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I attended the speech delivered by Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, even before he took up this position. He has always been one of the most interesting speakers, relying on the whole culture to put forward his arguments.
But as much as I appreciate them, they are not everyone's cup of tea. Colleagues in the trade press want them to be more product-oriented, more ad-focused, full of flash and ending with "one last thing" like Apple's. Why does not he look more like Steve Jobs, they seem to say.
I understand their point of view. They are there for reporting, not for the big picture. But that's the big picture on which Nadella focuses. He runs a huge business, which touches billions of lives every day, with thousands of products and services that do not launch new products every year, but often every week.
For me, the important thing is this: in his speeches, Nadella does not sell Microsoft. Instead, it puts the company and its products in context and, in doing so, attempts to set the tone for the industry as a whole. And to do this, he must become something different from his predecessors, Gates and Ballmer, he must become a futuristic CEO.
Let's go back for a moment and look at the world forty or so years ago. Alvin Toffler, one of the first futurists, wrote a book on the world that was looming on the horizon, a book in which information technology was transforming society faster and faster and where the old flow of information always faster and constantly growing. Mapping the effects of these changes on society, he coined a new term and used it as the title of his book: Future Shock.
We live in Toffler's tomorrow for thirty years, while the Internet wrapped its life in the Web. And now, we're adding more to this world, building a cloud on a mbadive scale to meet most of our computing and storage needs, connecting it to an ever-smarter system of ubiquitous computing devices that we integrate. deep in our lives.
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The future is rushing on us, faster and faster. Alvin Toffler's world is here, and he has brought a brilliant light that reflects ideas and technologies, blinding us for their repercussions and their social impacts.
One of my favorite novels is The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. It is a book on unexamined rapid progress, the balance between the uncontrolled shocks of the future shock and the humanistic use of technology that inspired the Whole Earth catalog and the work of the badociated foundation. "We are gods and we might as well be able to do it," he said in the first catalog, which gives access to tools and ideas.
I think this motto is at the heart of what Nadella talks about in her speeches. It describes an approach to technology that does not stray from its rapid progress, but rather seeks to direct it for the betterment of society as a whole. This is the thinking behind programs such as AI for the Earth, AI for Accessibility and AI for Humanitarian Action: using the tools provided by the company's research laboratories to pbad them on to students, researchers, to the whole world hoping that they will be used for good.
As an industry, we are motivated by the lure of what is brilliant, this new technology bigger, more powerful and faster than the one that existed before. We reach it without thinking, without stopping to think about the consequences of a possible change. And then, we leave things free, without watching what we do in the world, drawing inspiration from the next big thing.
Nadella's speeches are considered reflective homilies, drawn from the history of technology and the world of philosophy. They are based on decades of study and research in areas that we seldom touch the keyboard. These fields are as important as the latest JavaScript libraries, if not more. This is in the belief that this explains why chat applications have triggered riots, why social media has magnified social tensions: and why we have not noticed what we did as a "riot". industry until it is too late.
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We may not be able to fix the mess left by social media, but we can prepare for a future that is inexorably approaching, where machine-learning technologies and enhanced automation are changing society as much as agricultural and industrial revolutions. In The Shockwave Rider, Brunner talks about the transition from an arms race to a brain race, creating a wise world, similar to what our world is going through.
At the end of his novel, Brunner puts it to the vote, a worldwide plebiscite to come. We are at a pivot point, at a junction where, on the one hand, the dystopia of the surveillance state, artificial intelligence monitoring each of our movements, and the other where we can use these technologies and use them for build a better world. It's a clear choice, but that seems to be forgotten in a hurry to build the new and brilliant. We are on the right track to use these technologies and build what Charles Stross calls Panopticon's singularity, where everything keeps us on track and makes us not improve society.
By putting the technology in context, Nadella tells us that we have this choice and that we must do it, that we must be taken into account in the way we proceed and in what we do with our machines. His speeches can not be flash, they can not be full of products. But they are much more important than that, as they tackle the growth problems of an industry that comes out of its teens.
Microsoft is 43 years old. It's one of the fundamentals of our industry, a company that has been around for quite a long time to sow a whole fallout forest around its home in Seattle. It can not be as brilliant as it is brilliant because it is deeply rooted in the processes that animate the modern world. Nadella, as the third CEO, is in her old age, in her new role as an adult in the room, setting an example for the rest of the industry.
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