Bill Gates can spend his time doing whatever he wants at this point, and it seems currently he wants to work on a mysterious project at Microsoft called "Personal Agent."
He teased the project during a Reddit ask-me-anything session when asked how technology will evolve during the next few decades.
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"There will be more progress in the next 30 years than ever," Gates replied. "Even in the next 10 problems like vision and speech understanding and translation will be very good. Mechanical robot tasks like picking fruit or moving a hospital patient will be solved. Once computers/robots get to a level of capability where seeing and moving is easy for them then they will be used very extensively.
"One project I am working on with Microsoft is the Personal Agent which will remember everything and help you go back and find things and help you pick what things to pay attention to," he continued. "The idea that you have to find applications and pick them and they each are trying to tell you what is new is just not the efficient model - the agent will help solve this. It will work across all your devices."
That's ambitious, but it seems pretty doable given the progress that Apple, Google and of course Microsoft have made in the virtual personal assistant space over recent years.
Cortana is a decent competitor there, but there are a million ways she might be improved. And coming from Mr. Gates, this is very exciting indeed.
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