比尔·盖茨夫妇在2014斯坦福大学毕业典礼上的演讲

2015-03-13 14:07:53来源：网络

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　　Bill Gates: Congratulations, Class of 2014! Melinda and I are excited to be here. It would be a thrill for anyone to be invited to speak at a Stanford Commencement – but it’s especially gratifying for us.

　　Stanford is rapidly becoming the favorite university for members of our family. And it’s long been a favorite university for Microsoft and our foundation. Our formula has been to get the smartest, most creative people working on the most important problems. It turns out that a disproportionate number of those people are at Stanford.

　　Right now, we have more than 30 foundation research projects underway with Stanford. When we want to learn more about the immune system to help cure the worst diseases, we work with Stanford. When we want to understand the changing landscape of higher education in the United States so that more low-income students get college degrees, we work with Stanford.

　　This is where genius lives.

　　There is a flexibility of mind here – an openness to change, an eagerness for what’s new. This is where people come to discover the future and have fun doing it.

　　Melinda Gates: Some people call you nerds – and you claim the label with pride.

　　Bill: Well, so do we.

　　There are so many remarkable things going on here at this campus. But if Melinda and I had to put into one word what we love most about Stanford, it’s the optimism. There’s an infectious feeling here that innovation can solve almost every problem.

　　That’s the belief that drove me, in 1975, to leave a college in the suburbs of Boston and go on an endless leave of absence. I believed that the magic of computers and software would empower people everywhere and make the world much, much better.

　　It’s been almost 40 years since then, and 20 years since Melinda and I were married. We are both more optimistic now than ever. But on our journey together, our optimism evolved. We’d like to tell you what we learned – and talk to you today about how your optimism and ours can do more – for more people.

　　When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft, we wanted to bring the power of computers and software to the people – and that was the kind of rhetoric we used. One of the pioneering books in the field had a raised fist on the cover, and it was called Computer Lib. At that time, only big businesses could buy computers. We wanted to offer the same power to regular people – and democratize computing.

　　By the 1990s, we saw how profoundly personal computers could empower people. But that success created a new dilemma: If rich kids got computers and poor kids didn’t, then technology would make inequality worse. That ran counter to our core belief: Technology should benefit everybody. So we worked to close the digital divide. I made it a priority at Microsoft, and Melinda and I made it an early priority at our foundation – donating personal computers to public libraries to make sure everyone had access.

　　The digital divide was a focus of mine in 1997 when I took my first trip to South Africa. I went there on business, so I spent most of my time in meetings in downtown Johannesburg. I stayed in the home of one of the richest families in South Africa. It had only been three years since the election of Nelson Mandela marked the end of apartheid. When I sat down for dinner with my hosts, they used a bell to call the butler. After dinner, the men and women separated, and the men smoked cigars. I thought, “Good thing I read Jane Austen, or I wouldn’t have known what was going on.”

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