But mainly, the title is provocative and misleading. The article clearly states, he was asked a leading question "asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria", and he answered. The title makes it seem like he went out of his way to make the comparison and put himself on a pedestal, but thats not what happened.
I'd say he's at least partially wrong. Diseases are often cause by lack of knowledge and education, outburst can often be contained with good means of communication. I know people doing projects that use the internet (or cellphone text messages) to allow remote villages to better manage the available health resources. Internet connectivity allows the local healing person, often a nurse or similar level to send pictures and descriptions of wounds and health issues to a qualified doctor. This allows the doctors to actually go to the villages where they're needed most - actually saving lives. So the internet may very well be a live-saving thing.
The other point that people forget is that it's extremely hard to completely eradicate a disease. The only disease that I know of that's completely eradicated is the small pox. Polio, leprosy and even the black death are merely contained to a varying degree, often only in developed countries even though vaccines or cheap, effective treatments exist. So investing in connectivity and helping to spread information may actually be a viable path.
Case in point: Polio is endemic in only three countries today: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria. While in Afghanistan it'd be possible for it to be down to the war, in Pakistan and Nigeria it is down to skepticism and misinformation from religious groups (often based in past experiences) that are often amongst the most important information bearers in their communities. When people don't have other sources than a government they don't trust and other biased groups giving them false information, it's no wonder many misinformation proliferate.
Use of social worker and nurse pairs to do rural visits and vaccinations are much more effective. Verbal communication in the local language can communicate any extra information they need. Question and answer sessions are more fruitful. There is much more information to be gleaned about the community as a whole with a visit. The social worker and nurse can always update data when they get back to a location with internet access and provide a lot more medical context than the residents.
I agree it is not an either or proposition. However I believe the more effective solution, under current conditions, is the human visit. While that happens, continue to build up the infrastructure around these areas; not just internet, but access to clean water, roads to take people to hospitals, access to electricity (local or from a grid), etc.
Steps have to be taken in all directions to grow the radius of community well being.
If you're imagining a situation in which one individual in an outlying community gets sick with mysterious symptoms that turn out to be malaria, you have simply failed to grasp the magnitude of the problem.
We already have communications options available in those regions. The very same ones used over the last decades, whether its radio, hardline phones, cellular or even satellite.
Doctors and nurses out there already have communications. The issue here is that spending money to provide internet to the masses there is not as beneficial as making sure they live to use it.
Telecoms is available world wide for a price, via satellite. Internet is also available worldwide for a price. Broadband is coming in the next few years, worldwide, for a bigger price. Health revolution worldwide is not even on the horizon.
> Bill Gates: Google's Project Loon Doesn't 'Uplift the Poor'
Which is a pretty stupid statement to make considering technology does in fact "uplift the poor", since it leads to better economic environment, jobs, and better living conditions.
"Google started out saying they were going to do a broad set of things. They hired Larry Brilliant, and they got fantastic publicity. And then they shut it all down. Now they're just doing their core thing. Fine. But the actors who just do their core thing are not going to uplift the poor,"
Baloons giving internet access to people, doesn't seem to have an obvious uplifting effect on the poor? Could you explain how that will happen?
Also, did you read the linked article? He clearly addresses your point.
>Innovation is a good thing. The human condition – put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes – is improving because of innovation,” he says. But while “technology’s amazing, it doesn’t get down to the people most in need in anything near the timeframe we should want it to”.
Well, what Google and Gates' are doing is still better than Jobs' take on charity from his biography that demeans it:
"“Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”"
The world population has doubled in the last 30 years. Doesn't that scare anyone else?
Sure, you could save a few million poorly educated people from dying. Then what? They're all going to need food, energy, education, housing, etc etc.
Saving people from dying is no good at all if they still have a shitty life and die from something else anyway.
Not that greatly. Birth rates in near enough every country are dropping after having peaked. 7 billion in 2011, 8 billion in 2025, 9 billion in 2043, 10 billion in 2083 is what UNFPA predicts. As education improves and the relative value of each life, and as people live longer on average, the Malthusian catastrophe is one I would think we will avoid. In fact it is this stabilisation of the population that worries me because without any immediate pressure from something else, with no race, no competition and no Sturm and no Drang in progress, will we be destined to find the answer to the Fermi Paradox through our own fate?
Look at this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Populatio... and then consider that while the case of Japan seems about to be a portent for other countries. Doesn't this scare you even more - the thought of the human race ending with a whimper? Or will each of us be, by our current standards, a god among machines living a life a hundred times more valuable than those of their ancestors in their grasp over the earth. If anything these kinds of questions should probably keep you more awake than the thought of a Malthusian catastrophe at this point.
