Good evening, I’m Alois Zwinggi, member of the foundation of the World Economic Forum. I would like to bid you a hearty welcome to this first session of this year’s Open Forum. The theme of this year is to develop visions for 2050.

Tomorrow starts now, or today is the first day of the future, as we can say. For more than 20 years, the Open Forum has been a place where we have dynamic debates. We want to bring in all the different perspectives and discuss about them, and also discuss themes which are of interest for you in the audience.

We want you to participate in the debate, and therefore we are very grateful that you have taken the time to be with us tonight and discuss with us. Over the next few days, we will have many discussions about decisions which we will take today or not take, and what will be the impact and influence of this on our future life as far as technology is concerned, health, nature, climate, or also the development of our societies and of all of us.

Therefore, we are all concerned. Therefore, I would like to thank you again that you have taken the time to be with us tonight. And I wish you to have interesting discussions this week.

And I hope that you will leave Davos or stay in Davos if you live here with new insights, many things you have learned and seen here for the first time. And I would like to wish you a wonderful evening. Thank you very much.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Aruoture Oddiri, host of the Global Business Report on Arise News, happy to be here moderating this panel and thank you to the World Economic Forum for doing the work for me and introducing the topic.

We’re very much looking forward to your thoughts as well. So we’re going to begin with our panel. I think it’s fair to allow everyone here briefly to pretty much tell us the 2050 that you’re looking forward to.

Some folks want a 2050 where there’s only female presidents or some folks want a 2050 where there’s only electric cars. So just feel free to share the 2050 that you want and then we’ll get into more specific questions for each of you, then round robin, and then we’ll bring in our audience. Zainab, I’m going to start with you.

What 2050 would you like to see?

Of course, well, I am young, I’m a woman, I’m from the so-called global south. So that should be a teaser for what’s coming next. What 2050 do I want?

And honestly, the question asks what 2050 do I want, but I really went in and asked so many of my colleagues, friends, even a person who was in charge of running a media company to tell me what 2050 do they want so that I can tell something along the lines that resonates with most of us.

And the best of the answers included a world that’s liberal, that’s democratic, and that’s at peace with itself. And there was a strong emphasis on a world that’s at peace with itself and that doesn’t need to really have this fight back and forth. And that strongly connects with the 2050 that I want.

Of course, human rights at the center of it. I don’t want a 2050. where we need to come back again and talk about the conversations, the conflicts and all these problems that we are dealing with today.

But also at the same time, I want to 2050 that we feel prepared. We know that across generations, youth, elders, children all feel ready for what’s coming next and what’s happening now and that they feel included and that they are included. A little idealistic, for sure, as we can see it, but that’s what a young woman can do.

That’s what they can put forward in front of everyone and push for it as a result of their hope and resilience. And I would stop there.

All right. And I actually should be introducing everyone. Zainab Azizi, of course, global shaper with the World Economic Forum in Kabul.

I’m going to come over to… Yes. Thank you so much for doing some great work.

This is a very diverse panel. Everybody’s doing great work here. Up next, of course, is Agnes Callamard, Secretary-General of Amnesty International UK.

Agnes, what’s 2050?

Well, first of all, I want us to get to 2050. That’s the first thing. And frankly, given how some of the political leaders are behaving right now, I think we do need to question whether we, as a collective, can actually reach 2050.

So that’s my first wish. My second wish is that we get to 2050 without annihilation of half of the world, without World War III, without more repression, more genocide, more destruction of the environment that we have seen. So that’s my two big wish for 2050.

Now, if we do manage to get to 2050, if we manage to have the vision to imagine a 2050 without the destruction of the world, if we have the strength to be like the 1945 generation that reimagined the world, but without World War II…

I would want to have 2050 that is predicated on the relationship between human and the planet that allows for sustaining lives. I would like to see biodiversity respected. I would like to see equality being maybe not a thing of the past, but certainly something that we are committed to decrease.

I would like to see inequality within state and between state. I would want to see a 2050 that is centered on human rights protection, individual rights, collective rights. I would want to see a 2050 that recognizes the ills of the past, the injustice of the past that is predicated on the notion that those responsible for those ills, those responsible for bringing the planet to its knee, those responsible for genocide are actually paying for it in 2050.

Thank you.

All right. Thank you so much for that. Professor Adam Tooze is the director of the European Institute at Columbia University.

Professor, what 2050 do you want to see?

I don’t think I ever thought I’d be saying this, but an autonomous and self-determining Greenland I would take at this point. And all that implies one of the two countries that I hold a passport of, because getting us there would at this point imply a substantial change in mind, which may be one of the themes of this week here at Davos, an unusually important Davos in that respect.

More seriously, I think I would double down, not that that isn’t serious, I would double down on the climate and environmental balance question, and I would double down on it because it’s so precisely defined what we need to do.

and because the astonishing good news is that we’re actually now in the mid-2020s in a position to get to, at least for a very large part of the problem, something like sustainability over the next, as quickly as the next 10 years.

