Steamboats in software: Microsoft’s Brad Smith digs into America’s foundation for tech insights
As the country celebrates its 250th birthday this week, Microsoft is launching an unlikely summer project: a six-part series of short videos, hosted by Microsoft President and Vice Chairman Brad Smith, that look at American history with lessons related to technology and innovation today.
The premise is that every current technology debate — about issues like patents, privacy, and who will shape AI — has precedent somewhere in the world’s past, and that we can all benefit from remembering how we got here in the first place.
“We felt that the country’s 250th year is worth reflecting on the lessons of history, the role of technology, and the questions we face as a country,” explained Smith, a well-known historian in an interview with GeekWire this week.
In the first episode, for example, he stands in Philadelphia’s Independence Square to explain how a steamboat demonstration on the Delaware River in 1787 helped inspire the Constitutional Convention to give Congress the power to grant patents. This was the foundation of the intellectual property framework that Smith described as the foundation of American innovation.
Astute observers may see an irony in a company extolling the virtues of IP protection as Microsoft and OpenAI defend against a New York Times copyright suit over material used to train their AI models.
Asked about that, Smith made it clear that he saw no contradiction.
“Each generation of technology requires a new cycle of legal thinking, legislation and cases in many cases, so that the courts can maintain the balance that has always been needed between innovation and the protection of things that have already been created,” he said.
He also noted that Microsoft is often the party that goes to court to protect customers, pointing as one example to the company’s move this week to intervene before the European Supreme Court in defense of the European Union and the US data protection framework.
The six-part series was moderated by Smith’s chief of staff, Carol Ann Browne, vice president of Microsoft; and produced by Kirkland, Wash.-based Trifilm. The episodes, about 3 or 4 minutes each, will be released in the coming weeks. Smith said they were filming during existing travel plans, making stops along the route he was already taking.
This series moves around the Boston courthouse where privacy rights were born, the assembly line of Henry Ford’s Detroit for the distribution of new technology, Cincinnati for Tocqueville taking on non-profits, Great Falls, Md., for George Washington’s first ambitions and infrastructure, and Lewis and Clark’s trip to Montana in the amount of combining competing ideas.
“The country’s 250th anniversary is an appropriate occasion to honor the past, to celebrate the past,” Smith said, explaining the motivation behind the series. “But let’s make sure we find something in the past that helps us be more successful in the future.”
