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"A colorful and insightful insiders´ view of how technology is both empowering us and threatening us. From privacy to cyberattacks, this timely book is a useful guide for how to navigate the digital future." -Walter Isaacson

From Microsoft´s president and one of the tech industry´s broadest thinkers, a frank and thoughtful reckoning with how to balance enormous promise and existential risk as the digitization of everything accelerates.

Microsoft President Brad Smith operates by a simple core belief: When your technology changes the world, you bear a responsibility to help address the world you have helped create. This might seem uncontroversial, but it flies in the face of a tech sector long obsessed with rapid growth and sometimes on disruption as an end in itself. While sweeping digital transformation holds great promise, we have reached an inflection point. The world has turned information technology into both a powerful tool and a formidable weapon, and new approaches are needed to manage an era defined by even more powerful inventions like artificial intelligence. Companies that create technology must accept greater responsibility for the future, and governments will need to regulate technology by moving faster and catching up with the pace of innovation.

In Tools and Weapons, Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne bring us a captivating narrative from the cockpit of one of the world´s largest and most powerful tech companies as it finds itself in the middle of some of the thorniest emerging issues of our time. These are challenges that come with no preexisting playbook, including privacy, cybercrime and cyberwar, social media, the moral conundrums of artificial intelligence, big tech´s relationship to inequality, and the challenges for democracy, far and near. While in no way a self-glorifying "Microsoft memoir," the book pulls back the curtain remarkably wide onto some of the company´s most crucial recent decision points as it strives to protect the hopes technology offers against the very real threats it also presents. There are huge ramifications for communities and countries, and Brad Smith provides a thoughtful and urgent contribution to that effort.

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Brad Smith is Microsoft´s president and chief legal officer, leading a team of more than 1,400 business, legal and corporate affairs professionals working in 55 countries. Smith has played a leading role within Microsoft and in the IT sector on a wide range of policy issues, including government surveillance, privacy, ethics, immigration, rural broadband and computer science education. Prior to joining Microsoft in 1993, Smith was an associate and then partner at the firm of Covington and Burling, where he is still remembered as the first attorney in the long history of the firm to insist (in 1986) on having a personal computer on his desk as a condition for accepting a job offer. In 2014, the New York Times called Smith "a de facto ambassador for the technology industry at large." Carol Ann Browne is director of communications and external affairs at Microsoft. She began her career as a journalist in Arizona, but the lure of technology took her to Silicon Valley and a career in public relations. She joined Microsoft in 2010. Browne and Smith have collaborated on a wide variety of writing, video, and other communications around the world, including their "Today in Technology" blog series.

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