This prediction from the richest man in the world- the 76 Billion dollar man. The message- the world has never been a better place for me (of course) and you (???).
The interesting thing is that his parents bought him an encyclopedia and his knowledge of the world proceeded in an alphabetical order (why?).
There is only one fly in the ointment: “20
years from now, labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially
lower. I don’t think people have that in their mental model.”
This is actually the problem, people are able to visualize this. We will all be replaced by robots that Microsoft may or may not be able to build.
…
“We’re on this rising tide that’s not recognized. It’s overwhelming how
prosperity is spread around the world,” the ex-Microsoft CEO who is the
world’s richest man said in a conversation at the American Enterprise
Institute.
Here’s more on his prediction that there will be almost no poor countries by
2035:
Today 45 countries that are still in that low-income category. And what I’m
saying is that, by 2035, there should be less than 10, and they’ll mostly be
either places like North Korea, where you have a political system that
basically creates poverty, or land-locked African countries where the
geography, the disease burden, the disparate ethnicities mean that they haven’t
been able to bring together a government that in terms of education,
infrastructure, health does even the most minimum things for them.
He says people tend to be irrationally pessimistic: The Steven Pinker example, one of my favorite books of all time, is that if you
ask people, “Is this one of the most violent eras in history?” they
will say yes. Overwhelmingly, Americans say yes. Well, it’s overwhelmingly the
least violent era in history. And so what it means is your disgust with
violence actually increases, and that’s partly why we take steps and why within
our own society and the world at large it’s come down so dramatically.
And here’s more on the world getting better in ways not captured by economic
data: You know, buying encyclopedias, you know, I bought it — my parents bought a
World Book. I read it. You know, I had to learn the world alphabetically. Very
weird way to learn things. You know, now, every kid who has Internet access has
Wikipedia. And so whether it’s in the area of technology or medicine or various
things, you’re — there’s a lot of a qualitative nature that’s not captured in
those things. So whether the gross number goes up or not, the rate of
improvement in livelihood, you know, I think will be very rapid in the future.
regards