(Imgur)
For the third year in a row, the world’s richest tech-billionaire-turned-nerd-philanthropist hosted an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit.
As
in the past, Gates’s AMA session was very popular, generating more than
5,000 questions and comments and overloading Reddit’s servers at least
twice.
The founder of Microsoft and current co-chair of the nonprofit Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
answered approximately 30 questions on a wide range of topics,
including climate change, the future of technology, virtual currency,
his pets, and what it’s like to drink water made from human waste (no
different than regular water, he says — we’ll just take his word for
that).
Here are some of the highlights.
1. One of the first questions Gates tackled is whether technology is making us all dumber. (The unsurprising answer? No.):
Technology
is not making people less intelligent. If you just look at the
complexity people like in Entertainment you can see a big change over my
lifetime. Technology is letting people get their questions answered
better so they stay more curious.
It turns out that Gates is a Breaking Bad fan. Well, duh.
2. You know what does make Bill Gates feel stupid? Not being able to speak a foreign language.
I
took Latin and Greek in High School and got A’s and I guess it helps my
vocabulary but I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese. I keep hoping
to get time to study one of these — probably French because it is the
easiest. I did Duolingo for
awhile but didn’t keep it up. Mark Zuckerberg amazingly learned
Mandarin and did a Q&A with Chinese students — incredible.
We’re pretty sure that just made Zuck’s day.
3. Here’s what Mr. Bill thinks technology will look like 30 years from now:
There
will be more progress in the next 30 years than ever. Even in the next
10, problems like vision and speech understanding and translation will
be very good. Mechanical robot tasks like picking fruit or moving a
hospital patient will be solved. Once computers/robots get to a level of
capability where seeing and moving is easy for them then they will be
used very extensively.
One
project I am working on with Microsoft is the Personal Agent which will
remember everything and help you go back and find things and help you
pick what things to pay attention to. The idea that you have to find
applications and pick them and they each are trying to tell you what is
new is just not the efficient model — the agent will help solve this. It
will work across all your devices.
4. Gates also weighed in on the new holographic glasses his former company unveiled last week:
The HoloLens is pretty amazing.
Microsoft has put a lot into the chips and the software. It is the
start of virtual reality. Making the device so you don’t get dizzy or
nauseous is really hard — the speed of the alignment has to be super
super fast. It will take a few years of software applications being
built to realize the full promise of this.
(Microsoft)
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