Q&A with Bill Gates 2019 Breakthrough Technology

Every year, MIT Tech Review makes a list of 10 breakthroughs we think will have a big impact on the world.

We have identified things likenatural language processing, augmented reality （AR), CRISPR (Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats基因编辑技术), wireless charging and gene therapy(基因治疗)before they went mainstream.

So when we heard Bill Gates was interested in helping us choose this year's list, we jumped at the chance.

We offered Bill Gates a short list, he ignored it almost entirely, and this list is very much his own vision.

I sat down with him to talk about what he picked.

You are famously optimistic and you know, you subscribe to the view of people like cants rustling and Steven Pinker that when you look at the important indicators, life has been getting better consistently for billions of people.

How do you sustain that kind of optimism in world in which, you know, climate change is accelerating, we havepolitical polarization(政治极化）and disruption by social media, we have growing economic inequality which is fueled at least in part by automation and AI.

SO there’s a lot of current worries about the technology having a harmful effect, how do you retain your optimism?

It’s great that people are worried about the problems, because they require action, you know, even take inequity, global inequity is down, that is the poor countries are getting richer faster than the richer countries are getting richer.

The bulk of humanity lives in middle-income countries today, if you go back 50 years, there were very very few middle-income countries. It was pretty bimodal（双峰） where we had India, China, Africa were poor then Europe, U.S., Japan starting to be fairly well-off and not much in the middle.

But today, China is at the high end of middle income, India’s at the low of middle-income, Brazil, Indonesia. It’s a phenomenal story and the ability of science to see problems, you know, clearly in the case of heart disease and cancer make a lot of progress, some of the more chronic diseases like depression diabetes.

I’m optimistic even obesity, you know, we’re gaining some fundamental understandings of the microbiome（影响因子）and the signaling mechanisms involved in these things. So, yes, I’m optimistic. It does bother me that most people aren’t optimistic. And you know one of us is wrong and one of us is right.

Do you think you have successful person’s bios, in other words, you… of course, we have to fact that in. at my own life, I’ve been extremely lucky, the country I was born in, the education I got to have, the business work I got to do, even my foundation work is amazing and interesting work.

But even tracting out for my personal characteristics and personal experience, I think the big picture is that it’s better to be born today than ever and it will be better to be born 20 years from now than today.

So I want to talk about some of the individual technologies you picked for the list, one of them is lab-grown meat, which is still very tentative and still very expensive.

Why was that important enough to make the cut and do you think that in a, I don’t know, a decade or two decades, we could see lab-grown meat replacing a substantial proportion of animal-grown meat. Yes, I do, part of the reason I picked it is to remind people that clean energy doesn’t solve climate change. You know every time you read about oh clean energy, that’s it, we just need clean energy. No, you don’t. That’s only about a quarter of emissions come from electricity generation. So here you have a gigantic piece that is from beef production and now this can be a substitute. So this is a category that people weren’t paying much attention as a greenhouse gas problem and yet I think the path to solve it is clearer than in say the cement or steel or other materials case.

Another technology you picked is AI, virtual assistants.

So the reference there is two improvements and things like natural language processing, but you know, there are still AI is basically very dumb machines, they’re done one narrow task really well. The computer is so stupid that when you present emails, you don’t let it order it for you, you don’t trust it to have enough context to look at the material and understand the relationships and your calendar and it orders them for you. You pick which application to run you and pick which item to open.

So it’s working in a very low level today. I do think that we’ll have executive assistant type capability in a five to ten year period.

Now, you know, I’ve known to be too optimistic about some of these IT things in the past but generally they have progressed.

And you know it’s a huge priority project for companies like Google and Microsoft and on some things like translation, the deep learning approaches are surprisingly good, so I work on that lot in my part-time work with Microsoft and you know I want one so.

Right so in that case it’s gonna happen. Yeah, absolutely.