Bill Gates (10 page)

The depth and variety of information available in such a setting will, however, make it possible for the teacher to customize the rate and nature of the learning experience more directly to the individual student. Different speeds of learning will thus be more easily accommodated within the same classroom, and students with particular gifts and interests will be able to explore those also. Gates doesn’t just hypothesize about the potential benefits of new technology; he reports on pilot programs that have met with success in specific schools, some of them particularly troubled ones. The media tend to emphasize Bill Gates’s technical genius, business acumen, and vast wealth, but one of the things that makes him unusual in the world of high technology is a surprising appreciation of the human need
for personal mentors. He singles out a chemistry teacher who brought the subject alive for him, and he has noted again and again how much of a stimulus his friendship with Paul Allen was right from the start. He appreciates the importance of personality and individuality, and his views on the future of education make it abundantly clear that he is not the kind of “loner” his stereotype as a computer whiz would have him be.

In July of 1997, Gates put his money where his mouth is in terms of education by setting up a foundation to spend $200 million of his own fortune on computers for public libraries, backed up by an additional $200 million in software from Microsoft. The press (which had been asking for some time what Gates intended to do with his billions in terms of charity) quickly compared this gift to the building of more than twenty-eight hundred public libraries by the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie early in the century. Most public comment on Gates’s gift was laudatory, but there was the usual sprinkling of negative reaction that greets even the charitable efforts of the very rich. Some commentators suggested that the money could have been better spent on books and noted that Gates would at least indirectly profit from the further dissemination of Microsoft products in a way that had not been true of Carnegie. One letter to the
New York Times
went so far as to suggest that the gift, with its emphasis on inner-city libraries, was simply a way of creating a generation of low-paid computer drones by giving poor children just enough training to make them suitable for future exploitation. Such attacks seemed intent upon ignoring Gates’s long-held belief that the future of education depends upon giving every child a chance to participate in the gradual development of the information highway.

Bill Gates’s broader vision of the future does, however, require an American public—and, eventually, a world population—for whom the use of computers is second nature. And such a world will without doubt enrich the coffers of Microsoft and every other successful software and hardware computer company. One of his pet ideas is the development of what he calls a Wallet PC. This extraordinary piece of miniaturized computer hardware would not be much bigger than the wallets we now carry in our pockets, but it would have a variety of uses that even science fiction writers might have regarded as a stretch in the 1970s. It would serve as identification, notebook, and engagement calendar. It would contain electronic signals that would take the place of door and car keys, and pictures of one’s family or latest vacation trip could be called up on its small screen. Most important, it would usher in the “cashless society” that so many computer visionaries have long imagined. It would work for all purchases, even vending machines, with any transaction immediately transmitted to one’s central banking or credit account. The Wallet PC would even be capable of transferring money to your children’s Wallet PC when a kid says, “Dad, can I have ten bucks?”

Banks are already issuing “smart cards” and “check cards” that allow many purchases to be paid for directly out of one’s bank account, bypassing credit cards, but some retailers, according to newspaper accounts, are starting to balk at the charges that banks are levying on them. If this heats up into a real revolt and the consumer ends up paying the costs of such transactions, it may spell trouble for the supposedly imminent cashless society. What’s more, computers are not yet ready to handle the incredible load of financial information that would have to be processed
in a world in which even a single purchase of a fifty cent candybar would have to be transmitted instantly to financial institutions. Gates, however, is not deterred by these logistical problems, which he believes technology can overcome, although he has admitted that some people will refuse to use Wallet PCs, just as some people refuse to have phones or television sets even now. Given the millions of Americans who do not even have bank accounts, the resistance may be greater than Gates is counting on.

