Gates Package — page 1123

For many people--especially older people who lived in assisted living facilities--video calls have become a lifeline to the world. Even if you're tired of virtual happy hours and birthday parties, you can't deny that the connections they've provided helped get us through the darkest days of the pandemic. As devastating as the COVID pandemic has been, imagine how much worse the isolation would have been even a decade ago. Video calls existed, but broadband speeds weren't fast enough yet to support lots of people doing video meetings from home. The reason broadband infrastructure improved so rapidly over the last decade was because people wanted to be able to watch Netflix at night. By the time the pandemic started, bandwidth had increased enough to let people work remotely during the daytime. The truth is, it's impossible to predict exactly how breakthroughs will shape the future. You can come up with all these scenarios for ways in which a new technology will change the world, and then something like COVID comes along and forces everyone to use the tools at their disposal in new ways. For all her amazing foresight, I doubt even Katalin Karikó imagined that mRNA vaccines would one day play an essential role in ending a pandemic. I can't wait to see how digital breakthroughs continue to evolve in the years ahead. The technological advances we've seen over the last couple of years have the potential to create more flexibility and options that improve people's lives. They'll even put us in a better position to prevent the next pandemic. When we look back at this period, I suspect history will view it as a time of terrible devastation and loss that also sparked massive changes for the better.