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

by Brad Smith

At a time when data centers are collectively the world’s largest consumers of electricity, Ireland’s mild climate provides the ideal temperature for computers.

data. ECPA made it a crime for a US tech company to turn over certain types of digital data such as email, even in response to a legal demand from a foreign government.

We knew that like British ships in American ports in the early 1800s, our data centers would be welcome on European soil only if we agreed to respect local laws.

Use technology to improve what can be improved while respecting what works well already.

One thing we had learned long ago was that it was more fun to fight a battle but typically more rewarding to strike a deal.

“No one has been killed. These aren’t even attacks on people. They’re just machines attacking machines.”

carelessness. 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.

AI algorithm to predict the domain names hackers would go after in the future.

As I shared my frustration, our consultants nodded when one said, “Welcome to Washington.”

The internet helped push Estonia out of the shadows of Communism, transforming what would become the home of Skype into a vibrant self-proclaimed “e-democracy.”

People who are oppressed are united by a common desire, the quest for freedom. But once people are free, that common bond fades away.

For more than a century, almost every technology that has connected people who live apart has also created new barriers between people who live close together.

Leave it to the public to decide what is true. But let them make that decision based on an accurate understanding of who is speaking.

A democratic republic by its very nature is subject to disruption—both foreign and domestic—by efforts to disrupt confidence and sway public opinion.

stronger international rules and coordinated diplomatic action to restrain cyberthreats and help galvanize the international community to pressure governments to stop indiscriminate cyberattacks.

it was even harder to restrain conduct if it violated no rules in the first place.

important international norms were already in place and that we risked creating a perception that existing rules didn’t matter.

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.”

The only winning move is not to play.”

“If a weapon is seen as horrific and marginally useful, then a ban is likely to succeed. If a weapon brings decisive advantages on the battlefield, then a ban is unlikely to work, no matter how terrible it may seem.”

there need to be effective ways to monitor compliance and hold violators accountable.

The tech sector is full of energetic people working for ambitious enterprises. Bringing companies together to do something in a coordinated way is easier said than done.

In the twentieth century, new ideas sometimes moved successfully from think tanks to detailed conversations with nongovernmental organizations and government policy circles, ultimately breaking through to the public by way of important speeches by international statesmen.

Too often, wars have resulted from humanity’s failure to keep pace with innovation, doing too little too late to manage new technology.

negotiations. It was a bit like trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

A member of the court who had been at the center of its deliberations met in person with several national privacy regulators to walk them through the details of the decision and recommend how they could best use it to negotiate with the White House and Department of Commerce. It was the type of step that would fly in the face of the separation between courts and the executive branch in the United States. It was unusual in Europe, but not unheard of in many parts of the world.

one can debate whether to construct an immigration wall to stem the flow of people. But no nation can tolerate a barrier that stops the international flow of data.

One of the biggest features in the GDPR is in effect a privacy bill of rights.

companies. 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.

While there were parts of the GDPR that we found confusing or worse, we believed that one key to long-term success for the tech sector was sustaining public trust on privacy issues.

In other words, Europe is not just the birthplace of democracy and the cradle of privacy protection. It’s quite possibly the world’s best hope for privacy’s future.

titled Map to Prosperity shows that eighty new jobs are created for every one thousand new broadband subscribers.

An increase of four megabits per second in residential broadband speed translates to an annual increase in household income of twenty-one hundred dollars.

You never hear about the world needing to solve a radio or TV gap—these wireless devices were adopted quickly and were plug-and-play, latching on to the right frequency to work.19 The lesson is obvious: If it’s possible to shift from fiber-optic cables to wireless technology for broadband, we can spread broadband coverage farther and faster and

much like a Rubik’s Cube puzzle that can only be solved by moving many pieces at the same time.

Never let a negotiation narrow to a single issue that can produce only one winner, even if it means holding open some other topics on which agreement might seem in reach.

Despite spending billions of dollars, the biggest technology challenge for schools was not getting more computers into classrooms. It was equipping teachers with the skills needed to put that technology to use.

LinkedIn created the Economic Graph,17 which identifies what types of jobs companies are creating by region and country and what types of skills are needed to fill those jobs.

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.

In the 1700s, soon after Ben Franklin created the postal service in the United States, criminals invented mail fraud. In the 1800s, with the telegraph and the telephone, criminals invented wire fraud. In the twentieth century, when technologists invented the internet,

First, computing power finally advanced to the level needed to perform the massive number of calculations needed. Second, cloud computing made large amounts of this power and storage capacity available to people and organizations without the need to make large capital investments in massive amounts of hardware.

And finally, the explosion of digital data made it possible to build massively larger data sets to train AI-based systems.

one film each decade since the original appeared in 1984. In other words, if you’re a teenager or older, there is a good chance you’ve witnessed the dangers of autonomous weapons on the big screen.

Perhaps the most important was that well-intentioned students might not have all the right answers, but they might be asking the right questions. And these questions could lead to a better path that had eluded experts and senior leaders alike.

the best response to a half-baked idea often is not to kill the idea, but to finish baking

As I often tried to remind people, no one elected us. It seemed not just odd but undemocratic to want tech companies to police the government.

The arrival of cars, calculators, voice mail, word processing, and graphic design software may have eliminated and changed many jobs over the decades, but there still has been plenty of work to go around.

ten times as many daily calories as a person,24 many farmers depended on growing food for horses even more than for people.

As one economic historian has noted, “Installment credit and the automobile were both cause and consequence of each other’s success.”

Similarly, the automobile transformed the world of advertising. Seen by passengers traveling in a car at a speed of 30 miles per hour or more, “a sign had to be grasped instantly or it wouldn’t be grasped at all,”