By Gideon Rachman;  This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘Bill Gates on Ukraine’s ‘shock to the system’

Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week I’m interviewing Bill Gates, a man who probably doesn’t need much introduction. I met the co-founder of Microsoft several times over the years, and I’m always impressed by the range of scientific, political and environmental subjects that he’s following and the sharpness of his insights. Gates is somebody who believes absolutely in the power of science and technology to improve the world. He’s used the many billions of dollars he’s made in business to fund the Gates Foundation, which works to reduce global poverty and to improve public health. But as you’ll hear, he’s now very worried that geopolitics are getting in the way of efforts to fight poverty and climate change. So is even Bill Gates now a pessimist?

Bill Gates
You know, GPT2 was kind of a trick; GPT3 uhh it started to say if you understand; GPT4, it’s like, wow!

Gideon Rachman
That was Bill Gates expressing his astonishment at how fast artificial intelligence has advanced over the past year through the various iterations of GPT, an artificial intelligence system based on large language models or LLMs. When I met Gates at the Munich Security Conference a couple of weeks ago, our conversation ranged very widely from climate to the UN Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs, and why he thinks there are too many of them. Gates also explained why he thinks the ambition to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees is now unrealisable, but why we also shouldn’t lose hope, and why he thinks American efforts to restrict China’s technological development are doomed to fail. But since we were meeting at the Munich Security Conference, the natural starting point for our conversation was the war in Ukraine.

Bill Gates
It’s hard to overstate what a terrible tragedy the Ukraine war is. I mean, you know, for the Ukrainians, of course, you know, mind-blowing suffering taking place there. But the shock to the whole system, we’ve got, you know, fertiliser, it’s expensive, there’s less being used. Where is it being used less? In Africa. They’re the ones that get crowded out as the price goes up. Africa is a huge net food importer, which is something that can be changed over a period of a decade, particularly with better seeds, better advice, better credit. But, you know, they’re suffering immensely. And it all comes at a time where the economic cycle is making the debts of these countries, which have accumulated a lot, a lot more painful. So for the last decade, they’ve sort of gotten cash flow by increasing their debt and not paying much in interest. Now, those interest costs are high and the debt resolution processes appear to be at best slow because of the complexity that there’s a big private piece, a big Chinese piece. Anyway, so Ukraine has got people distracted. I don’t disagree with that. If you look at aid budgets ex Ukraine, they will go down. You know, Europe is the most generous in aid budgets, but they’ve got refugee costs, they’ve got in-country economic aid that they’re giving and that appropriately counts in the aid budgets, which are actually quite limited. So the portion that goes to places like Africa, it’s just gonna be down.

Gideon Rachman
There was a lot of focus on the effect on food prices a few months back when the Russians were briefly talking about blockading the Black Sea. There’s less talk of it, but is the issue still very intense?

Bill Gates
Well, food prices are way above their average. They’re not at their peak. Fertiliser prices are much higher. It floats with the natural gas price and Russia’s a huge fertiliser manufacturer and most of that is not getting out. So it means Africans are just using less fertiliser.

Gideon Rachman
So you see problems not just now but in the future because crop yields are gonna be lower and so . . . 

Bill Gates
Yes, the soil quality will be lower. That costs you for about three seasons if you cut back. Africa’s never used nearly as much fertiliser as it should because the credit and accessing the seeds that can actually take advantage of the fertiliser. Africa has very low agricultural productivity — about a quarter of what the US or Europe has. The seed improvements that took place in the ’70s and ’80s that were termed the green revolution — that didn’t take place for African ecosystems and they have the greatest variety of crops where sorghum, chickpea, millet, cassava. The African food production has more variety than any place on earth. I mean, it’s kinda surprising how little variety the non-African food basket is with the big cereal crops, but weirdly, that innovation system is grossly underfunded.

Gideon Rachman
So if this problem is pretty directly traceable to the Ukraine war, you know — unless we’re surprised, the war’s gonna go on for a while — what should we be doing to try to mitigate the effects?

