He's right. Poverty, disease and basic things like that are things about _survival_, the internet is not.
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.
> He's right. Poverty, disease and basic things like that are things about _survival_, the internet is not.
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.
> Diseases are often cause by lack of knowledge and education
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.
There are small outbreaks in lots of countries now and again. Combination of international travel and patchy vaccine coverage causes that.
The difference with Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan is that it is endemic at least in parts of the countries, meaning it is regularly found in the population and that it is self-sustained. Elsewhere the outbreaks are sporadic and isolated enough that they die back.
Communication is the key.... and the internet is generally pretty awesome for that. However, for rural medicine, the prerequisite (assuming infrastructure exists) is the ability to retrieve and parse the information. You need to be literate, have access to an internet enabled device, and know how to search for what you think ails you. Language could be a barrier too.
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.
The population density in some developing countries is extremely low. Botswana for example has roughly 2mio inhabitants of which roughly a quarter live in Gabs and yet another maybe 10% in the next 5 bigger towns. That leaves the rest of the country with an average population density of less than 2person/square km. Bringing people to a hospital by car on a good road can easily take a day or more. It's also not viable to have an educated doctor able to make that choice in each of the remote villages. So you really really need to find a good way to offload that decision to a person that's remote.
n.b. Botswana is a fairly well developed country, I just choose it as an example since I have family ties there and know the situation better than say Namibia which is similar in the population distribution.
It's true that diseases are often caused by those things, but in this particular case malaria is caused by the /Plasmodium/ organism and transmitted via infected mosquitoes.
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.
I have family ties in Southern Africa, I've been there multiple times, I've seen it and I still don't think I grasp the magnitude of the problem. However, on thing I know for sure: The problem is not limited to large portions of the population being infected with malaria. They also have a wide variety of other, quite nasty diseases that will all still be around once you eliminate Malaria - if you succeed at that. The sub-Saharan countries for example suffer from a massive AIDS/HIV epidemic, at some point the estimate was that every third adult in Botswana is infected. Things are better now with about 24% infection rate - that's still a quarter of the population. A common belief was that having sex with a virgin would cure your infection - with predictable results: Think anywhere on the range of merely spreading the epidemic to flat out rape of young virgins. I'm very sorry to respond in kind: I think you fail 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.
I'd say he's more wrong than right. There are basically no landline connections in large parts of Africa, since it's basically infeasible to cover the large distances involved with cables. Satellite is unaffordable for all practical purposes - when I'm talking about doctors and nurses I'm not talking about western foreign aid people but locals. If your average income is in the range of single digit USD a day, satellite comm is infeasible. Also, the communication system must be manageable and maintainable by locals with a basic eduction.
So the best available communication is often cellular, if any.
On the other hand malaria is a disease that only affects some parts of the population - namely the one that lives in malaria affected regions. Large parts of southern Africa are mosquito-free, hence no Malaria. To make up for that there's a ton of others diseases, so if you eliminate Malaria, you still have to fight Schistosomiasis [1], Trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) [2] HIV and a lot of other diseases for which treatments may or may not exist. In a country where the average infection rate with HIV hovers at about 30% the gain from eradicating Malaria is limited at best. Let's not get into poverty and access to most basic health care.
It's not a simple problem that allows for a simple solution and even eliminating every conceivable disease that affects people in developing countries will only be one minor factor to improving the situation there. Those people need access to knowledge and information as much as they need health care and water. Otherwise they'll forever be stuck on western subsidies - just healthier and longer.
Providing internet to the masses is one way of improving their chances of living to use it.
Doctors and nurses may have communications, but many countries do not have doctors and nurses even in every city, much less every little village.
It's clear we should be careful about not displacing funding for basic health care improvement with basic internet access, but they are not nearly always in opposition, and besides providing health care information, uses such as improving economic opportunities by giving access to market/pricing information also matters - for someone having to spend days getting their stuff to market, going to the right town to get the best price will also affect health: ability to afford sufficient food and shelter for starters.
