The Girl’s Effect on Bill Gates, with Malala, the youngest awardee of the Nobel Peace Prize

Davis Guggnheim brought Bill Gates, Oprah, and Malala Yousafzai (with her entire family) to Utah for a retreat focused on girls, and we pre-screened his moving picture (trailer). Bill Gates recently blogged about this girl’s effect.

Zia, Malala’s Dad: “Even before I was married, I dreamed of having a daughter. I named her before she was born. I wanted her to have her own name, not just the daughter of X, as in patriarchal societies.”

“The mindset of Talibanization is everywhere; the weapons against women are in their minds. Education is the path to liberation and emancipation.”

Malala: “my dream at the time was to become Prime Minister and change the whole country. My fear was for my father. We did not expect them to target a child. They had never done that before. It was astonishing.”

“I have not one proton of anger for the Taliban. I practice forgiveness. The inability to let go traps people. I practice forgiveness… except for brothers. I do get angry with them. There are exceptions.” (lots of ribbing from brothers about her Nobel Peace Prize not being consistent with their experience).

2 responses to “The Girl’s Effect on Bill Gates, with Malala, the youngest awardee of the Nobel Peace Prize”

jurvetson

Oct 18, 2015 at 5:56 pm

With Dad (speaking), mom, and her two brothers (a peace prize can’t transcend the adorable sibling rivalries); (I am sitting behind Oprah in the bright green Pied Piper shirt =)

Director Davis Guggenheim, Dad and Malala: Listening to BIll, with my son next to me: Sitting on the far left, JJ Abrams on the new Star Wars: “the fate of the galaxy is in the hands of a girl.”

And look at the conference room I was in on Friday at the Planet Labs HQ

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jurvetson

Oct 19, 2015 at 6:52 pm

Sporting my Nervana shirt, Bill and spoke about deep learning and AI for quite a while.

He sees the pace of progress pointing to supra-human AI in 30 years, and a flurry of narrow AI products before that, from autonomous cars to humanoid robots for elder care (in 5-10 years).

Q: What are you afraid or insecure about?
Bill: “I would hate it if my brain stopped working. For the first five years at Microsoft, I wrote all the code, or edited it. In my 20’s, I worked all the time. When I was 30, I thought that maybe I’d have 10 more good years. Now I have the illusion that my capacity is not reduced. I just want to hire people that are like I was in my 20’s. I’m getting old and I used to think that old people couldn’t think.”

“In the near term, I have a fear of epidemics. I think there is a 30% chance of bioterrorism or pandemic in the next 40 years. The statistical distribution is linear; the next epidemic is equally likely to kill 200K people as 20 million.”

And thoughts from Bill at the same place 5 years ago

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