An exclusive interview with Bill Gates

The thing that makes me admire Bill Gates more than most others:

There are two types of currencies in the world: time and money, and most of us trade one for the other in various forms (pay for convenience, or spend time working for a paycheck).

For the richest man in the world, he has all the money he'll ever need, but just like the rest of us, he only has limited amount of time left on this planet. Yet he is fully devoted on spending that form of currency, which is infinitely more valuable to him than even others, on the causes he believes in.

That alone convinces me on his sincerity and his true desire in making a difference.

There's two arguments that can be made: 'teach a man to fish' is basically what providing Internet access would do, it could enable a whole new generation of people access to information and allow them to significantly improve their lives, or for them to fully realise their potential. How many of them may actually be able to contribute directly to improving their lives, and the lives of millions of others if they had the resources?

But Gates isn't wrong, providing Internet access isn't what they need right now. They need safe water, and a cure to malaria, and improved medical services, and dozens of other things. Where Gates argument falls down is that it doesn't need to be a single focus, why not have the Gates foundation solve malaria cures why another goes after safe water, and another goes after Internet access. A multi-pronged attack to improve lives, and to give them the tools to improve their own.

"A voracious reader – he has always taken periodic breaks from his regular routine to read about and ponder the biggest problems he has taken on – his conversation is littered with references to authors. Given the smallest excuse, he plunges into a description of the different types of polio and vaccines – and then into the genetic tests that show how the disease once persisted and spread in areas like Uttar Pradesh even when full outbreaks were rare."

The above snippet represents the kinds of things discussed in the article. He talked about the internet for like one sentence. Bad thread title

Many people are making the leap from "access to information" to "better lives" without proper explanation of how that would work. Sure, for us it's obvious, but we're not the demographic Gates is talking about. The poorest of the poor have drastically different problems, and it's not obvious to me that they're something information can solve. "Student researching school report" seems like a good example, but much of this demographic don't even have the opportunity to go to school. And considering a full 50% of India lives below the poverty line, that's a humongous demographic.

And whatever problems can be solved by information, the poor are already making do via cheap mobile phones and their own ad hoc social networks. Which is probably the only thing that's viable for them, considering many can't even read properly and so speech is the best form of communication for them.

You could say that Internet access will create new industries and opportunities and the economic benefits will "trickle down", but 1) the timeframes are much larger (as Gates says), and 2) in my limited experience, very little seems to trickle down below the lower middle class. In fact, in India, the lower classes decry the "IT outsourcing" revolution, because prices went up across the board because the middle class suddenly had more disposable income. This did create a bunch of new jobs in the service industry, but on the whole the price increase only made things worse for the very poor.

This was posted to HN two days ago. The submitter then used a sub-optimal title ("Bill Gates says putting worldwide Internet access before malaria is 'a joke'"), which created frustrating discussion. (Title since edited to FT title.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6658518

You have taken a title from the sub-head ("The internet is not going to save the world, says the Microsoft co-founder, whatever Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires believe. But eradicating disease just might.") and kludged it to fit the 80 char limit.

Your choice is much less link-baity than the other submission. But it's still more link-baity than the real FT title.

HN does have a problem with titles. Perhaps people just need to post the real title and then make another post with their response to the article. But that means that people reading /new need to make several clicks - read the article and read the first comment before upvoting, and /new has a problem with not enough people upvoting from it.

The dupe-checker missed this.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/dacd1f84-41bf-11e3-b064-00144feabd...

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/dacd1f84-41bf-11e3-b064-00144...

I suspect that just providing digital services to people dying of disease isn't much good, but I think there are some really nice technology projects operating at very cheap and small scales to do good.

Two that spring to mind are kiva microloans (http://www.kiva.org) and the 'Gravity Light' that replaces expensive and dangerous kerosene lamps with kinetic-energy powered LED lights (http://deciwatt.org/)

I suspect that these kinds of small projects, dealing with small amounts of cash, or lighting, or water purification, or similar, are the technology projects that might contribute really usefully and in very short timescales.

Anyone else offer up some examples of cheap, near-term technology projects that HNers might want to get behind?

My uncle Turk has taken to building schools in Kenya (http://nobelity.org/building-hope-2011/).

The interesting things I have heard from that experience are that (1) raising money/awareness is incrediblely hard and time-consuming (2) western building methods don't work well in rural Kenya and (3) the locals are resourceful/hard-working in ways that put us startup founders to shame.

