As the country marks its 250th birthday this week, Microsoft is rolling out an unlikely summer project: a six-part series of short videos, hosted by Microsoft President and Vice Chair Brad Smith, that look to American history for lessons relevant to technology and innovation today.
The premise is that every technology debate of the moment — over such issues as patents, privacy, and who gets to shape AI — has a precedent somewhere in the country’s past, and that we’d all benefit from remembering how we got here in the first place.
“We felt that the 250th anniversary of the country deserved some added reflection about the lessons of history, the role of technology, and the questions that we’re facing as a country,” explained Smith, a well-known history buff, in an interview with GeekWire this week.
In the first episode, for example, he stands in Philadelphia’s Independence Square to explain how a steamboat demonstration on the Delaware River in 1787 helped inspire the Constitutional Convention to give Congress the power to grant patents. This was the basis for the intellectual property framework that Smith describes as a bedrock of American innovation.
Savvy viewers may see some irony in a company extolling the virtues of IP protections even as Microsoft and OpenAI defend themselves against a New York Times copyright suit over the material used to train their AI models.
Asked about that, Smith made it clear he doesn’t see a contradiction.
“Every generation of technology has required a new round of legal thinking, legislation and oftentimes lawsuits, so that courts can sustain the balance that has always been needed between new innovation and the protection of things created already,” he said.
He also noted that Microsoft is often the party going to court to protect customers, pointing as one example to the company’s move this week to intervene before Europe’s top court in defense of the European Union and U.S. data-protection framework.
The six-part series was overseen by Smith’s longtime chief of staff, Carol Ann Browne, a Microsoft vice president; and produced by Kirkland, Wash.-based Trifilm. The episodes, around 3 or 4 minutes each, will roll out in the coming weeks. Smith said they recorded during existing travel plans, working the shoots into stops on trips he was already taking.
The series travels next to a Boston courtroom for the birth of privacy rights, Henry Ford’s Detroit assembly line for the spread of new technology, Cincinnati for Tocqueville’s take on nonprofits, Great Falls, Md., for George Washington’s early infrastructure ambitions, and the Lewis and Clark expedition in Montana for the value of uniting competing viewpoints.
“The 250th anniversary of the country is quite rightly an occasion to honor the past, celebrate the past,” Smith said, explaining the motivation for the series. “But let’s make sure we get something out of the past that helps us be more successful in the future.”
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