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

by Brad Smith

Today, every aspect of human life is fueled by data. When it comes to modern civilization, data is more like the air we breathe than the oil we burn.

the world’s biggest consumer of electricity, the modern data center.

Since the dawn of time, any tool can be used for good or ill. Even a broom can be used to sweep the floor or hit someone over the head. The more powerful the tool, the greater the benefit or damage it can cause. While sweeping digital transformation holds great promise, the world has turned information technology into both a powerful tool and a formidable weapon.

When your technology changes the world, you bear a responsibility to help address the world that you have helped create.

Bill Gates, who had grown up as the son of one of Seattle’s most prominent and respected lawyers.

“If data is collected, it can always be abused,” he said. “It’s important that, as we operate around the world, we remember that governments can change over time.

People expected web pages, emails, and documents with photos or graphics to load on their phones and computers instantaneously. Consumer tests showed that a delay of just a half second would get under people’s skin.

As we analyzed hackers’ activities, we found that the first thing they often did when they successfully penetrated an email account was search for the keyword password. As people accumulated more passwords for more services, they often sent emails to themselves with the word password in them, which made for easy pickings for hackers.

“A free people,” he said, “ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

As we talked with more people about the notion of a Digital Geneva Convention, we realized that many of the points raised were pertinent to any form of arms control. There was a long history of public discussion about rules to govern weapons, and we needed to learn from them.

Since the end of the Cold War, the topic of arms control has in many ways receded from public view. As a result, a generation of arms control experts has departed the scene and there is no longer a broad public understanding of the issues.

“For years it has been next to impossible to get all the engineers across the company to agree on a single privacy architecture. Now the regulators and lawyers have told us what to do. The job of creating a single architecture just got a whole lot easier.”

According to the FCC’s 2018 broadband report, more than twenty-four million Americans, more than nineteen million of whom live in rural communities, lacked access to fixed high-speed broadband.

there is strong evidence that the percentage of Americans without broadband access is much higher than the FCC’s numbers indicate.

According to its latest data, 35 percent of Americans report that they don’t use broadband at home—or roughly 113 million people.7 And even the FCC’s own subscription data indicates that 46 percent of American households fail to subscribe to the internet at broadband speeds.

The highest unemployment rates in the country are frequently located in the counties with the lowest availability of broadband, highlighting the strong link between broadband availability and economic growth.10

It was in 2011 at a United Nations conference in Nairobi, Kenya, and we enabled attendees to use the Xbox at broadband speeds over the Internet based on a TV white spaces signal that traveled a mile.

There is simply no way the United States would be the global leader in information technology if it had not attracted many of the best and brightest people in the world to come work at leading universities or live in technology centers around the country.

As I sometimes say at Microsoft when we start a new project, first prize is to do something big. Second prize is to do something. Success rarely comes to people who do nothing.

The challenge was that the tech sector, to its credit, always looked forward. The problem was that, to its detriment, too few people spent time or even accepted the virtue of looking in the rearview mirror long enough to use a knowledge of the past to anticipate the problems around the corner.

“AI is the study of computational mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior.”

“There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.”

It’s difficult to build technology that serves the world without first building a team that reflects the diversity of the world.

When I’ve talked with military leaders around the world, they all share one thing in common: No one wants to wake up in the morning to discover that machines have started a war while they were sleeping.

I’ve been impressed by the US military’s deep and long-standing focus on ethical decision-making.

I learned from individuals ranging from senior generals to a West Point cadet, 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.

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

At a small dinner I attended in Seattle, the CEO of one tech company summed up the collective angst. “I feel well prepared for most of my job,” he said, describing how he’d risen up the ranks. “But now I’m being thrust into something completely different. I really don’t know how to respond to employees who want me to take on their concerns about immigration, climate issues, and so many other problems.”

As I like to say to our teams within the company, the best response to a half-baked idea often is not to kill the idea, but to finish baking it.

After so many waves of industrialization and automation, what is it that is so demanding of our time? As Rick Rashid, a former head of Microsoft Research, observed only half-jokingly several years ago, a lot more people now spend a lot more time in meetings.

While it’s one thing to predict accurately what jobs AI may replace, it’s quite another to estimate when computer-based replacements will arrive.

If anything, people tend to be too optimistic, predicting that change will arrive faster than is the case, but as Bill Gates has famously remarked, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”

“the AI world order will combine winner-take-all economics with an unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a few companies in China and the United States.”1 As he puts it, “other countries will be left to pick up the scraps.”

The argument is that the firm that gains the most users will gain the most data, and because data is rocket fuel for AI, its AI product will become stronger as a result. With a stronger AI product, the firm will attract even more users and hence more data.

“AI naturally gravitates toward monopolies . . . once a company has jumped out to an early lead, this kind of ongoing repeating cycle can turn that lead into an insurmountable barrier to entry for other firms.”3

data is probably “the world’s most renewable resource.”

Senior leaders need to think broadly, and they need to encourage their people to do more than simply find problems with every potential solution and instead help find solutions for every potential problem.

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.

The harsh reality is that some countries will violate these agreements. But it is easier for the rest of the world to respond effectively when an international norm or rule is in place.

The greatest risk is not that the world will do too much to solve these problems. It’s that the world will do too little. And it’s not that governments will move too fast. It’s that they will be too slow.