Bill Gates on artificial intelligence humor, other big ideas at Tulane book festival

Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist, addressed artificial intelligence's problem with telling jokes and other big ideas Thursday evening to launch this year's New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University.

The bespectacled tech mogul, in trademark dark sweater and slacks, took the stage at a crowded McAlister Auditorium and was led by author Walter Isaacson, a Tulane professor, on an hour-long tour of topics of most interest to Gates, who is now well into his second decade as a full-time benefactor.

Gates has written four books himself: two on the world of technology in the 1990s, when he was still running Microsoft, and two in the past couple of years to address climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. His latest authorial efforts reflect Gates' evolution from founder of the seminal software company to a man mostly preoccupied with giving away billions of dollars every year to address world problems.

"I didn't realize I would become insanely wealthy off of it," Gates told Isaacson of the early days in the late 1970s, when he and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen had modest ambitions to make office workers more productive. Gates recounted how he and then-wife Melinda realized in the 1990s that the vast scale of their Microsoft wealth meant that giving it away would need to be a full-time job.

Malaria was their foundation's first major cause. "I think we got off to a good start," he said, pointing to the decline of almost 60% in malarial deaths in the first 15 years of this century.

Gates was half of a festival doubleheader that started with Eric Holder, attorney general in the Barack Obama administration, who stuck to a somewhat narrower topic: the U.S. political malaise and the rollback of voters' rights in recent years. Television journalist Michelle Miller led the chat with Holder on the subject of his 2022 book "Our Unfinished March," written with Sam Koppelman.

They were the first of a roster of 130 authors and moderators at this year's book festival, or, as Tulane President Michael Fitts called it, "Mardi Gras for the Mind." Other big names include Carl Bernstein and Maureen Dowd from the world of journalism, fiction writers Richard Ford and Walter Mosley, historians Douglas Brinkley and Nikole Hannah-Jones and chef-authors Susan Spicer and Alon Shaya.

Gates, famously a college dropout, talked about education being one of the most intractable problems his foundation has tackled.

"We've managed to reduce the global deaths of children from 5 million a year to half that. The equivalent in U.S. education would be to have high school scores of 80% [of students] reach the same level as the top 10% do, and we've had no such miracle," said Gates, a big proponent of charter schools.

Gates also talked about the big advancements in artificial intelligence recently, something he said has sent him back to Microsoft to "product test" and advise colleagues.

"This is a rare moment when something is changing very dramatically," he said. Artificial intelligence will be able to do many things better than human beings within a few decades, he said, especially in white-collar areas such as the law and architecture.

"But it still makes horrendous mistakes in math. It's weird," he said.

Also, Microsoft's artificial intelligence software has trouble with jokes — "They're not very good," Gates said — and in understanding when the mood in the room has changed and it reverts to seriousness.

Finally, Gates, a famous proselytizer for reading, was asked what he is currently reading. "Born Into Blackness" by Howard French, he said. "It's a phenomenal book that tells about the role of Africa in modernity."