The Future According to Bill Gates: We Talked With the Tech Giant About AI, Misinformation and More
This is a show about our future, the ability to work well with A I and take advantage of it is now, you know, more important than understanding Excel or the internet crafted text to my son using Gen Z slang. Yo fam. What's good? How you vibing the conversation that a generation from now, we're not going to have to work as much. It's great that that's been 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 a Nirvana. But are we going to manage it well? Uh And how quickly does it come at a certain point? A I will be good enough to build a better A I? So A I builds a better A I which builds betters, builds, betters, builds better. This episode talks both about the, the huge benefits that for the next 1020 years will be the dominant theme. But then also about how we have to rethink, you know, how time should be used when work isn't in such short supply that discussion about if we can have enough teachers and doctors where, you know, we have incredible shortages, even in rich countries. Think of things like mental health. It's really an amazing thing that you, you deal with those shortages and you think, ok, how do we treat old people better? And what should the class size be? Can we make it be, you know, 15 or 10? Uh And ok, what things do we reserve for humans? You know, we don't want to watch robots play baseball. Uh So, you know, what are, what is that boundary where you say? Uh OK, whatever the machines can do is great and these other things, you know, perhaps are very social activities, uh intimate things. Where do we keep those jobs? It's getting 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 is struggling to find that boundary. The US is, is a tough one because, you know, we have the notion of the first amendment. And so what, what are the exceptions, you know, like yelling fire in a theater, you know. Uh And because you're anonymous online, you know, it, it, it can be worse. I do think over time, you know, with things like deep fakes, most of the time you're online, you're gonna wanna be in an environment where the people are truly identified that is they're connected to a real world identity that you trust instead of just people saying whatever they want. And so the idea of Providence, who sent me this email was that really them, you know, we're gonna have to have systems and behaviors that were more aware of. OK, who, who says that who, who created this? We have to give up hydrocarbons almost entirely. I have this group breakthrough energy that was very involved in the what's called the Ira bill in the United States that put in tax credits, you know, for existing and new technologies to accelerate their deployment. And we're consulted as an expert on OK, what's the policy to get the grid advanced? What's the policy to have permitting, not slow these things down? You know, how does hydrogen come into this? And so we're a resource including having lots of philanthropic funds from me and, and other donors on the policies that drive this forward. We're not meeting the activists high expectations, including staying below the 1.5 degrees. We are making enough progress that people should not despair. That is we need to keep working on this. And yes, we're going to have some ill effects that will force us to do adaptation. I was able to tell the activists that uh things are a bit better than they expect. Although their, their vehemence uh definitely had an effect on me to, to push harder. It was eye opening how hardcore they were and of course, you know, they kept the issue visible. Uh you know, I wish it was a bipartisan issue in the US. Fortunately, in most countries, you know, the argument is what, how to solve the climate, not, you know, is it, is it important at all? My hope to eradicate malaria in my lifetime, I want to eradicate in my lifetime is a tougher constraint. I'll be disappointed if the global health issue doesn't get uh significant viewership because you know, of the of, of my time in resources, you know, right up there with climate. That's the thing I work on the most like malaria deaths, which is a big focus of that. The 500,000 kids here who are dying of that. You know, I, I'm, I'm trying to be smarter about how we get, you know, everybody to care about that, you know, so that the rich country stay engaged in, in helping out.