Bill Gates Tells AARP What the Future Will Bring

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, and 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.

Rob Liggins/Netflix

​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.