Bill Gates
We’ve made huge progress in some areas. Childhood health in Africa is greatly improved. There’s still a lot to do. We’ve gone from a million malaria deaths a year to 400,000 malaria deaths a year. The pandemic was the first time where vaccination rates actually dropped. Malaria deaths actually went up a little bit. So we need to get back on track. You know, the foreign aid we have, we have to make sure that it’s very well spent where health is one of these things that we do. Even in the DRC, Somalia, we can get vaccine coverage. It’s not like, you know, pretending you’re gonna build the road or something. So, you know, we need to keep that visible. In the period 2005-15, which is the MDG period, poverty and global health really were visible. Now because of all the geopolitical things going on and the SDGs, sadly. We knew it would happen, that everybody wanted to piggyback. You know, there’s like 190 numbers instead of really two numbers: child-to-death poverty rate. So we don’t have as much visual clarity and if you ask young people what’s more a cause that animates them, climate is high. Whether they mean climate mitigation, climate adaptation, not clear, but just the basic inequity and what’s gone well with that, what still needs to be done? We haven’t kept that on the agenda. You could say that should be in the climate adaptation side of climate. That should be rephrased as continuing to reduce inequity even in the face of climate making it harder. So it’s still okay to fund vaccines, even though that’s not labelled as climate.

Gideon Rachman
Are you sort of saying that a lot of the issues that you’ve been pushing on for a long time are less sexy than they once were because they’re being displaced by other issues, whether it’s Ukraine or climate?

Bill Gates
Well, for the parents whose children are dying, I think it’s still as relevant. I don’t think, you know, that’s diminished . . . 

Gideon Rachman
I mentioned the . . . 

Bill Gates
Yeah, I know. I’m kidding. (Laughter)

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Gates
But yes, I agree.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. No, it’s right, I suppose, to press quite hard because that is what they . . . 

Bill Gates
Yeah. So we . . . the movement, which includes lots of groups as well as the foundation, we have to figure out how we get this ability because there’s a lot of good news on what got done, and we’re gonna have less resources. I’m not an expert on when the war will end. I hope when it does that those resources are increased. I know that innovation where we’re learning how to kill mosquitoes in new ways and we’re getting new vaccines and we’re understanding malnutrition — the ability to take the money and by having these new tools have more impact, that’s actually pretty exciting. The Ukraine war does not influence the speed at which, you know, we figure out how to make TB vaccine or TB drugs or TB diagnostic — that is full speed ahead.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And if you wander round this hotel, you talk to the diplomats, they’re all very worried about the global south. Why don’t they agree with us on Ukraine? Is that partly do you think because they have a different set of issues which they feel are being sidelined or even adversely affected by the war?

Bill Gates
Well, the global south has a lot of very disparate countries, some of whose leaders represent their people, and some of whose leaders don’t really represent their people. You know, if China appears to not want you to pick sides, that’s tricky because the economic relationship that most countries want with China, they don’t just go out of their way to upset China. So I wouldn’t say it’s direct Russian influence. It’s a little bit, hey, the global south has always felt they’re an independent voice, maybe more pacifist, naturally. And then, OK, is that gonna affect their neutrality?

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And so do you think the US is gonna have to get used to or is gradually getting used to the idea that it’s no longer the sole superpower and that comes with diminishing influence in some ways?

Bill Gates
Well, our influence at the end of World War II is so extreme that there was always gonna be some dilution from that. The US influence is still unbelievable, and for most world problems, like being ready for the next pandemic, the big problem is the US isn’t showing up and the world expects US leadership. But we’re still caught up in was WTO influenced by China? You know, we’re not as forward-looking as long-term actor in some of these tough problems as we used to be. So it’s not that the world rejected the US in all these cases. The world wants the US to show leadership.

Gideon Rachman
I mean you mentioned the pandemic, and I know the Gates Foundation did a lot on it, but you got this unbelievable blowback where you’re suddenly the focus of all these conspiracy theories. And it seemed to me for a very long time, you actually did rather well in being apolitical and being accepted as apolitical. But those days seem to be over for you now.

Bill Gates
I wouldn’t call the fringe group that believes whatever conspiracy theory, you know, caused the pandemic, whatever crazy thing is. I wouldn’t identify that as a political group. It’s not like that’s some huge bloc of voters. It’s just a phenomena of conspiracy theories that are less acute today now that the pandemic’s not as front and centre.

Gideon Rachman
But I noticed, for example, for George Soros, who’s had this for a long time and is more explicitly political, I think it’s made the Open Society Foundations’ work much harder.

