Far fewer are interested in computing so much as a gold rush that happens to use computing as its backdrop, which is overwhelmingly heading towards web-based media companies.
Yet Gates' and Jobs' gold came from edge clients, not web media. Clients have never been more powerful, why is there no modern gold rush in client software? Is it merely that SaaS/hosted software does not suffer from piracy?
Other things is that the web is more universal. Say I have a great client app. It works perfectly on a client Windows machine. If I want to tap the larger market I have to have an OS X version, an Android version, iOS (depending if I didn't target both when doing the OS X version), and a Linux version. To keep all of these people happy, the versions should be pretty much the same. That's hard to do with client software on multiple targets.
The web targets the lowest common denominator: browsers. Fortunately as those go, the VM that is the browser is pretty powerful. Sure I might not be in my preferred language, but I can get things done. If done right, powers are added as the device becomes more capable my leveraging existing frameworks like Bootstrap, etc.
Gates and Jobs are pop-stars of technology. A few hundred years into the future, we're more likely to see Charles Babbage and Alan Turing in text books than Gates and Jobs. Those text books are unlikely to be read by humans in the same physical form we exist today (unless something catastrophic happens), and the class of intelligent beings dominating that period will trace their lineage directly to inventors and scientists than businessmen.
Whom should we remember: Gödel, Turing, or Cohen?
Unfair, that is not an answer to what he actually said:
> Those text books are unlikely to be read by humans in the same physical form we exist today
You're talking humans, he is not.
I love how computer scientists seem to decide they've "solved" AI because neural nets can sorta- kinda- do something that we do unconsciously (like see) and blithely assume that we just need a bigger net to get "thinking". When have we ever built something more complex than, say, a bunch of rocks piled on each other, without understanding its basic workings?
> I love how computer scientists seem to decide they've "solved" AI because neural nets can sorta- kinda- do something
Citation needed. It turns out there are exactly zero computer scientists who have ever said anything even remotely like that.
But again, that's wildly off topic.
Sounds like assumed strong AI to me.
> Citation needed. It turns out there are exactly zero computer scientists who have ever said anything even remotely like that.
Why cite, you've apparently done the lit search.
From memory there's:
"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."
That was in 1993 -- so we've got almost ten years left. Phew.
http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge
Now he's a math professor, although his profession is currently "computer scientist" but I expect it to be very easy to find many other computer scientists who've said similar things, even going back to before neural nets. They may not be computer scientists you (or I) respect but...
I think some computer scientists spoke with similar confidence about LISP, but can't be bothered to find citations. (Obviously hard, since there aren't any, right?)
For really off-topic assumptions of this kind that push my button -- slower-than-light travel to other stars is often discussed as though it's a solved problem (e.g. Fermi's Paradox) despite the fact that it would require a really complex machine that was able to work flawlessly for hundreds or thousands of years. Again, something we're ludicrously far away from.
"If you are giving back, it means you took too much." See http://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_radical_wisdom_for_a...
It turned out that Bill Gates is a kind of Robin Hood: in a sense, he robbed the rich (those who could buy a computer or who owned a software company) and gave it to the poor.
Unless you believe that richer people should be richer because they deserve it and poorer people should be poorer because they deserve it, I think that he made a positive impact on the world at this point by redistributing wealth.
Microsoft's legacy been technologically bad (as in buggy lousy software), actively hurting (explicitly fighting against) the free software movement which aims to empowers regular people, and bullying governments around the world (literally taking taxpayer money). The elites of Microsoft took home among the greatest amounts of wealth of any company, and employees spend absurdly lavishly on all their business trips etc.
Microsoft is a good example of how richer people do NOT deserve their riches, so we're in agreement about the injustice of the system. Your idea that Bill Gates is on the right side of this is, well, almost completely backwards except that some of his philanthrophy is postive today. On the other hand, the Gates Foundation is a major pusher of Common Core testing in education, which is, by many accounts and perspectives, destructive and terrible policy. So, I'm not even sure that the Gates Foundation is all that positive, even there it's a mix.
Gates made a career stealing from not just the poor, but the charitable[1]. Then he pioneered new ways to destroy competing markets[2] He'll have to cure cancer to offset the damage he's done.
0. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_...
1. http://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/kerberos-pacs-and-...
Of course we all do, but that's pure ego. Each one of them was brilliant, there is no discounting that, but you also can't ignore the role that luck played. You can't just be brilliant and you can't just be lucky, you really have to be both to have the kind of success they did. It's not surprising that they are anomalies, hoping to recreate their success is like hoping to find a winning lottery ticket.
We shouldn't put any of them on a pedestal anyway. The empires of each of them was built on locking people into their closed systems at any cost. Jobs did some remarkable things, Zuck seems like he's going to do positive things with his fortune, and Gates might eliminate the world of a lot of disease, but you only have to look at past cutthroat titans like Andrew Carnegie to know that redemptive actions like that leave behind at best an ambiguous legacy.
There was a great piece on Grantland this week talking about Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and Microserfs. It had this bit which I thought was really interesting:
"The moment reads two ways. Either it’s about Zuckerberg, for all his billions, being Just Like Us — a slave to the same digital toy to which we’ve subcontracted management of our memories, our personal interactions, and our sense of self-worth — or it’s about how Facebook, born of Zuckerberg’s sense of exclusion, has made us just like him. The notion that the tech visionaries whose inventions colonize our daily lives are actually uploading the virus of their personalities to the global unconscious is an idea that floats through The Social Network; it’s the engine that powers Alex Gibney’s forthcoming documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, which stops just short of postulating that every iPhone includes a fragment of poor angry uncharitable emotionally stunted Steve’s immortal soul, like a sliver of wormwood from Mordor."
http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-hal...
If you want to be like Zuck, what is it about you that you are going to infect the world with?