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Bill Gates: Internet Will Not Save the World
quantr points out an interview with Bill Gates in which he talks about setting priorities for making a difference in the world. Quoting:
"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. Bill Gates describes himself as a technocrat. But he does not believe that technology will save the world. Or, to be more precise, he does not believe it can solve a tangle of entrenched and interrelated problems that afflict humanity's most vulnerable: the spread of diseases in the developing world and the poverty, lack of opportunity and despair they engender. 'I certainly love the IT thing,' he says. 'But when we want to improve lives, you've got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition.' These days, it seems that every West Coast billionaire has a vision for how technology can make the world a better place. A central part of this new consensus is that the internet is an inevitable force for social and economic improvement; that connectivity is a social good in itself. It was a view that recently led Mark Zuckerberg to outline a plan for getting the world's unconnected 5 billion people online, an effort the Facebook boss called 'one of the greatest challenges of our generation.' But asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria, the co-founder of Microsoft and world's second-richest man does not hide his irritation: 'As a priority? It's a joke.'"
Years ago, when I was a zoology major in university, I spent some time working on a study of elephant migration paths in Africa.
It was an eye opening experience. I was staggered by the sheer poverty, the lack of access to safe drinking water and food, the high rates of preventable illness, and the high rate of child deaths. I remember a woman living in Uganda who made "biscuits" for children made with washed dirt simply so they could get something into their stomachs that would reduce the hunger pains and not kill them. I don't give to USA charities since then. I give all my charity dollars to people who are doing outstanding work in areas of disease and poverty.
I have no idea what people struggling to find food would do with the internet. Would it enrich their lives? I don't see how. Would it save them from disease? Would it allow their children greater likelyhood to see their fifth birthday?
Bill Gates has the right idea. I just wish other very rich people had as much sense and willingness to spend their money to help people.
They guy is right.
They grammar is wrong
Well, it's more complicated than that. But his perspective seems to be one applying a humanistic vision in conjunction with empiricism. The fact that it's an unusual approach to charity is what's really baffling.
Of course ... 5 billion more facebook accounts, more product for Facebook to sell to advertisers.
He didn't just find himself running a disease charity, so therefore he's claiming that's what's important. He chose to set up a charity for what he felt was the most important problem. You can say he's wrong if you want, sure - but saying it's "convenient" is really silly; you're getting the causality chain completely backwards.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Giving people treatment to diseases is great, but it's a short term solution. What happens in 10 years, if you're not around to give them treatment?
People in underdeveloped countries need to be able to self-sustain themselves. Even if they can't develop a treatment themselves, they should be able to economically support importing it. Education is what's needed for all of this, and the internet is the best tool for education.
So, we need both short term (giving them the treatment they need) and long term (giving them the tools they need to advance).
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
Bill Gates is right. Zuckerberg's plan is a joke and the Internet isn't all that important for solving the world's problems. Unfortunately, Gates isn't helping much either, due to his fake philanthropy that often does more harm than good.
The Gates Foundation has an endowment of $30 Billion making it the largest philanthropic organization in the world. But one third of that money is invested in companies whose practices run counter to the foundation’s supposed charitable goals and social mission.
In Africa, the Foundation has invested more than $400 million dollars in oil companies responsible for pollution that many blame for respiratory problems and other afflictions among the local population.
The Gates Foundation also has investments in sixty-nine of the worst polluting companies in the US and Canada.. It holds investments in pharmaceutical companies whose drugs cost far beyond what most patients around the world can afford and the Foundation often lobbies on behalf of those companies for "Intellectual Property" protections that make obtaining low cost medicines more difficult.
Other companies in the Foundation’s portfolio have been accused of forcing thousands of people to lose their homes, supporting child labor and defrauding and neglecting patients in need of medical care.
Well, that's the naive cynical view. The reality is that as societies become more wealthy (particularly, as they move out of starvation/subsistence) they have less children (not more), and an important part of getting out of the poverty trap is reducing disease (which destroys a tremendous amount of labor). It's not the only step, obviously, but it is a step in the right direction (even if we are trying to behave as idealized, heartless social planning robots, and ignore all the current suffering this could mitigate).
