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

by Satya Nadella

AI must be designed to assist humanity. Even as we build more autonomous machines, we need to respect human autonomy. Collaborative robots (co-bots) should take on dangerous work like mining, thus creating a safety net and safeguards for human workers.

AI must be transparent. All of us, not just tech experts, should be aware of how the technology works and what its rules are. We want not just intelligent machines but intelligible machines; not just artificial intelligence but symbiotic intelligence.

The technology will know things a...

but the humans must also know about how the technology sees and analyzes the world. What if your credit score is wrong but you can’t access the score? Transparency is needed when social media collects information about you but dr...

AI must maximize efficiencies without destroying the dignity of people. It should preserve cultural commitments, empowering diversity. To ensure this outcome, we need broader, deeper, and more diverse engagement of populations in the design of these systems. The t...

AI must guard against social and cultural biases, ensuring proper and representative research so that flawed heuristics do not perpetuate discrimination, either deliberately or inadvertently.

AI must be designed for intelligent privacy, embodying sophisticated protections that secure personal and group information in ways that earn trust.

AI must have algorithmic accountability so that humans can undo unintended harm. We must design these technologies fo...

How can we protect ourselves and our society from the adverse effects of information platforms—increasingly built on AI—that prioritize engagement and ad dollars over the valuable education that comes with encountering social

diversity of facts, opinion, and context? This is a driving question that needs much more work.

But there are “musts” for humans, too—particularly when it comes to thinking clearly about the skills future generations must prioritize and cultivate. To stay ...

EMPATHY—Empathy, which is so difficult to replicate in machines, will be invaluable in the human-AI world. The ability to perceive others’ thoughts and feelings, to collabor...

we hope to harness technology to serve human needs, we humans must lead the way by developing a deeper understanding and respect for one another’...

economic thinkers advise us not to worry about it, pointing out that, throughout history, technological advances have consistently made the majority of workers richer, not poorer. Others warn that economic displacement will be so extreme that entrepreneurs, engineers, and economists should adopt a “new grand challenge”—a promise to design only technology that complements rather than replaces human labor. They recommend, and I agree, that we business leaders must replace our labor-saving and automation mindset with a maker and creation mindset.

In their first report, Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030, the study panel noted that AI and robotics will be applied “across the globe in industries struggling to attract younger workers, such as agriculture, food processing, fulfillment centers and factories.” The report found no cause for concern that AI is an imminent threat to humankind. “No machines with self-sustaining long-term goals and intent have been developed, nor are they likely to be developed in the near future.”

invent and design the technologies of transformation, which is where we are today. Second, we retrofit for the future. We’ll be entering this phase shortly. For example, drone pilots will need training; conversion of traditional cars into autonomous vehicles will require redesign and rebuilding. Third, we navigate distortion, dissonance, and dislocation. This phase will raise challenging new questions. What is a radiologist’s job when the machines can read the X-ray better? What is the function of a lawyer when computers can detect legal patterns in millions of documents that no human can spot?

if we’ve incorporated the right values and design principles, and if we’ve prepared ourselves for the skills we as humans will need, humans and society can flourish even as we transform our world.

Historian David McCullough has told the story of Wilbur Wright, the bike mechanic and innovator of heavier-than-air flight at the turn of the last century. McCullough describes how Wilbur used everything he could humanly muster—his mind, body, and soul—to coax his gliding machine into flight. The grainy old film, shot from a distance, fails to capture his grit and determination. But if we could zoom in, we’d see his muscles tense, his mind focus, and the very spirit of innovation flow as man and machine soared into the air for the first time,

together. When history was made at Kitty Hawk, it was man with machine—not man against machine.

Today we don’t think of aviation as “artificial flight”—it’s simply flight. In the same way, we shouldn’t think of technological intelligence as artificial, but rather as intelligence that ...

“How do we make technology work for us, and not against us — especially when it comes to solving urgent challenges like climate change?”

During the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, many of the key enabling technologies were originally developed in the United Kingdom.

Naturally, this gave Britain a big advantage in the race for economic supremacy. But the fate of other nations was determined in large part by their response to British technological breakthroughs. Belgium dramatically increased its industrial production to a level rivaling that of the United Kingdom by leveraging key British innovations, investing in supporting infrastructure like railroads, and creating a pro-business regulatory environment. As a result of these policies, Belgium

emerged as a leader in the coal, metalworking, and textile industries. By contrast, industrial productivity in Spain significantly lagged the rest of Europe as a result of Spain’s slow adoption of outside innovations and prot...

This question of technology diffusion—the spread of technology—and its impact on economic outcomes has always fascinated me. How can we make technology available to everyone—and then how can we ensure that it works to benefit everyone?

They found that, on average, countries tend to adopt a new technology about forty-five years after its invention, although this time lag has shortened in recent years.

