AI
5 awesome takeaways from Bill Gates’ predictions for 2024
Bill Gates says AI will change the world next year, although we’d argue it already has.
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Every year, Bill Gates makes predictions about where technology will help in the year ahead. Some of these come to fruition, while others are still future tech.
For example, in 2019, he forecasted ten things in a post in the MIT Technology Review, and multiple highlighted technologies hit the mark.
We got cow-free meat, ECGs in our smartwatches, and smooth-talking AI assistants like ChatGPT.
Now, he’s mused about what’s to come in 2024, and the overarching theme is that AI is going to push innovation forward in the year ahead.
Bill Gates says you haven’t seen anything yet for AI
The biggest takeaway from next year is that it will set the stage for “a massive technology boom later this decade.” AI technology is in considerable flux, with exponential increases seemingly every other week.
Gates sees AI working on some of the most challenging questions, like combating antibiotic resistance, bringing individualized tutoring tools to students, treating high-risk pregnancies, and making health history easier to find for medics.
AI is about to supercharge the innovation pipeline – Bill Gates
Since 2000, the number of children that die before age five has halved, in no small part because of vaccine innovation. Bill says AI can speed up the discovery of innovative medicines so fewer lives are lost before they reach their potential.
One other way to enable childhood potential is eradicating malnutrition. The Gates Foundation has discovered that a specific bacteria is responsible for the absorption of nutrients in babies’ guts.
If the gut bacteria doesn’t develop, or the baby doesn’t get enough, no amount of nutritious food will fix malnutrition. So they’ve developed a probiotic form of this bacteria that rights the delicate balance in the gut’s microbiome.
It’s no secret that 2023 has been the hottest on record, with climate change showing that it’s a real and present danger. Bill Gates has been active at United Nations Climate Change Conferences over the years, and this year was no exception.
At COP28, he saw more focus on stopping harmful emissions rather than discussing how to clean them up after the fact, including a more significant emphasis on nuclear power and alternative energy sources.
And the last thing that will happen in 2024 is that more people might vote than at any other time in history. Over 60 countries have large-scale elections scheduled, including our own.
The elected officials at every level of government will set policies that will reach further into the future than just 2024. That makes every vote count even more, not just for local reasons but world-spanning ones.
The future is what we make
It’s easy to read these predictions and be hopeful for the future. AI and other technology have the promise of a better world, provided they are used in altruistic ways.
Maybe it will find a solution to the climate crisis, although any solution still requires many countries to work together to put it into practice.
It is clear that, while technology can be argued as harmful in some cases, it’s an overall benefit to humanity. Innovation is a uniquely human trait, and the next generation of innovators is still to come.
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