Note that internet does not necessarily help education. Most people waste their time on the internet, including most of us on HN.
You can have as much info available to you as you want, if you go in the wrong direction or take no real action then it will all be for naught.
Well, in that case nothing necessarily helps education. Even books or teachers, people waste so much time in school. I for myself must admit that I tend to think of HN as very educating. I get exposed to information that I'd never find otherwise and to opinions of people I'd never meet otherwise. That's certainly much more educating than a lot of facebook.
Maybe, but the one thing a poor country can't do without are schools for fundamental education. You can do without internet for everyone, you can do without tv. But if you don't have schools and teachers, which some countries don't have (what they have only passes as schools and teaching) you're pretty much doomed as a country.
You're talking about telecommunications - not the internet. There is a difference. You don't need the internet for telecoms. You don't even need a mobile phone (though in today's Africa, generally a mobile will do a lot more for you). Africa are still fighting to get get decent telecommunications cover. Let alone internet. Telecoms is important, and undoubtedly saves and enriches lives. The internet, yes that too, but to a lesser degree.
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.
The internet is not only facebook and youtube, but a general purpose communications network. Having satellite internet available does not imply it's in any way affordable for local individual or organization. Having terrestrial internet for acceptable prices would allow for a variety of uses that are currently not possible, some of them undoubtedly beneficial for health care professionals.
The problem is, these places have treatable diseases running rampant for a variety of reasons. There is no one principle cause of ongoing survival problems in various parts of the world today, and no one solution to it either.
Endemic poverty is a complicated social and political phenomena which is maintained due to a variety of causes. Even if tomorrow you eliminated malaria, it's very doubtful the conditions in any country where it's a problem would improve. A case in point is famine - we have more then enough food today to feed a population of 10 billion or more people on the planet fully. But people still starve to death every day. And even when we give food aid for free, we still keep having the same issue - even when we're actively giving it.
When you start trying to order your problems by perceived importance, we get nothing done. Sure you think, I'd hate to die of malaria. But you live in a first world country - if you don't die of malaria, you don't then imagine that you'll still have nothing to eat tomorrow, or that you lack all of the education you take forgranted. Or that there'll be no jobs, or that even if you work hard you'll still be paying bribes just to get a driver's license. Or come the local elections if you don't guess the right side to be seen supporting you'll be murdered or raped, or both.
It's an egg-and-chicken problem then; you cannot manage the "available health resources" if those are nonexistent, so having those is a priority and that is more similar to what the BMGF is already doing.
A lot of countries in the developing world have existing health care resources, such as doctors or nurses, but managing them is a major problem in a state such as namibia or botswana where the population of a small city is spread out on a territory as large as germany. It helps if you can have a local, less qualified health care worker communicate with a remote specialist before either moving a doctor to the patient or the patient to the doctor. A medium to high bandwidth connection, eventually capable of video transmission helps a lot here.
You are painting a fairy tale outcome, poorly based on reality. Even in Colombia, were there is high-speed internet connections the coordination, willingness and education to make a fruitful use of this resource is scarce. So it's not like "Give them internet and they will figure it out!", it's a lot more complicated than that.
That's not what I'm saying. The same could be said about a malaria vaccine. "Develop it and all will be good" is a fairy tale outcome as well. Even "develop it, make it cheap and malaria will cease to be a problem" is a fairy tale outcome. The real world tends to be much more complicated than that - all I'm trying to point out is that there is a real problem managing available resources, especially in countries with low population densities. We can even see that in some less populated areas of eastern Germany (some areas of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern), but at least we in Germany can luckily afford to throw money at that problem.
We all agree is a problem, but we don't agree in that Internet is going to fix that just by existing. So in that order of ideas _by itself_ internet is far from being a priority over malaria and other set of issues.
No, it wasn't "just a leading question". Bill Gates has said something similar before, and quite recently, about Google's Loons:
> 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.
