Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates emphasized in an interview with the Chosun Ilbo that successful people should think about how to restore their wealth to society and alleviate inequality.

In a New Year’s interview with the Chosun Ilbo, Gates stressed the duty of entrepreneurs to contribute to society, saying that wealthy businessmen must give back to society and find a way to alleviate global inequality.

Gates, who attended a consumer electronics show that opened on Jan. 7 in Las Vegas, agreed to an hour-long interview on Jan. 8 with the Chosun Ilbo, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, Germany’s DPA, and Spain’s Metro.

You are very active in charities and in contributing to social organizations. What is your philosophy behind this?

Those people who have succeeded in society and amassed wealth need to think deeply about how to restore that wealth to society and alleviate inequality. As a businessman, success follows luck. I was lucky, and hence was chosen to be successful. My wife thinks the same way on this, so we are both active in service activities.

What activities do you do exactly?

The thing we work hardest on is our nonprofit organization, the Gates Foundation. It focuses attention on things like helping children with difficult-to-cure diseases in developing countries and assisting in disease research. I wish wealthy people would pay a little more attention to improving global inequality. [Last year, the Gates Foundation gave US$1.8 billion in scholarships to minority students in the United States, and another US$3.2 billion to help eradicate infant malaria in Africa.]

Your company is very active in charity.

In order to encourage employees to give, we run the “Giving Match” program, by which the company matches any contributions made by individual employees. The employees have responded well to it.

How do you foresee this year’s IT and consumer electronics industries?

I think we’ll see the materialization of an organically connected information environment, in which TVs, video game machines, digital cameras, and all home electronics are connected to the PC. What I mean to say is “Seamless Computing.”

Many new products have been announced during the consumer electronics show. Would you please describe a few?

The “Media Center Extender,” which allows viewers to freely view digital pictures or movies on multiple TVs within the home by using a remote control, is a good example. We’re been cooperating with companies like Sony and Samsung and expect to see it out on the market in the second half of the year. The “Smart Watch,” with which you can keep track of appointments, sports scores, the weather, and other things in real-time is another high-tech product we expect to see out on the market in the first half of the year.

Since, with PCs and TVs combining, the information environment will change greatly, what do you think the future will be like for hardcopy newspapers?

Up till now, journalists haven’t had to worry about which medium they would use to convey their writing. Really, which medium to use to convey writing hasn’t been influenced that much. Even now, paper is recognized as a convenient medium, so even though we’ve entered the computer age, it is still in wide use.

We’ve introduced tablet-type equipment [a computer with a book-sized screen in which one can enter information through handwriting]. The device will allow people to share data quickly when hooked up over wireless Internet. It gives you some idea of what the future of the print media will look like.

Do you mean to say that the printed newspapers will disappear?

Not at all. Take a look at encyclopedias, for example. Most encyclopedias still come in the printed form, but now, they are coming out in diverse forms, like CD-ROMs and DVDs. Compared to paper, digital information carries with it the advantages of being easier to search through and able to be displayed in multimedia form. Therefore, in the future, many forms of media will be put online, even if their speeds differ. Right now, there are more readers of the online edition of the Wall Street Journal than there are of its hardcopy edition. This is a major change.

(Translated from the Korean by Digital Chosun Ilbo staff.) (U Pyeong-hyeok penman@chosun.com )