TOOLS AND WEAPONS

A survey of the dangers and possibilities of the information age, four decades on.

“Companies that create technology must accept greater responsibility for the future.” So argues Microsoft president Smith, writing with communications director Browne, in this overview of some of the ways in which their industry has changed the world for better or worse. For worse: The computer age is tremendously costly in terms of energy. The authors open with a vision of a single data center about 150 miles inland from Seattle, with 2 million square feet of space housing “hundreds of thousands of server computers and millions of hard disks,” girded by rows of 20-foot-tall emergency generators should the nearby hydroelectric plant on the Columbia River fail. More is to come: As the authors note, the automobile of a decade hence will be a rolling computer, perhaps autonomously driven, consuming huge quantities of data on the cloud. Who benefits? Whether tech or automotive, in that instance, corporations benefit—and corporations, suggest the authors, can’t be counted on to regulate themselves alone. Smith and Browne consider some of the more vexing issues that technology has raised—e.g., facial recognition software, the gathering of personal data, increasing governmental demands for the release of personal information, the use of social engineering and available tools to manipulate popular opinion and elections (“one of our biggest challenges was how to talk publicly about the threats” since no one wants to tick off the Russians—or Donald Trump), and always the specter of artificial intelligence becoming so self-directed that the singularity arrives, that long-imagined scenario where machines find that there’s no real need for people to gum up the works. The authors also discuss the Snowden affair and the need for open data, stressing how important it is that “data not become the province of a few large companies and countries.”

Though it raises more questions than answers, a book for technologists and future-watchers to ponder.