From the course: Career Advice from Some of the Biggest Names in Business

Bill Gates on the future of digital spaces

From the course: Career Advice from Some of the Biggest Names in Business

Start my 1-month free trial

Bill Gates on the future of digital spaces

“

- As we all learn to work from home and do distance. You mentioned that you're spending a lot of time on Teams. A lot of us are doing it, using all kinds of systems to stay in touch with our colleagues. Does this change, and my kids are on Zoom classrooms every day. Does this change, do you think the education, do we start, does it create a system where we are not showing up in offices anymore? Do you think this is, you know, you wrote "The Road Ahead" about how the internet was going to change everything. Is this another moment where suddenly how we operate and how we deal with each other changes because of it? Or do we move back into, does it get more close to normal? - Well, the, we've been fortunate in an unnatural way to push things into the digital form. And there are a few things like business trips that I doubt we'll ever go back. I mean, they'll still be business trips, but you know, less. In the case of high school, I think the social activity you know, making friends, hanging out, that you get by being there physically, that's totally irreplaceable. And so even though on a pure learning basis if you have an internet connection and a device and you have a teacher who is really good at presenting the material and it's not a lab based cost. Yes, it's impressive how people are rising to the occasion and for a subset of students making that work. But I do think certainly for K through 12, we want to go back to having those kids together and learning how to socialize, spending time with their friends. And I'm optimistic partly because of the, you know data about young people in this that we will get that back. But some other things, you know like Microsoft had gone to do a shareholders meeting not as an in-person thing, even before this, you know now virtually every company is, and I doubt there'll be that many face-to-face shareholder meetings. Now everybody's got permission, also the amount of innovation in the software that facilitates this thing so that you think, okay, what is a virtual courtroom? What is a virtual legislature? You know, how do you create the logic? And in some ways you can create something that's actually more efficient and better than what was there before. (light music)

Contents