When Microsoft founder Bill Gates left the leadership of his company in 2008, he also disappeared a bit from the world’s eyes. With his Netflix documentary series What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates However, he is once again seeking the spotlight. Without hesitation to once again cast a public eye on the world that made him great and prosperous: that of digital technology.
No, Bill Gates isn’t done with technology. He never has been. Even after the Microsoft founder stepped down as chairman of the tech giant more than 15 years ago, it has remained an annual tradition for Microsoft employees to show him the company’s latest inventions at an office in downtown Redmond, the small town in northwestern Washington state that has been absorbed into Microsoft’s sprawling campus since the early 1980s.
But to the general public? Before that, Gates was best known, along with his (now ex-)wife Melinda, as a philanthropist. At the head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a nonprofit that has given away nearly $60 billion of the (former) Gates couple’s personal fortune since 2000 (plus another $39 billion from investment guru Warren Buffett), he was more concerned with fighting infectious diseases and tackling the impending climate collapse than with operating systems and office software.
But then came AI
From technology oracle to philanthropist, Gates has now adopted a new identity: that of documentary maker. With the documentary series that has just landed on streaming service Netflix What’s Next: The Future with Bill Gates he explores, together with a host of interviewees, the major issues that concern him today. And the first two seem to bring him back to an old love: digital technology.
The opening episode, on artificial intelligence, in particular, sees Gates return to his role as a technological visionary. Together with executive producer Morgan Neville, he interviews OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, filmmaker James Cameron (who suggested, among other things, that it’s “going to be hard to write sci-fi anymore”) and a whole host of tech CEOs, academics and technology journalists to help gauge what this technology will mean for humanity in the near future.
Gates himself says in the Netflix series that generative AI technology has overcome a major hurdle with GPT-4, because it can now “read and write.” After telling the founders of OpenAI (where he also happens to be a quiet regular) to call him if their creation would pass a standard biology exam at American high schools, he unexpectedly got that call after just a few months. Gates is now a believer in the power of artificial intelligence. In an interview with American tech site CNet, following the launch of the series, he suggested: ‘The ability to work well with AI and to benefit from it is now more important than understanding Excel or the internet.’
But Netflix continues to explore the true future impact of artificial intelligence. For example, it points out that it’s frightening that we don’t really know why AI hallucinates: it learns from itself, and our understanding of that learning process is minimal. And what if AI breeds superintelligence?
But the most important question that is raised: where is the human? How do we inject technology with humanism? And how do we ensure that humans – if AI will be able to take over more and more tasks from us, perhaps even an app that replaces general practitioners – end up in a collective vacuum of meaning?
“We don’t want to look at robots playing baseball,” Gates said on CNet. “So where is the line where you say, ‘OK, whatever the machines can do is great,’ and these other things are maybe very social activities, intimate things, where we keep human jobs? It’s not for technologists to understand that any better than anyone else. It really goes to the heart of religious and philosophical values. It’s a kind of Nirvana. But are we going to manage it well?”
Birth of the wappies
Other episodes of What’s Next: The Future with Bill Gates are a bit closer to the man’s philanthropic work: about global warming, income inequality and the fight against infectious diseases. But episode two also has to do with technology. A technology that once ended up in living rooms and lives with a lot of help from Microsoft: the internet.
When Windows computers were still the main internet channel, there was still optimism about the entire technology, that inexhaustible source of information that would make everyone wiser. Meanwhile, as the second episode of the Netflix documentary underlines once again, we know better: due to the evolution to social media in the early 2000s, those who do not necessarily know have started to inform each other. And that ensures that a category of internet users swallows the wildest conspiracy theories from each other.
What’s next? finds the mechanism behind this in, among other things, the fact that the internet feeds the fantasy that everyone, even without specialized frameworks, can do their own research. That undermines trust in experts. The documentary series illustrates this with what happened to Gates himself during the corona period. A phrase in an interview about ‘digital certificates’ was linked on an obscure blog to the idea of Swedish biohackers to combine them with implants, and lo and behold: a series of persistent conspiracy theories, which in some circles led to the idea that Gates is the antichrist, was born.
The best way to combat this wave of misinformation, Gates told CNet, is something that many of the theorists would dread even more: technology that lets us identify ourselves as real and true online. “I think over time, with things like deepfakes, you’re going to want to spend the majority of your time online in an environment where people are actually identified,” he said. “That is, they’re connected to a real identity that you trust, rather than just people saying whatever they want.”