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Well, it's more complicated than that. But his perspective seems to be one applying a humanistic vision in conjunction with empiricism. The fact that it's an unusual approach to charity is what's really baffling.
Baffling indeed.
Yes, having the people educated is one thing that needs to happen. But it is one of many components.
In order to give them Internet access they must also have power and communications systems. They must be literate or all the words are meaningless.
If the people are dying of malnutrition then yes, additional education about farming techniques and food safety can help. If people are dying from sanitation problems then yes, additional education can help. But it is just a single thing on the long list of things that need to happen to transform a society.
Sure they can give the rural slash-and-burn farmers an Internet-enabled computer with satellite modems and solar power chargers. It is nice to teach a farming community that for generations has practice slash-and-burn techniques that they should read about alternatives, but that by itself will not solve anything. Give them computers and Internet access and all you will have is a community who still practices the same techniques, with the change that they now can watch cat videos and play Angry Birds. The technology by itself won't transform them.
It takes a lot of pieces working together. It is true that giving computers to children can help benefit the community as shown through "Hole in the Wall" and other experiments but that little bit of education is only one facet, there are hundreds of other facets that need to be addressed. Providing a little bit of education is useful, but does not help much against problems of rampant disease, abuse, family planning, nor does it provide the tools and technology needed to implement what is taught. Teaching the community "this is what refrigeration can do for you" doesn't help if they cannot get electricity. Teaching the community "these are health issues that chlorinated water can treat" doesn't help when the village is struggling just to get enough muddy water so everyone can subsist.
There is much work to do. If one group wants to help by adding educational tools, that is certainly one useful thing. But Gates is right that there is a very broad spectrum of changes needed to bring regions out of poverty, and Internet access alone is not enough.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Mark Zuckerberg's and the like don't give a shit personally about the other people who don't have internet connection and the reasons they are not online. They just want them online for revenue. Get them online, make advertising dollars from them, let them figure out how to survive life.
Find a job you love, and never work a day in your life.
The internet is a tool, nothing more.
Like any tool it could be used for "good" or bad. Cryptographic techology allows both counter-cultures and terrorist networks to blossom (good or bad depending on your politics), and allows people to protect their IP from piracy (good or bad depending on your politics). Decentralized control of resources can be good (more experiments), or bad (segregation, discrimination). Unfortunatly just as it decentralizes, the internet also appears to be concentrating other resources (people are funneled to the large social networking companies) and delocalizing (killing off local small businesses).
The internet will change the world, The internet is already changing the world.
Will it save the world? It's a stretch, but maybe it will save the world from the past. But it won't save us from the future (one day no one will remember the Internet, as it will be a quaint reminder of a past era like the pony express).
That the internet was just a fad, and not a priority for Microsoft?
Or at least something to that effect?
I think it was in his book.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Contractors aren't mistreated in any way. They don't get company health insurance. Big deal. They're generally paid much more than "permanent" employees. Regardless, if you can't cut it for whatever reason, then find another line of work. There's no comparison between a IT contractor for MS and a kid starving to death in some shithole in Africa, and anybody delusional enough to think so needs a swift kick in the ass.
I don't respond to AC's.
When I was a kid I did Unicef collection every Haloween. We got an orange cardboard coin box at school, and collected donations to it along with our trick-or-treat. Unicef used these funds to build water wells for people in Africa who had only access to contaminated surface water.
A decade or two later, we found that many of these wells accessed aquifers that were contaminated by arsenic. And that thus we kids had funded the wholesale poisoning of people in Africa, and that a lot of them had arsenic-induced cancers that were killing them.
OK, we would not make that mistake again, and today we have access to better water testing. But it caused me to lose my faith that we really do know how to help poor people in the third world, no matter how well-intentioned we are.
And we had better not go around curing disease withoput also promoting birth control. Despite what the churches say, and the local dislikes and prejudices. Or we'll just be condemning more people to starve.
Bruce Perens.
Waaaaa?