We can, we have a chance of hitting the Dubai commitments of 2023, which is a tripling of renewable energy capacity and a doubling of energy efficiency. These are not impossible goals and they’re crucial, they’re absolutely crucial and you just see it all around, this is the warmest I’ve ever seen Davos, it’s crazy, as we were coming up it was like eight degrees, it closed us, it’s mad, I mean this is truly a thing that is happening and of course this isn’t a problem principally for incredibly rich and privileged people like ourselves here, they will all find ways of coping, I’m sure, but I think if you’re looking out to the horizon of 2050, the absolutely central question are the developmental possibilities of Africa, full stop, because by 2050 I’m going to be white and very old and the majority of young people in the world will be African and that is a radically new scenario, I mean the Asian predominance is the historical norm, but the emergence of Africa as a densely populated centre of global demographic dynamism is a radically novel phenomenon, in some ways of course a very good news story, but one that demands an answer to the question of development and the energy is central to that, and we have the opportunity at this moment to make that sustainable, so that for me is the thing, that’s my hope I think.

Thank you, well I’m from Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa, so thank you so much for mentioning that, you’re ground zero, I appreciate that very much. Taylor Hawkins, you of course are a global shaper in Sydney, of course here of course in Kabul, what’s your 2050 that you want to see?

So I think my head and my heart have different answers, give us both, well both I think a future that’s defined by dignity, by justice. by things that feel far out of reach at the moment, by sustainability. I think where my head sits though is that we need strategy fueled by hope and hope alone won’t get us where we need to be and I feel like there’s been two unfortunate windows that have clashed, which is one where we didn’t have access to the information we needed, another one where information is now so freely available but our attention is kidnapped.

And so we’ve not, and I would say I speak for young people, maybe in this perspective, I don’t think we’ve both had access to the massive information and command over our attention at the same time. And so I hope for a 2050 because we can’t possibly predict the challenges that we will be facing in 2050. We can estimate, I think, or anticipate, but what I hope is that we have the societal infrastructure, we have the literacy and the hygiene to know what levers to put our hands on because right now that literacy, that understanding, I think is predominantly in the hands of people who are not correcting the trajectory in the way that we need it.

So I hope that the unshiny conversations about policy, about infrastructure, about social connectivity become cool, become engaging, and become something that we can engage with effectively and practice the art of difficult conversations.

It really deeply worries me as I’m seeing that art sort of shrivel up in society. So our ability to sit in the presence of people we disagree with and almost find a sense of fulfillment and joy in that. So if we can be defined by that in 2050, I think we’ll be in a far better situation whatever emerges.

Fantastic, thank you so much for that. Arjun Prakash, he’s a co-founder and chief executive officer at Distyl AI and that of course is one of the core topics here at Davos and around the world. Arjun Prakash, what 2050 do you want to see?

Yeah, as a technologist I spend a lot of time thinking about what this paradigm shift that AI is going to bring is going to mean for all of us and I have a very simple hope for 2050 which is I hope we as a world can afford every single human agency and dignity and let me explain why I say that.

It is inevitable to me that in 2050, we will have a world where there is an abundance of systems that require intelligence. I think healthcare, human services, education is going to be abundant. It’s going to be very easy to scale these systems.

And what it also means is that there are consequences for economic structures that today require these systems to scale with people. And there is a, in my opinion, bad version of this, which causes disenfranchisement of a lot of people who today are part of scaling these systems. And I think there’s a very optimistic version of it, where we today make a commitment and a choice to redesign our economic and cultural systems to accommodate this new world and afford each person the freedom to have agency to participate in it.

Because the nature of many people’s jobs is going to change. And we need to bring them into the fold. Because I think this should be a collective move upwards.

I think there are a few times in our history where there have been the opportunities to make a collective move upwards. And I genuinely wish we do not waste this opportunity.

All right, fantastic. Thank you all for your opening thoughts there. So now we’re going to get more specific.

Zainab, how much of an impact should public policy have in shepherding us towards the 2050 that you want? With all the things you mentioned that you want to see, how much of just public policy? And you can also tell us what you’ve seen with public policies living up to your standards.

Yes, I have seen it all, I guess. It’s interesting. So I mentioned a liberal world, a democratic world, and a world at peace.

And all of it combined from a top-bottom approach. would center itself in public policy because all of us are bound to each other, serving each other or becoming one by a law. And throughout history, it was either the law of nature or the law, some sort of law, some sort of policy, some sort of regulation has ruled upon us.

And we have wanted that law to be there for a purpose, to serve ourselves, to serve our needs. But does it really meet all the needs we are putting out there to respond to? That’s under question, of course.

