democracies that authoritarian governments can counteract more readily than the republican form of government that Franklin’s words urge us to protect. The answer is probably yes. Digital technology has created a different world, and not always a better one.

As one Trump adviser challenged me on a trip to Washington, DC, “As an American company, why won’t you agree to help the US government spy on people in other countries?” I pointed out that Trump Hotels had just opened a new property in the Middle East as well as down the street on Pennsylvania Avenue. “Are these hotels going to spy on people from other countries who stay there? It doesn’t seem like it would be good for the family business.” He nodded.

Fair point. I wonder what the President himself would say if he were asked to bug rooms in the Trump hotel by a General whom he considered loyal to the Trump presidency.

To its credit, Siemens led one of the earliest efforts, creating what it called a Charter of Trust to focus on protecting the ubiquitous small devices that make up the internet of things.

Again not an effort I had heard of previously...any outside perspective on whether the Charter of Trust has had an impact?

“techplomacy.”

"I want to believe"....love the idea, not sure to what extent techplomacy is working in practice. Digital Geneva Convention et al....what are the concrete achievements of these groups and efforts? If AI is indeed or will be more a tool of authoritarian (not necessarily communist) governments will the DGC have enough teeth to suppress them?

Einstein’s words speak to the crux of today’s challenge. As technology continues to advance, can the world control the future it is creating? Too often, wars have resulted from humanity’s failure to keep pace with innovation, doing too little too late to manage new technology. As emerging tech such as cyberweapons and artificial intelligence

Speaks to Kevin Kelly's "What Technology Wants" as well as Tegmark's "Life 3.0"....we need controls, we need governance, we need to ask the right questions before tech (esp AI) spins out of control. So I am sympathetic to Smith's thesis. Not sure where to read debate about whether MS is doing enough in this field, and who or what else can and should be done. Getting other for-profits involved can not be bad. Getting democracies involved can not be bad. But can/should we get the Russians involved? Whom do we trust? Why do we trust them?

It had led us in the past sometimes to maintain for years two or more overlapping services, an approach that almost never turned out well. Apple, in contrast, had sometimes relied on its narrower product focus and Steve Jobs’s centralized decision making to solve this problem.

Overlapping services certainly did not hurt in "Soul of the Machine"....at the same time Steve Jobs's centralized approach certainly produced MANY successes. Which is better for the long term prospects of the economy? Of prosperity beyond fiscal or GDP growth? How many Steve Jobs are there out there to guide us? Is this an either/or choice?

As much as anything, her story is a testament to the need again to recognize that the spread of new technology is not just an economic imperative. It needs to be treated as a social cause.

I am for sure seeing this embodied in my first 4 weeks at MSFT.

one can’t graduate from an American military academy without taking a course in ethics.29 The same is not yet true for computer science majors at many American universities.

+1

There’s every reason to expect the transition to an AI era to be as large an upheaval as the transition to the automobile.

+1, and then some

As we thought about what this meant for our own products and future at Microsoft, we concluded that success has always required that people master four skills: learning about new topics and fields; analyzing and solving new problems; communicating ideas and sharing information with others; and collaborating effectively as part of a team.

I can say after 1 month at MS that this is not BS

China’s emergence as a technology superpower, in some respects, signals that we now live in an increasingly bipolar technology world. China and the United States are the world’s two largest consumers of information technology. They have also become the two largest suppliers of this technology to the rest of the world. On many days, a scan of stock market listings will show that seven of the world’s ten most valuable companies are technology enterprises. Five of these seven are American, while the other two are Chinese. A decade from now, the mix of companies topping this list is likely to have more Chinese firms.

And if data is MORE than just the new oil the Chinese advantage is in the collection of data w/o oversight or privacy protections. They simply have more data to work with, and that will continue to work to their advantage. A relative Chinese weakness -- immigration. The US, even in the last 4 years, relative to China, has a more permissive immigration policy. Making that policy less restrictive (actively promoting a larger population) is a net positive on that most basic of scales.

Today each country’s understanding of the other is often more limited than it should be. In most respects, this limitation is the strongest in the United States. Consider the fact that President Xi’s education included reading American authors from Alexander Hamilton to Ernest Hemingway. How many American politicians have read comparable Chinese authors? With more than twenty-five hundred years of rich history, the problem is not a lack of supply but a shortage of interest.

And in the last 4 years the interest has actually DECLINED:https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/08/29/why-studying-chinese-is-in-decline

we’ll also need improvements in operational security that enable multiple organizations to manage security together.

Azure confidential computing (ACC) is arguably leading the charge in this area.

We’ll also need practical arrangements to address fundamental questions around data ownership. We need to enable groups to share data without giving up their ownership and ongoing control of the data they share. Just as landowners sometimes enter into easements or other arrangements that allow others onto their property without losing their ownership rights, we’ll need to create new approaches to manage access to data. These must enable groups to choose collaboratively the terms on which they want to share data, including how the data can be used. In addressing all these issues, the open-data movement can take a page from open-source trends for software. At first that effort was hampered by questions about license rights. But over time standard open-source licenses emerged. We can expect similar efforts for data.

More ACC-related subject matter

Open Data Initiative, launched a month later, designed to provide a technology platform and tools to enable organizations to federate data while continuing to own and maintain control of the data they share.

Needs researccb

Hutch, the University of Washington, and the University of British Columbia and the BC Cancer Agency, both based in Vancouver. It is an early example of what is starting to spread, including the California Data Collaborative, where cities, water retailers, and land planning agencies are federating data to enable analytics-driven solutions to address water shortages.18

How is the open data initiative, federated data, and the confidential computing consortium related?

As we keep working to bring more technology to humanity, we also need to bring more humanity into technology.

As Satya suggested in 2015 for surveillance issues, as discussed in chapter two, we developed principles to guide our decision making for this topic as well. The resulting cloud commitments continue to serve as a model for us in other areas.

What were the resulting cloud commients?

it is more than possible for companies to succeed while doing more to address their societal responsibilities.

In the democracies of the world, one of our most cherished values is that the public determines its course by electing the people who make the laws that govern us all. Tech leaders may be chosen by boards of directors selected by shareholders, but they are not chosen by the public. Democratic countries should not cede the future to leaders the public did not elect.

A geographic gulf of almost twenty-five hundred miles obscures one thing the two places have in common. Traveling to each from a place like Seattle (which has its own tolerant appreciation for weirdness), you can understand, given the excitement and activity in each location, why it’s easy to feel, once there, that each place is at the center of the world. But more than ever, there’s a need to build a stronger bridge across this geographic divide.

But the tech sector needs to get over any illusion that it alone is capable of understanding information technology and its intricacies. Instead, it will need to do more to share information about these nuances so the public and governments can better appreciate them.

Sign me up.