Bill Gates Thinks We Aren't Doing Enough To Save Ourselves From Risks Of Climate Change & AI

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one of those non-profits on the forefront of the fight to change the world.

Unfortunately, founder Bill Gates is not very optimistic about the fight against poverty and humanity's future in general.

Reuters

In a recent podcast with Vox's Ezra Klein, the Microsoft founder, and now philanthropist, talked about how some parts of the world have been better able to tackle poverty, whereas others still struggle thanks to their steady population growth.

"There is that the dramatic decline of 26 percent of the world's population being in extreme poverty down to 9 percent," Gates said. "A lot of that came because Asian countries - first China and then later India, Indonesia, and Pakistan and Bangladesh - did a reasonable job of governance."

But here comes the bad news...

Unfortunately, recent estimates by the Gates foundation say most of the poor people in the world by 2050 will be solely in Africa, where their population is steadily growing. According to Gates, that's thanks to a variety of factors like colonialism in the continent's early days, their hard geography, the pathogen-friendly climate, and more.

Gates also talked about the future of humanity, in that it's hard to predict what are the needs we'll face 500 or even 50 years from now. However, he believes there are certainly a few tasks that we clearly need to get a handle on quickly to avoid future doom, one of those being global warming.

"We do have a few things like climate change where you want to invest today to involve problems tomorrow," he said. "I'm always a little surprised there's not more engagement on that issue. Pandemic risk, weapons of mass destruction. But there's not many that we can identify. There's not many that we really understand with clarity, and so somebody who says, "Okay, let's just let a million people die of malaria because I'm building this temple that will help people a million years from now."

The tech icon also commented on AI, particularly how we've been worrying about the risks of AI even as we push its development further along. "Working on AI is fun. If they (people working on the risks of AI) think what they're doing is reducing the risk of AI, I haven't seen that proof of that," he said.

"They have a model. Some people want to go to Mars. Some people want to live forever. Philanthropy has got a lot of heterogeneity in it. If people bring their intelligence, some passion, overall, it tends to work out."