A young physician I remember meeting in Somalia at the height of the civil war, working in a tent lit by kerosene lantern...trying desperately to save a young Somali child who had been gravely wounded by shrapnel. A young Chinese student stopped in a back alley of Beijing at the time of Tienanmen Square, in the most eloquent possible terms, described the hopes of his generation for a better, freer life in China. Also Greg Mortenson, who has become a kind of folk hero in this country, the author of Three Cups of Tea, on rebuilding schools in Afghanistan and an attempt to reach Islamic people in a new way, beyond military power.

Those are the people who have left a lasting impression on me, and they continue to do so across this country and around the world. When I left Nightly News, I said I'm not only going to spend my time in speeches...But I continue to be energized and inspired by the young and old men and women representing a wide range of ethnicity and interests, unhinged from the comforts of their homes, only to put their boots on the ground, their hands in the earth, and spend their nights in scary places, to make this precious planet a better place for all of us.

I encounter them around the world, as I did this last year in Rwanda, the year before that in Pakistan in earthquake-ravaged zones, in Rwanda which was the site of a terrible genocide in 1994; they're trying desperately to reconcile that tiny, tortured country. The NGO workers I'm familiar with, including an organization called International Rescue, they'll go to mountaintop villages and they have workout sessions in which the [wealthy organizers] sit across from the families [whose homes and land] have been destroyed. It's hard, emotional work. Then these workers can go back, and facilitators, can collect the data in a central place and analyze...a country which has such a primitive infrastructure.

One morning, I woke up in northern Pakistan in a cargo container with a bunch of American relief workers who had been there six months, hiking long distances with remote villagers, trying to assess their medical, sanitation, and health needs, how they move forward. And then when they hike out, those with boots on the ground, they put their hands on the keyboard, and by putting their hands on the keyboard, they were able to distill all that they had learned and make the relief efforts so much more efficient, and in so doing, they were making a big impression on those people who were skeptical of those of us in the West who seem to have so much, while they have so little.

A physician I know in New York, a specialist in new forms of restoring hearing for the profoundly deaf, before too long, in the next month or so, will program a Cochlear implant for a child in East Africa, by computer, from his offices at NYU. A farmer...I was talking to the other day now calibrates his planting program by tracking world market conditions on his computer, and in so doing he's reviving the agricultural economy in the Great Plains and providing jobs for its workers as well.

Those people whom I've encountered around the world, and those heroes who were documented by Microsoft here today, will not be found on Page Six or in the tabloid newspapers or in the evening entertainment shows. They are at the defining point of our times, this generation, just as those who came of age at the time of the Great Depression and then went off and saved the world in World War II defined their times, the people I call "The Greatest Generation," and their offspring, the Baby Boomers, who were at the vanguard of liberating the oppressed in this country, the people of color and women -- the Baby Boomers who invented the technology we're premiering here today.

It is a reminder to all of us, in this daily work that we now take for granted, that this technology requires guiding hands, an imaginative approach, and a good heart wherever it can be used. We also have to remember, of course, that technology alone is not the answer. At the beginning of the 20th century, people like you and of your age must've been thrilled and excited by the possibility of the technology of their time. They were at a crossroads [into] the American century. They had...rail travel, the first flight, the first automobiles chugging down the muddy roads, the telephone for communication. The beginning of the great industrial and financial might of this country...what everyone thought would be the Golden Era of Technology Advancement. It became a century that gave us two world wars, the introduction of the nuclear age, the Holocaust...and also [the wars in] Southeast Asia. It gave us a world divided between the haves and the have-nots. New plagues and old feuds along ancient sectarian lines.