Bill Gates is right about cyberattacks. That’s the scary part.

Bill Gates is roiling the internet again with fresh remarks on the fresh hell that awaits us all because we just won’t listen… to him.

In a sense, Gates is right to complain. He gets to see a lot more under the hood of global tech than regular people anywhere in the world. Undoubtedly, there is a ton of complacency or worse in the normie culture right now.

Gates is right to worry that the public won’t snap to attention unless the fabric of their lived reality splits right before their very eyes.

Many of us feel too powerless, too ignorant, too busy, or just too depressed to bother trying to keep up with the main source of public information about the transformations happening out of plain sight. Gates is right to worry that the public won’t snap to attention unless the fabric of their lived reality splits right before their very eyes.

Unfortunately, Gates doesn’t make the greatest messenger. That’s especially true in our long moment when everyone basically agrees on what’s going on, and disagreement — which switches back and forth depending on which “team” seems to be in power — is restricted to whether what’s happening is a good thing or a bad thing.

People with the inside scoop and their hands on the levers of power can and do flip messages as easily as zonked-out citizoids flip between TV channels or social media clips.

Gates has fallen prey to the flip side of the old joke that “if this is wrong, I don’t want to be right.” It feels so wrong to say Gates is right that even when he is right, he seems wrong.

This unfortunate state of affairs is on stark display in his latest interview, where he sat down with CBS News podcast host Tony Dokoupil. The topic, a familiar one to Gates-heads, was the planetary risk of climate ch— excuse me, of artificial intelligence.

RELATED: Sorry, Bill Gates. We’re sitting out this apocalypse.

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In the sequence that went viral this week, Gates emphasized that elites preparing to deal with cascading cyberattacks are more or less resigned to the fact that the world’s ordinary people will probably resist any kind of sweeping security-enhancing social restructuring until hackers finally make the pillars of their everyday life shake and crumble.

“If you have a big cyber attack that causes a lot of problems,” he said, “then people will say, OK, they were right. The people who were talking about that were right. So it may be that we have to suffer a few of the negatives before we’ll respond as fully as we should.”

“Fortunately,” he went on, keeping it vague, “those aren’t civilization-ending. They’re bad —”

At which point Dokoupil interjected, immediately getting very, very specific. “If you hack Fidelity or Vanguard,” he suggested, “and much of the world’s trillion-dollar retirement nest egg, that would be a pretty big event.”

Ya think? That’s quite the random example.

“Well,” Gates agreed, “you could create uncertainty in cases like that.” He went on to affirm the wisdom of “being ready” and “trying to make sure we do the things” that might “avoid any negative incidents. But” — yes, there’s a but — “assuming we fall short of that, then when some of the negatives start to emerge, you have very concrete ideas in place, so people say, okay, you’re right, we don’t want that to happen again.”

RELATED: Don’t be fooled by Bernie Sanders — tech won the midterms

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But Bill, Dokoupil might have jumped in, you’re giving me nothing but vague. I’m the one giving concrete suggestions about how to nuke the world reserve of funds ostensibly guaranteed to ensure young people don’t have to provide decades of retirement and end-of-life support to the last generation born at population replacement levels. You’re just talking about “the things” and “the negatives.” What concrete suggestions do you actually have?

Instead, Dokoupil concluded, “what it’s going to take for us as a country and a world to tackle this is not just a 12-page essay from Bill Gates. It could be a catastrophe.”

To which Gates responded: “That’s fair.”

Neither man would state the obvious: Draining the world’s retirement accounts would throw the economic and financial life of the Western world into a tailspin with only one possible way out — a coordinated international switch-flip to mandatory welfare-for-all: universal basic income denominated in a magical new kind of digital-credits currency.

It was left for the beleaguered viewer to understand.

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