Wow. That's ultra-elitist.
So, let's say you are diagnosed with a rare disease and the doctor gives you two weeks to live unless you get a medicine that costs $1000 which let's assume you can't afford. And you're going to die someday, anyway. Does that mean you have a shitty life and you deserve to die now?
So, amount of money = value of life? Is that your point??
So, I own 10x more money than you (assume) and hence compared to my standards, I think you live a shitty life and you deserve to die. How do you feel now?
Life is invaluable. Money has nothing to do with it.
Hans Rosling showed it quite well in a TED talk he gave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezVk1ahRF78
However, there is a kind of shortsightedness in his attitude: The thing is, societies evolve because of technology and opportunities. So while it is preferable for each individual to have no internet and no malaria, society as a whole might progress more by taking care of the fundamental causes of poverty (lack of education and opportunity, government corruption, etc) rather than fighting the symptoms.
Even if it turns out that Gates is right and I'm wrong, dismissing the relevance of the internet as flippantly as he has done is intellectually dishonest to a certain extent.
You're right, it's a complex bundle of interacting problems and there's plenty of space for them all to be tackled at the same time.
Knowing that Gates is pouring cash and expertise into malaria is re-assuring enough that it gives other people the opportunity to do other stuff.
This is probably the most realistic and sensible response that I've ever seen in any priority opinion flamewar
You are being intellectually dishonest by adopting an artificially contrarian position and trying to pretend he was saying we had to choose one or the other just, it seems, for the sake of having a contrarian position.
You are wrong, but despite having an idiotic opinion you're not an idiot, tempting as it is to think that. You are just someone who thinks that just because they can form a banal opinion that means the opinion has any worth. It doesn't.
Those words from Gates irk me somewhat. He seems to have the attitude that he's so obviously right we shouldn't even be having the discussion. That is something I very strongly disagree with.
I'm not adopting a contrarian position for the sake of it. I'm adopting the position that we need to open our minds and think deeply about problems without letting emotions cloud our judgment of what is important. I conceded from the start that I could be wrong, Gates has obviously spent a great deal more mental energy thinking about this problem than I ever will. Still, it's a discussion worth having, and the answer, whatever it turns out to be, is not obvious.
What a monopolistic cunt. Make microsoft quit taxing android phones for a windows license before you act like you have a high ground beyond your 22 hidden patents.
What a rich shitmark.
Clean water, healthy food, tenable living environment... All these things obviously matter more than internet connectivity. I don't know how anyone could argue otherwise.
If you can get yourself vaccinated against a disease, that's one less thing that can go wrong. You have to be healthy to do things.
Antibiotics and most other medical products are unnecesarilly burdened by patents and become prohibitevely expensive unless some rich patron grants them something they could buy at a much cheaper price.
Patents can be a tax on those who are unlucky. I think certain things deserve patents. But the company he represents taxes any linux device as a microsoft device.
I agree people should be healthy. But you know what? Maybe they should be able to make their own fucking choices in their own fucking hospital on their own fucking dime.
He is a cunt for being afraid of competition and supporting autonomy. That is a sign of the weak and those who are unable to deal with truly dynamic problems that come from actual competition.
In all honesty I understand his position. But for him to vocalize it as though he doesn't see the poor billions as potential competitors? Too fucking bad. He can have his own beliefs but fuck spreading a narrative.
You want me to pretend that his short time frame narrative matters? I'd be happy to die today I knew it was part of a meaningful step for others to get beyond the limits they were born into. Sadly socialist demagoguery tend to be run by worse fucks.
I've had malaria 7 or so times. The problem is when you don't get access to medication which is the problem. If you don't it can kill you very slowly.
Malaria is caused by this organism transmitted by mosquitoes. If you get rid of it, mosquitoes still live, but malaria can disappear.
Also its not zero sum. Dedicating resources to getting rid of malaria isn't going to stop people getting access to the internet. The problem lies more with the cost and quality of the internet.
Most people in Africa have access to the internet via some form of wireless means (mostly 3G/Edge). The problem is this is very costly. All the solutions that keep coming forth are just variations of wireless (Loon for example). People to have the phones, its not rare to see people go hungry to save up to by phones.
It gets access to a lot of people but then you have issues like latency, connection dropping, susceptibility to bad weather & bad signal. People love the internet but hate the cost. Android is partly solving it, but infrastructure is the other hard problem.
Everyone would love to hate him but I find it very hard to do that. His actions are clearly louder than his words (even when out of context).
