Box CEO: "We need a different set of laws" to govern digital era
Box CEO Aaron Levie, whose $1.5 billion cloud storage and file-sharing company went public last year, said the government needs to rethink the way it engages with the technology industry.
Asked in an interview on "CBS This Morning" Wednesday about U.S. law enforcement's efforts to push companies like Apple and Microsoft for more data, Levie said we need to go back to the drawing board to craft new laws for this era. "In a world where billions of people are going to be on the internet, where we're going to be accessing and communicating with anyone in the world from any device, we need a different set of laws that are going to actually ensure the protection of our information," he said. "We're in the very early stages of probably what is going to be a decade of change that's going to be necessary in our laws and practices."
Levie criticized U.S. policy as out of step with our increasingly technology-driven world.
"Our laws and policies and the way the government interacts with the technology industry sort of assumes that we're still in that physical era -- that physical world that is defined by borders and boundaries. And we're not there anymore," he said.
Levie dropped out of the University of Southern California to co-found Box in 2005, back when "cloud computing" was a little-known concept.
"Probably up until about five years in, my mom kept asking me when I was going to get a degree. That's since subsided," he said, laughing.
Looking to the future, Levie predicted Silicon Valley's next frontiers will be artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
"It will probably be a while until you have a robot that can clean your house in a proficient way," he said, but he noted the possibilities of A.I. are impressive.
"We can actually now apply technology to our most pressing problems like education, health care, life science, even the government."