He looked slightly tired, and the back of his head was a little bald.When he is not speaking, he sits on a chair and turns left and right; when answering questions, he will look at you intently, with a bright light in his eyes.

At noon on June 7, 2018, local time in the United States, Bill Gates, the 63-year-old founder of Microsoft and chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BillMelinda Gates Foundation), was in Seattle, USA.The headquarters of the Gates Foundation accepted interviews from several Chinese media practitioners, including the Economic Observer.

During the interview, he talked about how to view the current Sino-US relations, China's role in helping the world's most backward areas to fight diseases and eliminate extreme poverty, and how to face potential crises in the future world, including the development of artificial intelligence and many other topics.

It is very important to carefully handle differences between China and the United States

As the founder of Microsoft Corporation, Bill Gates has been the richest man in the world for more than ten consecutive years, which makes him widely known to the world.However, his seemingly more commendable achievement in recent years is that he and his wife Melinda middot; Gates established the world's largest charitable foundation in 2000-the Gates Foundation.

The funders of this foundation are the Gates couple, and later the stock god Warren Buffett (War-ren Buffett) also donated a huge amount of money.At present, the funds managed by the Gates Foundation exceed 40 billion U.S. dollars. Every year, about 4.5 billion U.S. dollars are donated to the world, especially poor and backward countries and regions, for the development of projects such as medical care and the elimination of extreme poverty.Eliminate inequality in the human world.

The Gates Foundation established a representative office in Beijing, China in 2007, and has also participated in China's efforts to eradicate extreme poverty and improve public health, as well as help Chinese anti-malarial drug production, vaccine production and other enterprises enter the international market.

In his speech before the interview, Gates said that we are very optimistic about China's potential in (combating AIDS, malaria and extreme poverty in Africa), and hope that China will become our strong partner.China has made great progress in scientific and technological progress and poverty reduction.The Gates Foundation is also helping China eradicate extreme poverty. This is an important initiative. It may take a year or two for us to apply the experience we have learned in China to other countries, but we are already looking forward to being able to participate in it.

Gates also maintains continuous concern for Sino-US relations and the promotion of friendly exchanges between the two countries.

The current Sino-U.S. relationship is complex and changeable, with frequent hotspots and conflicts. Some international political observers even believe that the Cold War between China and the U.S. has already begun.How does Gates feel about this?How will his foundation and his personal investment in China be affected?

Regarding the questions raised by the Economic Observer reporter, Gates replied that the Chinese economy and the US economy are inseparable; at the same time, he believes that this close relationship will continue to be maintained in the next few decades.

In addition to the huge size of the economy, Gates said that by most indicators, China's contribution to basic scientific research has reached the second place in the world; and, in the future, both in terms of quantity and quality, it will continue to growmomentum.

He also said that the United States and China have the ability to jointly solve many problems such as energy and health, and promote the stability of the world situation.Cooperation will bring great opportunities, admittedly, the two sides have differences of opinion on South China Sea, trade, North Korea and other issues.Therefore, it is very important how (the two countries) handle these differences prudently while cooperating.

Gates took the energy issue as an example: 10 years ago, China was not so active in the energy field, but now, or at least at present, China's leading role in energy issues has surpassed that of the United States.In my opinion, this is a good thing.In the future, most of the world's energy infrastructure will come from China and India.

Gates believes that both China and the United States need to adopt innovative means and mechanisms to develop bilateral relations.

He mentioned that TerraPower, a for-profit organization he owns, is currently working with China National Nuclear Corporation, one of China's most important central enterprises, to develop a moreSafe new nuclear reactor.It's still early days in development, but I'm confident in it.Moreover, it combines the unique capabilities of both the United States and China.I think this is a model of China-US cooperation.

It is worth mentioning that in 2017, Bill Gates was elected as a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering as the chairman of TerraPower.

At the end of answering the reporter's question from the Economic Observer, Gates also said: In the United States, he often maintains communication with Hank middot; Paulson, Ray middot; Dario, Henry middot; Kissinger and others to discussHow to maintain friendly dialogue between China and the United States.

The Hank middot; Paulson mentioned by Gates is Henry HankMerritt Paulson (Henry HankMerritt Paulson), who once served as the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States and is now the chairman of the Paulson Foundation; Ray middot; Dario (Ray Dalio, is the founder of Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund; Henry Alfred Kissinger, a former Secretary of State of the United States, is even more familiar to the Chinese.

It will take 8 years at the earliest to successfully develop an AIDS vaccine

The field of healthcare, especially the field of vaccines, is one of the philanthropic projects that the Gates Foundation pays the most attention to and invests the most money in.But is there any project where the foundation has continued to invest for a long time, but has achieved nothing?What would Gates do in this situation?

Gates first took the prevention and treatment of AIDS as an example. At present, we have not successfully developed a vaccine for AIDS, but there are many good early research and development progress.I think a vaccine could be developed in 8 years at the earliest, but it could be 15 years away.You can say that we have not succeeded in this regard, the progress of global AIDS prevention and control is a bit slow, and there are not enough sources of funds, but we still have to continue to work hard.