His exact words were a bit different than the article and you are assuming:
"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,"
But seriously, this is HN, do I really need to explain to you why the internet creates job? Why it helps spread information and education? Is this 1997?
I'll give you a first hand experience though, I've lived for 5 years in Peru. There, students told me that Google and the internet has literally changed their life. Before they had to buy expensive books, cross the city or travel to get that book and be able to do copies. Now they just go to the net cafe next door, search on google, get their answer, print it and they're done. For less than half a dollar. A gain in time, money and information and a gain in what these newly educated students will bring to society. I can't even begin to imagine the impact that http://duolingo.com and http://khanacademy.org will have on humanity and the poorest.
Show me the (at the very least) the correlation between internet access and social mobility.
You may help educate some people, though the data says educational outcome is more correlated with socio-economic status. And education is correlated with social mobility, but now we are two correlative (at best) steps away from the conclusion you are drawing. We've yet to show any causation...
Your outrage of having to explain this, is misplaced. This is not an obvious fact, nor is it backed by any evidence.
> Your outrage of having to explain this, is misplaced. This is not an obvious fact, nor is it backed by any evidence.
I'm not outraged at all, just surprised. I don't have enough time to explain something like that on HN (especially to someone who may just be trolling or acting in bad faith, not saying you are but you could be) and I don't feel the need to because the evidence that the internet has a positive effect on society and the economy are so overwhelming and just a few google searches away anyway. That's like asking why science or education are a good thing for the economy. Have a nice day :)
... you moved the goal posts significantly. We aren't talking about whether the internet has a positive effect on society or the economy.
We are talking about uplifting the poor. Which is more formally known as "increasing social mobility". The internet doesn't do that... Social mobility in the US did not change significantly with the introduction and growth of the internet... what more evidence do you need against your point?
When the economy improves, the poor live better and there are less of them living in the worst conditions. Otherwise, the economy wouldn't be improving. Call that uplifting, or social mobility or any other hip buzz word if you like. Doesn't change the fact that by helping the economy and creating jobs, the internet helps the poor by default. I witnessed it myself when living for years in the third world but it's a well known fact too that the internet helps the economy and creates jobs (and therefor helps the poor). Maybe you need to live in the third world for a while to see the direct positive impact the internet has on the poor and get out of your bubble.
Yeah giving internet to people who barely have running water and electricity is REALLY going to help uplift the poor. Solve health issues so people can work rather than spread disease. Introduce agriculture and self sustaining society. Then maybe you can introduce technology...
You might be surprised at the priorities of the poor themselves. Internet access means knowing the market price rather than being ripped off by a middleman for your crop. Getting the market price might mean being able to afford indoor plumbing, but maybe a scooter comes first so grandma can be taken to a doctor when needed.
Curing malaria is inherently a top down priority. Acquiring communications is bottom up.
To take another example, providing a robot chauffeur maybe a solution to a first world problem, but cars kill twice as many people as malaria, so don't knock the robot chauffeur if he cuts traffic accidents by half or better.
"Internet access means knowing the market price rather than being ripped off by a middleman for your crop."
This is a classic tale that got retold over and over again for the positive impact of communication. Farmers know the market price - that's not a problem. The problem is they might not be able to sell their crops at market prices due to logistical choices and availability.
If there are only a few trucks today to deliver your produce to the faraway market, you take whatever price the middle man gives you - regardless of the market price - because the other choice is leaving them rotten on the field.
> While at the conference, the young Malawian saw the internet for the first time and within hours began Google-searching for "windmill" and "solar energy" and was amazed with how many hits were returned for each search.
> Kamkwamba was particularly impressed with the speed at which he could achieve things using the internet. "I was very excited when I saw the internet for the first time," he said. "The internet makes transfer of information very instant."
Now imagine a billion people with the same access to information on useful things like good sanitation and building windmills.
Bill Gates has spent a lot of time among the world's poorest poor. When you do that, your perspective changes completely and he seems to be talking from that perspective.
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.”"
"Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything"
Which is a funny statement coming from Jobs, since he didn't invent anything either. Ripping off is fine when you add value, like the original Mac which borrowed a lot from Xerox labs prototypes.
I agree with you that Jobs was never a brilliant engineer, but I don't think Gates was particularly brilliant either and to say Jobs lacked imagination is ludicrous and to say he never invented anything is simply untrue. It may even be true he never invented a circuit (such as the Disk II controller) or never built a prototype himself, but that's not the whole of inventing something.
BTW, it was the Lisa that built upon the Alto (and added quite a bit of very clever ideas that never made it into the Mac).
> The world population has doubled in the last 30 years. Doesn't that scare anyone else?
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.
>Saving people from dying is no good at all if they still have a shitty life and die from something else anyway.
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.
Funny thing is, we "know" relatively good, what the maximum of earths population will be and why. And we know (also relatively good) how fast we will lift people from poverty, given the actual and historical numbers.
I'm all for having less humans around, but actually, educating women, eradicating poverty, and lowering death rates has shown to be the best way to reduce a country's birth rate. It just takes a generation or two. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
Middle class (by developing world standards) life is the most effective brake on population. Give people basic health care, Internet, TV, a phone, and literate daughters and watch the population growth rate fall to replacement level or lower.
Guys don't go so hard on him. This is a passionate person about getting rid of this disease.
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).
So why does he have to trash everyone else's priorities then?
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.
The thing is providing internet access is obscenely profitable in Africa.
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.
So why does he have to trash everyone else's priorities then?
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.
Getting rid of Malaria is obviously a higher priority than internet access from the perspective of any one person living in the third world today. I have much respect for Bill Gates for the work he's doing in that area.
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.
He's not dismissing it. He is saying we have got our priorities wrong.
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.
He actually said "priorities" and "to a certain extent" so he is not all that contrarian nor intellectually dishonest; plus you are the one using offensive wording in your comment.
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.
Well if that's your thinking maybe you ought to start advocating/doing something about hookworm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookworm
"In susceptible children hookworms cause intellectual, cognitive and growth retardation,"
Gates is right, but the reasoning is a bit more complicated:
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.
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.
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.
The smartest kids already knows that there are better places. Most kids knows that. Yet there's still lots of kids that do get the opportunity to go somewhee else, that still goes back to make things better.
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.
An excellent example of why HN doesn't allow submitters to fuck around with the article title.
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.
I'm with you. I also hate when submitters mess around with titles, since the journalist has already (a lot of the time) messed around and hand picked a quote or chose a sensationalist header. Then comes the HN submitter and double-fucks around.
It is a joke. Worldwide internet access is available today, for a high price, via satellite.
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.
I find it's important to have perspective of Gates vs the sili-valley-elites in this debate of who will save the world. It reminds me of this Dilbert comic strip from years ago: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-12-23/
The implication:
Dilbert => Gates
Zuck/Page => Wally
The real issue isn't quite this simple, but only in the context of how valuable internet access is in the context of an individual in a disenfranchised part of the third world.
Disclaimer: I am not a STEM guy so don't go calling me an elitist.
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.
There is more than enough money and resources to go around. It isn't a supply problem. We have heaps of everything. So being able to synthesise it wouldn't change that fact.
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]
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?
>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.
Our goal is to help everyone achieve a better life, right? Then some people are more valuable to that goal than others. They aren't more valuable in an absolute sense (no one is) but according to our current problems they are relatively more useful. Governments are trying to spend their money in the smartest way possible. I'm saying that we should prioritize a certain type of spending over another. With enough tech, we will be able to achieve real equality that is today impossible. Once that is achieved, we can forget about tech or value of human beings. These will be problems of the past.
> Our goal is to help everyone achieve a better life, right?
No, I don't think it is. I don't think there is a collective goal that everyone subscribes to.
As my earlier point pointed out... we have everything we need to achieve "real equality". What are we missing? Which piece of technology are you waiting for, for "real equality"?
