Wired: Peter Thiel, expressing his dissatisfaction with technology’s progress, recently noted, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Do you agree with him?

Bill Gates: I feel sorry for Peter Thiel. Did he really want flying cars? Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another. On the other hand, 20 years ago we had the idea that information could become available at your fingertips. We got that done. Now everyone takes it for granted that you can look up movie reviews, track locations, and order stuff online. I wish there was a way we could take it away from people for a day so they could remember what it was like without it.

Wired: It’s now five years since you shifted to full-time philanthropy. What was the hardest thing to give up?

Gates: I miss working on the advances that Microsoft gets to work on every day: changing how you write programs, how you visualize information, how you create documents, how you brainstorm. But I do get to take that digital foundation and ask, “How can we vaccinate children? How can we track nutrition in poor countries? How do we get cheap financial services for everybody? How do we take this platform and revolutionize education?”

Wired: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has saved more than 5 million lives. How do you get the media as excited about saving lives as they are about the next phone?

Gates: We need a malaria epidemic in the blogging community! Either that or we need people who have seen the malaria epidemic to start blogging. Seriously, we have two communities that don’t intersect with each other. One is about a billion and a half people—families, children—who live in malaria-prone areas. The others are living pretty nice lives, and it’s great. If the malaria epidemic was nearby, this stuff would be very prominent.

People doing innovative work in technology are making a huge contribution—they don’t have to feel bad about it. But if they make enough money, they should give some of it away to causes that they personally develop a connection to. If they can have an awareness about global poverty and disease, that’d be great. Twenty years ago, I didn’t have much awareness about those things. But in 1993, Melinda and I took a trip to Africa and made the decision to focus mostly on global health.

Wired: You were almost 40 then, but now wealthy young people in technology, like Mark Zuckerberg, are engaging in philanthropy earlier. Do you feel you had a part in that?

Gates: I won’t take any credit for that, but it is a very positive development.

Wired: You’re interested in massive open online courses and have championed Salman Khan’s videos. If these had been around when you were young, would it have affected your schooling?

Gates: No. For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good. Now, if you’re the kind of person who gets stuck on Chapter 5 and will give up if you don’t have someone to answer questions, don’t try and pick up the Feynman lectures on physics. That’s true whether it’s online or offline. A MOOC is an attempt to gather a group and encourage students, almost like a typical classroom, forcing you to interact during the lecture so that it kind of wakes you up and keeps you engaged. A hyperlearner doesn’t have to have those things.

Wired: Domestically your foundation concentrates on education. How bad are things in the US when it comes to educating the next generation?

Gates: There’s only one metric by which the US is going backward—the amount of education per dollar. That’s pretty impressive, because we’ve doubled the amount we spend over the past 25 years. The actual achievement scores are up a tiny bit. Well, actually it’s mostly flat, and that’s because we aren’t really studying what works and what doesn’t, so why should we expect to have improved? As long as classroom experience stays the same, it probably won’t educate kids any better than it did 20 years ago.

Wired: But don’t statistics show that the US is falling behind other developed countries?

Gates: Yeah, we’re 20th. But don’t panic. We’re not destined to be number one in everything. Yes, we could be way, way, way better in education. But beating Singapore is asking for a lot. They’re pretty hardcore.

Wired: What will we be writing about in Wired 20 years from now?

Gates: You’ll still be talking about the fear of robots. That’s a good one to chew on for a long time.

Wired: Which robots?

Gates: The article-writing robots. Seriously, what’s unique about human intelligence will be a topic of interest for way more than 20 years. But the biggest thing in that time period will be the completion of pervasive computing: vision, speech, handwriting, goggles, every surface, infinite machine learning, infinite storage, infinite reliability, at essentially no cost.

Wired: In the book section of your blog, one of the novels is The Catcher in the Rye . Did you identify with Holden Caulfield?