The most predictable disaster in the history of the human race

Ask him, and he'll tell you himself. "I'm very optimistic," he says. See?

And why shouldn't Bill Gates be an optimist? He's one of the richest men in the world. He basically invented the form of personal computing that dominated for decades. He runs a foundation immersed in the world's worst problems — child mortality, malaria, polio — but he can see them getting better. Hell, he can measure them getting better. Child mortality has fallen by half since 1990. To him, optimism is simply realism.

But lately, Gates has...