Bill Gates: Internet Will Not Save the World 247
quantr points out an interview with Bill Gates in which he talks about setting priorities for making a difference in the world. Quoting:
"The internet is not going to save the world, says the Microsoft co-founder, whatever Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley's tech billionaires believe. But eradicating disease just might. Bill Gates describes himself as a technocrat. But he does not believe that technology will save the world. Or, to be more precise, he does not believe it can solve a tangle of entrenched and interrelated problems that afflict humanity's most vulnerable: the spread of diseases in the developing world and the poverty, lack of opportunity and despair they engender. 'I certainly love the IT thing,' he says. 'But when we want to improve lives, you've got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition.' These days, it seems that every West Coast billionaire has a vision for how technology can make the world a better place. A central part of this new consensus is that the internet is an inevitable force for social and economic improvement; that connectivity is a social good in itself. It was a view that recently led Mark Zuckerberg to outline a plan for getting the world's unconnected 5 billion people online, an effort the Facebook boss called 'one of the greatest challenges of our generation.' But asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria, the co-founder of Microsoft and world's second-richest man does not hide his irritation: 'As a priority? It's a joke.'"
Re:Bill is doing the right things (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine having a library in your village that could show you how to build water condensers, new farming techniques, basic chemistry that could improve your quality of life, really ANY piece of information you could conceive of as well as the ability to communicate remotely with other vilalges trying to overcome similar problems at the touch of your hands.
But no, better to hand out fish then give access to fishing instructions.
Knowledge is power.
This is the stuff right here. It is not just one or the other, both are important. Having someone parachute in and give everybody shots is one noble and great thing. Having someone drive up right behind him with a library is yet another.
Re:True (Score:5, Interesting)
Bill Gates is right. Zuckerberg's plan is a joke and the Internet isn't all that important for solving the world's problems. Unfortunately, Gates isn't helping much either, due to his fake philanthropy that often does more harm than good.
The Gates Foundation has an endowment of $30 Billion making it the largest philanthropic organization in the world. But one third of that money is invested in companies whose practices run counter to the foundation’s supposed charitable goals and social mission.
In Africa, the Foundation has invested more than $400 million dollars in oil companies responsible for pollution that many blame for respiratory problems and other afflictions among the local population.
The Gates Foundation also has investments in sixty-nine of the worst polluting companies in the US and Canada.. It holds investments in pharmaceutical companies whose drugs cost far beyond what most patients around the world can afford and the Foundation often lobbies on behalf of those companies for "Intellectual Property" protections that make obtaining low cost medicines more difficult.
Other companies in the Foundation’s portfolio have been accused of forcing thousands of people to lose their homes, supporting child labor and defrauding and neglecting patients in need of medical care.
Re:They are both wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, that's the naive cynical view. The reality is that as societies become more wealthy (particularly, as they move out of starvation/subsistence) they have less children (not more), and an important part of getting out of the poverty trap is reducing disease (which destroys a tremendous amount of labor). It's not the only step, obviously, but it is a step in the right direction (even if we are trying to behave as idealized, heartless social planning robots, and ignore all the current suffering this could mitigate).
Golf clap. (Score:1, Interesting)
Access to fishing instructions is not access to the means to create tackle or access to a body of water where fish exist to be caught.
This needn't be an either/or proposition -- give people basic sustenance and the means to raise their own lot as time goes on. But without that basic sustenance, you have no foundation on which to build anything, and all the building materials and instructions you provide will go to waste.
Re:Bill is doing the right things (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine having a library in your village that could show you how to build water condensers, new farming techniques, basic chemistry that could improve your quality of life, really ANY piece of information you could conceive of as well as the ability to communicate remotely with other vilalges trying to overcome similar problems at the touch of your hands.
But no, better to hand out fish then give access to fishing instructions.
Knowledge is power.
You know, this sounds like a great idea in practice.
In reality it is quite different. I agree with Calibax. Having seen the poverty first hand and having worked to help build a medical clinic in Kenya, as well as my Ex, who runs a charity in Tanzania.
We got them some of these books, and some of this knowledge. They have access to a lot of it believe it or not. The problem is not that they don't know how to do it, but the same infrastructure problems that bother us in the modern world. We might "know" that building a good rail network in a city area will improve infrastructure - but politics and other factors get in the way.
In the same way, gaining access to clean water sounds like it should make a difference, just give the people the knowledge of how to build that dam and water pipe, as well as a sand filter system, and it will all be fixed right?
Not in my experience. People in poor countries are just like us, but with fewer "toys". They procrastinate, they like to have fun. They would love to own an ipod or iphone. They are more concerned with getting the next meal and next "fun" thing than they are with building infrastructure. When is the last time you went out and built yourself a water line by hand? They just don't see it as a priority. I know this because when we worked on one trying to bring cleaner water to the clinic, all the locals wondered why we would bother when you could just get water from the stream like they always have. And yes, they know that the stream water would make them sick, but it is rather like dealing with a smoker - they have got along just fine this far with stream or swamp water, why should they change if things are working fine? There are other things to worry about.
So, in my experience, they have the material to teach them how to change, but are so focused on living day to day that they don't have the mental bandwidth to build infrastructure projects like you would expect. In my experience, Bill Gates approach is the right one - fix the basic needs first, then they will have the mental bandwidth to devote to projects.
Drinking Water Isn't So Easy As You Think (Score:4, Interesting)
When I was a kid I did Unicef collection every Haloween. We got an orange cardboard coin box at school, and collected donations to it along with our trick-or-treat. Unicef used these funds to build water wells for people in Africa who had only access to contaminated surface water.
