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.
Eh, sincerity does not make a person right. Look into the eyes of any religious extremist for evidence of that. Gates thinks the internet won't save the world, but he's dead wrong. The internet, in it's current form, allows information to flow at will. And if there is any silver bullet for society's ills, it's certainly education. Teach a man to fish...
I strongly disagree. Our society is awash in information, and has been for decades now (the internet isn't exactly new, at least in the United States), yet life over the last 30-40 years has been pretty consistent. Arguably the automobile had a more fundamental impact on the structure of our society than has the internet.
The idea that information and education are a silver bullet is a romantic idea that's rarely evaluated on its own merits, certainly not by people who make a living pushing bits of information around.
So many people have lost so much time because of Windows and microsoft products. The progress of computer science have been a lot slower because of his monopolistic fight. As a proof, look how things have evolved since Microsoft is not relevant any more.
You're forgetting past history and the present times. It's not just Bill. IBM and Xerox before Bill Gates was worse. Apple now is far worse than Microsoft was in the "golden days".
Microsoft stole ideas, improved on them, and made them accessible to the public for far cheaper than anybody else. It wasn't just anti-competitive practices that put them at the front.
Apple stole ideas that others have done, improved on them, and made them accessible for a price HIGHER than everyone else because of marketing. It isn't just their anti-competitive practices that have put them at the front.
If you are going to make a claim to history and "you had to be there", then remember ALL of history and don't be condescending and assuming it was someone young that voted you down.
I am not forgetting. Your comparison of Microsoft and Apple is unfair, I have another way to present it: "Apple stole ideas from laboratories and created a market for them. Microsoft copied successful market products to make them better integrated in windows and to sell them better."
The article http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/pops/pop7.4microsoftmonopolyf... gives irrefutable facts. Do not accuse me of rewriting the history. I was there to see the birth and death of many good products that have been killed by Microsoft tactics (dr dos, stacker, framemaker, borland C++, ...). One of my most usefull book at that time was http://www.amazon.com/Undocumented-Windows-Programmers-Micro.... Many people have lost a lot of time because of the monopoly of Microsoft. How much time lost because of IE6 ? I have lost a lot of time between 1999 and 2002 because visual C++ was not compliant at all with the standard published in 98.
My opinion is that all the time lost because of Microsoft has been detrimental to computer science progress.
This argument is faulty, implying that Gates' time is more valuable than others'. We need both time and money to survive, when you need not worry about the later, logically you can approach other pursuits with more dedication.
When did the parent post claim Gate's time is more valuable than others? I only saw that the parent comment claimed that to Gates himself his time is much more valuable than his money, but even so he spends all of his time pursuing good things. He was never compared to anyone else.
What he means is, Gates time is so much more valuable to him than his money is to him, where most people time or money might be more valuable than the other, but not to such an extreme. My time is more valuable to me, but there is only so much money I'm willing to spend on convenience. Gates however would probably be willing to spend thousands of dollars on convenience that would seem like huge waste to the rest of us.
He makes the point that despite his time being so much more valuable to him that he is still willing to spend his time doing good things instead of just having a stress free easy life.
That is the case for everybody, for time is limited and money can be created arbitrarily.
Don't take my comment as an attack to the OP, I'm just stating that the situation is the same for everybody, and there are many people out there with less resources, but I claim their contribution is as valuable, if not more.
Most of us are willing to sacrifice time for sometimes even small amount of money. For example, I used to wait in line on Black Fridays for cheap deals on electronics. After I got a decent job I stopped doing that kind of things but I would probably still wait in line for a couple hours if I can save a thousand dollars. For someone like Bill Gates, he would probably easily PAY $1000 to save an hour of time, so the relative value between money/time is different for everyone.
For a billionaire like Gates, he effectively only has one currency left to worry about, since time is the only thing that's important and worthy of consideration for him. That is why I said time is more important to him than it is to rest of us, since he is unlikely to trade his time for anything other than what he truly desires.
His point was that Gates already has all the money a person could ever want, so he no longer values it enough to waste any time trying to make more. For a normal person, money is often valued more than time, which is why the majority of us spend most of our days working for someone else. If I ever became wealthy, my time would become more valuable than money too, and I would spend most of my time doing the things that I really want to do. Right now, However, I need money more than I need time.
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.
I get the feeling that people in most developed countries have a pretty naive view of poor countries, especially in Africa. The striking images of the famines of the 1980s in Ethiopia are what that most people recall, when they think of "poor Africa". That thinking is completely disingenuous and quite hurtful to Africa's development.
Technology has made incredible inroads in the continent. While we fret over Facebook running slow on 2010-era Android phones, micro-economies are thriving thanks to feature phones in Africa's poorest regions. Children who leave to work in the city are able to transfer money back to their village. They top up the village cell phone owner's pay-as-you go account, the owner then pays out that amount (in cash) to the family there. Farmers are able to get up-to-date info on crop prices, helping them from getting short-changed by opportunistic buyers.
Yes, there are parts of Africa where fresh water and basic medicine are the biggest need, but there are also much larger parts where those needs are (to some degree) met. There are many forms of charity and humanitarian aid, they can all have a massive positive impact on the communities that receive them.
I was reading about how in Africa they've built their own networks with just basic phones, and it fascinated me. What they've managed to achieve with what we view as obsolete technology is fantastic, which is why I'd be curious to see what they could do with more technology and how it could shape their lives. Like this guy: http://gizmodo.com/313408/nigerian-man-builds-working-helico... that's just an awesome hacker ethic.
Definitely. There's enough time and resources for everything. People just need to coordinate and spend their time more wisely.
