Will the Pandemic Accelerate the Autonomous Revolution?

The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically disrupting not only our daily lives but society itself. This show features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the deeper economic, political, and technological consequences of the pandemic. It’s our new daily podcast trying to make longterm sense out of the chaos of today’s global crisis.

On today’s episode, Bill Davidow, longtime Intel executive and author of Marketing High Technology, discusses what the future holds in technology in response to the current pandemic.

From the episode:

Bill Davidow: I think one of the most important things we could do is give individuals complete ownership of their information. One of the things we said in the book—what we would like to do and what we thought would be great—is if somebody like Bill Davidow could have a safe deposit box and an information fiduciary where all of this information about me was stored and I had the key to that box. Then, if an insurance company wanted to sell me automobile insurance and they wanted to know, I could say you can look at this information for that purpose and for that purpose alone. I’ll supply it to you, or if I wanted to do free searches on Google, I could say Google, I will give you my, say, Level 1 information and in return for you doing free searches for me, you and only you can use that information. If we don’t make that information available broadly for everybody to use, we’re going to cut off the ability to program our behavior or we’re going to reduce it significantly. I have a hard time seeing how that would have horrible effects on the economy.

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William H. Davidow is a general partner with Mohr Davidow Ventures in Menlo Park, California. Before forming this venture capital firm, he was senior vice president of sales & marketing for Intel Corporation and shepherded the renowned Intel 8080 and 8086 to success. Prior to joining Intel he was a marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard’s computer group. Davidow graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College and holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.