Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton.

Bill Gates hosted aQ&A session on Reddityesterday. A number of the questions related to technology, innovation, and other important economic issues. Here are some of the Microsoft co-founders most interesting replies:

What kind of technological advancement do you wish to see in your lifetime?

The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia, Right now computers dont know how to represent knowledge so they cant read a text book and pass a test.

Another whole area is vaccines. We need a vaccine for HIV, Malaria and TB and I hope we have them in the next 10-15 years.

What are the limits of money when it comes to philanthropy?

Philanthropy is small as a part of the overall economy so it cant do things like fund health care or education for everyone. Government and the private sector are the big players so philanthropy has to be more innovative and fund pilot programs to help the other sectors. A good example is funding new medicines or charter schools where non-obvious approaches might provide the best solution.

One thing that is a challenge for our Foundation is that poor countries often have weak governance small budgets, and the people in the ministries dont have much training. This makes it harder to get things done.

If we had more money we could do more good things even though we are the biggest foundation we are still resource limited.

We discuss this in our annual letter this year: http://www.gatesletter.com

If you could create a new IP and business with Elon Musk, what would you make happen?

We need clean, reliable cheap energy which we dont have. It is too bad the sun doesnt shine all the time and the wind doesnt blow all the time. The Economist had a good piece on this this week. So we need some invention perhaps miracle batteries or super safe nuclear or making sun into gasoline directly.

(Hereis The Economist article he refers to.)

Why do you think our healthcare systems have such a hard time leveraging the revolutionary changes in scalability that weve seen in software?

It is super important to improve our healthcare system both to reduce chronic disease but if we dont do better health costs will squeeze out spending on all other government functions.

I agree it is surprising how tough it has been to get digital medical records right and to learn from looking at those records.

Still there are some very promising things going on. For example the idea of looking at a blood sample to find cancer very early so it can be treated. We will be able to use genomic data to tune treatments.

There are a few big problems like diabetes, obesity and neurological conditions including Alzheimers that we really need to solve.

Id like to ask, apart from a killswitch, which other precautionary measures we could take to ensure that AI behaves well and doesnt wipe us out?

One thing to make sure the people who create the first strong AI have the right values and ideally that it isnt just one group way out in front of others. I am glad to see this question being discussed. Google and others are taking it seriously.

What do you think about Universal Basic Income?

Over time countries will be rich enough to do this. However we still have a lot of work that should be done helping older people, helping kids with special needs, having more adults helping in education. Even the US isnt rich enough to allow people not to work. Some day we will be but until then things like the Earned Income Tax Credit will help increase the demand for labor.

Any thoughts on the current state of the U.S.?

See the original post here:

Bill Gates on AI, healthcare, and the universal basic income - American Enterprise Institute