What will 2022 be like: business gurus Musk, Gates, Benioff tell

Bill Gates

The MICROSOFT founder admits that 2021 has been "the strangest and most challenging year of his life." “In 2020, we still found a short period when everything was relatively normal, after which covid-19 confused all the cards. But the pandemic has dominated our lives since the first day of 2021,” Gates notes. However, he looks to 2022 with optimism.

“It’s probably stupid to predict anything now, but I think that the acute phase of the pandemic will end in 2022,” the billionaire said. Gates adds that medicine is getting better at dealing with new strains and that the CORONAVIRUS infection is likely to become endemic. Outbreaks of COVID-19 are possible in the future, but the number of deaths will gradually decrease. However, another trend that worries Gates greatly, the growing distrust of the population in the authorities around the world, may become an obstacle. “We need government involvement if we want to prevent an environmental disaster or the next pandemic,” he explains. “But a drop in trust prevents them from being effective.”

The billionaire has no doubt that digitalization will remain a global long-term trend after the pandemic. First of all, in his opinion, it will affect office workers. Companies will experiment with different work formats, and IT corporations will look for solutions that will help reproduce the spontaneity that is characteristic of communication in the office and lost after the transition to remote work. Technology will evolve rapidly: Gates is sure that in two or three years we will forget about the usual video conferencing services and will communicate with 3D avatars of colleagues. Also, digitalization beyond recognition will change education and medicine. With regard to the latter, Gates expects that in 2022 humanity will make significant progress in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and in the fight against diseases such as HIV, polio and tuberculosis.