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

by Brad Smith

Facial recognition was the type of issue where we sometimes diverged from others in the tech sector. Perhaps more than anything else, this reflected what we had learned from our antitrust battles in the 1990s. At that time, we had argued, like many companies and industries, that regulation was unnecessary and likely to be harmful. But one of the many lessons we’d learned from that experience was that such an approach didn’t necessarily work—or would be regarded as unacceptable—for products that have a sweeping impact across society or that combine beneficial and potentially troubling uses. We no longer shared the resistance that most tech companies traditionally had shown for government intervention. We’d already fought that battle. Instead we had endorsed what we thought of as a more active but balanced approach to regulation. That was one reason we called for federal privacy legislation in the United States as early as 2005.

heading. As we met with people in El Paso and discussed what AI might mean for jobs in the region,

If we had to predict a job that AI is likely to eliminate sooner than most, we’d nominate the position of taking orders from customers in the drive-through window at a fast-food restaurant.

There are certain tasks that AI likely won’t perform well. Many of these involve soft skills such as collaboration with other people, which will remain fundamental in organizations large and small. As Rick recognized, this often requires meetings (hopefully well-planned ones). AI similarly is unlikely to excel in providing the empathy required of nurses, counselors, teachers, and therapists.

At one point, Satya talked about AI and where it was going, and he pointed to its ability to translate languages. When he said that AI would soon replace human interpreters, he paused for a moment, realized what he had said, and turned to the interpreter. “Sorry,” he said. The interpreter didn’t skip a beat. “Don’t worry,” she calmly replied. “Someone from IBM told me the same thing twenty years ago, and I’m still here.”

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.”

we’re likely to see not a single transition across the entire economy or even for a single technology, but rather successive waves and ripples in different sectors. This may characterize technology and societal change over the next two or three decades.

Consider two of the innovations that resulted from the Great Depression: government policies to pay farmers not to overproduce certain crops, and deposit insurance and regulations to ensure the health of banks. While we can’t predict all the areas where new public innovations will be needed, we should assume that such needs will arise. Put in this context, our biggest concern perhaps should not be that technology innovation is so fast, but that government action is so slow. Can democratic governments respond to new needs and crises in an era of political gridlock and polarization?

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.

Apple may well generate more profits within China than the rest of the American tech sector put together. It’s a notable accomplishment but also a challenge for the company, given China’s large contribution to Apple’s global profitability.

Tay, like XiaoIce, could be trained to interact with people based on feedback in conversations. A small group of American pranksters had organized an effective campaign using Tweets to train Tay to utter racist comments. In little more than a day we had to withdraw Tay from the market to address the problem, providing a lesson not just about cross-cultural norms but about the need for stronger AI safeguards.10

the global population’s use of technology. Even more broadly, it’s almost impossible to imagine this century ending in a better state than it began without a healthy relationship across the Pacific.

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. As history has demonstrated repeatedly, if the United States is going to navigate global challenges, it will need leaders who understand the world.

Data, as economists put it, is “non-rivalrous.” When a factory is powered by a barrel of oil, that barrel is not available to any other factory. But data can be used again and again, and dozens of organizations can draw insights and learning from the same data without detracting from its utility.

We had been on the wrong side of history, and as we all concluded, it was time to change course and go all in on open source.

What if we could create an open-data revolution that would do for data what open-source code had done for software? And what if this approach can outperform the work of an inward-facing institution relying on the largest proprietary data set?

We see these dynamics come into play in the political issues of our time. People argue about immigration, trade, and tax rates for wealthy individuals and corporations, but we seldom see politicians consider or the tech sector acknowledge the role that technology is playing in creating these challenges. It’s as if we’re all so absorbed in the resulting symptoms that we lack the time and energy to focus on some of the important underlying causes. Especially as the impact of technology continues to accelerate, it risks fostering a myopic understanding.

It’s unrealistic to expect the pace of technological change to slow. But it’s not too much to ask that we do more to manage this change.

