- Bill Gates said he grew up worrying about nuclear war, but future generations will have to be concerned about that as well as bioterrorism and climate change—to name a few.
Bill Gates has laid out what he believes should be on the agenda for the next generation to address.
Having been born in the 1950s, the Microsoft cofounder said one of his greatest fears growing up was the threat of nuclear war.
And while this issue is far from resolved, the billionaire philanthropist also highlighted a handful of further issues that people his children’s age will need to address.
Speaking to Patrick Collison of the Computer History Museum last week, Gates explained: “A nuclear war or a super bad bioterrorism event, or not shaping AI properly or not bringing society together a little bit around the polarization. Those four things, yes, the younger generation has to be very afraid of those things.”
Gates, 69, then retrospectively added climate change to the to-do list for millennials and Gen Z to rectify.
But even with all of these major concerns on the horizon, the man worth $168 billion added that the headlines of life in the 2020s and beyond are only looking more positive.
“It’s fine that people are worrying about the problems we face, including how we shape AI and polarization and we’re arguably less ready for a pandemic now than after the last one because of the divisiveness that’s come in around that.
“It’s weird the things that we all wish would be better and the things that we worry about, but if anybody thinks it was [better] back in 1955 for women or people who are gay or people who have got heart disease or cancer—it’s just insane.
“The big headline is people are living longer, people are learning more, people are more literate.”
Gates, the former CEO of Microsoft and the cofounder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—now known as the Gates Foundation—also pointed out that as these issues rise up the agenda, they may be overemphasized to ensure action.
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He explained: “They’ll actually, to some degree, exaggerate the likelihood and the impact of some of those things in order to activate people to make sure we steer clear of those things.”
Provided focus is put on these problems, Gates’s outlook for the world he is leaving to the next generation is positive: “We’re going to be so much better off: Alzheimer’s, obesity, we’ll have a cure for HIV, will have gotten rid of polio, measles, malaria. The pace of innovation today is greater than ever.”
USAID issue
In the more immediate time frame, the tech titan has a more pressing concern: the lives that will be lost if the funding freeze on U.S. aid to foreign countries isn’t rescinded.
Under Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and with support from President Trump, work at the USAID department has been halted, and tens of millions of dollars in funding have been canceled.
Earlier this week Gates was asked by PBS how many lives could be lost if this ban wasn’t rectified, to which he responded: “It’s definitely in the millions.”
He went on to add that PEPFAR—a project that has provided $110 billion in funding to the prevention of HIV and AIDs since its inception more than 20 years ago—”has kept over 20 million alive with HIV drugs, started by President Bush and continued on a bipartisan basis literally up to the day Elon decided it wasn’t a good organization.”
“I know a lot of those workers, I know that work,” Gates continued in his conversation with PBS. “A very, very high percentage of it is stuff every taxpayer would be proud of.”