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

by Brad Smith

The flying public would not stand for it. Why is information technology fundamentally different, especially when many of an airplane’s components are now based on it?

The truth is that government agencies have long proven adept at developing the factual capacity to understand the products they regulate. This doesn’t mean the process is free of frustration or that everyone does an equally good job. Nor does it mean that all regulatory approaches make good or even common sense. 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.

There exist many hurdles that will need to be overcome. We live in a time when roiling geopolitical headwinds are causing many governments to pull inward. It’s difficult to expect great leaps in bringing nations together when the day’s dominant headlines talk about countries leaving trade blocks or pulling out of long-standing treaties. Beyond this, it’s a time when many governments are finding it difficult even to make decisions that matter only to themselves.

Continued progress also requires that governments recognize that in addition to regulating technology, they need to regulate themselves. Issues like cybersecurity and disinformation will shape the future of war and the protection of our democratic processes. Just as no industry in history has fully engaged in successful self-regulation on its own, there’s no precedent for a nation protecting itself by relying solely on the private sector or even by regulating it. Governments will need to act together, and part of this will require new international norms and rules that limit national conduct and hold countries accountable when they violate those rules.

This context provides clarity. 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. Technology innovation is not going to slow down. The work to manage it needs to speed up.