"The Verge audience is an amazing group that thinks about technology, that knows the rapid progress that’s being made," Gates told me. "We can go far if we get all those great thinkers helping to invent, helping to support, and imagining what’s possible. We feel lucky to get to talk to this audience about what we’re seeing, and sharing that optimism."

Throughout February, Bill will be narrating episodes of our animated series The Big Future to explain and illustrate his vision. We’ll also be publishing in-depth features examining how rapid change in health, farming, banking, and education might improve the lives of impoverished communities around the world. Gates is our guest editor, but we have promised his team that we’ll do serious independent journalism against these themes; we will present a complete picture of this future to you. It’s going to be exciting.

So what exactly are we going to be talking about?

We’ve spent some time with Bill over the past few weeks, talking through his ideas about the future — and pressing him on the boundaries of that vision. It’s funny: Bill is difficult to engage in small talk, but he’s eager and willing to engage in difficult issues like income inequality and regulatory challenges in developing countries. Throughout our meetings first in his private office outside of Seattle and then in New York, Gates offered a compelling, focused, and coherent argument for his vision of the next 15 years — a vision that is surprisingly as reliant on the development of stable governments and infrastructure as it is on technology.

Bill and Melinda predict the number of children who die before the age of five will drop by half

In health, Bill and Melinda believe that improvements to core infrastructure in the developing world will have dramatic impact — for example, they predict the number of children who die before the age of five will drop by half, as access to vaccines increases and sanitation improves. They also predict that the number of women who die during childbirth will drop by two-thirds, as more women choose to give birth in hospitals, gain access to birth control, and plan their families more carefully.

But technology has a role to play as well: Gates believes that polio, guinea worm, elephantiasis, river blindness, and blinding trachoma can all be eradicated by 2030 thanks to targeted distribution of drugs using more accurate digital maps and donated medicines. He also believes that a combination of vaccines, more effective cures, and better testing means malaria will be on the way out by 2030. And Gates thinks that we’ll reach an HIV "tipping point" by 2030, with more people starting treatment than getting infected in Africa, leading to the overall number of cases declining worldwide.