The problem it's that you don't know where the next Newton will come from. Better to give everyone the chance because, as you say, he was so influential.
It's not that simple though. There's quite a few people who are not at risk of ever getting malaria, but who don't have any decent internet access. So for them, curing malaria will make 0 difference to their life.
Also, since when has Microsoft or Bill Gates ever been sold on the idea of the internet as a good thing?
So if the government knocks down on your door tomorrow and says:
"Look, you have two choices, we can help you not get cancer, and we'll supply you with daily pills for the rest of your life, but you will not be allowed to have Internet access ever again, or you can choose Internet access, and we won't give you the cancer-fighting pills anymore".
Having cancer tends to negatively affect one's quality of life. ;) But it's an interesting question--quality of life vs. lifespan. Imagine if there was no possibility of prolonging human lifespan, but instead we had the means to stop aging, say in a person's mid twenties to mid thirties. Having some 50 or 60 years time with your mental and physical faculties in prime, not having to rush, being able to take your time and learn and do practically everything you want. We would live like gods.
Not sure what your point here is, but it kind of reads as if you're saying that the life of someone on the verge of internet access is more valuable that that of someone on the verge of fatal malaria.
From the majority of people from 1st world countries, it is more valuable. I'm never going to meet anyone who has had malaria, or even anyone who knows someone who has had maleria. It's a non issue. But I'll certainly experience and interact with a larger internet population.
> I'm never going to meet anyone who has had malaria
You likely have done so, many times. For many countries malaria is so endemic that most people have had it once or more (malaria is not very lethal if you have access to the right medicines; the problem is a lot of people don't). Except for people living in places with extremely low immigration levels, it is unlikely that you'll go very long before coming across someone who have had malaria.
> , or even anyone who knows someone who has had maleria.
He's being realistic. How many of us are donating even percent of our income towards malaria eradication? Eradicating malaria has been possible for decades. It has not happened because people amongst others continues to prioritize luxuries over other peoples lives.
We can pretend we're not amongst "those people", but the fact we're spending time on HN debating this matter instead of doing something about it pretty much demonstrate that most of us are.
I don't know about "realistic", but it expresses a value other than "all lives are created equal". I think if someone has a value other than "all lives are created equal", then focusing on expanding internet usage ahead of malaria eradication is a conclusion that could be deduced from that (when combined with other values we might all share).
The problem is that all sorts of other whacked conclusions can also be deduced from "not all lives are created equal", so you need a whole other host of values to protect against that.
However, I don't think the converse is true. If someone is focusing on expanding internet ahead of eradicating malaria, it doesn't necessarily mean they don't believe "all lives are created equal". It could instead mean they are simply ignorant, which is not bad if they are open to perspective. That is kind of Gates' point - he's being evangelical about pointing out that if you have that value, you should probably pay attention to things like malaria. Other sources point out the same thing. Check various conversations over at lesswrong, or check out the top-rated charities at givewell.org, or just google the many arguments on efficient charity-giving.
All lives are not created equal. That's just bs. Of course not all lives are created equal. For example if I had to pick between the lives of Einstein and Hitler, I'd pick Einstein.
So there's a philosophically sound argument that eradicating malaria comes before worldwide Internet access. Or does it just rely on majority consensus that the one should come before the other?
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.
What is so frustrating is that the malaria problem has all but been solved. I have read on multiple occasions about our ability to breed genetically modified misquotes that can be used to decimate mosquito populations on the one hand and on the other create malaria immune mosquitoes that stop the transmission of the disease. So why hasn't it been done? Short answer: bullshit "unknowns" about long-term ecological effects. Well try explaining that to the 12 children who just died from malaria while I wrote this comment.
You can't pivot your way out of ecological catastrophes, you know...
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.
Source? I find that very hard to believe. For starters, not nearly all humans do or have lived in places where malaria is particularly widespread.