And I have a deep, from all the experiences in life, immigration, conflict, our schools being bombed, my country being cornered, and of course, many other countries being cornered around the world. You see that public policy at times doesn’t really respond to the needs of people. But it’s the civic engagement, it’s the deeply societal efforts from young people, and at times old or children, really bring the change.

And it has happened in its simplest form that we can see or hear about these days is protests. When public policy doesn’t respond to our needs, people get up, raise their voice, and they protest. And we see that everywhere.

But sometimes if it doesn’t, if your country or the system that should govern and respond to your needs doesn’t respond to you but restrict you and you cannot protest, then you go and create or establish efforts hidden or in the public.

that can address your needs. And as an example, a huge example is education is banned for girls above sixth grade in Afghanistan, specifically, not specifically, but mainly for young girls. But what happened, and the policy is not responding, regional efforts are not there, international law, nothing is responding, and it’s a basic human right that’s denied.

So what is happening is youth around the world, Afghans, non-Afghans, they are putting in efforts, creating platforms, using tools such as AI or other, or they’re just basic efforts to reach out to these girls through internet, through websites, through meetings, to respond to their basic wish of getting education.

And that’s where I believe public policy fails, because we, as humans, not all of us, some of us fail to really center it on the people of that community. That’s just an example closest to my heart, but I’m sure we all have many other examples that we can resonate with and talk about.

Thank you for that Zainab. Agnes, you’ve spoken about your worries over the spread of authoritarianism across the world, and Zainab was just talking about protests, and we’ve seen a number of protests flare up in different regions.

As we march towards 2050, the protests seem to be matching, well, I’m going to put that to you. Do you think the protests are matching the spread of authoritarianism, and is authoritarianism, essentially, is there a check on it, in your view?

Well, authoritarianism is galloping, it’s increasing, it’s not just an Amnesty International finding, it’s a finding of everyone who research human rights, democracy, and so on. Some of the most long-term studies have concluded that right now we’re back to 1985 level in terms of how many people in the world live in so-called democracies. So we have lost some count since 1985.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, all the progress, we’ve seen a U-turn for people around the world. Authoritarianism is quick. Democracy takes a very long time to be established.

Look at the United States, 12 months of Donald Trump in the White House, and it is a playbook of how authoritarian practices get embedded into every institutions from attacks on freedom of expression, freedom of the media, academic freedom, freedom of association, attacks on dissent, creation of new militarized security forces that are unbounded, the attacks on migrants, on refugees, on trans, on women.

All of those things have taken place in 12 months. Can you quite grab that? How long does it take to create equality, a true sense and experience of safety, of security?

All of that has been literally destroyed in 12 months. And I have many friends in the United States. I’ve lived there.

There are many friends who are brown people, black people. And the fear, the fear under which they live every day is palpable, palpable. So it’s everywhere.

And it’s not just Donald Trump. You could believe that Donald Trump has brought us to there. No, for more than eight years, Amnesty International has been denouncing the slow, But through spread of authoritarian practices throughout Europe, emergency legal decisions have become normalized.

Policing has become grounded on practices, including linked to surveillance and facial recognitions that have led to many abuses. Attacks on non-discrimination have become very commonplace. And what do we have to say about other places, such as Iran, for instance, where thousands of people have lost their life in the last week, combating one of the most cruel authoritarian regimes?

So we are all being impacted by the rise of authoritarian practices around the world. There is no easy solution to it. It’s not just disrupting Donald Trump.

It’s not just resisting Donald Trump. It is also looking at our own society and unpacking the dynamic that has made those authoritarian practices possible. The fears, the anxieties, including over AI, and how do we tackle it?

I think that’s the key question. I mean, there is no doubt that it is unchecked. There is no doubt that it is everywhere right now.

The key question that we need to ask ourselves is, what do we do about it? Because make no mistake, authoritarian practices lead to very bad things for a lot of people. And when it becomes a global phenomenon, it leads to what we saw in 1940.

So we really need, it is incumbent upon us to combat authoritarian practices wherever we are. We do not need to be in New York. We do not need to be in Paris.

We do not need to be in Davos. We can combat authoritarian practices in our village, in our communities, in our families. And we must combat it.

Because if we don’t… There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the destination will not be 2050. Let’s be very clear.

We will not get to 2050.

You raised a very great point. Yeah, clap if you want to go ahead I Know we’re running short on time But I have to follow up on this because you just mentioned the authoritarianism in the United States and the cruel regime in Iran Well, what do you make of Donald Trump threatening strike?

He doesn’t like Iran, right? So that’s one authoritarian figure taking on another regime and then with what happened in Venezuela Can you what does that muddle things up when one authoritarian?

Well, of course, I mean if you know, everything is muddy. Everything is great I can fully understand why many of my friends and colleagues from Venezuela have a lot of reluctance to denounce What was an act of aggression against Venezuela and maybe if I was Venezuela and I will say yeah Maybe it’s not great for international law, but wow 150 political prisoners have been released.