It's also somewhat disappointing that we tried to prevent HIV infection by giving HIV-susceptible people a pill a day.This is HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis.We did tests to show that it worked, but it turned out that convincing people to take their pills every day was not an easy task.Now, we plan to develop injections that are injected every month or every three months to protect people from the threat of AIDS.We think that way people will get their injections on time.In this respect we encountered greater difficulties.

In the field of malaria, Gates said that although the first-generation vaccine is available, the protection period of this vaccine for children is very short, and the effective protection period is only 6 months. Therefore, the scope of application is limited and it is not suitable for large-scale application.Promotion requires the development of a second-generation malaria vaccine.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) undertakes most of the research and development of the malaria vaccine project, and the bulk of the research and development costs are provided by the Gates Foundation.

Gates also mentioned that in many backward countries and regions in the world, the existing basic health care system cannot effectively vaccinate children.I have been in Nigeria for a long time.Vaccine coverage in northern Nigeria is only 20%.However, in countries such as Tanzania and Ethiopia, whose economic conditions are far inferior to Nigeria, the coverage rate has reached 85-90%.Establishing an effective vaccine delivery system is difficult.

In his view, areas where progress has been slow include the development of crop seeds with higher yields and higher vitamin contentdash;mdash;new seeds are developed very, very slowly.

But, as always, the staunch optimist says that despite some setbacks, there has been a lot of progress, with institutions such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GlobalFund) and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), child mortality rates have fallen dramatically, some of which have far exceeded our original expectations.Overall, our global health business is going very well, and we will continue to work hard on it.Even if we suffer setbacks, we will not give up easily.

Artificial intelligence can be used and controlled by humans at least at this stage

So is there anything else that makes this staunch optimist feel relatively pessimistic?In the future world, what huge crises and challenges will mankind face?

In this regard, Gates replied that there are two types of situations that make people feel pessimistic.One is unexpected adverse events that we are not prepared for.For example, a sudden large-scale influenza disease occurs globally, which cannot be dealt with.I have mentioned this possibility in my past speeches and articles, that is, a large-scale infectious disease caused by an unknown pathogen.

The second category is the threat of terrorism.He talked about the dire consequences if nuclear weapons fall into the hands of terrorist organizations.If a terrorist organization creates biological weapons such as smallpox and changes the characteristics of the smallpox virus, it can increase the fatality rate from 30% to 90%.Unfortunately, this technique is not classified.Biotechnology can not only help us develop new drugs, but also can be used by criminals.

As for other frightening events, such as asteroids hitting the earth, Yellowstone Park volcanic eruptions, etc., except for large-scale infectious diseases and terrorist attacks, the probability of these events is extremely low.People are afraid of war, and it is also war that destroys human productivity the most. There have been world wars in history, but we are a lucky generation. We have not experienced large-scale wars at present, but the future is always unpredictable, and no one can guarantee mdash;mdash;Nuclear weapons are scary, and while they haven't been used since World War II, they've always been there, and there's a steady stream of new ones being invented, even artificially intelligent ones.I just finished reading a very good book called Army of None, which talks about what the countermeasures should be for autonomous weapons.

As a well-deserved leader in the global technology community, especially in the IT world for decades, Gates has made his own further judgment on the issue of artificial intelligence. Advanced artificial intelligence will not become a reality soon; at least for now, artificial intelligence canFor our use.

Gates believes that when facing future disasters, human beings must still be prepared.This preparation also includes collaboration among governments around the world.

He gives the example of climate change, which has a delayed effect, and it's the richer classes who are causing the problem, but they can afford to buy air conditioning or move north or grow crops in other ways.However, citizens of African countries on the equator suffer the greatest losses, even though they contribute only 2 percent to climate change.Countries around the world have begun to discuss how to solve this thorny problem.In my opinion, the only way out lies in accelerating technological innovation.With existing tools alone, the cost of reaching zero greenhouse gas emissions will be prohibitively high, requiring many people to abandon modern lifestyles such as air conditioning and refrigeration.So unless we keep innovating, there are hard trade-offs, and that's why I'm actively pushing for innovation.

In addition, in the short term, the world today faces issues such as trade disputes, which also lead to concerns about whether global coordination can be achieved.Despite the challenges, being born in this day and age is a blessing more than any other time in history.And I believe that the world will probably develop in a better and better direction, and China is a very good example.Just imagine, would you rather be born in 1960 or in China in 2018?The United States is no exception. For example, women and gays are in a much better situation today than in the past, and various tools, including digital tools, have given us tremendous capabilities.Although we have become accustomed to this, this is very great progress.Young people are not only using these tools, but also finding ways to expand their use.In a sense, even with these challenges, there is hope for innovation as long as we collaborate, share and collaborate through digital tools.

The world's richest man and the world's largest philanthropist ended his answer in this way.