Bill Gates Turns Skeptical on Digital Solution's Scope
By Sam Howe Verhovek
Redmond, Wash., Nov. 1 — As the "Creating Digital Dividends" conference drew to a close in Seattle recently, the final speaker arrived and started asking skeptical questions. The premise was that "market drivers" could be used "to bring the benefits of connectivity and participation in the e-economy to all of the world's six billion people," according to conference materials, but the speaker would have little of it.
"I mean, do people have a clear view of what it means to live on $1 a day?" the speaker, William H. Gates, asked. "There's no electricity in that house. None."
When a moderator brought up solar power, Mr. Gates shot back, "No! You can't afford a solar power system for less than $1 a day." And, "You're just buying food, you're trying to stay alive."
It is a theme to which Mr. Gates, the world's richest man, returns in an interview at his office here at the Microsoft Corporation, the giant software maker he founded. Pacing the room, waving his hands, he conjures up an image of an African village that receives a computer.
"The mothers are going to walk right up to that computer and say, My children are dying, what can you do?" Mr. Gates says. "They're not going to sit there and like, browse eBay or something. What they want is for their children to live. They don't want their children's growth to be stunted. Do you really have to put in computers to figure that out?"
For a man often thought of as the world's chief evangelist for technology, Mr. Gates is assuming a surprising role these days, in which he seems to be taking his own industry to task for having far too much faith in digital solutions to the planet's worst ills. He openly dismisses the notion that the world's poorest people constitute a significant market for high-tech products anytime soon. Such thoughts, he says, may undercut the case for urgent aid to the most impoverished people.
But in a way, the man who has also become the world's biggest philanthropist seems to be taking himself to task, offering the confession that he himself was "naïve — very naïve" when he began his charitable endeavors six years ago.
When he did so, he said in the interview, he expected that projects involving computers and information technology would make up the bulk of his giving. But now his priorities are otherwise, with health care, especially development and distribution of vaccines, soon expected to account for at least two-thirds of the grants offered by the $21 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Or, as he put it at the Seattle conference, the world's poorest two billion people desperately need health care right now, not laptops.
Mr. Gates said he had certainly not lost his faith in the long-term promise of technology to deliver a better world. But he has lost much of the faith he once had that global capitalism would prove capable of solving the most immediate catastrophes facing the world's poorest people, especially the 40,000 deaths a day from preventable diseases. More philanthropy and more government aid — especially a greater contribution to foreign health programs by American taxpayers — are needed for that, he says.
And it also explains, he said, why he has taken on the unaccustomed role of self-described "troublemaker" about the promises of technology. It is a role he assumed at the Seattle conference, which created a stir in his industry and irritation among at least some of the organizers, but one that he seems to have played at other recent appearances.
"Whenever the computer industry has a panel about the digital divide and I'm on the panel, I always think, `O.K., you want to send computers to Africa, what about food and electricity — those computers aren't going to be that valuable,' " he explained in a speech last month before the Global Foundation in Melbourne, Australia.
"They want to sit on the panel and talk about how the computers will solve all the world's problems," Mr. Gates continued. "They're amazing in what they can do, but they have to be put into the perspective of human values. And certainly as a father of two children, thinking about the medicines I take for granted that are not available elsewhere, that sort of rises to the top of the list."
Some people in Mr. Gates's industry have commended him for his recent comments, while others have accused him of setting up a straw man. Nothing in the quest for a more wired world, they say, is at odds with the notion that food and health care remain a more immediate concern.
And still others, including some of Microsoft's principal competitors, argue that Mr. Gates is downright wrong. They say there are all kinds of tangible, profitable products that their industry is developing that will help improve people's lives, including the world's poorest people. Some directly involved in the conference here, sponsored by the nonprofit World Resources Institute, seemed annoyed by Mr. Gates's comments.
"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,' to hear that simple repetition of Maslow's hierarchy, that wasn't exactly furthering the point of the entire meeting," said John Gage, the chief research officer for Sun Microsystems and the founder of Netday, a global volunteer effort to connect schools to the Internet.
Mr. Gage's reference was to Abraham H. Maslow, the psychologist who suggested that human beings reach fulfillment through satisfying a series of needs, which begins with basic physiological needs like food and water and rises to others that include love, self-esteem and personal expression. Where Mr. Gates has it wrong, Mr. Gage argued, is that technology is rapidly being used to satisfy even the most basic needs on the hierarchy.
Mr. Gage, known as a periodic critic of Mr. Gates, said that the declining cost of cell phones and other hand-held mobile technology would soon make them immensely useful for even the poorest people. They might use the devices to share important information about health care and food conditions, he said.
Others in the industry were more measured in their response to Mr. Gates's recent comments. "I think he's right and he's wrong," said James F. Moore, chairman of GeoPartners Research Inc., which specializes in technology and economic- development issues. "He's right, and I'd emphatically support him on this, that other divides are more important than the digital divide: the divide on health care, the human- rights divide, the education divide."
But in the view of Mr. Moore, a policy adviser to Hewlett-Packard, which recently announced a $1 billion program to focus on new markets in the third world, "what's going on here is that people are really trying to think about the essence of high technology and what it can do. And I would say I think he's missing something by being so dismissive of these markets."
Mr. Gates, however, seems adamant on the point. "Anybody who says, `Oh sure, we'll sell to the people who live on a dollar a day,' they just don't get it," he said.
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