Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott rise to his current post so unlikely, who loved his hometown and could not leave the place. He started following his passion once accidentally he caught the technology bug in the 1970s. It was the time when the jobs were decreasing dramatically, of which he could grab an opportunity.
He dropped his PhD in computer science at the University of Virginia, to join Google and become a Senior Engineering Director there. Then he left Google for LinkedIn and eventually become Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations. Then he joined Microsoft as CTO. Even when he is deeply satisfied with the course of his career and its trajectory, still contempt on the fate of being far away from hometown. He published the book, ‘Reprogramming the American Dream’ in April, co-authored by Greg Shaw.
He believes that the machine learning and artificial intelligence will aid an entrepreneurial rise in smaller towns that will place less of a burden on companies to hire employees in the small towns since some technical development will be conducted by the human-designed bots. He also hopes that as some of these businesses blossom, more youth will be inspired to start their own businesses powered by technology, creating a wide range of possibility without leaving their hometown.
“There is no way that you can reasonably educate your kids and attract and retain really great employees to these jobs and to even run the businesses themselves unless you have good broadband connectivity in all of these places,” says Scott. 25 million people in the United States do not have adequate access to broadband, where 19 million of those are in rural communities. Scott says this gap must be fixed and there must be higher efforts for venture capitalists to invest in businesses in non-traditional towns and cities. More than a venture capitalist, it will require a private-public partnership. We can create a collaboration between private companies, the academy and the government to solve a big problem for the public good like, potentially, high quality, low-cost health care.
When many worries that the rise of artificial intelligence will eliminate many jobs, Scott believes those losses will be more than offset by those new businesses created in all corners of the United States leveraging AI and other technological advances.