Bill Gates
Oh, absolutely. You know what was done to George Soros being attacked in Hungarian politics, that’s different. (Gideon interjects) For me it would be more, is the acceptance of vaccines been damaged by the pandemic? And I’m very worried about that, that a lot of countries had really great acceptance of vaccines and the fact that in the US and some other places there was all that vaccine scepticism. That hasn’t stayed in the US. You know, when we ask people, do they trust vaccines, there’s a number of countries, including some in Africa, where that number’s gone down a lot.

Gideon Rachman
And of course one of your big drives has always been to eradicate polio but do you think one of the indirect effects of this might make that slightly hard?

Bill Gates
Yeah. We always, we had in the early 2000s these rumours that the polio vaccine was to sterilise Muslim women. And it took us three years of working with Muslim leaders where they would visibly give the polio vaccine to their kids to get the level of compliance up so that we were able to get polio out of Nigeria. Now, you know, the two places we’ve never eliminated wild polio are Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Pakistan the CIA used a vaccination campaign not to vaccinate kids, but rather to see if Osama bin Laden lived in a particular compound in Abbottabad. So they were hoping a child would come out and they would look at the blood and see if it was a person related. And that was uncovered and that hurt vaccines and vaccination quite a bit that in that case it was a CIA-created activity. Anyway, you know, it’s kind of this non-intuitive thing that the way to save your child’s life is to have a metal needle stuck in their arm many times, but it’s the truth.

Gideon Rachman
I mean, it’s hard to see any upsides of the Ukraine war, but do you think that indirectly it might help the battle against climate, which obviously you wrote a book about quite recently in that it accelerates the green transition?

Bill Gates
I’d say pretty modestly. I mean, it’s certainly caused some coal plants to stay open. It’s meant that non-Russian sources of natural gas are expanding at full speed. Qatar’s got the North Field. They look brilliant for having done that. So it’s got as many negatives as positives. Not having a natural gas dependency, particularly a Russian natural gas dependency, maybe that will be accelerated. You haven’t seen the R&D budgets change that much. The thing that slows down renewables is actually not their economics. It’s more the permitting of the fields, whether onshore, offshore, and the permitting of the transmission. And so you see, like the wind manufacturers are having a tough year, but it’s all permitting-related. Permit the fields, permit the transmission, you know, think through the grid. You may have to put some storage in to make sure it’s reliable. Will this cause those regulatory impediments to be taken away? I’m not sure, because it’s complex local politics that denies the transmission line or the wind field.

Gideon Rachman
And, you know, you come to conferences like this. One of the slogans that you always used to hear was “Keep 1.5 alive”. But I think you think that’s dead.

Bill Gates
No, and it’s a nice religion, but it’s just not realistic. And you wanna be in the real world on how quickly can you change electricity, heat, transport, industry, agriculture, buildings. And there’s many, many sources of emissions from many, many, many countries. And most of those emissions are in middle-income countries. We have to do a lot of R&D and invent things in the lab. Then we have to get them out and scale them. Then we have to get their price down. Then we have to fully deploy them in rich countries. And when we’ve done that then the middle-income countries will see that and say, oh, that’s how you want us to make steel and cement. And then we have to scale them up in all of those countries and 2050 is only 27 years away. So, you know, sadly, we’re gonna emit more than we’d like to. The less we emit, the better. This is not one of those things that if you cross the threshold, you don’t have to keep trying.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. But I mean, for those who say, “But if we cross 1.5, if we get to 2.5, that is disaster for the world”. I mean, it sounds like we will get to 2.5. So we’re gonna have to mitigate.

Bill Gates
I think we can avoid 2.5, even 2.0 if things went extremely well. It’s not out of the question. Depending on how well we do politically, investment, innovation is a huge part of that. Right now, these so-called green premiums are very high. Green cement costs twice as much, green aviation fuel costs twice as much. And you not only have to green the electricity system, you have to more than double its size because energy has to come from somewhere. The only form of clean energy that’s easy to move around is electricity. So you take your car, transport energy, you take it from the electric grid, you take a lot of heating homes from the electric grid. You take, you know, making fertiliser, making steel. You are pulling out a lot of electricity. And so that you have to green the grid and make it two-and-a-half times bigger. And we’ve just never done anything like that. We’re not even close to the rate. There’s no country that is at the rate they would need to be for that green grid. And yet you draw a line where it’s going up every year. That means you took the permitting issues from both the fields themselves, from transmission and somehow solved those.

