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

by Brad Smith

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

The chatbot seems to have filled a social need in China, with users typically spending fifteen to twenty minutes talking with XiaoIce about their day, problems, hopes, and dreams. Perhaps she fills a need in a society where children don’t have siblings? This social chatbot has grown to serve more than six hundred million users,

In short, an obligation to serve China through a joint venture operates as a real and typically effective barrier to market access.

AI projects he’d been working on. As Master Xianxin explained to us, the monastery had devoted itself to merging Buddhist teachings and traditions with the modern world.

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

What if we could create an open-data revolution that would do for data what open-source code had done for software?

opportunities emerge to share data in ways that will advance societal goals—like curing cancer. Fortunately, this law allows data to be repurposed when it is fair and compatible with the original purpose. Now there will be critical questions about how to interpret this provision.

It behaves more like electricity in that it powers tools and devices that run almost every aspect of society and our lives. Like electricity, AI will run in the background

the first regulatory step would not be the last, but we believed it was wiser for governments to take a series of more limited steps more quickly.

Historically there has never been a national business or technology center as distant from a country’s capital as Silicon Valley is from Washington, DC. Even this fails to capture the distance between America’s political and technology capitals.

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

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,