Anytime Bill Gates grants an interview it's an interesting read, and when he's not angering American allies overseas, he's a generally insightful and gracious guy. Last time he spoke, he even admitted that Microsoft has been lagging behind in the innovation department.
In a recent interview with Wired, Gates spoke about flying cars, robots, and said that while he misses innovating at Microsoft, he's got other breakthroughs to make.
"I miss working on the advances that Microsoft gets to work on every day: changing how you write programs, how you visualize information, how you create documents, how you brainstorm," he said to Wired's Steven Levy. "But I do get to take that digital foundation and ask, 'How can we vaccinate children? How can we track nutrition in poor countries? How do we get cheap financial services for everybody? How do we take this platform and revolutionize education?' "
When asked about those lamenting over the pace of technology's progress (no flying cars, to be precise), Gates bats the suggestion aside, saying that idea was never very practical.
"Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another," he said. "On the other hand, 20 years ago we had the idea that information could become available at your fingertips. We got that done. Now everyone takes it for granted that you can look up movie reviews, track locations and order stuff online. I wish there was a way we could take it away from people for a day so they could remember what it was like without it."
Gates even touched on the fear that robots will eventually take all our jobs. Asked what Wired would be writing about in 20 years, Gates said "article-writing robots," but who knows? At that point it might be robots filling out Wired magazine pages, writing about themselves.
"Seriously, what's unique about human intelligence will be a topic of interest for way more than 20 years. But the biggest thing in that time period will be the completion of pervasive computing: vision, speech, handwriting, goggles, every surface, infinite machine learning, infinite storage, infinite reliability, at essentially no cost."