Pissing your day away on HN debating what Bill Gates said about malaria and the internet for the second time in three days is probably not one of those worthwhile contributions. The world isn't going to be any different after our discussion. It will be a little better because Bill took action.
Well, it is not a great question to start with. From the article:
>> But asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria...
You cannot spend all your resources just on one problem. Governments spend on space exploration while spending a much bigger sum on poverty eradication, health and so on. Also, internet penetration can be a great tool in fighting some of the problems mentioned.
"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.
Funny you mention "not being able to go to school" as a problem that can't be solved by the internet, because with all the knowledge that's in there, someone with time and motivation can really get a lot of the benefits of a school. Knowledge is the power to stand on the shoulders of giants and optimise your way through a tough situation. At least that's one way it could work. This isn't just about school reports.
I also mention illiteracy. They lack even the basics to grasp any knowledge they could find online, or the capacity to imagine how they could use it, let alone being aware of what "online" is. My point is that their situation is so drastically alien to us, that ways we imagine they could leverage information simply does not apply to them.
For instance, the basics beyond food and shelter. Something we take for granted, like, say electricity, is not easily available to them. To get them Internet, you have to first get them power.
And then you have to convince them to let their kids peruse the Internet, because that's not going to earn money for their next meal, whereas going out and working in the fields or a construction site is.
The ironic thing is, many of them are aware that education is important, but in a very shallow way: to them, if it doesn't come with a degree attached, it's a complete waste of time. Not only is that mostly true for their situation, they lack the foundation to even imagine that they could actually apply the knowledge themselves to improve their own lives. Education is the ticket, but it's so much more complex than "here's the Internet, go learn."
It's hard to appreciate their situation until you spend enough time in the poorer parts of a third world country and see this day in and day out.
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.)
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.
> "Your choice is much less link-baity than the other submission. But it's still more link-baity than the real FT title."
I find that the latter part of your statement unfair. Was the title different when you made this comment? You make it sound like the submitter editorialised whereas these are words from the sub heading i.e. still from the source - It's hardly 'kludged'. The real title is so bland it's almost useless.
Yes, I agree that HN sometimes has a problem with titles but I've no idea what the solution is.
The real title is so bland as to be useless, and HN has a problem with people using very bland titles for their posts.
This submitter has "kludged" the subheading to fit the 80 char limit.
Because HN forces people to use 80 chars, and because article authors use stupid titles, this submitter had to use the sub-heading. But they couldn't use all the subheading, and thus they've pulled out the interesting bit.
> I find that the latter part of your statement unfair.
Yes. I'm not very good at expressing myself or making my point.
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?
I always enjoy visiting afrigadget.com , where people are figuring out solutions to their own problems with available resources. Definately a different perspective than I have ever seen on TV.
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.
[citation needed], really. I don't think education was the determining factor in jumpstarting the South Korean economy. South Korea recovered due to external cash and infrastructure investment:
"Much of the country's infrastructure was destroyed during the Korean War that followed in 1950-1953. After the war, South Korea became heavily dependent on U.S. aid."
-- http://www.southkoreagovernment.com/economy.htm
I do think there are situations you can't think yourself out of, or be educated out of. Examples are sickness or lack of infrastructure. It's no good having mobile internet access to the wikipedia article on malaria if your child has the disease, you've never been to school, there are no healthcare workers, no available vaccines, and there is no power socket to charge your phone...
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...
It's really important not to think about vaccines for malaria as a simple dead/alive issue. Malaria doesn't just kill people, it also incapacitates them for long period, and leaves them substantially less able to be productive. Eradicating malaria would remove a huge drag upon African economies.
And education would convince people of the need for vaccines, the need for condoms, and the need of seeking medical help. It's more than just an availability issue, it's also a culture, education and economic issue...
Besides, considering there is massive unemployment and underemployment in most 3rd world countries (especially amongst youth), I really don't think illness has any effect on overall productivity...
Furthermore, history has shown, with few exceptions, that quality of life, healthcare, prevalence of disease and every health metric gets better with economic prosperity...
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 :(.
Pretty sure it has to do with him aging. At some point in your life you realize your own mortality and start to decide what really matters in your life.
Even in my 30's, I've consciously started to make decisions about how I want to spend my time. Do I want to play video games for 3 hours, or go out and mountain bike for 90 minutes, or spend time with my dogs or my family? I'm pretty sure Bill went through the same thing, albeit he has a ton more money and those decisions were easy for him to use his resources to try and be a huge agent of change.
It probably also has to do with his legacy. Does he want people to remember him as the tyrant who ruled MS with an iron fist and his idea to rule the world? Or as a kind, gentle billionaire pouring his vast resources into solving some of humanities toughest problems?
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.
I've always found this a puzzling argument. He wants to spend his billions on malaria and polio, should we let him do that or should we start a committee that decides how best he should spend his money? Maybe he can do a televised competition where people go on stage and make a 1 minute pitch for him to choose one cause over another. Or maybe he can just keep doing what he's doing and solve two really big problems and then move on to something else that he wants to do when that's done.
He didn't suggest that people pour money into malaria either, really, he just suggested that they don't pour it into connectivity, and he had a really good point. But if people want to do that, then maybe we can solve malaria and polio AND get people connected at the same time!
Name them. What 100 are those? Malaria is one of the single biggest factors in the development of the average African child's life, and the effects of it resonate through a lifetime. It is almost certainly the most Important priority, rather than some photo sharing startup that is "Dropbox meets Quora for Snapchat users". Clearly, no one has to go do what Gates is saying, but the hyperbole here is silly.
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.