Gates loses faith in computers

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,393015,00.html

Edward Helmore in New York and Robin McKie in London
Sunday November 5, 2000

Microsoft boss Bill Gates has renounced the machine that has made him
the world's richest man. In a startling proclamation, Gates has
announced that computers can do little to solve the planet's gravest
social ills.

'The world's poorest two billion people desperately need healthcare,
not laptops,' he said.

The declaration represents a major personal transformation for Gates,
and has sent shockwaves through America's high-tech business
community. Had the Pope renounced Catholicism, the surprise would not
have been greater.

Speaking in Seattle at a conference on using computers to help the
Third World, Gates said he still had faith in the ideal that
technology could bring about a better world, but added that he doubted
that computers - or global capitalism - could solve the most immediate
catastrophes facing the world's poorest people.

People who thought that developing countries could benefit from the
e-economy had no idea what it meant to live on $1 a day with no
electricity, said Gates. 'You're just buying food; you're trying to
stay alive.'

The billionaire technologist became positively vitriolic about the
idea of using computers in the Third World: 'Mothers are going to walk
right up to that computer and say, "My children are dying, what can
you do?" They're not going to sit there and, like, browse eBay or
something.

'What they want is for their children to live. Do you really have to
put in computers to figure that out?'

For a man who has benefited more than anyone from the IT revolution,
this reappraisal is extraordinary and comes after several months of
growing disillusionment in Gates about the state of the planet, and
the potential for technology to help it out of its current crisis.

He confessed he had been 'naive - very naive' when he began giving
away his fortune six years ago. At that time, he said, he expected
that computers and information technology would make up the bulk of
his philanthropic donations. 'Computers are amazing in what they can
do, but they have to be put into the perspective of human values,' he
said.

Having visited Africa and other Third World countries his priorities
had now shifted, he said. At least two-thirds of the grants offered by
the $21 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would now be devoted
to Third World healthcare and the development and distribution of
vaccines.

In the past year the Gates Foundation has given more than $200 million
to health-related causes, including $25m for the International Aids
Vaccine Initiative, $50m to prevent maternal and child mortality, $20m
for international family planning efforts and $100m towards children's
vaccines. 'As a father of two children, thinking about the medicines
that I take for granted which are not available elsewhere, that sort
of rises to the top of the list.'

These remarks have angered many of Gates's wealthy, hi-tech
philanthropist counterparts. They say he has unfairly placed computers
at odds with providing food and healthcare in developing countries.
Others argue that Gates is wrong to think that technology cannot help
improve even the poorest people's lives.

'After listening to three days of serious analysis and work, and then
to have Gates rather flippantly say, "You've got to have clean water
and food" - that wasn't exactly furthering the point of the entire
meeting,' said Sun Microsystems chief research officer John Gage, who
heads Netday, a charity committed to wiring the world's classrooms to
the internet.


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