Books reviewed in this essay:
Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, by Chris Miller (Scribner, 2022), 464 pages, photos, illustrations, map.
This is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race, by Nicole Perlroth (Bloomsbury, 2021) 528 pages.
The Lazarus Heist: From Hollywood to High Finance: Inside North Korea’s Global Cyberwar, by Geoff White (Penguin, 2022), 304 pages.
Overview
The revolution in information systems technology during the past 40 years has fundamentally changed how people live and relate to one another. Unfortunately, as with many innovations in history, human beings rapidly weaponized their latest discovery. The pace of innovation in weaponizing the computer-based technologies that form the fabric of our lives is moving as fast as the technology itself.
Within 20 years, discussions about cutting edge automation in warfare went from GPS-guided munitions to artificial intelligence, swarms of autonomous drones, and quantum computing. Taken together, authors Chris Miller, Nicole Perlroth, and Geoff White offer a close examination of technological breakthroughs that made the computer revolution possible, how nation-states are competing against one another in a new cyberweapons arms race, and how one country is using these innovations to run a vast criminal enterprise.
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