Microsoft chairman and CEO Bill Gates announced the “golden age of computers” at a recent Princeton University award ceremony honoring world-changing figures. Gates intimated to a crowd of about 1,000 students the future of computing while addressing other technology issues like privacy and security.
“This is the golden age of computers and software coming together, and becoming a far more powerful tool to empower people, empower them in their work, and empower them in their playtime; even the realm of education will not be untouched by these major advances,” Gates told the group of students who honored him with the second annual Crystal Tiger Award. Last year’s award was given to former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Besides plugging next month’s release of Xbox 360, Gates also expanded on Microsoft’s recent technological forays. Within the next decade, Gates said, Microsoft will “conquer” speech and visual recognition while humanizing the computing experience through an “appreciation of the richness of human intelligence.”
Gates gives two examples of the type of futuristic software and hardware capabilities that will result from the “factor-of-a-million improvement” in memory capacity, referring to the famed Gordon Moore, who predicted a doubling of capacity every two years or less.
One advance Gates notes is a Tablet device that will eliminate textbooks and traditional printed newspapers and magazines as reading quality and ease of search on devices like that improve.
The Tablet advance is part of a “holistic” technological experience. Gates weaves a tale of a business lunch in the future where a camera phone with sophisticated recognition software that recognizes a photograph of a receipt and automatically sends it to an expense report.
“And so, it’s doing recognition on your behalf. If you’re traveling in a foreign country, you take a picture of a sign that’s got the foreign language on it, you take that image, send it up to a powerful server computer and just send you back down the translation so that you are completely aware of what the sign says, even though it’s not in a language that you know,” he continued.
On privacy, Gates assured that encryption to fight eaves dropping on wired or wireless networks was an easily solved problem. The tougher part of the equation, he said, is defining privacy and discovering how to audit systems for privacy. The largest challenge in this is giving users a complete understanding of exactly how information submitted to Websites, like credit card numbers and other personal information, will be used by the operators of the Website.
Those interested in reading a transcript of Gates’ speech can find the 35 minute presentation at his Website.