So this is a reality. This is a messy world we live in but do we need to Sign a pact with evil in order to get something that we believe is going to be okay. And do we have any Historical evidence of that kind of X.

Well, we have just Afghanistan here do we have a lot of evidence where this kind of foreign aggression against the country is bringing lots of Betterment in the long term for people actually, I don’t have a lot of evidence to it So I think I’m gonna resist being forced into a corner where I need to make a choice but I want us to make to create and to claim the space of Denouncing both Denouncing u.s.

Aggression on Venezuela and denouncing the crimes against humanity that have been committed by the Maduro regime Against its own people and that he will need to be held accountable for but that is not gonna happen in a New York prison It should happen in a Venezuelan prison and he should render account to his people not to God knows who in fact in New York.

Well said. Thank you so much

I saw you raise your hand. I think I read your mind if anyone wants to chime in on it And it’s you don’t necessarily have to go with the question I give if you want to you know follow up on what’s been said, that’s fine But professor go ahead I was do you want to follow up on that because I want to ask you about climate change and where we’re going

I know it’s not very Davos, but I think at some level we actually have to talk about politics. I mean, when you talk about public policy, we need to talk about the politics that make public policy. When we talk about the long struggle for various types of rights in the United States, we have to talk about the political forces that conducted that struggle and who their opponents are.

And though I take it, I think your point is right about the fragility of rights regimes and how quickly they can be broken. They’re a little bit like ice. It takes a while to grow, and then you can break it.

But we shouldn’t underestimate the extraordinary persistence with which right-wing politics in the United States, since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which is the truly convulsive upheaval in American democracy, that still is working its way through our society today.

Right from that moment onwards, a counter-movement began that is now finding its success, and we are hosting them here, and we are going to sit with them, and they are the legitimate and bona fide heirs of that generation, including the president himself and his family.

And the very least we can do is speak openly about the history of the Klan and the history of the lynching and the history of Jim Crow and the history of segregationism and its apologists running all the way through to the 90s and the 2000s, who are deep inside the Republican Party.

And I say this as a Democrat who lives in a highly segregated city, so this is not just about party politics. Racism in America can’t be reduced to that. But we need to be clear about who it is has been trying to make change and who it is who’s been trying to do the opposite and to undo it.

And those cultures of violence that we see in ICE, they come from somewhere. Anyone who’s spent any time in America knows that people have reason to fear the police. They have reason to fear the police.

As a white guy, I’ve never felt this before, but since I’ve lived in the United States, I’ve known at least around the edges what it means to fear people in uniform. Because it’s capricious, and it’s hyper-masculine, and it’s deliberately violent, and it’s deliberately abusive. And it’s simply a fact that we have lived within the United States forever, right?

So at that level, this isn’t new. But what’s radical about it is just how uninhibited, how empowered, how shameless it is, and how little resistance, frankly, there has been to what’s been going on. The big hope of the midterm elections in November, and everyone has just got their fingers crossed, the democracy will work, and they will deliver a giant, crushing rejection.

Because American society has an overwhelming majority of decent people, who even if they are conservative, hate the sight of giant, overgrown, bully boy men hurling women to the ground and abusing children.

It isn’t popular, is one of the weird things about it. It’s not actually a proper authoritarian populism in that sense. It’s quite sectional.

It’s very, very strange what’s going on. But yeah, let’s talk about climate. Do these people also deny the climate?

Yes, they do. Yes, they do. In a staggering way.

And in a way which has the same qualities, right? Because this time around, they haven’t just politely withdrawn from the Paris Accords, which is Trump versus one, right? Very gradually, he says cheerio, and then finally they exit in 2020.

No, this time around, they’ve left every single UN organization, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which America brought into being under a conservative American president in the late 1980s.

And then in the maritime organization, we know where there was an effort to clean up one of the great hard-to-abate sectors, which is maritime transport. We know they used literally mafioso methods of going into the negotiations and picking off the representatives of small countries and threatening them with personal sanctions, which is ruinous to anyone who moves around the world, right?

Because it basically means you lose access to your bank, to your phone. You can’t function. And they threatened the representatives of the smallest states so as to create a blocking veto minority that prevented us from moving rapidly towards the decarbonization of shipping, where we actually had WEF organized.

Let’s be clear, MESC, WEF organized first mover business groups were pushing that. That has been one of the projects of this organization. And this American government that we are hosting, who has a house on the promenade celebrating 250 years of God knows what.

Those people deliberately sabotaged these negotiations. We are still going to sit with them. I’m going to chair a meeting with Lutnick tomorrow morning or tomorrow afternoon.

Oh, wow.

Like, I am going to do my job as chair, but we should be clear about who it is we’re dealing with. And they are taking those tactics of intimidation and personal threat into the climate space. And that is the reality that we’re dealing with at this moment.

