Microsoft's Brad Smith: "Orwell's 1984 was a warning"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2019

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson bring on Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, to talk about suing the government (3:00), working at Microsoft for a quarter of a century (5:00), how battling the government changed the company’s approach (7:00), whether Silicon Valley will do the same (9:40), calling for a cultural revolution (11:40), being careful about who they sell their tech to (14:30), the rising demands of tech employees (19:00), why this time is different with artificial intelligence (21:200), the new age of anxiety (29:10), the culture of tech (31:35), how Silicon Valley is like the Galapagos (34:10), how it is changing (36:00), the primacy of data centres (37:30), how tech companies are like banks (40:55), and data privacy as a human right (44:30).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yeah, technology.
0:02.0	What is it all about?
0:04.0	People often ask, am I optimistic or pessimistic?
0:07.0	And the answer is both.
0:10.0	That's why we talk about tools and weapons.
0:13.0	And I actually think we're well served to go back and recall what George Orwell wrote 70 years ago in his novel 1984.
0:23.0	And remember that it wasn't a prediction but a warning.
0:30.8	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech.
0:39.8	This week, we have a very special guest.
0:43.8	Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, that little $1 trillion company up in Seattle, is on the program.
0:53.6	Now, I was very excited to sit down with Smith because I'd been
0:56.4	following him for a while, not in a stockery way, but in a kind of a journalistic way. You see,
1:01.9	because amid all of the worry and scare stories and the warnings, both real and imagined,
1:10.6	about AI destroying jobs, about facial recognition
1:13.7	software being used to create surveillance states, all these big thorny questions facing the tech
1:19.9	industry. Most of the big guys, the guys who are creating this stuff, have been pretty
1:25.2	lily-livered when it comes to actually
1:28.1	talking about it, how they approach it, what could go wrong, what their policies are, etc.
1:35.4	But Smith, who's been at Microsoft for 26 years, and is the right-hand man to Satya Nadella,
1:42.6	the chief executive, is actually pretty forthright about this stuff.
1:46.6	And he's been perhaps one of the clearest and consistent voices talking about some of these biggest issues in a pretty straightforward way.
1:55.2	And now he's written a book about it called Tools and Weapons.
	...

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