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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said the market at times is failing to drive dollars where they are needed most – saving millions of lives lost to infectious diseases. That’s where the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is foundation is stepping in to help. View full video.
He also said he wants to make sure that the benefits of technological advances are made available to everybody, and in particular aren’t excluded from the two billion people in the poorest third of the population.
“With all these rapid innovations - material science and cultural science, medical science, entertainment, the quality of video games, enhanced commercialism - we should really not just focus on what these breakthroughs mean for the richest two billion of the six billion on the planet,” Gates said in a speech to University of Chicago students February 20 at the Charles M. Harper Center.
Solutions require more creativity than simply making personal computers available cheaply, Gates said. “That is of no value at all to the poorest two billion,” who have no electricity, teachers, textbooks, or internet connections. In projects where certain technological advances have been put in, they haven’t been maintained or used. “It takes some really brilliant thinking to take these advances and think through how they can be made relevant,” Gates said.
At times the most beneficial level of technology may be a portable, battery-operated DVD player. Gates told of how new, best practices for farming have been recorded and shown to struggling small farmers, who then were three times more likely to actually adopt the practices.
One of his labs held contests within an area to see which farmers had the best practices, and then filmed them. “So it’s kind of like American Idol, except this is about not starving,” Gates said. “The level of interest and the desire to be the one that gets picked to be videoed is just phenomenal.”
Such methods and others - microfinance projects, creative use of cell phones to access information - “these things can have huge impact where it’s needed the most,” Gates said. “The market signals are not there. If it was true, these [poor] people’s needs would tap into economic demand and the right things would happen.”
As evidence, Gates pointed to a glaring disparity. “Less than 10 percent as much is spent on malaria as is spent on baldness. Malaria kills a million people a year. Baldness hasn’t killed anyone yet, but, boy, some of those top two billion, they really want that [cure] to happen. So you see these disparities where only by creating recognition, reward systems, awareness, can you make sure that the innovation isn’t disproportionately beneficial to a small subset.”
Gates said he is excited about new technology on the horizon and how it will benefit society.
Hardware and software have been improving at an exponential rate not seen in other parts of the economy, he said. With technological advances, people will be able to voice-activate and interact with information in a personalized way never seen before, leading to improvements in everything from business practices to scientific research to computer textbooks to interactive entertainment.
He stressed current limitations on people in such fields as medicine or business who have to gather information from individual pieces of paper. Having to rely on information such as test results on paper, “we’re really asking doctors to do more than they should,” he said.
Instead, people should be able to point to information on a screen and cross-reference all sorts of data. “People today don’t even realize how information-starved they are,” Gates said.
Gates will be leaving Microsoft some time this summer to focus on his foundation.
“It’s the first time I’ve changed my focus since I was 17,” Gates said.
When asked what’s been most difficult about his career, the billionaire responded, drawing laughter: “Well, I’m really not in a position to complain.”
One challenge he cited was that as Microsoft grew, he had to accept a less intense and personal level of scrutiny and involvement in the product. “Learning how to manage and lead in a large organization - it’s a transition,” he said.
“My mistakes were picking engineers and saying, well, if you’re a high IQ engineer, then you can manage people, basically on the belief that IQ is fungible,” he said, “because I don’t understand why it’s not. But it turns out, it’s not.”
“At Microsoft, every year it felt like this was the most difficult year or the most interesting year,” Gates said. “I still feel that way.”
“It’s impressive,” said Jeff Chessare, a student in the Evening MBA Program. “He had this dream as a high school student and he followed it from that point. He took a huge risk in leaving school and just pursued it to this day.”
Both Chessare and fellow Evening MBA student Umer Ahmad found it interesting that Gates was challenged by having to let go of the heart of the business, the technology development, in order to let the company grow.
“A lot of companies still have issues with that, where managers want to remain pure with their trade,” Ahmad said. “It’s unfortunate but their companies don’t grow at the right pace because of that. A lot of companies could learn from that.”
Ahmad said his wife is a doctor studying infectious disease, and her research group has been interested in getting grants from Gates’ foundation. He said he was happy to hear about foundation efforts in Africa, and that Warren Buffet, who donated to the foundation, and Gates are “putting a lot of emphasis on that continent. I think it’s been ignored for decades and it’s really unfortunate.”
Ahmad also said he took an interest in what Gates said about using technology to help poor people, because technology allows access to information. “Information is what they need and information makes everybody more efficient, and circulates best practices.”
– Mary Sue Penn