Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.