Bill Gates says this is the No. 1 unsolvable problem facing today’s young people: ‘The harm is done’
Bill Gates, the subject of numerous conspiracy theories, is likely more familiar with misinformation than he’d care to be. But a conversation with his daughter Phoebe further opened his eyes on the issue’s severity, he says. “Hearing my daughter talk about how she’d been harassed online, and how her friends experienced that quite a bit, brought that into focus in a way that I hadn’t thought about before.”
CNBC Make It
Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates spends a lot of his time and money trying to help solve some of the world’s biggest problems — from climate change to poverty. One major problem has even him stumped.
“Misinformation is the one where I, a little bit, had to punt and say, ‘OK, we’ve handed this problem to the younger generation,’” Gates tells CNBC Make It.
Misinformation is becoming more common, as technological advances like artificial general intelligence chatbots make it easier to generate and spread falsehoods quickly. AI-generated misinformation was named as the top global risk of the next two years in a World Economic Forum survey in January. Fifty-five percent of Americans said the U.S. government and tech companies should act to restrict false information online, in a 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center.
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