Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age
Author: SMITH,BRAD
ISBN: 9781984879226
RM79.90
Publisher,PENGUIN PRESS
Publication Date,
Format, Paperback
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Microsoft President Brad Smith operates by a simple core belief: if your technology changes the world, you bear responsibility for that new world. This might seem uncontroversial, but it flies in the face of what has long been Silicon Valley's reigning ideology. Now, though, we have reached an inflection point: Silicon Valley has moved fast, and it has broken things, and a new understanding has emerged that a human-centered technology doesn't just take care of itself; it has to be designed with that intent. In On the Razor's Edge, Brad Smith takes us into the leadership cockpit of one of the world's largest and most powerful tech companies as it finds itself in the middle of some of the thorniest emergent issues of our time. These are challenges that come with no preexisting playbook, including privacy, cybercrime and cyberwar, the moral conundrums of AI, big tech's relationship to inequality, and the question of dealing with despots, far and near. While in no way a self-glorifying "Microsoft memoir," the book opens up the curtain remarkably wide onto some of the company's most crucial recent decision points, as it strives to protect the hope technology offers against the very big threats it also presents. Every tool can be a weapon in someone's hands, and companies are being challenged now in entirely new ways to have a vision that embraces the totality of their responsibilities. We have moved from a world in which Silicon Valley could take no prisoners to one in which we're all in a sense its prisoners. There are huge ramifications to be thought through, and Brad Smith's On the Razor's Edge is a marvelous and urgently necessary contribution to that effort.
