Quotes About Technology

This has the whiff of August 1945," said former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden, referring to the emergence of the atomic bomb. "That's a big deal."105

It's hard to imagine now, but as late as 2007, the Intelligence Community's annual threat assessment did not include the word cyber once.42 In 2009, cyber threats still ranked so low on the priority list, they were buried on page 38 of the forty-five-page threat assessment, just below drug trafficking in West Africa.43 Fast forward five years and the world looked very different, with cyber vaulting to the top tier of the 2012 intelligence threat list.

While running a wide range, the cyberattacks perpetrated by China Russia, Iran, and North Korea come in five basic types: stealing, spying, disrupting, destroying, and deceiving.

In 2018 cyber theft cost an estimated $600 billion globally. That's about as much as the global illicit drug trade.65 If cybercrime were a country, it would rank in the top twenty-five in terms of annual GDP.

Gen. Keith Alexander, once the nation's top cyberwarrior, called it "the greatest transfer of wealth in history.

It's hard to overstate just how foreign the worlds of Washington and Silicon Valley are to each other. At the exact moment when great-power conflict is making a comeback and harnessing technology is the key to success, Silicon Valley and Washington are still working on working together.

The sheer volume of online data today is so staggering, it's hard to comprehend: in 2019, Internet users posted 500 million tweets, sent 294 billion emails, and posted 350 million photos on Facebook every day.29 Some estimate that the amount of information on earth is doubling every two years.30 This kind of publicly available information is called open-source intelligence and it is becoming increasingly valuable.

Anything running on code and connected to the Internet is a potential cyberattack vector. This global battlespace changes every time anyone on earth downloads an app, installs a patch, inserts a thumb drive, connects to airport Wi-Fi, or plugs in a smart toaster.

As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work wrote, "AI is accelerating innovation in every scientific and engineering endeavor."5 Not since electricity has a breakthrough technology ushered in so much potential promise and peril.

populations at scale. There is greater upheaval still to come. In 2019, Google announced it had achieved "quantum supremacy"—a computing breakthrough so powerful that a math problem a supercomputer would need ten thousand years to solve could be cracked by its machine in just three minutes and twenty seconds.

Securing advantage in this new world means that intelligence agencies must find new ways to work with private sector companies to combat online threats and harness commercial technological advances. They must engage the universe of open-source data to capture the power of its insights. And they must serve a broader array of intelligence customers outside of government to defend the nation.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are, too. Although some companies have declared they will never use their technology for weapons, the reality is their technology already is a weapon: hackers are attacking computer networks through Gmail phishing schemes and Microsoft coding vulnerabilities, terrorists are livestreaming attacks, and malign actors have turned social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook into disinformation superhighways that undermine democracy from within.

Technological advances (like the Internet) used to start in government and then migrate to the commercial sector.52 Now that process is reversed, with breakthroughs coming from large companies like Google and Nvidia and from startups like Ginko Bioworks and Dataminr.

Satellites are not just getting better; they are getting more plentiful. According to then Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, the number of satellite launches more than doubled between 2016 and 2018.44 In 2018 alone, 322 small satellites about the size of a shoebox were hurled into space. The Paris-based firm Euroconsult estimates that more than eight thousand small satellites will be launched between 2019 and 2028.

In 2000, approximately 15 percent of the world's population was connected to the Internet.51 Today, more than half the world is online, and more people are estimated to have mobile phones than access to running water.

Together, these four nations are behind 77 percent of all suspected state-sponsored cyberattacks since 2005.

Who would know but ten years ago that kids would be texting each other all the time, that that would be one of their main forms of communication.

So many times, these kids know more about the technology than their parents. And so many times, we're putting kids in very adult situations and expecting them to behave like they're 40 years old. Well, that's just not going to happen.

there a tiny tribe on an island in the South Pacific that is being destroyed by climate change and does not get any sort of technology that does

A motor-car cuts a swathe through the bright air, sharp-beaked, irresistible, shouting to the wind to make way.

I cannot stress enough that the answer to life's questions is often in people's faces. Try putting your iPhones down once in a while, and look in people's faces. People's faces will tell you amazing things. Like if they are angry, or nauseous or asleep.

The twentieth century contributed skyscrapers and typewriters and automobiles and telephones to the world. Solid, workable objects. Every innovation of the twenty-first century could be erased by a power failure.

don't worry because GAFAM did not know the type of toilet paper you are using

My theme for philanthropy is the same approach I used with technology: to find a need and fill it.