Five Questions from the Twitterverse
Last week, I did an onstage Q&A with Twitter founder
Jack Dorsey at the annual investors summit hosted by Vinod Khosla. Jack
also solicited questions from the Twitterverse. Here are my thoughts on
a few of the questions from his followers.
BILL GATES: @barronstechblog, the great advantage of
solar and wind is that they don’t require fuel. They also have
disadvantages. One is that, to reach the scale we need, they require
energy farms that cover many square miles. Another is that they are
intermittent. What do you do when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind
doesn’t blow? If you depend on these sources, you need some way of
getting the energy during those time periods when it’s not available.
BILL GATES: When it
comes to technology, there are four areas where I think a lot of
exciting things will happen in the coming decades: big data, machine
learning, genomics, and ubiquitous computing. So if I were 20 years old
today, I’d be looking into one (or maybe more!) of those fields.
@fesja, I’d like to think that I also
would be far more aware of the problems of the world’s poorest people
than I was when I was 20. This is my one big regret from the time I
spent in college. When I left Harvard, I had no real awareness of the
disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that affect millions
of people. It took me decades to find out about these things, and to
start trying to do something about them.
Young people today have amazing
opportunities. You have communications technology that I never had at
that age, and you are far more aware of global inequity. So whether it’s
in the career you pick or a volunteer project you do on the side, you
can start sooner than I did.
BILL GATES:
@realshawnisaac, Right now, polio is the single disease I’m spending the
most time on, because we’re so close to eradicating it. It exists in
just three countries: Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. If we can wipe
it out completely, it’ll be only the second time humanity has
eradicated a disease (the first was smallpox).
It’s hard to single out one disease
after polio, but there are several areas where the world will make a lot
of progress in the coming years. For example, our foundation is very
focused on malaria. New drugs will drive down the number of malaria
deaths dramatically. Another example is tuberculosis; the drugs and
diagnostic tools we have today are good enough to cut the death rate by
quite a bit, but it will take 6 or 7 years before we have the
innovations that allow us to start talking about eradicating TB.
BILL GATES: No matter
how much money you have, you can’t buy time, @DanPierson. There are only
24 hours in every person’s day. So I set clear priorities, like my
family and my work, and am pretty hardcore about sticking to them. It
helps that I’m lucky enough to be able to free up some time by choosing
not to do certain things. For example, I don’t mow the lawn.
BILL GATES:
@JohnValentine2, I had an interesting discussion with the journalist
Thomas Friedman about this topic last year, which you can watch
here.
As I told Tom, it’s no secret that
American politics are pretty polarized right now. Personally, I’d like
to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our
biggest problems.
I know some people use “technocrat” as
an insult, but I mean it as a compliment. We should be asking ourselves:
Given the things that the country wants to get done, what’s the most
efficient way to accomplish them? In areas like our energy supply or the
budget, the current course won’t get us where we want to go. So the
debate should be focused on the choices that are available to us. What
are the facts? What do the numbers tell us about what’s working and what
isn’t?
That’s essentially what we try to do
with the foundation. For example, we’re trying to help improve the U.S.
education system. I wake up every day asking myself, how can we provide
some examples of what works? How can we identify what makes a teacher
really effective, and help all teachers be as good as the best ones? I
think the country would have healthier political debates if more of our
leaders brought a similar analytic approach to their work.
