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Chapter 8

FUTURE TALK

A Conversation with Bill Gates

Chairman, Microsoft Corporation

—interviewed by Larry King of CNN

LARRY KING: I’m having this conversation with you on a computer, and I’m wondering if e-mail is going to replace the post office in the future.

BILL GATES: E—mail won’t replace the post office, but it will replace a lot of paper the post office and overnight services carry around today.

KING: Do you worry your child won’t learn penmanship because there’s always a keyboard and a printer nearby?

GATES: When I was in school, I always felt it was unfair that kids who happened to have bad handwriting were penalized at grade time?

Obviously, everybody needs to learn basic writing skills. We want our kids to have a full complement of 3 basic communications skills. I’m a lot more concerned that kids who only use calculators and never learn to do multiplication and division by hand may fail to grasp the basics of mathematics.

KING: Will there be any use for pencils and paper?

GATES: People will use pencils and paper for a long time but they won’t use them as much as they do now.

KING: Tell me how a computer will be used in the average home thirty years from now.

GATES: You’ll have lots of thin flat screens covering Walls of your house and you’ll carry a hand—held device around with you. The screens will feed whatever visual information you want—live video from a place in the world you like, an art reproduction, or maybe a stock ticker.

KING: What happens when the power goes out?

GATES: We’re very dependent today on electricity and we still will be in fifty years. If there’s a power failure, you won’t get much work done, although battery technology will improve enough that short power failures won’t necessarily shut down all of your computers.

KING: Are we going to get television and news and entertainment from the Internet rather than from a set hooked to cable in the house’?

GATES: News and entertainment will be delivered from the Internet to cable television and telephone connections in our homes. We’ll access this information using a Variety of devices, some of which will resemble today’s televisions.

KING: Will a person be able to work in the future without having any computer skills?

GATES: There will still be jobs for people without computer skills, but a smaller percentage than exist today. The proportion of the workforce that lacks computer skills will decrease as people not having those skills get retrained or retire. Most young people have computer skills or at least an enthusiasm to get them.

KING: Describe an office in the future. Telephone? Fax machine?

Conference room? Will there be an office building’?

GATES: The key element of the office of the future is that it will have lots of flat screens, just like your house will. And these screens are going to be everywhere once they get thin enough, cheap enough, and high enough in quality. You’ll carry around a lightweight screen the way you carry a wallet or cell phone or newspaper today.

The notion of” a fax will disappear because documents will be transferred electronically without having to pass through the intermediate stage of being printed on paper. If the recipient“ wants to read it on paper, she’ll print it.

“Telephone” refers to an audio—only electronic communications link, and We’ll continue to have this kind of connection. But I think audio only communication will be the exception rather than the rule.12 Communications will usually involve videoconferencing, collaborative Work on a document, or some other kind of data interchange beyond audio alone. We’ll have conference rooms, but some of the participants in a conference may be in other places and hooked in electronically. Some will participate from home when being face—to—face isn’t important. Office buildings and even cities may lose some of their importance because the Internet and corporate intranets will enable Workers to communicate, share information, store data, and collaborate regardless of where they are.

KING: What Worries you about the future?

GATES: The worlds rapidly growing population concerns me. We need to encourage people to start thinking about the consequences of having too many people on the planet——food and water shortages, pollution, too many people crammed into drug—infested and violence-filled urban centers.