I first met Bill Gates in 2004 at the Computer History Museum. He was back today for an interview with Patrick Collison about his new book.
The best demo he ever had: spending five hours with Simonyi at Xerox PARC. They created a typeset master plan for Microsoft on Simonyi’s bitmap work processor. “I spent more time at PARC than Jobs. When he later accused us of stealing the Windows UI from Apple, I said ‘no, no, no, we both stole it from Xerox.’” Chat GPT was the second best demo.
“We were just trying to write software faster than anyone else. It wasn’t any one product.”
“I am certainly on the spectrum. I was late to develop social skills. I rock back and forth, and apparently, that’s not that attractive. I just turned 70, and my resolution is to give up rocking.” (I noticed his foot bouncing up and down throughout the interview)
Did LSD affect you like it did Steve Jobs? “Definitely not. Paul Allen was very much into this Jimi Hendrix song Are You Experienced? Paul gets me drunk, and gives me pot, hash, eventually acid. The insult that Steve Jobs said was that if Bill Gates had dropped acid, maybe his products wouldn’t be so poorly designed. And I said to Steve, ‘look, I got the batch that was good for engineering, and you got the batch that was good for design. I’m, sorry. I wish I had your batch too. It would have been a nice extra skill set to have.’ (laughter) You know, you are always thinking you are having profound thoughts, and afterward you wonder if you brain was permanently damaged. So, I gave that up fairly early on.”
“All four of my grandparents are devout Christian Scientists. My parents were raised that way. It’s very strange; they don’t seek medical help. My parents bonded over their rejection of Christian science. I believe in science and medicine.” (we passed anti-vax protesters with big signs at the entrance)
“We had the computers playing tic-tac-toe and Monopoly.” Patrick: “Ah! You started early.” (long pause) Gates: “anyway,” and changes subject.
“AI will make intelligence free.”
“The aging society problem is solved by the robots are coming problem.”
“If nuclear fusion does not work, we will need some miracle of storage for solar.”
Video of the whole interview here.
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