So many things that we think about every day can be used as either a tool or a weapon.

This has been true of so many technologies over time, and digital technology is in so many ways, potentially a formidable

weapon.

Hi there, Alex Clement here of GZero Media. I'm in for Ian Bremmer this week on a special edition

of the GZero World podcast. Today I'll sit down with

Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, to talk about his new book on the promise and perils of

the technologies that shape our lives. Let's get to it.

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Artificial intelligence, big data analysis, facial recognition, social media, new technologies

that thrive on data have brought great promise and benefits to our lives,

to our health, to our economies, and to our standards of living. But they also pose grave new

threats to our privacy, our jobs, our national security, and even to our democracy.

Few people are as keenly attuned to these challenges or as involved in trying to sort them out as our guest today, Brad Smith.

He is the president of Microsoft, you may have heard of it, and the author with Microsoft's senior director, Carol Ann Brown, of a timely new book called Tools and Weapons, the Promise and Peril of the Digital Age.

Brad, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Good to be here. Let's start off with this idea of tools and weapons. How should we think about the distinction between what makes something a tool and what makes it a weapon and how

that applies to the technologies of today? One of our points is that so many things that we think about every day

can be used as either a tool or a weapon. Take a broom. We can use it to sweep the floor. Somebody can

use it to hit somebody over the head. This has been true of so many technologies over time.

Benjamin Franklin created the Postal Service in the United States, and criminals turned that into a vehicle for mail fraud. The telegraph became a

...