Thank you so much. I very much appreciate the passion of the panel. Taylor, I’m going to come to Australia, and it’s still on public policy.

You wear many hats. You’re also, you know, working on a lot of youth initiatives as far as the future of youth is concerned. I do want to ask you about the policy in Australia where under-16s are banned from social media moving forward to 2050.

They’re saying they’re doing it because they’re protecting the youth, and that’s where your work is. How are you viewing that dynamic? Feel free to be as passionate as the rest of our panelists.

No, I have to say, it’s a really good sign when you’re on a panel and you get so enthralled with what someone else is saying that you lose all comprehension for the fact that you’re about to have to talk.

Look, I think I request the grace of the room as I navigate what, at least in Australia, is a very political question. As someone who runs a non-partisan organization, so humor me as I do some acrobatics. Look, I think that the social media ban policy in Australia is an excellent example of long-termist-looking policy that maybe fails to look at the broader system.

If we break that down into three elements, you can think participation, policy, and people. So from a participation perspective, it maybe wasn’t best practiced the way that it was done. It was moved through incredibly quickly from a lot of the youth networks that I work with.

They didn’t feel adequately engaged, and given that it is a youth-centered policy, that’s a fascinating feature of this policy that’s come to be. and the impact of that is not just on the outcome and the policy itself which I’ll get to in a second but it erodes a sense of engagement and that civic infrastructure that we’ve spoken about and I think that comes back to what are the things that we watch silently and allow to happen because as an Australian who feels way off in the corner away from the US I’ve been trying to take it very seriously to say what of what I’m seeing over here do I see in small doses in my own country and it’s a fascinating thing to think about.

The second thing that I would say is on the policy itself. Do we need to get young people off social media? I would say unequivocally yes.

I don’t have an objection to that concept because I imagine in 2050 we’ll view social media the same way we do many other drugs. I don’t know many deeply happy joyful and fulfilled people who spend a large amount of time on social media. That being said is it a systemically viewing policy that’s looking at all of the factors to keeping someone safe online which is the skills, your ability to interpret miss and disinformation, your ability to build the supportive relationships if and when something damaging does happen online and as a woman who spent enough time on the internet I can tell you it’s probably if you spend time on the internet for the duration of your life at some point you will see something that is damaging to you psychologically in one way or another and we need the skills, we need the relationships, we need the support networks in order to address that and at this point that policy in isolation without the system’s view does not deliver on that.

I have hopes and ambitions that we can build that around it but it’s an interesting maybe hamstringing of the policy as it stands and then you’ve got to look at the people factor. When we’re leaving people without the systemic support the blame game will inevitably start to happen and so what we need to be doing is trying to set ourselves up for success from the beginning thinking about who’s involved in this decision-making process.

It’s a heartbreaking reality that democracy done well is slow but it is that upfront investment for long-term payoff and it comes back to the central truth of its short-termism is the drug. We want the payoff, we want it quick and we go for the sugar hit immediately but what we really need to do is invest in the kind of robust policy and processes that can stand the test of time and be safeguarded against some of the frightening things on our horizon.

Thank you so much for that, Taylor. Arjun, I’m going to ask you about artificial intelligence and some worries about a divide that is growing. I mean, your company Distil, you’re assisting enterprise, giving enterprise solutions to companies with artificial intelligence.

And my question to you is, do you share in that worry with respect to inequality to where, as we move forward to 2050, those who have the resources and have access to AI will be far outpacing those that don’t have the resources to access that?

What are your thoughts there?

It’s a very relevant question. So let me just start by saying something that I think hopefully most of us can agree with. Technology and AI is an amplifier of a set of intents and culture we choose to program it with.

It’s not AI making decisions. It is a set of values we, as a society, choose to align the system with. And I think that fundamentally we need to decide what are the incentives we want to set up for society in pursuit of this new model in the lead up to 2050.

I think that, again, this requires long-term thinking. There is a lot of short-termism right now, right? Like CEOs are optimizing for the next quarter.

There is a temptation to optimize for the next election. And what the moment calls for is some statemanship and long-term thinking to design what are the policies and systems we want that actually can perpetuate. And once we program the AI with it, it’s going to amplify that.

If we don’t change the incentive structure that had been designed for the last few decades with a certain economic model, you’re going to end up with concentration of wealth. More importantly, you’re going to end up with concentration of agency. Because fewer people are going to make most of the decisions that get amplified 10x larger by these systems.

Things that used to take five years now can happen in six months with AI. So there is a need for conscientious long-term thinking, which is I think a moment that is here and now and not a problem we can afford to kick the can down the road five, ten years.

That’s my point of view on that. Thank you so much for that. All right, so those are the specific questions.

Now we’re gonna go, you know, round Robin. We’ve got a few more minutes where we get our audience involved. Before the World Economic Forum began, WEF did, here in Davos, WEF did release a report on global risks based on surveys.

