Tools and Weapons – The Promise and the Peril of The Digital Age, Brad Smith, ISBN: 9781 5293 51576
IT is not surprising that the book, Tools and Weapons – The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age is a New York
Times bestseller, written by Microsoft president, Brad Smith and senior director of communications and external relations at Microsoft, Carol Ann Browne – with a foreword from Bill Gates – the book explains the ongoing empowerment and threat of technology.
Written in an easy-to-read style, and peppered with some wry humour, the authors give a frank account of how they
have battled to keep their customers’ information private and safe from both cyber attacks and governments.
The reader is given insight into the world of fast-growing technology and included is the nuts and bolts of how it all works. For example, in the beginning Smith goes to great pains to explain the cloud (the world’s filing cabinet) what it is exactly and how it operates and it blew my mind.
ALSO READ: Fabulous reads – Book overflows with historical truth
It is all about data, “some say that data has become the oil of the twenty-first century” as every aspect of our lives is fueled in one way or another, by data. The digital infrastructure that supports data is called the cloud. One of the
many, many Microsoft data centres, this one in Quincy, Washington, consists of more than 20, temperature-controlled buildings totaling two million square feet with each building the size of two football fields.
The bottom line is that there needs to be more regulation of tech firms who should co-operate and include the government who has a role to play.
Brad Smith’s core belief is: “When your technology changes the world, you bear a responsibility to help address the world you have helped create.”
Smith explains the emerging issues they face: privacy, cybercrime and cyberwar, social media, the moral conundrums of artificial intelligence, big tech’s relationship to inequality, and the challenges for democracy, far and near.
A must-read to understand technology and where it is leading.
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