The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation continues to lead incredible efforts to raise quality of life for poor countries, promoting and implementing technologies in medicine, education, and sanitation. There’s even a revolutionary new, low-cost toilet that separates solid and liquid waste material for recycling. I’m eating breakfast as I read this, so I skip to some of the cleaner breakthrough technologies.
Gates predicts that an executive assistant AI will be available in the next five to ten years, a super-smart Cortana or Siri. I have mixed feelings about this. I don’t want an AI backed by a huge Tech giant whose primary motive is to subtly manipulate my thought patterns for the purpose of selling me shit (ideas or products), not to mention the privacy and security issues. It seems like Hacker News publishes a story every week about some creepy vulnerability in baby cams and other home devices. It’s going to be very difficult for any Big Tech operation to earn back trust after Snowden and Cambridge Analytica. However it would be so cool (and beneficial) to have a private, trustworthy AI to help with mundane tasks. I’m thinking of SARA, the private AI in my novel TOKYO GREEN. Is there any chance we could get a private AI? How would the technology get smart without having the ulterior motive to persuade, sell to, and control people? These questions demand attention, but Gideon doesn’t go there. I’m marking digital personal assistants as a “maybe” on the beneficial scale.
The most encouraging points of the interview are those about several big-picture efforts to improve the environment and fight back against climate change. Gates has dumped billions into an investment group called Breakthrough Energy. I take a break from the interview and check out their web site. It looks fantastic. “Reliable, Affordable Energy for the World – Investing in a Carbonless Future”. I make a note to follow this blog in the future, along with Gates Notes. Gates is big on nuclear power and so am I. Turning back to the interview, there’s a statement by Gates worth quoting:
“If we didn’t have climate change the quest to get broad acceptance of nuclear power wouldn’t be a priority for me. The general public attitude towards nuclear is a real challenge.”
Bill Gates
Yeah, I totally agree. Nuclear power is the clear answer to the world’s long-term environmental and energy needs. It’s too bad that anti-nuke became part of the environmental movement’s dogma back in the hippie days. Having lived within a few hundred miles of the Fukushima meltdown in Japan, I know first-hand the gripping fear and hysteria that the mere mention of “radiation” brings with it, and how these emotions are stoked and distorted to further a political end.
Gates reminds us that clean energy is good, but not nearly enough. Only about one-quarter of the world’s carbon emissions come from producing electricity. Another quarter comes from the harvesting of animal flesh (cattle). This must hit home with Gates, as he loves eating hamburger. For the world this will only become more of an issue as developing countries become more nutritionally diverse.
“All of that new consumption translates into tangible improvements in people’s lives. It is good for the world overall—but it will be very bad for the climate, unless we find ways to do it without adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.”
gatesnotes.com
Rather than quit eating hamburger or shaming people into eating less meat, Gates picks post-livestock meat as one of the most important emerging technologies going into the new decade. This tech is cool, beneficial, but also expensive. The challenges are in bringing down the costs. I make a note to find out where we are on lab-grown (post-livestock, they call it) meat, and do a quick search. It looks like Gates (along with Richard Branson and Cargill, Inc., a huge agricultural company) invested a lot of money in this stuff.
“Memphis Meats, a post-livestock meat producer, received a new $17 million donation from a slew of major American industrial powerhouses…”
futurism.com, August 2017
I’ve also heard of Beyond Meat, but haven’t tried it. I imagine it’s tough to find in Japan. Is Cargill investing in this stuff because they see it as the future, or because they want to maintain control of the industry?
The two big winners in this interview are nuclear power and post-livestock meat.
There was a time in the late nineties, around the time of Microsoft’s anti-trust suit, when my impression of Gates was not so good. Now, given his philanthropic impact, he’s a total bad-ass. Gates is my personal prototype for being a beneficial person. I haven’t watched too much TV lately, but the Netflix special “Inside Bill’s Brain” is on my list of things to see.
The Interview posted on MIT Technology Review