Secondly, while deaths from malaria are high in developing countries, according to WHO it still "only" accounted for 4.4% of deaths in low income countries in 2002.
While the percentage of Malaria deaths has undoubtably dropped substantially as the fight against Malaria has intensified, the drop in recent decades do not seem to justify that the worldwide deaths causes by Malaria has at any point been so far above 50% to compensate for lower rates later and for the parts of the world where Malaria either is not endemic or not widespread enough to cause significant deaths.
While I find it kind of obscene that ISPs (and many many other businesses) make lots of cash in Africa (third world in general) rolling out connectivity, while seemingly giving little back, which of course could help with malaria (and many other issues), I do wonder if it will blow back on the west in the form of the mass of Africans suddenly knowing how the other half live as it were. As a result, demanding more of what the west have, knowing how the west profits while they suffer. Im sure they do know to an extent, but this might prove it, or make it fantastically clear. Heh, kinda like their Snowden. They suspected, but access to real data will prove it.
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?
Google has let me down, but I remember an article I read a few years ago in the Indian edition of the TIME magazine. It spoke of how millions of dollars spent on medicines for malaria between the late 90s and early 2000s had done nothing in terms of numbers for the malaria problem. The problem had just gotten worse. The antibiotics required to cure a person kept getting stronger and more expensive, since the malarial parasite was becoming immune to common antibiotics.
The article then did a case study of on single NGO that did not distribute medicines, but rather distributed mosquitoe nets. There was a sharp decline in the numbers for people affected with malaria in the region in which this particular NGO was operating.
Some times connectivity, access to communication and information is much better then spending millions and billions of dollars on medicines, medical staff and medical research (on stronger anti-biotics. Throw all the money you want at vaccine discovery and it is not wasted.) when a much cheaper and easier alternative would have gotten better results.
If lack of information and communication was a cause of the bad approach being used, then the internet definitely will help in such situations.
> 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.
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.
Oh no, so my power point presentation on the cloud won't save the world? What a cruel realization for someone like me, living in the startup world, constantly getting told how great everything I do is. What comes next? The realization that electronics, like the iPhone end up as waste, destroying the environment and its acid causes cancer to children instead of bringing them rainbows and unicorns? It sounds just as bad as the realization that Facebook and other, invade privacy and are used for bullying leading to depressions and suicide.
(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.
I don't disagree with Gates. In fact, I find it very difficult to comment on his moral position at all, and that's what makes this such a fascinating discussion.
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.
Though it is worth pointing out that worldwide internet coverage would provide a great resource for those living without suitable education and work opportunities.
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.
While this is obviously a good statement, it is besides the point. There's no reason you can't work on both and since he is caring about malaria, others can work on internet access. The question to ask would be, if working on both slows progress in either and what the "sweet spot" is for balancing funds and efforts to achieve the best overall progress.
the QALYs generated by enabling tech are harder to quantify because they are several steps removed from the aid. Example: the CDC has projected that greater access to the internet could save millions of lives by providing quicker info about breakouts of infectious diseases and coordinating responses.
Bill Gates (or realistically someone in his organization) should answer my emails. I'm going to deliver him a way to curb malaria spreading at cost, and nobody over there has gotten a hold of me yet. I'm severely tempted to just drive to his house and drop the prototype off....
Post an explanation + clear diagrams of how it works somewhere, and your process for making the prototype with pictures of it. And details about the cost/parts etc.
Then drum up some interest. Get some blogs to write about it, then hopefully bigger media. Works better if you can point out something unusual - eg if you were 15 years old, that would work really well for you here, or if you can put a concrete estimate to the cost/benefit - "Save 100 Lives For $100 With This Anti-Mosquito Shield". Find their angle for them, and you have a better chance. Someone will get a hold of you then.
The time-lapse with proof that it works would probably help a lot if you could as well, but details are even better for the skeptics among us.
Thanks, I will try to do that. The only unusual thing about me is that I scooped Google once, and they acted weird about it. I'm twice that age though :)
Right now I am trying to figure out how to get a proper medical study done that this stuff doesn't affect people.
