"Tools and Weapons" deals with modern technologies such as Cloud Computing, Social Media, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the impact of these technologies on society, governance, privacy, etc.
This book is co-authored by Brad Smith who is currently serving as president of Microsoft. One of the remarkable learning is that Brad is by training a lawyer who is leading a very high tech company working on all the tech which has been mentioned in this book.
Book draws on the learnings of Microsoft when working with government agencies to help catch genuine wrongdoers and keep customer's privacy in mind. This is a fine balance to make and there are some fine learnings from that.
The chapter on Rural Broadband is fascinating to me to understand the challenges rural areas face and the potential application of TV signaling technology to connect them with the rest of the world.
The impact of AI to process vast amounts of data to get actionable intelligence is now mainstream news. It is unfashionable to say that someone is not working on AI. However, AI is as good as the person who trained the AI system and built a computational model. It has been proved to be biased. Social media feeds show you only those content that you showed an affinity to. There have been reports of automated resume screeners having a negative bias against females and certain ethnicities. The use of Facial Recognition is becoming mainstream in consumer products (cell phones, PC) and enterprises to provide targetted selling. This has a serious implication on privacy.
In conclusion authors (Brad and Carol) provide their perspective on technologies that are going to impact everyone's life and what are the challenges ahead along with some solutions. Governments, citizens need to be aware of these impacts so that they can safeguard themselves against the misuse of these tools and prevent conversion to a weapon.
This book is co-authored by Brad Smith who is currently serving as president of Microsoft. One of the remarkable learning is that Brad is by training a lawyer who is leading a very high tech company working on all the tech which has been mentioned in this book.
Book draws on the learnings of Microsoft when working with government agencies to help catch genuine wrongdoers and keep customer's privacy in mind. This is a fine balance to make and there are some fine learnings from that.
The chapter on Rural Broadband is fascinating to me to understand the challenges rural areas face and the potential application of TV signaling technology to connect them with the rest of the world.
The impact of AI to process vast amounts of data to get actionable intelligence is now mainstream news. It is unfashionable to say that someone is not working on AI. However, AI is as good as the person who trained the AI system and built a computational model. It has been proved to be biased. Social media feeds show you only those content that you showed an affinity to. There have been reports of automated resume screeners having a negative bias against females and certain ethnicities. The use of Facial Recognition is becoming mainstream in consumer products (cell phones, PC) and enterprises to provide targetted selling. This has a serious implication on privacy.
In conclusion authors (Brad and Carol) provide their perspective on technologies that are going to impact everyone's life and what are the challenges ahead along with some solutions. Governments, citizens need to be aware of these impacts so that they can safeguard themselves against the misuse of these tools and prevent conversion to a weapon.
No comments:
Post a Comment