Sounds like *you've* never been involved in senior business decisions for a multimillion dollar company.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Second, overpopulation is the issue. We all want a better lifestyle and there is no way to avoid that. As more people live, and more people want stuff, the planet is going to have big issues. The mantra used to be that the planet cannot handle every person in China owning a refrigerator. China is dealing with that reality now. It is not pretty. The only way to deal with overpopulation is change our consumptions patterns.
And this is where Gates is full of crap
The internet is changing our consumption patterns and helping everyone. 40 years ago kids would collect large plastic dics, wrapped in two layers of paper, maybe a book, and a sheet of plastic that would be thrown away immediately. In most cases when the kids moved out of their parents house, and the entire collection went into the landfill, tons of non biodegradable plastic. This does not happen anymore and kids keep their iPods for years. Patterns are changing for the better
Yes it is true that Jimmy Carter, with the help of the Gates Foundation convinced people to filter their water before drinking it so they would not get infected with worms. It is also true that various technologies have made micro loans practical and Kiva has used the internet to efficiently fund those loans. This is helping the most venerable.
The internet is creating a culture in which rapid communications of research that would have been unaffordable 20 years ago is now practical. The simple act of communicating, which would have required an international phone call or fax, is not for all practical purposes, free. If you have never tried to call into the US from a foreign location, ask someone how expensive that is. Not that faxes were not themselves revolutionary for research. When I was at the university , we were able to employ several Russian researchers due to the Fax machine.
The internet provides a standard platform for dissemination and collection of information of services. Saying that it cannot help people in the greatest need is like saying verbal language, writing or cheap books does not help the venerable. Perhaps not directly, but we are no longer, for the most, shitting in the street and dying of cholera. That, my friends, is because of the ability to communicate across borders and generations.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Build them out of what? Using what tools?
The other anonymous coward most likely refers to survival tricks that start out simplistic using sticks, stones and cloth.
And where do these survival tricks using primitive materials come from? They often come from the indigenous people of the region. For example the technique of filtering water through sand, plant materials, charcoal, etc is thousands of years old. These people don't necessarily need the internet to explain such things, a tribal elder of the region explaining how his grandfather used to purify water, what different plants were used for, etc may do a far better job. Well, at least for the people living in rural areas. For those in urban areas the techniques using primitive materials may not scale up.
Energy use fundamentally underlies all economic activity, and this is primarily a technological issue. The general ignorance regarding this relationship and what it implies about how we produce energy can theoretically be addressed by the Internet as it is an issue of consciousness.
Gail Tverberg's excellent article on the matter should be carefully considered: http://oilprice.com/Finance/the-Economy/Why-Rising-Energy-Costs-are-Responsible-for-Widespread-Economic-Recession.html
The globe consumes on the order of 17 terawatts, primarily in some form of fossil fuel. Average use per person is around 2 kW, while the United States average is around 10 kW. As increasing energy use is a primary method of reducing poverty, we need to consider raising global per capita use. In order to address both the economy and the climate, all fossil fuel consumption must be eliminated while dramatically lowering the cost of that energy production. Meaningfully lowering the cost of energy requires minimizing land and material use, so energy density is of great significance. The only reasonable candidate for accomplishing this is nuclear power, but as current technology is no where near suitable for this task, so we must look to new technologies. Currently the most promising approach involves something called the molten salt reactor, which has precious little public support despite its potential for addressing both cost and liability. If we are going to responsibly manage the great risk that all of humanity faces, this situation must radically change.
To have some idea of the scale of the challenge that faces us, aiming for 50 terawatts of production by 2050 will merely raise per capita consumption to 5 kW. Today, it is unimaginable that this will be achieved as current efforts are focused on increasing efficiency to mitigate rising costs. This will not solve our problem or help us avert the risk of catastrophe- it only buys us a little time. With the right technological approach, this goal looks within reach, but this will require substantial public support in terms of mindshare and $billions, perhaps 10s of $billions. Current renewable approaches figure in the range of 100s of $trillions and is not remotely feasible for addressing poverty, climate, or any of the other myriad of problems we face including disease.
