Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone

by Satya Nadella

Artificial intelligence powers every experience, augmenting human capability with insights and predictive power that would be impossible to achieve on our own.

The intellectual history of how computers augment the human intellect and build a collective IQ has always fascinated me.

Doug Engelbart

Engelbart’s Law states that the rate of human performance is exponential; that while technology will augment our capabilities, our ability to improve upon improvements is a uniquely human endeavor.

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash popularized the term metaverse, envisioning a collective virtual and shared space. David Gelernter wrote Mirror Worlds, foreseeing software that would revolutionize computing and transform society by replacing reality with a digital imitation. These ideas are now within sight.

“If you know how to paint with math and science, you can make anything,” he once told me.

He would later tell journalist Kevin Dupzyk that he visited a farm on Brazil’s eastern shore, wandering around with a notebook and pondering the contribution he wanted to make to computing. He began to think about how computing could displace time and space. Why are we chained to keyboards

and screens? Why can’t I use my computer to be with anyone I want, no matter where they are? Alex sensed that the evolution of computing had only reached the equivalent of prehistoric cave paintings. MR was to become a new paintbrush that would create an entirely new computing paradigm.

Alex defined a new career quest for himself: “I am going to make machines that perceive the real world.” Perception—not a mouse, keyboard, and screen—would be the protagonist of his ...

The “how,” the blueprint, became to build a new computing experience designed around sensor...

their environment, and the objects around them. This new computing experience must enable three kinds of interactions: the ability to input analog data, the ability to output digital data, and the abi...

AI will change our world. It will augment and assist humans, much more like Baymax than Brenner.

A confluence of three breakthroughs—Big Data, massive

computing power, and sophisticated algorithms—is accelerating AI from sci-fi to reality. At astonishing rates, data is being gathered and made available thanks to the exponential growth of cameras and sensors in our everyday life. AI needs data to learn. The cloud has made tremendous computing power available to everyone, and complex algor...

AI today is some ways away from becoming what’s known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), the point...

even surpasses human intellectual ...

Like human intelligence, artificial intelligence can be categorized by layer. The bottom layer is simple pattern recognition. The middle layer is perception, sensing more and more complex scenes. It’s estimated that 99 percent of human perception is through speech and vision. Finally, the hig...

These are the building blocks of AI, and for many years Microsoft has invested in advancing each of these tiers—statistical machine learning tools to make sense of data and recognize...

and even begin to learn and understand human language. Under the leadership of our chief...

Huang, and his team, Microsoft set the accuracy record with a computer system that can transcribe the contents of a phone call more accurately than a hu...

journalist Geoffrey Willans once said. “You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.” Goethe went further. “He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.” Learning or improvement in one skill or mental function can positively influence another one.

“If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet,” the Danish Nobel physicist Niels Bohr once said.

The shared hope is that quantum computing will utterly transform the physics of computing itself.

Instead of being simply a 1 or a 0 like the classical bit, qubits can be every combination—a superposition—which enables many computations all at once. Thus, we enter a world in which many parallel computations can be simultaneously answered. In a properly constructed quantum algorithm, the result is, according to one of our scientists, “a great massacre in which all or most of the wrong answers are canceled out.”

It would take a classical computer 1 billion years to break today’s RSA-2048 encryption, but a quantum computer could crack it in about a hundred seconds, or less than two minutes. Fortunately, quantum computing will also revolutionize classical computing encryption, leading to ever

more secure computing.

To get there we need three scientific and engineering breakthroughs. The math breakthrough we’re working on is a topological qubit. The superconducting breakthrough we need is a fabrication process to yield thousands of topological qubits that are both highly reliable and stable. The computer science breakt...

Millions of people around the world go hungry because of inadequate food production or flawed distribution. One of the biggest problems with food production is that it requires fertilizer, which can be costly and draining

on our environmental resources. Making fertilizer requires converting nitrogen from the atmosphere into ammonia, which enables the decomposition of bacteria and fungi. This chemistry, known as the Haber process, has not been improved upon since Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented it in 1910.

are. Free speech, privacy, security, and sovereignty are timeless, nonnegotiable values.