They had like a top 10 or a top 20. The number one based on surveys, the risk that, you know, respondents, you know, indicated was geopolitical tensions, right? And we’ve touched on that already.

But within that top 10 was misinformation and disinformation. And I guess, you know, how your worldview is shaped, in addition to your education, background, and so on, is the information that you’re filtering in. And there is a worry that as we get closer to 2050, you know, misinformation and disinformation is just, it’s gathering steam.

So my question to the panel, just one after the other, is how to combat that? Because even with AI and the deepfakes and so on and so forth, this stuff is getting more complex and social media also has a role in that as well. So Zainab, how do we, how do you think we can effectively combat misinformation and disinformation as it spreads?

It’s super important. It’s at the heart of awareness and knowledge to understand what misinformation and disinformation is. And it’s also relatively important to touch upon the fact that how misinformation and disinformation can be categorized for certain sets of information in a specific region is not the same or not explained the same way to another region.

So there’s always that the different standards sit around how we defined these terms or any other term. But yes, what we can do, ground realities are usually so different than what we see on our screens. And of course, we are so used to seeing our screens that we forget to touch and reach out to people who are on the ground, who are living the life.

I have lived under conflict. I have been refugee in several countries. And people to people relationship has always been extremely different than what they portrayed into words, either newspaper back in the day, or now, I’m not too old though, or now the social media that you would see people come, you would see someone new come to you, talk to you with a pre-judgment of a situation, not trying to understand you, but just to impose their ideal reality in their head on you.

And that judgment is created through not knowing really what misinformation and disinformation is, and just reading the text or the words in front of you, and following through, oh, okay, this is correct.

There are context. Without having context, you cannot really understand the situation. So to fight back the misinformation or disinformation in any region in the world, I believe we can take several actions.

One, to engage those local voices into these global platforms that we are all seeing. If you don’t have the local voices, if you really don’t understand what the ground living lifestyle is, let alone knowing in general what the tradition or what the ruling authority there is, you cannot really understand.

the difference between the different subjective opinions that you can have towards a story. Let’s say in a village far, I would give examples for my country because that’s where I come from and I don’t feel okay with giving examples from other countries. That would be me questioning myself first.

So in villages in my country, there are some traditional norms and systems that allow people to respect elders with their decisions and listen to them and that’s basically a transaction created in that society.

Governments changed, interventions happened, so much happened, war happened, but that transaction between the elders and its community or that traditional or naturally established relationship between that community is always there.

It’s there till today when governments fell. People didn’t have anyone to go to or an office or an authority to go to to get a letter for their employment or anything else and what they would do is rely on that elder of the community that they had selected to get their words and go present that to another village or wherever they wanted to go.

But when it comes to international understanding of those ground realities, we think that these people don’t like systems whereas they have been filled throughout history and they don’t feel that anyone responded to their needs so that any system that was brought upon them, that was imposed on them, was able to sustain itself.

So when you don’t understand these small nuances around someone’s understanding of life, which has been truly different from you, everyone in this room is truly, truly privileged. I myself am very privileged. I wish instead of me there was a woman from a a country who is under conflict, who has been stripped off all their life, who has lost family, sitting here and talking to you guys instead of me and I truly truly wish that happens one day in any platform like Davos so that not us it’s not us versus them or someone going through all this process and formality to explain these nuances around stories, culture, and inclusion or any other thing that we want to raise.

So that’s where we can fight misinformation and disinformation to create context, to understand, to listen to people, to not come with a prejudgment or think that what we think, what we have been taught through academia or any platform is correct for the whole world.

It’s not. You have to listen to the people. If it’s war, if it’s anything, just those people what if they say we don’t want your system, that’s their decision.

So you cannot impose your reality on them and that’s where the whole divide increases if you keep imposing, if the world, if the one region of the world keeps imposing on the rest of the world.

Thank you for that. Thank you so much for that. Agnes, I have to tell you I’ve had a debate with a family member who didn’t believe the amnesty data I was giving them about the issues going on in Venezuela, about the Maduro regime.

So I really want to throw this to you. How do you, if I’m talking to somebody who’s educated and has, you know, doesn’t believe data I’m giving them, how do we combat misinformation and disinformation, I guess? How do we do this?

Education, I think, is certainly key. Key literacy on apprehending what people can read on social media and internet. And I think in many curriculum right now, it is starting.

So I’m hoping that there will be you know, at least in two generations from now, I think we will have people far better able to tackle what they are reading on social media. Look, I think we need the holistic approach to technology and it means the regulation of the business model of social media. The notion that some hateful information, some kind of information gets much more spread and circulation because they are more likely to resonate in some part of the people’s brain.

I mean, that is what needs to be tackled. It is the entire business model of the big tech companies that we need to be able to challenge. That can be done through better regulation.

We did attempt to do that in Europe through the AI Act that was adopted last year. And for the last 12 months, the President of the United States has waged a war against against the regulation of social media and the regulation of AI. Why?

