Tool and Weapons

The book “Tool and Weapons” narrates the dangers and possibilities of the information age, four decades on. The authors argue that companies that create technology must accept greater responsibility for the future. The book is an overview of some of the ways in which their industry has changed the world for better or worse. It mentions that 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. The author notes that the automobile of a decade hence will be a rolling computer, perhaps autonomously driven, consuming huge quantities of data on the cloud. The author opines that corporations will benefit but cannot be counted on to regulate themselves alone. It is suggested that more vexing issues that technology has raised such as facial recognition software, gathering of personal data, increasing governmental demands for the release of personal information, use of social engineering and available tools to manipulate popular opinion and elections are required to be addressed. 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. TW

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