Bill Gates is guest-editing The Verge in February

Technology will build a better, safer, healthier world by 2030

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I’m very excited to announce that Bill Gates will be The Verge’s first ever guest editor in February. This is a new type of collaboration for us, but there’s no one better than Bill to lead the way — and there’s no better time than now.

Every year, Bill and Melinda Gates publish a letter outlining their philanthropic efforts and the changes they hope to make in the world. This year, that letter is about improving the lives of the poor through technology. Specifically, it’s about dramatic changes that will occur in banking, farming, health, and education in the next 15 years. It just so happens that The Verge exists to explore that kind of change — to examine, celebrate, and critique our shared future as advancements in technology move ever faster. If there was ever a time for Bill Gates and The Verge to come together, it’s now.

"The Verge audience is an amazing group that thinks about technology, that knows the rapid progress that’s being made," Gates told me. "We can go far if we get all those great thinkers helping to invent, helping to support, and imagining what’s possible. We feel lucky to get to talk to this audience about what we’re seeing, and sharing that optimism."

Throughout February, Bill will be narrating episodes of our animated series The Big Future to explain and illustrate his vision. We’ll also be publishing in-depth features examining how rapid change in health, farming, banking, and education might improve the lives of impoverished communities around the world. Gates is our guest editor, but we have promised his team that we’ll do serious independent journalism against these themes; we will present a complete picture of this future to you. It’s going to be exciting.

So what exactly are we going to be talking about?

We’ve spent some time with Bill over the past few weeks, talking through his ideas about the future — and pressing him on the boundaries of that vision. It’s funny: Bill is difficult to engage in small talk, but he’s eager and willing to engage in difficult issues like income inequality and regulatory challenges in developing countries. Throughout our meetings first in his private office outside of Seattle and then in New York, Gates offered a compelling, focused, and coherent argument for his vision of the next 15 years — a vision that is surprisingly as reliant on the development of stable governments and infrastructure as it is on technology.

In health, Bill and Melinda believe that improvements to core infrastructure in the developing world will have dramatic impact — for example, they predict the number of children who die before the age of five will drop by half, as access to vaccines increases and sanitation improves. They also predict that the number of women who die during childbirth will drop by two-thirds, as more women choose to give birth in hospitals, gain access to birth control, and plan their families more carefully.

But technology has a role to play as well: Gates believes that polio, guinea worm, elephantiasis, river blindness, and blinding trachoma can all be eradicated by 2030 thanks to targeted distribution of drugs using more accurate digital maps and donated medicines. He also believes that a combination of vaccines, more effective cures, and better testing means malaria will be on the way out by 2030. And Gates thinks that we’ll reach an HIV "tipping point" by 2030, with more people starting treatment than getting infected in Africa, leading to the overall number of cases declining worldwide.

Bill Gates Editor

In farming, Bill and Melinda are betting that better seeds and improved access to information will allow poor farmers in Africa to increase their yields and grow a wider array of crops, leading to a reduction in hunger. That sounds like a bet on GMOs, but Gates says more traditional breeding methods have a role to play as well — and that investing in agricultural development is a better long-term strategy than simply buying food.

In banking, Gates believes that the rise of mobile will "help the poor radically transform their lives." Poor people in countries like Kenya and Bangladesh don’t always have access to banks, so instead they store their wealth in jewelry and other expensive items which they can’t easily use for small transactions. Mobile banking systems like M-Pesa and bKash solve this problem by moving currency onto phones, where small payments can be made, and a wide array of services can be offered to people who might otherwise never have access to a bank.

Of course, there are real questions about regulations and technology lock-in to be answered — questions that some would answer with new decentralized technologies like Bitcoin. Gates doesn’t think Bitcoin is ready for the very poor though; he’s betting better regulation will allow more centralized systems with better anti-corruption measures to take hold.

Gates believes the rise of mobile will "help the poor radically transform their lives."

And lastly, Bill and Melinda think that rapid advances in educational software on mobile phones will change the way students and teachers around the world learn every day. That software isn’t good enough now, but it’s getting better fast, says Gates. He also told me that he thinks even closed platforms like iOS should offer sandboxes where motivated tinkerers can learn to write their own code — not a surprising view from a man who built his fortune tinkering with computers.

Of course, improvements in educational software need to be paired with dramatic improvements in the educational gender gap around the world. Bill and Melinda draw particular focus to this issue in their letter, but the solutions still seem fairly vague — you’ll see us explore the issue in great detail when our education feature comes around.

That's a lot of big ideas for us to explore — even with Bill Gates as our guide, the staff of The Verge has a great deal of work to do. But it’s work we’re eager to do; it’s work that we hope will help push forward Bill’s vision of a better, safer, healthier world in 2030. Our features will run every week in February alongside Bill’s episodes of The Big Future. We hope you’ll join us.

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