The tech visionary says it’s the best time in history to be over 50 – ‘by a long shot’
In the documentary What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates (Netflix, Sept. 18), directed by Oscar winner Morgan Neville, 56, the billionaire philanthropist talks with everyone from Anthony Fauci to Lady Gaga about how tech is about to transform lives — and make the lives of older people longer and better. Gates, 68, told AARP what to expect from his show — and the future.
Will artificial intelligence (AI) have an impact on improving the health of folks over 50?
Oh, fantastic, and AI is improving rapidly. As you get older, you think about those things more. I’d encourage your readers, when they get an MRI or a medical bill, to feed it into even today’s AIs. I know a lot about health terminology, but when I got an MRI, even I said, “Oh, that’s what that means.” That’s very typical for people my age. In the future, AI will essentially participate in your session with the doctor, summarize those meetings, and you can go back and ask questions and share with your relatives — “Here’s what he said about my neurological diagnostic, what do you think?” So [AI’s impact on] health is so phenomenal, including accelerating research on new cures.
The pandemic scared people about the future. But does the battle you’ve joined against malaria, which killed an estimated 50-60 billion of the 117 billion people ever born, suggest there’s hope?
The progress of humanity is actually fantastic. The average lifespan continues to go up. Leisure hours go up. The number of kids who died every year at the turn of the century was 10 million; now it’s less than 5 million. Progress [against] malaria and polio are part of that. Not only will we get polio done, but we have a good chance of getting malaria done as well. It’s pretty magic. You really wouldn’t want to turn the clock back.
Is this the best time in history to turn 50 or older?
Oh, certainly, by a long shot. Twenty years from now will be even better. I spent yesterday meeting with Alzheimer’s researchers at Indiana University and Eli Lilly, and AARP is a great partner in the Alzheimer’s work I do in funding diagnostic stuff that’s looking very promising. These new medicines, particularly if we figure out how to use them early on, are very promising. I saw my dad face Alzheimer’s, and there is hope that there’ll be fewer people having to go through that.
Is tech, including AI, already making an impact on health care?
It’s a pretty phenomenal thing when I go and see health care patients getting great follow-up, even in places like Africa, where most people never get to meet a doctor in their whole life.
You talked with The Terminator director James Cameron about how people increasingly get information through entertainment. Is there opportunity — and risk — in the merging of entertainment and information?
In this TV series, I talk with such a wide range of people about the issues. I learned a lot. I do think entertainment helps us think about the future, and possible futures, better than any other medium.
How about movies that speculate about the future?
In the movies Her or Black Mirror, they tend to pick one thing, they’re just showing you one aspect. But entertainment forces us to think about the future in a way that hopefully prepares us so that we shape it in the right way.
You yourself were shaped by science fiction like Robert Heinlein’s, right?
I love Heinlein, and my friend [Microsoft cofounder] Paul Allen, that was partly how we bonded. I know Neal Stephenson, and he joins that tradition of taking things like gene editing or crypto or virtual worlds, and getting us to think about them. You can do a lot worse than reading science fiction to prepare yourself for the future.
You talk with Lady Gaga about social media, which has spread ridiculous misinformation about her, and also you — anti-vaccine people accuse you of secretly being a lizard. Is there risk in this new information tech?
People get a kick out of some of these wrong things. Sadly, there’s hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by vaccine misinformation. We all have to learn best practices and the way that we balance that, including using AI to help us identify those things. That’s an unsolved problem that the younger generation’s going to have to engage in. I learned a lot talking to my daughter on that — one who lives in that maelstrom in a more direct way than I do.
On the show, you have AI write a letter from you to your daughter Phoebe Gates, 22, an influencer with 668,000 social media followers, in youth-speak slang you don’t know. Can young people teach us elders some lessons about using tech for a better future?
It’s always great to check with them, because even for somebody who’s been immersed in it my whole life, they’re finding ways of using the AI, or finding where it doesn’t work for them, that keeps me up to date on that, as well as all their cultural interests.
What do you hope people get from the show?
I hope people see that things like climate, how AI is going to get used, or global health — that the future is very exciting, that they can engage and learn these things. It’s fascinating. From the young climate activists to my daughter to the African malaria scientists, it’s a world that really is making progress. And I hope that comes through.