Because of these, you know, the kind of techno state that he is trying to establish. So, we always go back to the necessity of public policies and governments being prepared to enact policy for the betterment of people, not for the sake of few profit and greed, in fact, of people. Why do we need trillionaires in this world?

Can I ask? Do we need trillionaires? We don’t even need billionaires, frankly.

So, I mean, that is part of what you’re talking about, that misinformation, disinformation. We need to tackle media ownership. Over the last 10 years or so, we’ve gotten to a process of heavy concentration of, I’m not talking about social media, I’m talking about actual media.

How do we fight this misinformation and disinformation?

I mean I’m old enough to remember pencil and paper. I vividly remember the advent of personal computers, the laptop, the internet. These were all huge shocks and overwhelmingly positive and I still cling to the idea that AI also in some senses is overwhelmingly positive.

It enables us to do things we just simply couldn’t comprehend before. I have colleagues who are deep skeptics who want just bands, blanket bands on AI and humanities education. I’m not in that position but I use it every day myself.

In fact I have a kind of routine of forcing myself to ask crazy questions from you know my high-end AI which I couldn’t possibly answer myself in reasonable time and yet it gives me a kind of B-plus answer to a crazy question right now and that’s amazing.

I can get like several B-plus answers to really wacky questions. I actually have guilt because you know you couldn’t ask a human to answer these questions back-to-back and my machine just runs away like a kind of eager dog and comes back with these answers. So for somebody like me who just loves exotic knowledge this is this is a huge gift.

I mean really chapeau, it’s amazing. But what is it that we are doing and I and I both of you said education is part of the solution. I’m thinking oh my god like what is it and I’m increasingly I love the village example.

Of course it doesn’t generalise. The problem is we don’t live in villages anymore. We live in these gigantic communities of hundreds of millions of people.

But increasingly few and urbanisation is the trend we’ve passed when we can the majority of people live in urban or suburban spaces now worldwide. And I’m only saying that because in the end I end up thinking again and again that there is something about the embodiment of knowledge. There is something about the directly interpersonal which is the only really good answer to this question.

And then there’s a and so one of the questions as an educator it’s a really old-fashioned question I actually start asking myself is what is it that I want my students to remember? Not to know, but to remember. To take into their bodies and keep there.

Because that’s going to be the prompting bit of them. That’s the bootstrap. Those are the instincts.

That’s the taste, the creativity, the thing that triggers the clever question to the AI. And of course in due course AI will do this as well, but it seems to me that that’s one thing that we really need to focus on in a way that I never thought I would be emphasizing. I’ve always been somebody who fled from memory practice.

Like why would you do that? You can just look it up. You’re very good at googling.

Like why? But I think with AI the challenge is actually to know what we want inside ourselves. And then I think the other thing we presumably have to cultivate, this is the economist in me talking, is this has got to be demand driven.

If we’re going to keep truth in circulation, people are going to have to want it. They are really going to have to want it. And if the fake stuff and the artificial stuff and the slop is no longer slop but cordon bleu, let alone like three Michelin or just McDonald’s if that’s the way your mind goes, right?

We don’t have a chance. So we’re going to have to have like some motivations for actually desiring truth. Even if it’s hard, if it’s difficult to swallow, even if it’s somebody else’s truth that might actually turn out to be better than you.

And those seem to me, so these chairs are lethal. If I actually fall over and die, like first day, it’s not a conspiracy. It’s the chair.

But those two things seem to me to be the newer kind of educational purpose for me. It’s like A, what is it you want to know? Like really want to have and then where are you going to put it?

You’re going to put it inside yourself and keep it there. So maybe learning and teaching now has to be a bit more like learning a language in the way that a language remaps your brain and the way that it becomes part of who you are and how you express yourself.

The fact that we can all communicate in English up here after all is a flippin’ miracle. And maybe that’s where we need to think about the deep answers to this question. But as I say, I feel more confounded than ever before in my life on this issue.

Thanks to you. Thanks to you and your mind-bending things you do.

Thank you, Professor. Taylor, earlier you were talking about youth and them staying off social media. So what’s your take on misinformation?

So I think as fourth speaker just before the technical expert, I’ll try and come at it from maybe building off what you just shared, which is I think the mis- and disinformation is a rampant virus in a weakened system.

And so I think what we also need to think about is what is it within ourselves that makes us so ready to grab the polarizing slop or quorum burr that we’re presented with. And that’s the hard internal work that must be met with systemic policy solutions and technical responsibility and a whole bunch of other things. But I think we need to do the hard and uncomfortable thing of looking within ourselves and seeing what has this society cooked within myself that makes me so ready to believe that thing that makes me, like it gives you that feeling that is kind of addictive.