Based on this analysis, Comin agrees that differences between rich and poor nations can largely be explained by the speed at which they adopted industrial technologies. But equally important, he says, is the intensity they employ in putting new technologies to work. Even when countries that were slow to adopt new technologies eventually catch up, it’s the intensity of how they use the technology—not simply the access—that

Gini coefficient, which measures the difference between a society’s division of income and a perfectly equal division of income. It’s really quite elegant. If 100 percent of a given population were to earn $1 per day, that would be absolute equality. If 100 percent earned $1 million per year, that too would be absolute equality. But when only 1 percent earn $1 million while everyone else earns nothing, we’re approaching absolute inequality. Gini’s work provides a way of measuring the degree to which the income distribution in a given society approaches or diverges

from perfect equality.

Capitalist economies reward qualities like innovation, risk-taking, and hard work—qualities that generate value, produce wealth, and usually lead to benefits for many people throughout the society. When rewards flow to the people who exhibit those qualities, unequal income distribution is the inevitable result. Edward Conard, a founding partner of Bain Capital, carries the argument even further in The Upside of Inequality. Conard concludes that inequality ultimately leads to faster growth and greater prosperity for everyone.

He sees two constraints on growth: an economy’s capacity and willingness to take risk and to find properly trained and motivated talent.

But excessive inequality has the perverse effect of reducing incentives for many people. What happens when people work more and yet make less money? It is discouraging, leading many people to slacken their efforts, abandon dreams of launching or expanding businesses, and perhaps to leave the workforce altogether. It also weakens overall economic activity.

I want to avoid the pitfalls of what Marx described as late-stage capitalism—a theoretical time when economic growth and profits collapse—and get back to the returns enjoyed in early stage capitalism. But how? That’s the question most heads of state around the world are also grappling with. In computer science and engineering, we search for something called the global maxima. It’s a mathematical phrase describing the optimal state—the highest point of a function. Where technology is concerned, I would argue that the global maxima for every region of the world—a country, county, or community—should be to import the latest world-class technologies in order to fuel innovation and growth among that nation or region’s entrepreneurs—to drive both exports and local consumption of these innovations with intensity across sectors and segments of society. In other words, focus on adding value as well as broad use to help generate surplus and opportunity for more and more citizens.

China has clearly done this with proactive industrial policy that supports their entrepreneurs and economy across manufacturing and consumer Internet services. China strategically used the global supply chain and their own domestic market to amplify their comparative advantage and bootstrap their economic growth.

The combination

of industrial policy, public sector investment, and entrepreneurial energy is what many other countries will also look to replicate from China’s success. I see the beginnings of this in India with the creation of the new digital ecosystem known as IndiaStack. India is leapfrogging from once being an infrastructure-poor country to now leading in digital techn...

Egypt has an ancient

heritage of science, math, and technology, and its universities have produced physicians who work throughout the Arab world. So health care turns out to be one of Egypt’s areas of comparative advantage.

Education plus innovation, applied broadly across the economy and especially in sectors where the country or region has a comparative advantage, multiplied by the intense use of technology, over time, produces economic growth and productivity.

“societies that utilize new tools quickly are likely to be more productive.”

Another high-priority area is fostering human capital and next-generation skills development. Building knowledge allows workers to keep up with the increasing pace of technology.

The pathway to new technologies requires a parallel investment in skills development—making sure people have the requisite skills to participate in an increasingly digital society, one that depends on smart devices and online services. In schools, this requires promoting digital literacy and making sure that teachers and students have access to technology and learning tools at low cost. In the workplace, we need to invest in lifelong learning with a focus on programs and investments

that promote upskilling for the cloud and a more digital-ready workforce. Companies like Microsoft are already expanding their educational capacity and building initiatives to accelerate such skills development, especially at small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Knowledge is necessary to find new uses for new technologies and that knowledge is accumulated through training and experience. Every country is different, but Germany provides an excellent example of the productive use of new technologies. Germany and the Unit...

Countries that invest in building technology skills as a percent of GDP will see the rewards.

Hong Kong, located in China but ruled for generations by Great Britain, was free of antimarket Communist rule and became an economic engine, attracting and training workers.

Governor John Kasich of Ohio, in the midst of a bitter 2016 presidential campaign, wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal arguing that a vote against trade is a vote against growth. He pointed out that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a major trade agreement that was pending approval in Washington at the time, is about helping large and small companies find growth in Japan, Australia, Canada, Chile, and other Pacific Rim nations that want to increase trade with America. The world needs continued progress on trade liberalization. Kasich pointed out that 40 million U.S. jobs depend on trade.

In his book The Start-up of You, Hoffman writes about the forces of competition and change that brought down Detroit as an economic powerhouse: “No matter what city you live in, no matter what business or industry you work for, no matter

what kind of work you do—when it comes to your career, right now, you may be heading down the same path as Detroit.”

What we aspire to do through LinkedIn is to build a network of alliances to help provide the intelligence on opportunities, training resources, and collective action we all can take to create economic opportunity for individuals. In this way, we hope to ensure that other cities in the future won’t suffer the same fate as Detroit—and, in fact, just as Detroit did, other cities can shape the...