In an interview with Patrick Collison, Bill Gates expresses his four major concerns for future generations. The billionaire spoke at CHM Live this past February to promote his new memoir Source Code: My Beginnings. The event’s proceeds went to the nonprofit United Way. During it, Gates discussed his life story, from his early interest in programming to founding Microsoft. After resigning as CEO of his company, Gates began investigating global issues that most needed his philanthropy. During his research, he found four “scary things” that should concern everyone.
This generation’s fears, according to Bill Gates
When Bill Gates was young, his main fear was the atom bomb. But if he were a child of this generation, he would fear several more things. “There’s, you know, about four or five things that are very scary, and the only one that I really understood and worried about a lot when I was young was nuclear war,” Gates said. “Today I think we’d add climate change, bioterrorism slash pandemic, and keeping control of AI in some form. So, you know, now we have four footnotes.” He added a “potential” problem to the list: social polarization.
AI: Solution or problem?
Although he called unchecked AI scary, Bill Gates believes it may solve society’s “dearth of intelligence”. If used productively, it may help fill people’s gaps of knowledge and streamline information. “We don’t have as many medical experts, you know, people who can stay on top of everything, or people who can do math tutoring in the inner city,” Gates said. “And we have a shortage of intelligence, and so we use this market system to kind of allocate it. AI, over time… will make intelligence essentially free.”
The climate crisis
Clean energy and climate change have long been one of Bill Gates’ focuses. He even founded the TerraPower plant in the hopes of revolutionizing the U.S.’s energy system. He also started Breakthrough Energy to fund innovations in clean tech. In his Netflix series, What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates, he speaks with young climate activists about these issues, and was surprised at their bleak outlooks. But in an interview with Fast Company, he said “their despair motivated me to push forward more aggressively.” He also reassured the activists that they are making a difference and they “should not give up” since “we need them in their creative way to keep this on the agenda.”
Nuclear war
During the CHM interview, Collison mentioned how Gates was afraid of nuclear war as a child and asked if he still feared it. In his reply, Gates mentions the other scary things to worry about, but doesn’t take nuclear war off the list. “In terms of nuclear war, it is very scary to me that people are complacent because we have done so well. We haven’t; we’re here. Since World War II, we haven’t blown up any nuclear weapons and killed people.” However, he continued, the technology has advanced until fissile material could be made with undetectable lasers, and now atomic bombs can be recreated by a “non-state actor”.
The spread of disease
This isn’t the first time Gates had spoken about another pandemic. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he said, “The chance of a natural pandemic in the next four years is somewhere between 10 and 15%. And it’d be nice to think we’re actually more ready for that than we were last time, but so far we’re not.” He added that people are rehashing old mistakes instead of “having a consensus about what tools are missing”. As of now, the Gates Foundation is combating polio and diseases from unsanitary water. But Gates called for stronger policies about quarantines, more investments in disease monitoring, and more vaccine research and development.
The present is good
Despite all of the current and future challenges, Bill Gates focuses on the positive. He states that life is better today in terms of civil rights and public health. Yes, the younger generation needs to worry about “a nuclear war, or a super bad bioterrorism event, or not shaping AI properly, or not bringing society together…” But at the same time, he believes the likelihood and impact of these problems are exaggerated to encourage people to avoid them. Above all, he believes things are better than before: “The big headline is people are living longer. People are learning more. People are more literate.”
Bill Gates is optimistic about the future
Despite the scary prospects, Bill Gates believes people in the future will live better if they address them properly. “Absent not solving some of these big problems, things are going to be so much better off,” he concluded. “Alzheimer’s, obesity, you know, we’ll have a cure for HIV, we will have gotten rid of polio, measles, malaria. The pace of innovation is greater today than ever.”
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