Gideon Rachman
What about some, you know, you keep such a close eye on all the different technological breakthroughs and possibilities, invest in a lot of them. Do you see any kind of something big coming along that might help us?

Bill Gates
Well, certainly, if you had electricity from nuclear fission or fusion. Because the amount you have to build to make that plant versus building a solar field or a wind field. It’s just 20 times easier cement per amount of energy, and you put it right where you need the energy. And so that you can solve the challenges there, which are costs, safety, perceptions, waste. And I think there’s a good chance we can. We can’t depend on that because the fission industry has basically died because its costs were far too high. But both in fission/fusion, that would make a huge difference if that can come into the mix. We should continue to build renewables at full speed because that’s an important part of the mix. But if we can mix in a significant amount of one of these two — and there’s more money going into it, there’s 14 fusion companies, I’ve invested in four of them, there’s a lot of fission renaissance. I’m a huge investor in one of those.

Gideon Rachman
What about, I mean AI is the topic of the moment. It’s all over the papers. Do you think that can help?

Bill Gates
Well like, AI is going to play a big role and I’m very involved in Microsoft Open AI. Worked just as an advisor and also, where in my foundation have, you know, we’re gonna build educational tutors out of this. We’re gonna build a medical advisor for low-income countries where most people never get the help of a doctor in their entire life. So, yes, any place where you have limits that having an ability to read and write can help relieve those limits, like to streamline the work doctors do or to take the administrative overhead of the health system and reduce that pretty dramatically. This idea of computers being able to read and write, nobody knew when that would come along and now it’s arrived.

Gideon Rachman
Are you worried by strong AI? I mean, there was this piece just recently somebody has been talking to Bing’s chatbot and said that they found it profoundly unsettling and that it seemed to have a mind of its own and to be trying to manipulate them.

Bill Gates
Well there’s, there’s all these people trying to make the AI look stupid. But anyway, I mean, it’s fine, there’s no threat. The technology most people are playing with, it’s a generation old. It’s the version three compared to what’s integrated into Bing, which some journalists have and will be opened up more broadly. So it’s much better. It still makes mistakes. You can still get it to say crazy things. You have to provoke it quite a bit, so it’s not clear who should be blamed, you know, if you sit there and provoke a bit. The improvement over the next two years in terms of the accuracy and the capabilities will be very rapid.

Gideon Rachman
Are you worried by the idea that at some point AI might develop a mind of its own, you know, have its own ideas about what it wants to do and escape human control?

Bill Gates
You know, in the long run, if AIs get good enough, it raises questions about, not just did you write your paper, but you know, what will the bans for certain jobs be? And you know, what’s the value of an education? That’s a long way south in the future. There will be some labour displacement, but mostly there’ll be more efficiency. Your ability to research articles or have things summarised for you so that you can write better articles that, you know, helping doctors be more efficient. We’re very backlogged in terms of do we have enough educators, enough doctors? And so for the next decade, there’s a lot of very good things. If it get smart enough, which there’s no predicting me this reading and writing came from scaling up. You know, GPT2 was kind of a trick. GPT3 uhhh it started to say if you understand, GPT4, it’s like, wow! You know, I challenge them in June to do some things GPT3 couldn’t. And then by early September, they showed me that they could do those things. And that was very surprising to me.

Gideon Rachman
About what things were they?

Bill Gates
Oh, pass an advanced placement biology exam (hmmm). And I knew a lot of biology questions so I had de novo so it couldn’t have been trained (hmmm) in these things. And these are super abstract things that, you know, when you read a biology textbook, you don’t remember the words, but you start, you know, what’s mitochondria, what are organelles, what’s the energy balance. You, in a very rich way, store that knowledge in order to be able to apply it. And until really GPT4, I didn’t see that as being, you know, super impressive. This was very impressive coming many years before I thought, what I thought we’d have to add explicit knowledge, storage and manipulations as opposed to just scaling up LLMs and then a few clever things, but it’s mostly a gigantic LLM.

Gideon Rachman
So if it’s surprising you now, there’ll be more surprises . . .

Bill Gates:
Absolutely (yeah). You know, now we kind of understand why it’s not good at math and we’re making it be good at math and there’ll be a lot of competition. Google has very strong people . . .

Gideon Rachman
Last try on this, but doesn’t there come a point where we stop making it do things that can start making us do things?