What if I worked on making a fusion reactor technology that could give "free energy to everyone". Would I get to shit on Bill Gate's "anti-malaria" campaign, too, because I'd think my priority is more "important"?
Phone and Internet communications are very important to people. Much more important than it might seem at first glance. I come from a relatively poor country where people would spend "whole salaries" to buy a smartphone. Clearly people themselves have different priorities, and it's not just about the corporation's or government's priorities.
So I guess my point is, I'm sure Bill Gates could go about funding his anti-malaria campaign without trashing other priorities. If he wants to attack other people's priorities, how about attacking something like oil subsidies, that take important amounts of money from the tax payers, and give it to very profitable companies. That money could be used for fighting malaria instead - if you will. But again, not for Bill Gates to decide.
Looking at Vodafone's margins in countries such as Kenya (via Safaricom) they're amongst the highest for a telco in the world. This was even true before MPESA came along. These companies can afford to pay outrageously high license fees, taxes, interest expenses amongst other things and still invest in networks all around the country & still turn a heavy profit. Safaricom, MTN, Vodacom whatever so long as its a wireless communications company are the largest or in the top 5 in the countries they operate in.
The problem comes about is there are two information platforms. One on an expensive 3G/Edge based network (the internet) and the other an information platform based on a cheaper SIM App/SMS. This isn't a problem you can solve by throwing money at it. Bill Gates can't fix this that easily.
You see services pop up that use SMS to get information over a web experience because of these costs. It would be better if everyone had access to first grade information instead of falling back to SMS.
Back to the central point these telecoms firms have more power to solve the issue than Bill Gates does. Whether he tackles malaria or not you'll still see them spend heavily in infrastructure. They just charge too much and people are incentivized fall back to these SMS like alternatives (which MPESA is also built on btw). But these SMS-like services are not the internet. So its not at the loss of this if he invests in an anti malaria campaign.
I think its not he's trashing other people's priorities. The world was fine before the internet came long, it did help. But diseases have caused harm for as far as the dawn of recorded time.
Given that his charity is the 800lb gorilla in the world of charities I think his attitude is pretty damaging. That's more of a problem with the concentration of so much power in his foundation than with his opinions. The only "charity" larger than his is the IKEA holding company and it doesn't do anywhere near as much actual charitable work.
When you dominate the market for charitable works the way the Gates Foundation does, you can easily smother alternative approaches -- even if that is not your intention. In a system with one dominant "buyer" of charitable work, it is easy to consume all of the non-money resources (people, equipment, governmental coordination, etc) available to all charities.
This might seem like a callous view but I think it's better to invest money on helping the scientist caste (wherever they might have been born) than to simply cure a bunch of random people. In the movie Elysium (2013), they send magic machines to help the masses, which achieves nothing since they are just as poor as before but a bit healthier. I left the movie theater feeling depressed and angry.
What we need is real technological progress. If we could for example synthesize objects or food easily à la Star Trek, we would solve poverty and inequality more efficiently than thousands of years of social programs.
Consider the fact that Isaac Newton's scientific output was worth more than 99% of the work of every other intellectual in the world in the past few centuries leading up to his birth. What's even more amazing is that Newton spent only a tiny fraction of his time doing actual science; he was obsessed with mysticism and other pseudo-scientific doctrines. So giving a billion dollars to the next Newton will be many order of magnitudes smarter than spending that same billion curing laborers. However, it's not politically correct, so I doubt it will be feasible.
The problem is we suck at distributing it. We have a system that allows the super rich (and thus super poor) to exist.
If we could magically create any object we like, the rich/powerful would make sure they had a monopoly on that technology so they could maintain their richness/power. There is a great talk given by G.A Cohen against capitalism that illustrates this point wonderfully[1]
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA9WPQeow9c [Video]
EDIT:
Sorry just saw your strange reference to Newton as well. You are saying technological advancement is more important than people, and we should prioritise advancement over people... why? Why should we advance technology for technologies sake?
That's not what I said at all. On the contrary, I'm saying that if you want to help people technological progress will be vastly more efficient than anything else, and particularly aid programs. I don't care about progress for its own sake, nobody does. I'm saying that some people are objectively more valuable than others in the long term and that we should help them instead of helping huge numbers of less productive people. A single great invention could save all those people better than any amount of aid money.
Also, since when has Microsoft or Bill Gates ever been sold on the idea of the internet as a good thing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine#False_claims_about_...
It's like trusting oil companies to help humanity when everyone well knows they lobby the government to get their way to access more oil in foreign lands, even if it means to engage in warfare.