In such a circumstance, some evidence indicates that an act is morally right while other evidence indicates that it is morally wrong, but the evidence or strength of argument on both sides is inconclusive. Unfortunately, that summed up Microsoft’s situation—which is precisely why the decisions that I faced as CEO, and that we faced as an organization, were so difficult, painful, and controversial.

How big is our data becoming? So-called Big Data—information stored and analyzed in the cloud—is on track to reach 400 trillion gigabytes by 2018.

Throughout history, trust has had an economic as much as an ethical purpose. Why has the United States generated so much economic opportunity and wealth? Economist Douglass North, who was co-recipient of a Nobel Prize, examined this very question. He found that technical innovations alone are not enough to drive an economy to success. Legal tools like courts that will fairly enforce contracts are necessary—how else to ensure some random warlord doesn’t come along and take away your property? What separates modern humans from the caveman is trust. The American founding fathers knew this. They defined the timeless values that undergird the First Amendment’s right of free speech. Now we need to work out digital publishing laws that will protect free speech in ways that enhance rather than undermine trust among citizens, organizations, and governments.

Similarly, the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans against unreasonable search and seizure, is based on timeless values that must be upheld through enforcement laws that require continual updating in the face of social, political, economic, and technological change.

This dynamic has been playing out for centuries. On July 3, 1776, John Adams, then a member of the Continental Congress from Massachusetts, wrote to his wife, Abigail, from Philadelphia pointing to the grievance he saw as the origin of the American Revolution—unreasonable search and seizure by the British. For generations, the colonial government had gone house to house searching for evidence without permission. Adams’s passion for ...

Modern cell phones [today] are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans “the privacies of life.”

Every wave of technological change has required us to reaffirm the values that undergird protections against unlawful search and seizure and develop new ways to protect them.

Now it is our generation’s turn to design legal and regulatory systems that will discourage and punish the evil while encouraging the good to flourish—and to do so in a fashion that will enhance the overall level of trust in society as a whole.

issues. Yale Law School professor Akhil Reed Amar, author of The Constitution Today and other popular books on the history of American law, said this in an interview with Time magazine: “My parents were born in undivided India, ruled by a monarch and by the Parliament that no one in India ever voted for, just like the American revolutionaries.

First, we need a more efficient system for appropriate, carefully controlled access to data by law enforcement. Among government’s many important responsibilities, none is more important than protecting its citizens from harm. Our industry needs to appreciate the importance of this responsibility, recognizing that our customers are often the very people who need protecting.

Second, we need stronger privacy protections so that the security of user data is not eroded in the name of efficiency. Governments also have an obligation to protect citizens’ fundamental privacy rights. Collection of digital evidence should be targeted at specific, known users and limited to cases where reasonable evidence of crime exists.

In his book Machines of Loving

Grace, John Markoff writes, “The best way to answer the hard questions about control in a world full of smart machines is by understanding the values of those who are actually building these systems.” It’s an intriguing observation, and one that our industry must address.

First, we want to build intelligence that augments human abilities and experiences. Rather than thinking in terms of human vs. machine, we want to focus on how human gifts such as creativity, empathy, emotion, physicality, and insight

can be mixed with powerful AI computation—the ability to reason over large amounts of data and do pattern recognition more quickly—to help move society forward.

Second, we also have to build trust directly into our technology. We must infuse technology with protections for privacy, transparency, and security. AI devices must be designed to detect new threats and devise appropriate protections as they evolve.

And third, all of the technology we build must be inclusive and respectful to everyone, serving humans across barriers of culture, race, nationality, economic status, age, gender,

physical and mental ability...

A few people are taking the lead on this question. Cynthia Breazeal at the MIT Media Laboratory has devoted her life to exploring a humanistic approach to artificial intelligence and robotics, arguing that technologists often ignore social and behavioral aspects of design. In a recent conversation, Cynthia observed that, while humans are the most social and

emotional of all species, we spend little time thinking about empathy in the design of technology. She said, “After all, how we experience the world is through communications and collaboration. If we are interested in machines that work with us, then we can’t ignore the humanistic approach.”