“Computing is a good historical example where lower costs actually caused the overall market to grow.”
Bill Gates
The Year Ahead 2026: Optimism with footnotes (Primary source)
In this blog post, Bill Gates writes he remains optimistic about global progress thanks to innovation and AI, but warns funding cuts, inequality, climate change, and AI risks temper that hope and require urgent action.
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“The effects of this disruption [Artificial Intelligence] are hard to model. Sometimes, when a game-changing technology improves rapidly, it drives more demand at lower cost and, by making the world richer, increases demand in other areas. For example, AI makes software developers at least twice as efficient, which makes coding cheaper while also creating demand elasticity for code. (Computing is a good historical example where lower costs actually caused the overall market to grow.)”
Bill Gates
“People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“Few skills are more important than knowing how to distinguish what’s true from what’s false.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“The axiom that you learn more from your failures than your successes is trite but absolutely true.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“The man who is good at making an excuse, is seldom good at any thing else.”
— Benjamin Franklin Secondary source“Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything good in the world.”
— Helen Keller Disputed“Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.”
— Leonardo da Vinci Primary source“I don’t think AI’s impact will be as dramatic as the Industrial Revolution, but it certainly will be as big as the introduction of the PC.”
— Bill Gates Primary sourceArtificial Intelligence Computer Programming Technology Economics