Still, Bill Gates is far from the most wild-eyed futurist around. There are those who claim that a cashless society, for example, will totally eradicate the so-called underground economy that is the theater of operations for everyone from drug dealers and car thieves to petty burglars, not to mention quite a few politicians over the years. These utopian forecasters are ignoring a problem that Gates himself is fully aware of and quite worried about: computerized theft. It has been said that many famous bank robbers, including the legendary Willie Sutton, were quite smart enough to be bank presidents, but found robbery easier and more exciting. Over the past twenty years, the number of criminals specializing in computer crime has risen just as fast as computer usage. In the last year, the media have focused for the first time on the growing number of people whose complete identities have been stolen electronically—their Social Security and driver’s license numbers, along with credit card information. These people have not lost their wallets: their identities have been swiped even as they engaged in legitimate commercial transactions that were carried out by computer. They have suddenly discovered that their credit is ruined and that they are liable for astronomical bills. It can take months of work to prove that they
are who they say they are and that someone has purloined their lives.

Bill Gates recognizes the problems in this area, but, once again, he believes that they can be solved with new technology. He has stated that the Wallet PC will in fact be better protected than today’s wallet because it will be possible to deactivate the entire device at once if it is stolen, rather than having to contact a number of separate institutions to report missing credit cards, checks, and identification. And he notes that security codes are one of the most important if least talked-about areas of computer research.

Security codes are crucial not only to safeguarding financial transactions but also to the question of privacy. Gates has written and spoken about the privacy issue on numerous occasions. “Steaming open an envelope,” he has said, “has never been so simple and untraceable as it is, in effect, on the Internet.” He sees some technological solutions to the problem, making it impossible, for example, for e-mail to be forwarded or even printed out, or ensuring that it can’t be read more than once, when it first appears on the recipient’s screen. But he admits that technology can’t solve all privacy problems. The media have recently been focusing on the fact that most people have no idea how much information on their lives is gathered by computer, or that that information is routinely sold to other companies looking to extend their lists of consumers for marketing purposes. For example, when people use the cards issued by supermarket chains to get an automatic lower price on specials, that information is recorded and can be resold to marketing companies that want to know exactly what soap powders and cereals you buy. Gates was dealing with this issue two years ago, long before the media got interested.

In Gates’s view, the privacy issue is one that will have to be dealt with as a matter of public policy, by governments around the world. He notes that there are already many privacy laws on the books, and that these will have to be extended to deal with the electronic community of the information age. But he cautions against rushing into the passing of such laws, believing that a major public debate must take place first.

Finally, there is a major area of future computer development that Gates is preoccupied with as much for business reasons as for any broader vision he has of twenty-first-century life. That involves the conjunction of computers and television. What Gates and many other computer business leaders want to see is television sets capable of a clarity that makes it possible for them to carry not only the coming HDTV picture emanating from broadcast channels, already mandated by Congress, but also the textual material so important to Internet and PC usage. He wants to see broadcast television and PC screens merge into a single unit. But the makers of television sets and the major television networks and cable companies do not want to move in that direction, chiefly because the new HDTV sets are going to be expensive enough to begin with without adding to their cost by making them compatible with PCs. The television people simply do not believe that every household is going to have a PC, and that even if PC usage grows faster than they expect, the public really doesn’t want a merger of the two mediums, but would rather have separate appliances for separate uses.

One of the issues being contested here rests on the fact that PCs are still far too complicated to use to be considered appliances in the way that television sets are. You can’t just push a button with a PC as you can with a televi
sion set. The television industries have taken note that while recent polls have shown the VCR to be the American public’s favorite appliance, the majority of owners do not know how to program them to record programs off the air. VCRs are used simply to play rented or purchased videotapes. PCs are vastly more complicated to use than VCRs, and the television industry believes it will be a long time before enough people buy and learn how to use PCs as they currently work, or before something simple enough to be considered an appliance replaces them, to make the fusion of television and PCs a good marketing bet. Harsh words have been traded on this issue, with Gates and some other computer company CEOs saying that the television set makers will be put out of business if they don’t agree to fusion of the two electronic mediums, and the television company CEOs replying in kind.