Bill Gates: Why bet AI's future on self-driving cars?

"I'd say most of the opportunity to make computers improve work is in front of us rather than behind us," Gates said at a Microsoft Research gathering at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Wash., on Wednesday. These days, though he spends most of his time as cochair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he retains a hand in shaping Microsoft's future as a technology adviser to CEO Satya Nadella. Gates characterizes even 2019's business software as a relatively short step up from pre-digital times, still at a "It's better than Wite-Out" level. Computers have been used mainly for "extremely structured tasks such as creating financial statements" where the machine leads the human through an "opaque" process, he said, and for jobs like writing emails where the human, not the machine, understands the significance and context of the content of the messages. But in another five years, the AI in Microsoft's products will have developed a deep understanding of the facts and language of users and their businesses.