President of Microsoft - Brad Smith
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 538 Ratings
🗓️ 25 September 2019
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do we ensure our astonishing technological advances are harnessed for good, not harm? HARDtalk's Stephen Sackur speaks to the President of Microsoft, Brad Smith. Remember the time when the internet was trumpeted as the tech tool that would deliver us a golden age of knowledge, freedom and democracy? Now we’re in a darker, more cynical place – the digital revolution has generated fears about lost privacy, mass surveillance and systemic misinformation. Have the corporate titans of tech failed us?
Image: Brad Smith (Credit: Gary He/Reuters)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker. |
| 0:07.0 | Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it. |
| 0:11.7 | My guest today is a veteran insider in the world's most lucrative, life-changing, and strategically vital industrial sector, information technology. |
| 0:23.5 | Brad Smith isn't a code guy or a software designer. |
| 0:27.1 | He's a lawyer and seasoned corporate manager who's risen through the ranks at Microsoft |
| 0:32.7 | to be president of one of the top five tech businesses in the Western world. |
| 0:38.3 | Smith has lived through the evolution of our digital age. |
| 0:42.3 | Back in the 90s, Microsoft's dominance of the market in computer operating systems |
| 0:47.3 | made it the target of antitrust legal action in the US. |
| 0:52.3 | Now the greatest controversies in information technology are less |
| 0:56.1 | straightforwardly economic, more political. The internet, once seen as an unalloyed good, |
| 1:03.0 | the pathway to knowledge, freedom and democracy is now viewed with more skepticism. It shapes |
| 1:09.2 | our lives in ways which leave us vulnerable to invasions of |
| 1:13.2 | privacy, to covert surveillance and many different forms of manipulation. Have the corporate giants |
| 1:19.8 | who developed and profited from information technology fail to take responsibility for these |
| 1:25.7 | potential harms. |
| 1:31.5 | Is much more government regulation and market intervention required? |
| 1:34.2 | Well, Brad Smith joins me now. |
| 1:35.7 | Welcome to Hard Talk. |
| 1:36.2 | Thank you. |
| 1:36.9 | Nice to be here. |
| 1:41.3 | You have served an extraordinary amount of time at Microsoft, best part of three decades. You have seen the evolution of our attitudes toward information |
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