This truly is an issue of consciousness, and hopefully the Internet will serve its purpose in helping us confront our widespread superstitions and general fear so that we may focus our efforts towards policies that will make a difference. Our intelligence is being challenged and our future is at stake. What will we make of this? Are we going to be content with a hellish existence, or will we rise from this mess with a coordinated effort to address fundamental problems with this experiment at civilization?
The gates foundation has one "business" goal - invest it's money and spend the profit on charitable works. If they spend the capital the charitable foundation ceases to exist. Also if you think board decisions of for-profit companies are made solely on the basis of the profit to be had, then I must assume you are projecting your own morals onto others.
As for Gates, I'm almost exactly the same age as he is, I distinctly recall him saying on multiple occasions over the last 30yrs that he would give the bulk of his money to charity when he hit 55. Gates charity work and his efforts to get other billionaires to join him is has almost single-handedly rescued the traditional concept of US philanthropy from the "greed is good" generation.
Thing is you don't have that kind of money, which is odd given your obsession with it?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
A decade or two later, we found that many of these wells accessed aquifers that were contaminated by arsenic. And that thus we kids had funded the wholesale poisoning of people in Africa, and that a lot of them had arsenic-induced cancers that were killing them.
Are you sure you're not mixing up two different stories here? Although trace amounts of Arsenic are common in aquifers that contact certain kinds of alluvial sediments, only a few areas have experienced really high concentrations. In particular, this has happened with shallow tube wells in India and Bangladesh. These types of wells were extremely cheap, and were drilled in the millions starting around the 1970's with UNICEF assistance; I am unaware of any similar large-scale occurrence of contamination in Africa.
On looking at the morbidity and mortality modeling from the WHO link, I wouldn't automatically label it an complete tragedy right away, either. The amount of Cancer and other diseases from arsenic contamination (chronic ingestion, the concentration is not the kind required for acute poisoning) is definitely non-trivial. However, following the implementation of the tube wells, infant mortality dropped by something like half (keeping in mind this that the high starting point of mortality means half of a fairly big number), with substantial reductions in prevalence of waterborne diseases. It is entirely possible that the number of lives (and maybe person-years of life) saved by the wells could outnumber those that were lost.
Actually, I strongly suspect that the person-years of life saved could be greatly more than the number lost, but I can't directly substantiate the possibility with numbers, except to say there is evidence that recent anti-arsenic campaigns have resulted in increases in infant mortality, due to avoidance or loss of well water leading to greater use of microbially contaminated water supplies.
Obviously, it would be great to have both clean water with no arsenic at all. Possible with deeper but more expensive wells that have been gradually replacing the older wells (it sounds like other strategies like filtration and rain-water storage have sustainability problems when implemented out in the field), but I doubt UNICEF or similar charitable organizations can get the money they need these days to replace them all at a sweep.
There are a lot of ugly minds today who are telling the whole world how they actually think, and then projecting it onto Bill.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
There is much work to do. If one group wants to help by adding educational tools, that is certainly one useful thing. But Gates is right that there is a very broad spectrum of changes needed to bring regions out of poverty, and Internet access alone is not enough.
And, of course, there's the aspect of all this that everyone seems to overlook -- connectivity is not education. It may make it easier to get educated if it's used in conjunction with an education program, but in and of itself the internet is a piss-poor educational tool. The sheer volume of misinformation, minutiae, gossip, and punditry dwarfs the sorts of knowledge that are actually useful, much less the subset of that knowledge that would be useful to someone in the developing world.
Those of us who use the internet as a reference tool are used to that unreliability, and we can afford it. If the information on how to make cheese that we found on some website turns out to be wrong, then we shrug and toss the results in the garbage disposal. Folks living on the edge of subsistence don't have the luxury of experimentation.
I was never a fan of Gates while he was running Microsoft, and I've always thought his methods were on the shady side at best, but the efforts of the Gates Foundation to tackle real problems, particularly unpopular, ignored, and solvable problems, have to be respected. Gates may have been a lousy coder and no real techie, but maybe that's a good thing.
Your ignoring the scale of suffering caused by disease in places like Africa and just how staggering an impact it is happening.
