The phenomenal generosity of the United States in its aid budget towards health issues is the best in the world. You can look at that broadly, you can look at it in terms of HIV, the PEPFAR money which came together in a Republican administration with bipartisan support.
There are several hundred people who stayed in the Ebola-affected countries and continued to do the work, put themselves at great risk because medical workers are the most likely to be infected because they're helping out when the person's health is deteriorating, including quite a bit of bleeding as they're getting very, very sick.
I think Ebola is a great example of where the world really needs to come together. The three countries where this outbreak took place have had a lot of civil war, very weak health systems. And so, it did take a while for people to understand ....that eventually what we saw was a very unique Ebola epidemic. I think it is quite impressive what's being pulled together, and I think we will be able to get this under control.
In fact, that's where my vision of the coming digital opportunity is somewhat different from other people's. I divide it into three parts. One is the office. That's the one I'm most excited about and is the most concrete.
People in business understand paying money to be more efficient. You can bootstrap markets where the devices are too expensive at first because these are so valuable to some people.
You can go overboard in how quickly you might expect new technologies to transform people's lives. But I very much believe the way software is used, the way information gets distributed, will be dramatically different within 10 years. There is fire to go with all this smoke.
There is this broad, broad recognition of how technology is enabling new things. Companies that never paid attention to computers in any form now see digital technology as creating threats and opportunities for them.
Nobody has a guaranteed position in computer technologies business. We've done some good work, but all of these products become obsolete so fast and the structure of the business as it broadens out is going to be so different.
Part of the magic of economic growth is how you educate people, and the leading economies have to stay in front of that. From an economic point of view, it affects competitiveness and creates jobs. Or from a social justice point of view, you can take someone in the bottom tier of income and let him compete to be a doctor or lawyer. The education system is the only reason the dream of equal opportunity has a chance of being delivered - and we're not running a good education system.
I am super lucky. I've been in the area where things have been changing and been part of the digital revolution, the magic of software, the internet, the computer, and now the cellphone... so it's been a great privilege.
There was a magical breakthrough when the computer became cheap and we could see that everyone could afford a computer.
Good stuff tends to happen gradually, whereas violence or catastrophes are deemed more newsworthy.
If you say to people that there's less violence today than in the past, they would be stunned to hear that. But it's the truth, even though we have awful things happening in Syria or Sudan.
Vaccines are extremely well tested; their safety is well understood. The false allegations about vaccines causing autism have been disproven. But there are still echoes out there confusing people.
We have completely eradicated smallpox; we have almost eradicated polio. That's the miracle of vaccines, which is even greater than that of antibiotics.
In 1990, one in 10 children died before the age of five. That's now down to one in 20, and vaccines were the single biggest factor in that. Had it stayed at 10 percent, 122 million more children would have died.
If there was an epidemic, that definitely would make people accept vaccines. I wouldn't hope for that, of course, but if you wanted people to love vaccines, an epidemic would remind them how magical they are.
We need to cooperate globally on epidemic preparedness and prevention in the same way we are cooperating globally to stop people from getting nuclear weapons.
Today, we take the risk of nuclear war quite seriously, climate change not so much and epidemics least of all. But no single country, not even the United States, is well prepared. And even if one country is doing the right things to protect itself, it has to be a global thing.
Playing Bridge is a pretty old fashioned thing in a way that I really like... I do the dishes every night - other people volunteer but I like the way I do it.
The most important work I got a chance to be involved in, no matter what I do, is the personal computer... I even knew not to get married until later because I was so obsessed with it. That's my life's work.
The market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the government to do the right things.
Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10 percent to business thinking. Business isn't that complicated. I wouldn't want to put it on my business card.
Bioterrorism is like earthquakes, you should think in order of magnitudes. If you can kill 10 people that's a one, 100 people that's a two... Bioterrorism is the thing that can give you not just sixes, but sevens, eights and nines.
Getting ready for a global pandemic is every bit as important as nuclear deterrence and avoiding a climate catastrophe.
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