Bill Gates
If you have an AI that only a few humans have access to, that’s a lot better than some other AI your main problem is not the AI doing things, it’s those people. They can do cyber attacks, they can do spoofing and things. So you hope the AIs are broadly available and not just some small group controlling them. I like the fact that I know how to allocate foundation money, hire scientist, motivate scientist, pick — okay, we should do GP cause nobody is doing that. And if it ever gets to the point where I just type in, hey, you know, take my money and spend it for me, and I think, oh shit, it’s doing better than I would have, that will create us . . .

Gideon Rachman
You know you wanted to be more intelligent than you or . . .

Bill Gates
Wow that seems selfish. I don’t know what I think. I could, you know, goof off then. So, yeah, there’s a little bit of labour market in the near term and eventually a sense of meaningful contribution and eventually the control thing. But I don’t list that high on the list of my concerns?

Gideon Rachman
Last issue I’d really like to get your view on, because I know you’re an internationalist and you believe in technology’s ability to improve the world. So, I remember ten years ago doing a lunch with the FT with you where you were telling me, you know, be positive about China’s emergence, the tech that it can do, etc. And now you look at the world, let’s get the mood in the US and there’s efforts ready to block China’s technological advance. How do you feel about all that? It’s the world’s not on the way you want it to.

Bill Gates
Well, I don’t think the US will ever be successful at preventing China from having great chips. You know, we are going to force them to spend time and a bunch of money to make their own chips, but given 5 to 10 years and they take money out of their poverty program. The idea that we could ever sell them chips, we’re just eviscerating that. You know, we’re saying make your own jet engines, your own software, your own chips. And I think that’s a shame and I don’t get the logic. Given that they’re at scale to catch up fairly quickly and I don’t see how that’s some gigantic benefit. So you know, I wish the US and China could get along better. We seem to be on a deteriorating trend which when we have things like health, innovation, climate innovation that are win-win things between all countries, but the most important relationship in the world is the US-China relationship. I’m disappointed and worried about how that relationship has evolved over the last couple of years.

Gideon Rachman
So you think that the American effort, even if one agreed with its underlying thrust, is unlikely to succeed?

Bill Gates:
I don’t even get what it’s success has defined us — to make sure we have less jobs in our chip industry, to have excess supply in the chip industry, to make Taiwan more attractive. It’s complicated.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah, I think they would say, we’re trying to stay ahead of China. And they say that China’s a military threat and this stuff has military uses and we’ve got to keep them down.

Bill Gates:
Yeah. So if you really think there’s gonna be a war in the next decade, then you shouldn’t have warned them that you were gonna cut their chips (laughs) off in advance. I mean, it’s very nice to have told them in advance that that would be a problem. So even in that, which I hope never happens, I don’t think will happen. But even that scenario, why give them a head start building their own chips?

Gideon Rachman:
And for this America’s tech sector, for Microsoft, for Google, whoever? Is this gonna make their life more difficult? Because you know, you’re gonna find it difficult to cooperate with the Chinese who are doing interesting stuff.

Bill Gates
Microsoft doesn’t have a gigantic amount of its sales in China. We have some, but you know, we’re not like Apple, who has 20 per cent. We have a great exchange of smart people, many of whom are in China working for us, some of whom were born in China came to the United States. So the labour pool benefit to the world in health and software of having this smart Chinese students contribute in these fields, whether they leave China or stay in China is phenomenal. So anything that cuts back on that just slows things down.

Gideon Rachman
Okay, So geopolitics is, just to conclude, really, getting in the way of a lot of things. I mean, we talked, started with Ukraine, we ended with the China. I guess the common theme is that the things you think are important, it’s not a great time for them.

Bill Gates
Well, the human condition continues to improve. I mean, we’re doing obesity drugs, we really will have great TB drugs, we’ll understand malnutrition. You know, between the infectious disease innovations foundation funds and the rich world to see stuff that the market probably funds, it’s amazing. Assuming we can avoid big nuclear wars or bioterrorism wars, despite all these geopolitical headwinds, life will be better 10 years from now, 20 years from now. Climate is this looming problem that it’s gonna take a ton of money and innovation and attention to change the industrial base. And we’ll be a little behind where we should be on that. But despite all those things, you know, unless you’re predicting a nuclear war or some big bioterrorism thing, the world is improving.

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Gideon Rachman
That was Bill Gates ending this week’s edition of The Rachman Review. Thanks for listening. And please join me again next week.

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