Bill Gates's 'Ask Me Anything': Poop Water Tastes Just Fine, But Watch Out for Robots

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For the third year in a row, the world’s richest tech-billionaire-turned-nerd-philanthropist hosted an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit.

As in the past, Gates’s AMA session was very popular, generating more than 5,000 questions and comments and overloading Reddit’s servers at least twice.

The founder of Microsoft and current co-chair of the nonprofit Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation answered approximately 30 questions on a wide range of topics, including climate change, the future of technology, virtual currency, his pets, and what it’s like to drink water made from human waste (no different than regular water, he says — we’ll just take his word for that).

Here are some of the highlights.

1. One of the first questions Gates tackled is whether technology is making us all dumber. (The unsurprising answer? No.):

Technology is not making people less intelligent. If you just look at the complexity people like in Entertainment you can see a big change over my lifetime. Technology is letting people get their questions answered better so they stay more curious.

It turns out that Gates is a Breaking Bad fan. Well, duh.

2. You know what does make Bill Gates feel stupid? Not being able to speak a foreign language.

I took Latin and Greek in High School and got A’s and I guess it helps my vocabulary but I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese. I keep hoping to get time to study one of these — probably French because it is the easiest. I did Duolingo for awhile but didn’t keep it up. Mark Zuckerberg amazingly learned Mandarin and did a Q&A with Chinese students — incredible.

We’re pretty sure that just made Zuck’s day.

3. Here’s what Mr. Bill thinks technology will look like 30 years from now:

There will be more progress in the next 30 years than ever. Even in the next 10, problems like vision and speech understanding and translation will be very good. Mechanical robot tasks like picking fruit or moving a hospital patient will be solved. Once computers/robots get to a level of capability where seeing and moving is easy for them then they will be used very extensively.

One project I am working on with Microsoft is the Personal Agent which will remember everything and help you go back and find things and help you pick what things to pay attention to. The idea that you have to find applications and pick them and they each are trying to tell you what is new is just not the efficient model — the agent will help solve this. It will work across all your devices.

4. Gates also weighed in on the new holographic glasses his former company unveiled last week:

The HoloLens is pretty amazing. Microsoft has put a lot into the chips and the software. It is the start of virtual reality. Making the device so you don’t get dizzy or nauseous is really hard — the speed of the alignment has to be super super fast. It will take a few years of software applications being built to realize the full promise of this.

(Microsoft)

He did not offer an opinion as to whether this device finally makes Microsoft ‘cool’, however.

5. The single greatest thing that has improved life in poor countries? Vaccines, says Gates.

Being able to grow up healthy is the most basic thing. So many kids get infectious diseases and don’t develop mentally and physically. I was in Berlin yesterday helping raise $7.5B for vaccines for kids in poor countries. We barely made it but we did which is so exciting to me!

6. Does Bill Gates own a dog? Why yes, he owns two, and they’re named after cookies:

We have two dogs. One is Oreo and the other is Nilla. I will say I spend less time with the dogs than the kids do but I really like them (when they are not barking at night and not eating things they are not supposed to and when they are well house trained).

(ReCode)

7. It turns out Gates is a fan of virtual currencies; bitcoin, though, not so much.

For our Foundation work we are doing digital currency to help the poor get banking services. We don’t use bitcoin specifically for two reasons. One is that the poor shouldn’t have a currency whose value goes up and down a lot compared to their local currency. Second is that if a mistake is made in who you pay then you need to be able to reverse it so anonymity wouldn’t work.

8. Where should the U.S. be spending more money on R&D? Safer and cheaper nuclear energy.

I am supporting TerraPower which has a 4th generation design that looks good. It doesn’t use Thorium — it uses the 97% of Uranium that normally can’t be used for a reactor by breeding and burning. This means fuel will always be cheap. There are a lot of innovations but the key one is that it is far far safer than anything today — not relying on human operators.

9. The always crucial meat-related question: Dry rub or barbecue sauce?

Sauce. Lots of sauce. I always spill a bit so I avoid BBQ before TV appearances.

One word, Bill: Wet-Naps. Check 'em out.

(Yahoo News)

10. Should we be worried about the rise of superintelligent machines, as both Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have recently warned? Be afraid, says Gates. Be very afraid.

I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern.

Reach out and touch Dan Tynan at ModFamily1@yahoo.com.