Bill Gates is one of the smartest people on the planet. Few people would doubt that…unless they’d had to deal with Windows ME, but it’s time for those people to let it go.
Gates is intelligent, yes, but he’s also incredibly philanthropic. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is working to achieve some incredible goals, and I have to say that I believe that they are earnest in their attempts to “save the world.”
And yet, I do wonder if he’s about to make a mistake.
An Energy Miracle
In a recent interview with The Atlantic, Gates gave some great insight in our nation’s need for an “energy miracle.” I personally whole-heatedly agree with Bill on this point, but in the interview, he referenced the Manhattan Project, the US government’s top secret WWII research program that produced the world’s first two atomic bombs, and opined that we needed government funded R&D along those same, focused lines but toward different goals.
While that point is rather neutral, I’d like to look at an underlying issue: the speed of change. He’s not pushing us to develop faster and faster computers or to dive deeper in development of artificial intelligence. (In fact, Gates is one those urging caution in that field, and for good reason.) Instead, he’s looking for an acceleration in energy research and adoption, meaning that we need to find and perfect an energy source and switch to it faster than we switched from wood to coal over two hundred years ago. That wood-coal transition took nearly six decades: we may only have three decades in to make an energy switch this time.
So What?
Where’s Bill’s mistake? What’s so wrong identifying a problem, encouraging problem-solves to solve the problem, and urging them to develop their solution faster than ever before? Maybe nothing, but maybe everything.
The Western Hemisphere switched from wood to coal in the nineteenth century as they switched from primarily agrarian societies to proton-industrialized societies. This transition brought many beneficial changes to our society, but negative changes came as well. Changes that, looking back, we may not have been ready for.
Now, I’m not a Luddite, and I’m not suggesting that the Industrial Revolution was a bad thing. What I am saying is that one change will cause other changes, and that a sudden change in the foundation of society (such as in a fuel source) is even more disruptive, especially if that change has been intentionally accelerated. These sudden changes, these “leaps forward,” can been incredibly beneficial to humanity long-term, but they can cause some serious damage in the short term, damage that we may never fully recover from.
We don’t need to fear change, but we do need to approach it carefully, with all due deference to the world we know. And yes, the world we know is broken, but who’s to say that the things we change won’t, down the road, break it further?
Will Bill Gates’ quest for a new fuel source become something that we look back on with regret? I doubt it, but we may end up looking back at this time, before the Post-Industrial Revolution Revolution, with deep feelings of nostalgia because the one thing we can be sure of is that when we do finally replace fossil fuels, our world will be moving full-steam ahead.
[via The Atlantic | Gates image via Wikipedia cc and smoke stacks vladdythephotogeek via Compfight cc]
Eric Dye says
That last line (I see what you did there).
Phil Schneider says
🙂