Take a place like Swaziland. 1/4 of the population has HIV, is too poor for triple cocktail treatment and are thus dying. 110,000 children are orphaned as a result. On top of that, 58% of the population requires treatment for pneumonia each year, and nearly 60% requiring rehydration for diarea (And we're not talking having a sore gut from a cold, but conditions that are often fatal).
Will education help them? Well swaziland has around 90% literacy rate, and an exceptionally good school enrollment rate which is comparable with even western countries. Something is failing here that *isnt* education.
The last major war Swaziland was involved in was nearly a century ago, and its monarchy is widely held to be benevolant and not particularly corrupt or malicious. Its economy however is , like many post-colonial countries, a bit of a basket case and income disparity is utterly terrible, with a fabulously rich ruling class and the majority of its population surviving on about $1.50 a day. Despite being well educated, simple education alone appears not to be fixing this.
The simple fact is a massive chunk of the productive workforce is incapacitated and dying placing enormous economic pressures on those who do work, and this causes terrible poverty, compounded of course by the terrible inequality that was foisted on the country from its legacy as a british colony.
Bracketing aside the troubling questions of wealth distribution, it is clear that swaziland is doomed without a very serious improvement in health care. HIV does not have to be a death sentence anymore when treated by modern anti-virals. We can't cure it yet, but we can make it something that doesn't kill. A westerner in a UHC country (to ensure poverty doesnt remove access to medicine) with HIV can live as long as someone without HIV as long as they continue to take the required medicines and lives a generally healthy lifestyle. Malaria is a disease that stalks the poor (when was the last time you heard of a malaria outbreak in europe, australia or the united states?) and can be trivially contained if the money is spent as it should. The remaining conditions can be contained and cured with simple antibiotics and ensuring clean water and hygenic waste disposal.
There is no reason Swasiland should be any poorer than a european country. But like many african countries, its problems revolve around universal access to healthcare, wealth disparity and equitable access to clean water and waste disposal. Education, and by this I mean the internet too, does not factor here. Whats the point of reading about the fabulous lives of the westerners whilst dying of AIDS, malaria and diahrea.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
A big part of it is the inflation rate. Ex. I looked at one in offering loans in Mongolia at ~19% interest. The thing is inflation has been around 15% there so the effective interest rate is only about 4%. With defaults the return on investment was quoted at 1.8% which is probably about right.
I get the donate part and I don't expect to see my money again but I'd like to see it sustain itself. Otherwise you are dumping money into something that has no chance of helping: buying a car for a guy to be taxi driver were all the males in town are already taxi drivers and no one visits for example. If they know they got to pay you back what the money is worth after inflation they are forced a bit to look for good ideas not just another goat because goats are what they are used to.
The Earth is overpopulated. That's the fundamental problem we all face. Eradicating disease is a worthy aim, but will only make this underlying problem worse. I'm not suggesting we shouldn't eradicate disease, but it must be coupled with real action on overpopulation. Even thinking about the problem would be a start.
"They guy is right."
That guy has been wrong with every prediction about the internet in the last 20 years.
I'm not disputing your comments. However, what gives me second thoughts about the efforts of the Gates foundation is that they don't try to promote self-sufficiency in the target areas they're supposedly trying to help. For example, instead of simply trying to donate medicine why don't they try to set up labs that will manufacture the medicine within the country that needs it. It seems that even in his charity work Bill Gates has adopted the mindset of a proprietary software vendor, where even if a product is given away free, you're not given too much of a control over how it is to be used.
No, but he's trying to put the good PR spin on things.
How about this one to start.
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,2533850.story#axzz2jXU69lfS
Basically, he does humanitarian work to the locals, but is a large stake holder in the factories that are making the locals sick. Because he's "helping" them, he's the good guy. Because he's only a large stake holder in the factory, he's not the bad guy. He brings in more money from the factory than he puts out to help the locals.
Profit/Loss. If you bring in $100M, and you pay out $20M, and look like the good guy, you're doing it right, as it's still an $80M profit. Since you're dumping the $20M in to "help" the people, the locals won't complain.
If he had more loss than profit, he would simply cut ties to both sides. It's not worth it.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.