The Future According to Bill Gates: We Talked to the Tech Giant About AI, Disinformation, and More
The Future According to Bill Gates: We Talked to the Tech Giant About AI, Disinformation, and More
This is a show about our future, the ability to work well with AI and benefit from it is now, you know, more important than understanding Excel or the internet copy my son wrote using Gen Z slang. Yo fam. What’s good? How do you feel about the conversation that in a generation we won’t have to work so hard. It’s great that that’s started because that’s not, you know, for technologists to understand better than anyone else, you know, that really gets to the heart of, you know, religious values, philosophical values and it’s kind of Nirvana. But are we going to manage it well? Uh And how quickly does it get to a certain point? Is AI going to be good enough to build better AI? So AI is building better AI that builds better, builds better, builds better. This episode is about the, the massive benefits that are going to be the dominant theme for the next 1020 years. But then also about how we need to rethink, you know, how to use time when there’s not so little work, that discussion about can we have enough teachers and doctors, where we have, you know, an incredible shortage, even in rich countries. Think about things like mental health. It’s really an amazing thing that you, you deal with those shortages and you think, okay, how do we treat old people better? And how big should the class be? Can we make it, you know, 15 or 10? Uh And okay, what things do we reserve for humans? You know, we don’t want to see robots playing baseball. Uh So, you know, what are, what’s that boundary where you say? Uh OK, whatever the machines can do is great and these other things, you know, are maybe very social activities, uh intimate things. Where do we keep those jobs? It’s going to be hard to write science fiction. There’s always been conspiracy theories. We underestimate how creative Americans are. Bill Gates is part of a reptilian race that includes Tom Hanks and Lady Gaga. You know, I think every country struggles to find that line. The US is, is a tough one because, you know, we have the idea of the First Amendment. And so what, what are the exceptions, you know, like calling fire in a theater, you know. Uh And because you’re anonymous online, you know, it, it, it could get worse. I think over time, you know, with things like deepfakes, most of the time that you’re online, you want to be in an environment where people are actually identified, that is, they’re connected to a real world identity that you trust rather than people just saying whatever they want. And so the idea of Providence, who sent me this email, was that they really, you know, we need to have systems and behaviors that are more aware of. Okay, who, who says that, who, who created this? We need to give up hydrocarbons almost entirely. I have this group of pioneering energy that was very involved in what’s called the IRA Act in the United States, which put in place tax breaks for existing and new technologies to accelerate their deployment. And we’re consulted as experts on, OK, what are the policies to improve the grid? What are the policies to allow these things to happen, not to slow them down? You know, how does hydrogen come into this? And so we’re a resource, including having a lot of philanthropic funding from myself and other donors for the policies that move this forward. We’re not meeting the high expectations of the activists, including staying below 1.5 degrees. We’re making enough progress that people don’t have to despair. That is, we have to keep working on this. And yes, we’re going to have some adverse effects that will force us to make adjustments. I was able to tell the activists that things are a little bit better than they expected. Although their, their ferocity uh certainly had an effect on me to push harder. It was eye-opening how hard they were and of course, you know, they kept the problem visible. Uh, you know, I wish it was a bipartisan issue in the United States. Fortunately, the argument in most countries, you know, what, how do we solve climate, isn’t, you know, is it, is it even important? My hope to eradicate malaria in my lifetime, I want to eradicate it in my lifetime, is a more severe constraint. I’ll be disappointed if the global health issue doesn’t get uh significant ratings, because you know, of the, of my time in resources, you know, as well as climate. That’s what I work on the most, like malaria deaths, which is a big focus. The 500,000 children here who die from that. You know, I, I’m trying to be smarter about how do we make sure that everybody cares about that, you know, so that the rich country stays involved in, helps.
