USA TODAY International Edition
Prevent a dystopian future, Nadella tells coders
Microsoft CEO urges developers to use their powers for good
SAN FRANCISCO Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella used his company’s annual developers conference Wednesday to caution developers that they use their powers for good and build systems that avoid the dystopian predictions of authors George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.
“The opportunity for developers to have broad impact on all parts of society has never been greater,” Nadella, a former Microsoft engineer, told 5,500 developers assembled in the city’s convention center hall. “But with this opportunity comes enormous responsibility.”
The CEO added that he considered himself “a tech optimist, ( but) there are unintended consequences of technology,” consequences that won’t be solved by technology itself, but only by its creators.
“Orwell, in ( the novel) 1984, described a society where technology was used to monitor and control and dictate, and Huxley ( in Brave New World) talked about distracting ourselves without meaning or purpose,” he said. “We don’t want that.”
Nadella’s warning comes at a time when digital creations are increasingly misused or hijacked, whether that’s suicides and murders streaming on Facebook Live or the proliferation of fake news. Beyond the impact on users, horrified by violence, worried about copycats and confused by widely shared false information, the trend threatens the livelihood of tech giants that depend on ad dollars.
Facebook and Google have pledged in the past weeks to improve their monitoring of content in order to stop such incidents. In Google’s case, it was responding to an advertising boycott of Alphabet- owned Google and YouTube after a newspaper showed corporate ads frequently surfacing on racist, terrorist or other offensive content.
In a seeming nod to this problem, Microsoft announced at Build that it had created a new video indexing product that leverages cloud- computing power to scrub videos for voices and emotions in an effort to identify offensive content.
Those computing smarts reflect Microsoft’s effort to evolve from a lumbering software license- based company to a nimble enterprise- focused business.
On stage, Nadella noted 90% of Fortune 500 companies use its Azure cloud ( though Amazon Web Services still dominates the space) and 500 million devices now run Windows 10 software ( which is up from 400 million last fall).
The company’s stock has been pushing all- time highs despite a recent earnings report that noted a 26% drop in revenue from sales of its Surface tablets, showing that Microsoft still finds hard- ware vexing. The company’s failed $ 8 billion acquisition of phone handset maker Nokia remains a low point.
Along with his warning, Nadella also touted the imminent and exponential marvels of ultra- connected workplaces and healthoriented breakthroughs.
Focusing intently on the cloud and AI- powered future, Nadella, who is three years into running Microsoft, introduced a live demo featuring construction workers on a job site. Using cameras powered by image- recognition software, both the workers and their various tools could be identified and tagged by Microsoft’s software.
The idea is that alerts can be sent out to any smartphone running this workplace app, alerting personnel to everything from potential hazards to the location of a needed tool.
Nadella likened the coming trend to our ability, 20 years ago, to begin searching the expansive Web for targeted information. Only in this near- future scenario, sensors connected to artificial intelligence will allow us to search physical spaces.
“The opportunity for developers to have broad impact on all parts of society has never been greater. But with this opportunity comes enormous responsibility.” Satya Nadella