My issue with putting trust behind the studies saying vaccinations are perfectly fine is that corporations once again are known to fund mislead research to protect their interests. Forgive me to use cannabis as an example, but it's broad enough to show how much effort they put into making false claims that it's extremely unhealthy to both physical and mental health. Today the research has done a 180 because the government is slowly but surely easing up on the research which was once heavily restricted.
Starting with "connectivity" is basically "putting the cart in front of the ox". There's this utopical view that once you give them internet access smart African children will start freelancing and provide for their families, but it doesn't work this way: once you give him internet access, the African child with an IQ of top 0.001% will just learn there are better places in the world to be and live and he will find a way to leave his country and pursue a better life for himself, leaving his family and all the other around him behind in the same state of poverty. By putting connectivity first you'll basically end up building a better brain-drain, which might be exactly what some of the new generation billionaires want, but this is not socially responsive philanthropy!
Smart people are empowered by connectivity, indeed, but they don't use this empowerment to pull the others around them up, not at the risk of pulling themselves down in the process. You need a social and economical infrastructure, with the basic healthcare and poverty problems solved, so the smart people empowered by connectivity can "pull up" the rest of the society without the risk of pulling themselves back down into misery!
I agree that "connectivity is a social good in itself", but I think that you don't need to do anything in particular to get people "connected". Once you solve the basic health and poverty problems of a community, they will get themselves connected in no time, without any direct outside effort - lots of small local companies will spring to provide cheap services and the big companies are already building cheaper and wider infrastructure as we speak.
The World Bank estimates that migrants transfer around $500 billion per year back to their home countries; that's around 4x times the global amount of foreign aid.
http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/10/02/Migrants...
There are many instances of "innocent" actions of mankind that ravaged huge areas of the world very rapidly (the beaver plague in south america, just off the top of my head). Ecosystems often find themselves in very delicate states of equilibrium, an equilibrium that can be irreversably broken with the slightest missstep. There are very good reasons to be extremely conservative in this area.
One of the hardest parts in eliminating poverty from the poorest nations on earth stems from the lack of economic infrastructure in those countries. We can keep giving them rice and supplies but until they have work opportunities that provide a way to purchase their own life essential resources; the fundamental issue causing the poverty in the first place will remain unsolved.
Internet is a good step towards providing that infrastructure.
He should know better than that.
This is what I would like to hear from Mr Gates: "Guys, I'm taking what I believe is the most important thing in the world and that's curing those damned diseases. And I think that once we have cured all the people, they would need better education and internet is so far the best we have (though it could still be improved). So you Zuck and Larry and others work on that and we will all make the world a better place."
If he explicitly said something along those lines, my admiration for Mr Gates would skyrocket thru the roof. If he still thinks the internet is a joke (because only priority number 1 is important, right?) than I still stand by my original statement that he should know better.
Both the short term and the long term are important. So it is strange to make the comparison. Both these investments can co-exist.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/161679272/bradleys-kina-...
Quinine is the best natural cure for malaria.
This project is succeeding with very little kickstarter funding.
I was not attacking Gates -- simply suggesting that a tiny dose of funding for this Seattle tonic startup could help a lot for malaria, and then the much more expensive internet infrastructure problems could be addressed.
Investing in this tonic water startup for that purpose would be pointless and counter-productive.
Also it's rather inappropriate to be shilling it in a serious discussion about responsible philanthropy.
rshlo has editorialized this title, and thus some comments here are pointless knee-jerk reactions to a bad title, rather than a reaction to what's actually in the article.
(Sorry for that sarcasm)
About technology and evolution of society...
Did you know that the neolithic revolution actually caused diseases, famines and made humans more aggressive, less social, less intelligent and lowered the life expectancy so much that it only recovered in the last centuries.
Considering technology to solve all the really big problems is naive in a world, where most new technologies come with new diseases physical (posture, various forms of cancers by new materials, radiation, ..) and mental (addictions, depressions, reduction of memory retention).
No, I don't want to go and live like the apes. I enjoy the comforts, but given all this it's just self-deception to think that computers with internet would solve more problems to people suffering from illnesses than any other tool, a vaccine or even a change in world politics.
Folks, I am a technology and information enthusiast, but please lets keep our help cool and not get emotional over the realization that people may actually need something else and that technologies have dark sides and that there may be many cases where the pros outweigh the cons, but it's not a general rule and shouldn't be the religious dogma of a technocracy.
Available resources in general, and in particular those available to specific individuals/foundations, are limited, hence it is not possible to pursue both worldwide internet access and malaria eradication with the same strength as you can pursue either of them.