An antbot attachment that causes mosquitos to stop flying, so they are easy to kill on the ground. I am working on having the antbot also kill the mosquitos without being piloted.
Googling for "antbot" returns a variety of seemingly unrelated projects. Could you possibly be more specific? But more curious to know the mechanism behind it that causes mosquitos to stop flying.
Though I have to say, robotics doesn't seem like the cheapest way to go about killing malaria - though it would be awesome if it turns out to be.
I will gladly send you a prototype to try (and return the 20 dollars to you if you do not like it). I don't believe in NDAs, so be aware that if you decide to annex the design, I will eat you.
I think both internet(read education) and child health are important for any part of the world. You can't always be fixing their health problems rather than giving them a means of learning how to fix their problems themselves. You need to do both at the same time.
It's not like we can only have one, or that doing one will obstruct doing the other. Quite the reverse, actually. Doing either would facilitate doing the other.
> It's not like we can only have one, or that doing one will obstruct doing the other.
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 funniest thing about this is that he got confused between Peter Singer, the ethicist, and Paul Singer, a venture capitalist and philanthropist. It gets even funnier when you find out that Paul Singer's philanthropic activity is mostly lobbying at similar activities which the argument he's quoted as making would dismiss.
I generally like what Bill Gates is doing and think there should be more people like him in the world. But this statement is really below him; it has kind of 'me hates google' behind it and is wrong.
Did you read the entire article? The link headline is link-bait. He was asked a leading question and answered it. Gates didn't go out of his way to make the statement.
You are right, I didn't read it. Mea culpa. I've read it now and I have mixed feelings still.
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.
You are right, but I hope you do understand my point. This is about short term vs. long term. Bill Gates could have made the choice to not found Microsoft, and instead give the seed money to a charity that solves a disease. But then he wouldn't have been able to spend billions on malaria research.
Both the short term and the long term are important. So it is strange to make the comparison. Both these investments can co-exist.
Nice to see that even with a few dozen billion under his belt he still's the same guy: unable to help himself from mocking ideas he thinks suck! Who cares if you agree with him, his honesty and passion are amazing.
You've got it the wrong way: with his billions and fame, he is more likely to be honest and to mock others. People will listen to him and respect no matter what he says.
Wow, downvoted for suggesting that Gates support a kickstarter project that will, if it's successful, become one of the best tonics in the world (I've tasted it).
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.
Quinine is not the best antimalarial drug out there nowadays, and is certainly not a good choice if you have lots of money to invest in malaria treatment in impoverished regions of the world.
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.
Why, so they can't create companies to support their countr's GDP to become independent of your pity aid?
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.
You don't have to agree with everything that a person says or does in order to acknowledge a simple truth. If Gates said the sky is blue, would you (as you have done) call him a 'cunt' for saying so?
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.
The country these people are living in should have hospitals. They should be able to affordably produce antibiotics, malaria nets and everything else.
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.
The country could potentially have their own corporations that produce a tax basis for hospitals. Those hospitals could have a much lower cost of setup.
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.
Vaccinations bring up a very controversial debate. The counter argument to vaccinations is that they increase the rate of autism dramatically because they contain a preservative of mercury. Research has shown that in 1992 when they increased the amount of vaccines given to children the rate of autism sky rocketed. Coincidence? Some say that it's a direct link, others oppose of that conclusion. The debate rages on.
My issue is that I struggle to trust the pharmaceutical industry as all corporations when reaching a certain size turn corrupt. When corporations are in the business of health shady their concern is about making money rather than human health.
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.
No your problem is you believe your completely unsupported opinion is more valuable then the breadth and depth of scientific literature on the subject, and to that end have elected to do no in-depth reading on the matter.
It is an attitude that can only come from someone who's been vaccinated and lives in a country where such programs have practically eradicated common fatal diseases, and will be completely unaffected by whether or not they're dangerously wrong.
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.