A decade or two later, we found that many of these wells accessed aquifers that were contaminated by arsenic. And that thus we kids had funded the wholesale poisoning of people in Africa, and that a lot of them had arsenic-induced cancers that were killing them.
OK, we would not make that mistake again, and today we have access to better water testing. But it caused me to lose my faith that we really do know how to help poor people in the third world, no matter how well-intentioned we are.
And we had better not go around curing disease withoput also promoting birth control. Despite what the churches say, and the local dislikes and prejudices. Or we'll just be condemning more people to starve.
Re:True (Score:4, Interesting)
Waaaaa?
Sounds like *you've* never been involved in senior business decisions for a multimillion dollar company.
Re:True (Score:5, Interesting)
As for Gates, I'm almost exactly the same age as he is, I distinctly recall him saying on multiple occasions over the last 30yrs that he would give the bulk of his money to charity when he hit 55. Gates charity work and his efforts to get other billionaires to join him is has almost single-handedly rescued the traditional concept of US philanthropy from the "greed is good" generation.
Thing is you don't have that kind of money, which is odd given your obsession with it?
Re:True (Score:3, Interesting)
There is much work to do. If one group wants to help by adding educational tools, that is certainly one useful thing. But Gates is right that there is a very broad spectrum of changes needed to bring regions out of poverty, and Internet access alone is not enough.
And, of course, there's the aspect of all this that everyone seems to overlook -- connectivity is not education. It may make it easier to get educated if it's used in conjunction with an education program, but in and of itself the internet is a piss-poor educational tool. The sheer volume of misinformation, minutiae, gossip, and punditry dwarfs the sorts of knowledge that are actually useful, much less the subset of that knowledge that would be useful to someone in the developing world.
Those of us who use the internet as a reference tool are used to that unreliability, and we can afford it. If the information on how to make cheese that we found on some website turns out to be wrong, then we shrug and toss the results in the garbage disposal. Folks living on the edge of subsistence don't have the luxury of experimentation.
I was never a fan of Gates while he was running Microsoft, and I've always thought his methods were on the shady side at best, but the efforts of the Gates Foundation to tackle real problems, particularly unpopular, ignored, and solvable problems, have to be respected. Gates may have been a lousy coder and no real techie, but maybe that's a good thing.
Re:Bill is doing the right things (Score:5, Interesting)
The example of swaziland (Score:5, Interesting)
Your ignoring the scale of suffering caused by disease in places like Africa and just how staggering an impact it is happening.
Take a place like Swaziland. 1/4 of the population has HIV, is too poor for triple cocktail treatment and are thus dying. 110,000 children are orphaned as a result. On top of that, 58% of the population requires treatment for pneumonia each year, and nearly 60% requiring rehydration for diarea (And we're not talking having a sore gut from a cold, but conditions that are often fatal).
Will education help them? Well swaziland has around 90% literacy rate, and an exceptionally good school enrollment rate which is comparable with even western countries. Something is failing here that *isnt* education.
The last major war Swaziland was involved in was nearly a century ago, and its monarchy is widely held to be benevolant and not particularly corrupt or malicious. Its economy however is , like many post-colonial countries, a bit of a basket case and income disparity is utterly terrible, with a fabulously rich ruling class and the majority of its population surviving on about $1.50 a day. Despite being well educated, simple education alone appears not to be fixing this.
The simple fact is a massive chunk of the productive workforce is incapacitated and dying placing enormous economic pressures on those who do work, and this causes terrible poverty, compounded of course by the terrible inequality that was foisted on the country from its legacy as a british colony.
Bracketing aside the troubling questions of wealth distribution, it is clear that swaziland is doomed without a very serious improvement in health care. HIV does not have to be a death sentence anymore when treated by modern anti-virals. We can't cure it yet, but we can make it something that doesn't kill. A westerner in a UHC country (to ensure poverty doesnt remove access to medicine) with HIV can live as long as someone without HIV as long as they continue to take the required medicines and lives a generally healthy lifestyle. Malaria is a disease that stalks the poor (when was the last time you heard of a malaria outbreak in europe, australia or the united states?) and can be trivially contained if the money is spent as it should. The remaining conditions can be contained and cured with simple antibiotics and ensuring clean water and hygenic waste disposal.
There is no reason Swasiland should be any poorer than a european country. But like many african countries, its problems revolve around universal access to healthcare, wealth disparity and equitable access to clean water and waste disposal. Education, and by this I mean the internet too, does not factor here. Whats the point of reading about the fabulous lives of the westerners whilst dying of AIDS, malaria and diahrea.
Re:Bill is doing the right things (Score:4, Interesting)
Wrong. F You.
It has nothing to do with stupidity. It has everything to do with culture and human conditioning.
If your grandfather fished a certain way, and he taught your father to fish that way, and your father taught you to fish that way, and the same is true for the other children in the village, then that's the way you fish. The odds are, you derive pleasure from fishing that way. It feels right, because that's the way your preteen brain was wired to live. If I now come in and say to the village "Hey. Stop fishing. Use this sophisticated replicator to produce all the fish matter you want from sunlight", the majority of the village will ignore me. Not because they're stupid, but because they're *people that fish*.
Over time, the replicators will be used more, and the fishing will occur less. Some of the older folks will never give up fishing. Some of the children will not learn how to fish. Eventually, the fishing will stop as one generation dies off and another raised in a new way supplants it.
The same thing happens in first world cultures, to blacksmiths, weavers, and eventually C# coders. Some have the capacity to adjust. Many don't.
Really, you need to provide the *aid* to the older generation, and the *education* to the younger and those that can adjust. The reality of most aid programs is that just the opposite occurs, which is why most aid programs are doomed to fail.