In contrast to prior technology eras and inventions such as the railroad, telephone, automobile, and television, digital technology has progressed for several decades with remarkably little regulation—or even self-regulation. It’s time to recognize that this hands-off attitude needs to give way to a mo...

I took from our battles three lessons that we continue to learn from and apply. As we consider the current role of technology in the world, these seem as applicable to the entire tech sector today as they did to our company in the past. First, we needed to accept the heightened expectations that those in government, the industry, our customers, and society at large had for us. We had to assume more responsibility, whether it was required by law or not. We were no longer an upstart. We needed to strive to set an example rather than argue that we could do whatever we wanted. Second, we needed to get out and listen to what other people had to say and do more to help solve the technology problems that needed to be solved. This started with building constructive working relationships with more people. But that was just the start. We had to understand better other people’s perceptions of and concerns about us. We needed to do a better job of solving small problems before they grew out of control. This required that we sit down more frequently with governments and even our competitors to find common ground. We recognized that we’d undoubtedly face some hard questions, and we would need to find the courage to compromise. There were days when some engineers argued that we should instead keep on fighting. At times, I almost felt that they were calling my courage into question. While there were times when we needed to stand our ground, there were many moments when I argued that it to...

Part of the answer requires that tech companies develop greater capabilities in disciplines beyond traditional product development, marketing, and sales.

The tech sector is full of good and thoughtful people, but the three centuries since the dawn of the industrial revolution are devoid of any major industry successfully regulating everything about itself completely by itself. It would be naive to think the first successful case will emerge now.

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.

Rather than expensive public investments in costly fiber-optic cables that will take decades to reach rural homes, it’s more sensible for government funding to stimulate new wireless technologies in ways that will accelerate market forces so they can reach a critical liftoff point and then move forward on their own.

But in my experience, government officials have come a long way since the morning fifteen years ago when I was talking about digital advertising with a US Senator who was unaware that he could read the Washington Post on the internet.

Having worked in the technology sector for more than a quarter century, I realize that the products are complex. But so are contemporary commercial airplanes, automobiles, skyscrapers, pharmaceuticals, and even food products. You don’t hear any serious suggestion that the Federal Aviation Administration should leave aircraft unregulated because they are too complicated for people in government to understand.10 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?

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.

Information technology and the companies that create it have gone global. The internet was designed to be a global network, and many of its benefits come from its connected nature. Perhaps more than any other technology in history, its influence and its geographical reach exceed any single government. This sets it apart from prior inventions such as the telephone, television, and electricity, which are based on networks or grids that typically correspond to national or state lines. One way to appreciate this challenge is to consider the technology that perhaps was the most similar to digital technology in its regulatory impact. As the 1800s progressed, railroads played arguably a bigger role than any other invention in redefining the United States. They extended beyond the boundaries of the state governments that initially had assumed the most authority to regulate the economy. In the decades that followed the Civil War, the nation’s railroad companies in many ways became larger and more powerful than many state governments. Things came to a head in the 1880s. There was virtually no tradition of regulating the economy at the federal level except during times of war, and proposals in Washington, DC, to regulate railroads, repeatedly went down in defeat. The state governments responded by passing laws to regulate railroad rates that impacted trips beyond their borders. In 1886, the Supreme Court struck these down, ruling that the federal government alone had this power.11 Su...

How can governments regulate a technology that is bigger than themselves? This is perhaps the single greatest conundrum confronting technology’s regulatory future. But once you ask the question, one part of the answer becomes clear: Governments will need to work together.

If this type of progress is possible in a time of growing nationalism, there is hope for even more headway when the international pendulum swings back toward the center.

This makes it even more important to sustain momentum until the day the United States government resumes its long-standing diplomatic role by both supporting and providing leadership for these types of multilateral initiatives. There is no mistaking the fact that the world’s democracies are weaker when the United States is standing apart from the rest.

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.