Of course, there may well be factors where by doing A, you also achieve parts of B, but given that the timeframe before ‘world-wide internet access’ helps ‘researching a malaria vaccine’ is at least ten-or-so years (the absolute minimum time it takes someone with no education to get anywhere where they can actively develop vaccines), I doubt that this is feasible.
The actual title is: "An exclusive interview with Bill Gates".
The submitter has editorialised it ("Bill Gates says putting worldwide Internet access before malaria is 'a joke'"). The small part of the interview the current title is referring to is this:
"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.”"
He doesn't say connectivity isn't important. He just thinks that is isn't as important as finding a cure for malaria.
Worldwide disease control is an incredibly hard problem.
Just think that only 20 years ago the internet was not generally used to conduct business. Sure academia, and some international businesses had embraced it, but it was in its infancy. People distributed information via many other means - means which are cheaper than the internet to this day. Everyone saying that the internet or telecoms enables faster and easier transfer of that information is correct - but it's not the only method, and it's certainly not the most efficient way to educate people.
The implication:
Dilbert => Gates
Zuck/Page => Wally
I'm with Gates. And Dilbert, for that matter.
I mean if you keep asking "Why?" like a 5 year old, eventually you hit what underlies the reasoning: some basic assumptions that each person holds and that the rest of the argument is built on. E.g. Kant's categorical imperative.
The problem is not everyone might agree with your most fundamental assumptions, and when you arrive at questions like "Internet or malaria eradication first?" people will disagree. Unless you lay those assumptions bare, it's unnecessary argumentation.
E.g. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.." Well I might just not hold that that truth is self-evident, and disagree with you on any argument you build on that assumption.
Another barely considered idea that has just floated in to my head is the idea that some how, say via UN treaty, rich countries and or corporations should be prevented from profiting in third world countries while certain defined baselines of quality of life are below a certain standard. So, for example, you cant profit from internet connectivity until health and education standards are at a certain defined level. Or, perhaps if companies do, then a percentage of their profit must be spent in that country addressing the various issues.
OK, I have zero idea how you define that in to law or treaty, especially with out some gits working out how to circumvent it, but as an ideal to work to?
> Indeed, something very good came out of this work, and also out of similar work done by others at other places: the microscope.
----
Also, remittances have been increasing and these help the situation in poorer countries enormously: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remittance and I'm pretty sure that the Internet is not entirely fault free in causing this increase.
And then there's this too: http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2012/07/17/mo...
Giving people access to some form of communications, even if it is just SMS surely can't hurt and must be bound to be an investment that can pay back itself, Malaria or no Malaria. Bill Gates should be congratulated and commended for his work every day. But to read out of that that the two have no relation with each other is a bit short-sighted.
If you had a billion dollars, what would you do to make people's lives better? For most of us, this is like talking about what to do if you won the lottery: the stuff of daydreams, not reality. But if you really sit down and think about this problem, it's not an easy one to get a grasp on.
You could do immediate things, like feed them, vaccinate them, or teach them English. These are things where you pay ten bucks, you get ten meals. Easy to measure.
You could do systemic things, where you create a system that's then supposed to do things. Build a school, create a farm, build an irrigation system.
You could invest in systems, choosing winners over losers. Finance that business, support that government program.
There are other options, and it'd probably be interesting to go through them all one day. But at the end of it, you're left with the uncomfortable fact that thousands of other entities have invested trillions of dollars in making people's lives better and have very little to show for it. Entities much smarter than you, operating on a much greater scale than you can. Even if you're Bill Gates.
I'm not ready to give up and say the problem is intractable, but it makes me angry that so many snake oil peddlers, many of whom are politicians, sell the idea that these are solved problems; we just need the money. They are not.
So I wish Gates the best of luck. I'd probably bet on connectivity ahead of saving lives, because I think long-term it's more important for humanity to solve its own problems than to keep individuals alive, but heck if I'm happy with that opinion. And if I were Gates, I might just take us to task for that, as he's doing. Good for him.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/nasa-internet-lase...
Solar planes and low orbit satellites could also be used as bounce points from earth uplinks.
http://www.o3bnetworks.com/o3b-advantage/service-coverage http://titanaerospace.com/platforms/solara-50/
Help people help themselves instead of making more dependant.
The "more basic stuff" is guaranteed to improve when their own cultural awareness arises way beyond malaria.
Internet accelerates that process. Vaccines don't.
PD: also, is not about one or the other, it's about attacking the problem in both flanks
"give a man a fish..."