Ragging on Bill Gates

For some time now I've been reading Peggy Noonan's column in the Journal, I'm not embarassed to admit it. We often differ in opinion but she has a long view and thinks about stuff deeply. This week she writes, not for the first time, about her anxieties about AI as it accelerates into the hockey stick phase of its integration into everyday life, and specifically how the fact that the main actors driving its rollout: the Titans of Big Tech (Zuckerberg, Brin, Page, Nadella, etc.) are competing with each other for domination, a very bad recipe for thoughtful rollout. Fine. Point well taken.

But she goes out of her way to rag on Bill Gates: "who treats his own banalities with such awe and who shares all the books he reads to help you, poor dope, understand the world—who one suspects never in his life met a normal person except by accident, and who is always discovering things because deep down he’s never known anything," Now, I don't want to defend Gates for everything he's ever done, and I can see how the public persona of his third act, his Uber-Mr Rogers mode, might not be everybody's cup of tea, but I think at this point in time there's no good reason to rag on him that hard. He is legitimately trying to give away as much money as he can to attack big problems.

So what if he writes book reviews. If, like Oprah, he thereby encourages people to read books, it's net positive overall. If his reflections are at times mundane and don't expand on general principles that have been around for millennia, that just shows us that it's hard if not impossible to make progress in morals and ethics and that the process of growing older and wiser for every one of us is to make piece with the fact that we are all subject to the same limitations as everyone else. On this small point, it would be nice for Ms. Noonan to do the same.