Finding Common Ground
4 years, 7 months, 14 days, 17 hours
7 December 2024
‘I am an optimist. But I’m worried about polarisation…’
‘I am an optimist. But I’m worried about polarisation…’
The quote is from an interview published a few weeks ago in ‘The New Statesman’, a magazine founded in 1913 and always associated with liberal, left-wing or progressive views (take your pick depending on which value-laden label you prefer). The interviewee? Bill Gates.
‘We have moral clarity that we are all humans, and we owe it to the developing countries, particularly the low-income countries, to help them out.’
The determination of Bill Gates to try to eradicate the world’s deadliest diseases is well known. And the logic of his focus is supported by the evidence in Bjorn Lomborg’s book ‘Best Things First’, whose Top 12 most statistically impactful things to work on to improve the world include Tuberculosis (No. 1), Malaria (No. 5), Chronic Diseases (No.8) and Childhood Immunisation (No. 9).
But the article is gripping because what comes through is the message that despite his natural optimism and belief in the power of technology, Bill Gates is increasingly troubled.
Partly it is that progress is stalling, with, the article states, 25 of the world’s poorest countries now spending more on debt than on education, health and social security combined. But more significantly it is that countries are turning inwards, nationalism is rising, and defence and security are attracting more attention and funding. What the article poetically calls ‘the spirit of transnational and multilateral collaboration that illuminated the early years of the century’ is getting squeezed, sometimes deliberately and sometimes because it has just slipped in the order of national priorities.
I shortened the quote. In full Gates said: ‘But I’m worried about polarisation, I always worry about bioterrorism, I worry about nuclear weapons, I worry about climate change, and now I would add AI; although it’s the most positive innovation, it happens so quickly that it will be quite disruptive.’
But his worry about polarisation seemed to me the most significant because global collaboration is the key to mitigating all the other risks on his list.