What I'm Reading: Tools and Weapons by Brad Smith

Between school and work, I’ve been in the political science game for nearly three decades now. I’ve seen the Berlin Wall fall, the USSR collapse, and 9/11 terrorize an entire world. In the last decade alone, I’ve witnessed the Great Recession unfurl, China transform itself into an economic powerhouse, and climate change go from niche issue to existential crisis. And yet the single most transformative thing to hit geopolitics over these last 30 years is the rise of new technologies that have fundamentally reshaped how people interact with each other and with their governments.

So I’ve been making it a point to be reading a lot about technology lately, and there are quite a few must-reads out there: Kai-Fu Lee on AI Superpowers in particular is revelatory. But there’s maybe no better book I’ve come across dealing with the intersection of tech and politics than Brad Smith’s Tools and Weapons. (This is the part where I am supposed to “disclose” that the place where Brad Smith works, Microsoft, is a sponsor of GZERO Media. After reading this book, I’m not just going to disclose it, I’m going to state it proudly.) 

In this book, which he wrote with his Microsoft colleague Carol Ann Brown, Brad argues that technology—like all tools, from the broom to the nuclear reactor—is not inherently good or evil. It all depends how we use and regulate it. He lays out just how pervasive the digital transformation has become, and sounds the alarm about how its usefulness as a tool in virtually all aspect of our lives also makes it such a devastating weapon in the wrong hands. In Brad’s view, the best way to limit the harm that tech can do is to take a broad-based approach in which tech companies themselves take greater responsibility for their products, and governments become more intelligent regulators (yes, he thinks government should regulate tech more). He warns of the dangers of a new technology Cold War between China and the US, and calls for states, companies, and civil society to work together on better tech regulations if and when national governments won’t.

Not many people in power are prepared or up to speed with the ways in which technology can upend the world as we’ve known it. I suggest they start by reading this book, and I recommend that you do, too.

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Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group, foreign affairs columnist at TIME and Global Research Professor at New York University. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook.