Tools and Weapons summary

On 6 June 2013, the head of Microsoft’s public communications team, Dominic Carr, received an email whose contents would shock him, and then the world. 

The email, from a Guardian journalist, claimed that the US government’s National Security Agency (NSA) had been accessing private user data, phone records and other information belonging to millions of people, including foreign leaders around the world.

As the twenty-first century unfolded, terrorist attacks became a worryingly frequent occurrence.

At first, the implications for new digital technologies weren’t obvious. 9/11, for instance, took place in a world that wasn’t yet hooked on social media, a world of fax machines rather than smartphones.

Many of the tech innovations of the twenty-first century were developed in Silicon Valley in California. That means that they were designed with a certain cultural perspective in a country that takes freedom for granted. But what happens when this collides with different perspectives? 

One example illustrates this well.

On 12 May 2017, Patrick Ward, the owner of an ice cream business, was wheeled into a surgical prep room at St Bartholomew's hospital in central London. He’d traveled three hours up to the capital from a small village in southern England for the crucial heart surgery that he’d waited two years to undergo. He lay on a gurney, wired up to monitors, with his chest shaved. A surgeon’s assistant appeared and told him that he’d have just a few more minutes to wait. 

He waited. Hours passed. Then, a doctor flung open the doors of the prep room and informed him that he wouldn’t be able to have his surgery, as the hospital’s computers were all down.

In its infancy, the internet seemed like a good way to connect the world and bring us closer, but in recent years we’ve seen its shadowy side.

Take the divisive 2016 US election, where social media platforms were used to disseminate “fake news.”

Artificial Intelligence: what’s the first thing that comes to mind? The dark techno score and scanner gaze of The Terminator? R2D2? The AI romance in the film Her? The truth is, we’re surrounded by AI already: your smartphone learns about you as you use it, for instance.

So, what should concern us about AI today?

A tool can be used for good or evil. With a broom, you can sweep a kitchen floor or smash someone over the head. The same applies to information technology.

Consider these recent innovations: