Brad Smith, President of Microsoft and Author of "Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age"
Brad Smith is the president of Microsoft, where he leads a team of more than 1,400 business, legal and corporate affairs professionals in 56 countries. He serves as the company’s chief legal officer and leads work on a wide range of issues involving the intersection between technology and society, including cybersecurity, privacy, ethics and artificial intelligence, human rights, immigration, philanthropy and environmental sustainability. Described by the New York Times as “a de facto ambassador for the technology industry at large,” Smith has testified numerous times before the U.S. Congress and other governments on key policy issues.
Smith grew up in Appleton, Wisconsin, where Green Bay was the big city next door. He attended Princeton University, where he met his wife, Kathy (also a lawyer). He earned his J.D. from Columbia University Law School and studied international law and economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland.
Smith’s recent novel, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age, details the great potential and risk that comes with the progression of technology in the modern world. Smith argues that companies with the power to create this technology also have a duty to protect communities from its (potentially negative) consequences and that this unprecedented power must be used to help brighten the future for society as a whole.
Austin Stiefelmaier (BT): The focus of this interview will be your new book, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age, but before writing your book and beginning your career at Microsoft, you graduated Princeton University as a member of the class of ’81. To start, how did your time at Princeton impact your career?
Brad Smith (BS): It’s really had a huge impact on my career and life in a number of different ways. Maybe I should start with the fact that I met my wife there...but beyond that, Princeton broadened my perspective on the world, as I think it does for many people. I grew up in a smaller city, Appleton, Wisconsin. When I came to Princeton, I was exposed to people from across the country and to issues around the world. It gave me a couple of things that connected me, technology, and technology policy issues. In my junior and senior years, I worked as an assistant to the University’s Director of Government Affairs. I had a number of jobs throughout my four years of Princeton, starting with delivering the Daily Princetonian the fall of my freshman year. By my junior and senior years, I was working in government affairs, and a lot of the University's issues were around technology and technology policy, so it first got me really interested in that. It also got me really interested in issues around the protection of refugees. That was the topic for my senior thesis. I stayed involved with immigration and refugee issues ever since. So in many ways, the issues I have pursued throughout my career really were formed for the first time while I was at Princeton.
BT: How has your career at Microsoft uniquely positioned you to understand and communicate tech issues that have been formulated in Tools and Weapons?
BS: In a perhaps ironic way, I was fortunate to work on some of the big antitrust issues in the 1990’s and see firsthand the collision between technology, law, and government. Then, when I was named general counsel in 2002, it really became my job to go out and work with others to make peace with governments around the world and with other companies across the tech sector. It was not an easy experience for any of us at Microsoft to work through these issues—the issues were complex. People had very different perspectives on not just the issues but about what we were doing as a company and how we were working with others. In short, it required us to change. When I look at the issues the whole tech sector is facing today, they are clearly broader and deeper than the ones that Microsoft faced fifteen or twenty years ago, but there are also some really obvious similarities. One of the arguments in our book is that the tech sector is going to need to change. Having lived through some of this change myself, it is a helpful perspective to bring to bear.
BT: With regards to Tools and Weapons, I would like to get your thoughts on which policy about which you have written is the most significant.
BS: There’s a number of different policy issues that Carol Ann and I have written together. If I were to pick one, it would be the importance of protecting democracy. Democracy is obviously one of the most fundamental aspects of American society; it defines who we are as a country. It defines the political system that roughly half of the people in the world live in today. Yet, we are seeing authoritarian regimes increasingly use digital technology to undermine or even attack democracy. We highlight in the book the three forms of these attacks. One involves weaponizing email by hacking into the emails of candidates and political parties and think tanks. The second involves the use of misinformation to manipulate political campaigns. The third is potential vulnerability of voting systems. And the most fundamental attribute of democracy is the ability to ensure that votes are cast and counted accurately. So I think it’s right to highlight that as the most important area. We highlight actions that tech companies need to take. We highlight new areas of government policy. We highlight the need for collaboration between government and the tech sector in new forms of multilateral involved high-stakes diplomacy. I strongly believe it’s one of the most important issues for the next decade for our country and every democratic country around the world.
“...we are seeing authoritarian regimes increasingly use digital technology to undermine or even attack democracy.”
BT: This fall’s magazine theme is centered on marketing, so I’d like to take a short break from discussing Tools and Weapons to pose a question on the topic: To the layman, Microsoft is best known for its hardware. Yet, over the last few years, the company has increasingly relied on its cloud computing capabilities to maintain its value and compete effectively in the tech sphere. What do you see as Microsoft's defining identity, and do you think it's still important today for companies to have a focused source of branding?*
BS: More than any time in the twenty-six years that I’ve worked at Microsoft, I think that the company today is very mission-driven. Our mission is all about creating technology that will empower other people to achieve more in their lives as individuals or within their work in organizations. That mission really defines our identity. Whether it’s Xbox or Surface or HoloLens in the hardware space or productivity software or massive data centers and the cloud and AI, everything is fundamentally about defining purpose. I do think it’s important for companies to know what they stand for. Employees and potential employees today, perhaps most especially students, are looking for purpose-driven companies at which to work. Oftentimes consumers are increasingly focused on the fundamental focus and purpose of a company as well. Now you need to, of course, then take that purpose and not only permeate it through your products, but bring it to the market through your brand. For us, Microsoft as a brand, we hope, stands for empowering other people. It stands for trust in the issues we talk about in our book, and it stands for protecting our customers around the world. But you see how all these things are really unified if we focus on our mission.
BT: Now back to Tools and Weapons, I noticed the idea that large tech companies like Microsoft take actions reminiscent of nations continuously pops up. You also mention that tech firms can and have occasionally come together to discuss issues with government, sometimes on an international level. Where do you think the relationship between tech firms and government is headed, and what do you see as the ideal relationship between the two entities?
BS: Well I think that companies always need to be subservient to governments. That’s the first principle. Especially in democratic societies, the government is elected, and companies are not, and we always have to remember that catching order. When you look at these societal issues being created by technology, they also require new forms of collaboration. One form of collaboration is across the tech sector. There is more that we can do across the industry to work together to address big problems of our time. This ranges from protecting cybersecurity, to creating new standards around privacy, to closing the skills gap for people. All of these are important. But even beyond that, we’ve called in our book for a new focus and new urgency around multilateral diplomacy. In our minds, the multilateral diplomacy from the 20th century needs to include not only collaboration between governments, but collaboration among government, companies, and nonprofits. That’s the only way we’ll address some of these big technology issues on a global basis. I hope that a decade from now, we will see more of these kinds of initiatives. I hope that we would see some institutional structure in place to facilitate them. It won’t end, for a moment, the more traditional interaction between government and companies, which often involves the regulators and the needing to sit down and talk with each other. But we hope that we see this new form of collaboration play a much broader role.
“Especially in democratic societies, the government is elected, and companies are not, and we always have to remember that catching order.”
BT: On a similar note to the last question, as digital service providers become ever more international, whose laws and principles should they obey? How can this be standardized across tech firms, whether or not they originated from the US? After all, even in Western democracies, the definitions of what some assume as basic rights, such as freedom of speech, vary markedly.
BS: It’s a great question, and it highlights one of the preeminent tensions of our time. We still live in the world that was first established by the Treaty of Westphalia. That is to say, a world where the territories and sovereign borders and each jurisdiction is controlled by a government. What that means for companies, and for individuals, is that you have to follow the law of the land whenever you’re within that territory. And that’s a good thing. Especially in the United States, we’ve all grown up rightly so with a view that no one is above the law. That means that no person, no company, no product, and no government is above the law. But then you have the other side of the tension. Technology today is global; the companies that create this technology are global. That means, on the one hand, that companies have to follow different laws in different countries. It means that we need to be committed to certain principles, especially in the field of human rights that reflect global norms. What this means, perhaps above all, is that we need governments to do more to work together. If you’re trying to figure out how to make global technology work in a world controlled by government in a defined territory, it by necessity means that governments have to more together and governments need to more with these companies to address this global technology.
BT: While reading your book, I became interested in the notion of a Digital Geneva Convention. Could you explain a bit more about what that means and what it could look like?
BS: When we endorsed the concept two years ago of creating a Digital Geneva convention, in part, this was a reminder of what the world accomplished after the close of World War II. In 1949, all of the governments in the world came together in Geneva, Switzerland with the international committee for the Red Cross. They signed what is known as the Geneva Convention. Its fundamental purpose is to impose on governments not just a moral responsibility, but a legal duty to protect civilians even in times of war, to try to avoid civilian casualties. Our first point is that in some ways it feels that the world is going backwards. Because now we’re in the 21st century, we are mostly living in a time of peace, and yet we are seeing governments repeatedly attack civilians on the internet. Our first point is that this is not a future we should embrace or allow to unfold. Instead we need a new approach that imposes on government the same responsibilities to protect civilians on the internet in the time of peace that they accepted for the protection of civilians near a battlefield in times of war. It means that we need to build on all of the international norms and laws that exist already because there are several, and they’re important. They include the Geneva Convention and the United Nations Charter. It means that we need to complement this with interaction by tech companies themselves. We have done this by creating the Tech Accord which has now brought together more than 100 companies from more than 20 countries. It means that we will ultimately need a new set of international agreements along the lines of what we have described as a Digital Geneva Convention. Only if we do these things can we apply in the 21st century some of the lessons that the world learned all too painfully a century ago.
BT: One of the most personally striking lines in Tools and Weapons is a bit of advice offered by the Pope where he urges you to “Keep your humanity.” So how do you remind yourself and strive to “keep your humanity” in your work?
BS: I tend to benefit from working in the same office since January of 2002. That’s a long time. I have a routine of driving to work and parking in the parking lot every morning when I am in Redmond, Washington. Every morning when I get out of the car, it provides a quiet opportunity to walk to the building and remind myself of a few clear thoughts before the hectic events of the day unfold. And I do try to remind myself of a couple of things in particular. One is to try and ensure that as a company we are thinking broadly of what we need to do to support our customers and the world. And the other is to try and find a little bit of time to be nice in small ways for the people I work with. Once the day begins, one of the hardest things is having the time to remember the important things that you hope you do every day. So I always find that if you think about them before the day begins there’s at least a better likelihood that you’ll remember them as the day unfolds.
“...the other is to try and find a little bit of time to be nice in small ways for the people I work with. Once the day begins, one of the hardest things is having the time to remember the important things that you hope you do every day.”
BT: In Tools and Weapons, you devote a fair amount of time to Artificial Intelligence. So I’d like to ask what world economies are the best equipped to deal with the potential upsets that AI related job loss, transformation, and creation would entail, and why? Furthermore, for those economies that aren’t as well equipped, what do they need to do to prepare?
BS: Well one of things we really try to do in the book is bring to light how artificial intelligence works. It’s coming together in a very dramatic way as we get ready to enter a new decade. I’m trying to describe different technologies that are facilitating it and then also talk about what we see as the most likely impact on the economy in terms of the kinds of jobs that will or will not be impacted.
With that context, the first thing that is evident is that countries will benefit the most from AI if they are quicker to deploy it. It’s a little bit like electricity in this regard: you have to use it to benefit from it. And like electricity you probably want an economy to move quickly to deploy AI in all of the various sectors where it will accelerate growth. Right now, in some ways, I would say that the Chinese government is at the forefront of deploying AI technologies in a very rapid manner. The US and Western Europe are doing well also.
The second thing to think about is the skills that will be needed to be successful when it comes to AI. Here, there is a need for more investment to equip people with digital skills like computer science and data science. But AI also requires a multidisciplinary approach. One of the things we talked about was that it will require more interaction with people from the humanities and social sciences. Here the United States is probably in the strongest position even though we have an enormous amount of work to do to spread the skills more broadly across the population. The third thing that people will need to think about is how governments adapt AI. In the book, we analogize the transition with AI to the global transition that took place a century ago as the economy moved from the horse to the combustion engine. And as we point out, the indirect economic effects in many ways are the most challenging. And this requires agile government, and here I think that there’s a benefit to the European Union which is proving to be more agile. To some degree it’s a greater challenge to the United States which has tended to be defined politically by more gridlock.
Then the last thing that I would add that people should think about is that there are some societies in the world where they are starting to actually see their population decline. Countries like Japan and Korea and Central Europe all fall into this category. In some respects, these countries may find it the easiest to embrace the technology. They need more technology to sustain their current standard of living. What that really means is that when you look around the world today, you can identify different parts of the world that have an advantage in one of these spaces, but not an advantage in all of them, and that’s in part why your questions is so interesting. It gives every country an opportunity to step back and ask what are we good at today that will benefit from the adoption of AI? What are we less positioned for and how do we address that challenge?
“...when you look around the world today, you can identify different parts of the world that have an advantage in one of these spaces, but not an advantage in all of them... It gives every country an opportunity to step back and ask what are we good at today that will benefit from the adoption of AI?”
BT: How do you think consumers should be made aware of how their data, and even their faces, are being used? How should governments and companies present this information understandably to less than tech-savvy individuals?
BS: One of our favorite chapters to work on and write was our chapter on consumer privacy. It’s because after many years of little movement in the United States, American privacy law is starting to move forward, especially driven by the law passed last year in California. At bottom, we need to make the data that exists about each of us as individuals much more accessible to us. We need to create better dashboards so that we can each go online and see the data that companies have on us and correct it if it’s wrong. We need the rights to move it to another data provider we prefer. This is a space where the European Union has really been a global leader. They adopted last year what’s called the General Data Protection Regulation. To date, Microsoft is the only major tech company to make available the rights under this new law, not just to consumers and customers in Europe, but to consumers and customers everywhere in the world, including the United States. From our perspective, it is a sign of what the world needs and what is likely to come: mainly making data more easily accessible to those of us who create it and we continue, or rightly should continue, to own it.
BT: Besides reading your book, how do you recommend Americans unfamiliar with digital tech issues educate themselves?
BS: It’s a great question, and first, there’s no substitute for using these products. Increasingly, that is not a hard challenge, especially for younger people. We tend to use them and rely on them throughout our daily lives. I then think it requires that we read broadly. We tend to see technology policy issues covered in the major traditional, news-oriented publications. We tend to see it in policy publications in Washington DC like Politico and Axios. They’re good places to go. And then you can look at the technology side of these issues, from some of the more tech-oriented forces of information. Whether it’s The Verge or podcasts that someone like Kara Swisher has on Recode Decode. There’s a variety of places one can go.
More than anything, it involves having a sense of curiosity. I’d almost conclude where I began. One of the things that I was fortunate enough to develop as an undergraduate was more curiosity about what is going on around the world. One of the things I found repeatedly in my career is that very successful people, almost regardless of the field that they are in, share a broad sense of curiosity. They always want to know more about what’s happening in the world. They always ask why, and not just what or when. People can pursue their own sense of curiosity from the huge amount of writing and podcasts and the other things that exist today that will serve them very very well.
*Question submitted by Isabella Lee from the University of Chicago