I think Bill Gates is right about what matters because we have to get our population growth under control and the best way to that is insure that children survive and are healthy. Possible good outcomes open up when you don't have a desperate, damaged population living day-to-day.

I do wish he would be a little more involved on the energy/climate change front. Population and Energy are going to be the defining issues of the next two hundred years.

Sure it will. The thing that I think Gates is missing is that even the poorest parts of the world aren't universally so. One need only think back to what it must have been like hundreds and even thousands of years ago. People back then were unimaginably poor by modern standards, how did we get from there to here? Incremental development a bit at a time. All it takes is a seed. A seed of literacy. And education, and entrepreneurship, and industry, and so forth. Once the norm starts changing things can reach a tipping point more rapidly than we tend to appreciate.

Look at South Korea, for example. In the 1950s they had been devastated by several wars (WWII and the Korean war). Today they are a wealthy industrial power house.

It may seem non-intuitive that today countries that are wracked by war, starvation, terrorism, corruption, and disease will end up with mass ownership of tablet computers over the next few decades, and that doing so will be one important facet in becoming wealthy, industrialized nations in the next few decades after that, but it's almost certainly going to happen.

Of course, spending a considerable amount of effort on curing malaria in the short-term is probably also a good idea regardless.

Education and development will save the world. Vaccines and disease eradication will save a lot of people from a certain type of death, but it won't enable them to live a high standard of living. Investment (is. access to capital) entrepreneurship and empowerment are what's going to enable that.

And while the internet isn't going to save them, computers and the internet open up an entire world of knowledge, and can empower people...

There is a real need for bringing infectious tropical diseases in Africa under control and I admire Gates's for what he has already done with polio in India but I'd like to politely disagree, even if it is just to refocus the debate on 'social mobility' on a global scale. I've had several conversation with young Africans who have transcended impossible odds armed only with what they could learn from the internet and access to libraries. There was that story a few years ago of the Kenyan boy who built a windmill generator from garbage. I get the feeling that they are sometimes tired of their problems of being constantly framed by the sick dying child or the poverty stricken family. It is a bit one-dimensional. They are a resourceful bunch. His heart is in the right place and he should continue but let's not forget that Africa has been getting aid, food and vaccines for decades and that there's been comparatively less focus on knowledge transfer between richer nations and African states.

We need to invest in changing how we use and generate energy, so that we can bring it to everyone. Things like Malaria and Zuc's plan to internet the masses will take care of themselves once people have the energy required to lift themselves out of the mud. Please tell me if I'm wrong, but with all the money that gets spent on treating Malaria, why is it I don't see any of that going to empowering the people that need malaria treatments to treat their own malaria? Give them the means to provide themselves with the treatments they need, don't just build up a new dependency on drugs you provide.

@wmeredith Providing a man with all the intelligence in the world is a noble thought but if he does not have the power to use that intellect, it is again lost. That knowledge is useless without having the tools. "Teach a man to fish, but without a net he sits on the shore wrapped in sorrow watching the fish he knows he could catch swim past."

To save the world we'd need to get rid of humans. Saving humans instead of the world would probably end up with a Matrix-style future of charred earth and blackened skies, with human beings thriving on internet-connected stasis pods to efficiently create "renewable" energy.

There is a huge misinterpretation here: we should read the context first. Gates was asked which was more important, Zuckerberg's plan for internet access for all, or a malaria cure. The question itself is a silly one, because both can be done simultaneously.

Bill Gates has long seemed rather skeptical of the Internet. During his time at Microsoft, he only embraced the Internet to the extent necessary to prevent it from disrupting the Win32 monopoly earlier.

Interesting article. Despite the rise of technology are humans committing less crime ? I don't think there's a relation between technological development and morality unfortunately :(.

I wonder if Microsoft's failure to dominate search, email and social networking has anything to do with his view.

It appears that Bill really loves his wife and, now, is following the values she got from the nuns in her schooling.

Bill Gates is not going to save the world, says The Internet.

while eradicating a deadly illness is probably good, it won't save the world.

I'm sorry, but there's no way for Bill Gates to say that without sounding like an arrogant asshole. The world doesn't have to unite and spend all of its income on what Bill Gates says is the most important priority. There are at least other 100 priorities that could be put above malaria, and even those shouldn't be done exclusively.