And I’ve gotten myself trapped in that before. The algorithm has gotten me because it’s feeding me that exact flavor of what I want that makes me feel like I’m right and that person that I want to argue with is wrong. And so it is the responsibility and I’m so hesitant because I think the climate movement has really suffered from this.

The whole individuals need to recycle and that’s how you’ll save the planet. But I do think that on this mis- and disinformation piece, there is a huge responsibility that we need to have to keep our internal world in check and sort of the internal system that we’re operating on at a place where we don’t seek the polarization and where we reject the algorithm serving that up to us.

But I defer to the technical expertise.

Arjun, in a lot of tech, talking with mis- and disinformation, I would love to hear your thoughts as well how we combat this with AI playing such a big role and going forward to 2050.

I have a tendency to try to model the world in systems. It has a beautiful quality of generalizability and scalability and on this matter of misinformation, I The system that scales in my opinion is accountability I think fundamentally any technology, be it AI or whatever else, is ultimately reflecting the architect and creator of the system.

And I don’t just mean the model creator I mean, once you have a model, you give it a set of system prompts, or you give it some instructions you’re creating a system. Ultimately, it’s just scalable intelligence at the end of the day. People need to be accountable for what they create.

It’s that simple There are two versions of this I can give example of. I think this social media world didn’t have that accountability. I think the platforms and the creators were generally shielded from the accountability for various reasons And I think it led to this almost uncontrolled propagation of mass reach and speed combined with information that people didn’t take accountability of.

And I think there are some serious consequences to that that we all see. And I don’t think we should do that with AI. I think systems that people create, institutions create, countries create, should take accountability for what they do.

I don’t think it’s the agent that’s responsible. It’s the legal entity or the human that created that is accountable. And I think we don’t think about it enough that way.

That’s my point of view on it. I do also want to just address something you said that I thought was very and you very eloquently put the role of education in it. I think increasingly the shift that’s happening is one from where people are doing work to one where people are describing what the work needs to be done is.

And we are all moving towards a world, you can pick the time horizon, but over some time horizon the opportunity is for everybody to be an architect. And I think the most important thing that I think we can learn in the educational system is how to describe a system. And I love the liberal arts educational system for that reason.

It teaches you how to think. It teaches you how to describe. I think physics is a beautiful modeling of the natural world.

I think philosophy is a beautiful modeling of the societal world. And I do think that that is a very important thing we need to learn to architect a world that we all are proud of.

Thank you so much. Thank you. I enjoyed this so much.

I have more questions, but now it’s your turn, ladies and gentlemen. So please, there we go. Here come the hands.

So we’ll just introduce yourself and direct your question to anyone on the panel. Try and be brief, because there’s a whole lot of people here that want to ask questions. Thank you.

Oh, thanks, and we appreciate for coming and meeting. I am Japanese. I’m from Japan.

You are great. And so I have a question for you. What makes you come to Davos and driving force?

Your passion is great. So I want to know your driving force.

Our driving force.

Well, your driving force for being here at Davos, I guess, right? His driving force, his motivation. All right.

Why don’t we collect a bunch? No, no, let’s collect a bunch.

Oh, about the questions?

Two or three questions, and then.

I guess, OK, lady in the back.

Hello, Manuela Foster from Germany, also the future medicine woman and diplomat of Mother Earth and the Galactic Nations. So I’m an awakened starseed. Nowadays, I talk about that.

And from that perspective, with the cosmic wisdom and the higher consciousness level, I’m wondering why, when we want so much change, we are not talking more about spirituality and our sovereignty, which we can gain back through spirituality and practice of energetic leadership.

So what do you think about? What can you do in your area to make people aware that they actually have the power? inside of them.

And only if you have the inner guidance and inner stability, you also can really decipher what’s true and what’s not true, because it comes with feeling, not with knowing.

I have to say that is a very interesting question.

Oh yeah, this is great. Let’s have some more. One more.

This is a fantastic video.

Alright, so it fits with a great audience. Okay, go ahead.

I have the mic. My name is Sidney Sampson. I’m from Nigeria, and my question is…

Hey! My brother.

My question goes to Callamard and the Prof, and it’s this. In an increasingly fragmented and polarized world, where might now seems to be right, what role do you see multilateral global alliances playing in trying to balance these tensions? And how can they be strengthened to do that?

Because, I don’t want to go to the other part, but that’s the question, and I hope you got it. Thank you.

Okay, I think, should we start with those three first? Your motivation for Davos, the spirituality question, and then the multilateralism, being able to address the issues we’re seeing. So, who would like to…

I guess you were the first question directed at you.

So, I mean, I think there might have been years in which the rationale for coming to Davos wasn’t clear. But this isn’t one of them. And it goes directly to your point about multilateralism.

I mean, this is an unusually significant week. Because what’s happening here, and it has also to do with the change of leadership at WEF, is that we have, in the form of Larry Fink, one of the absolutely key figures in the world of global finance, CEO, the dominant figure of BlackRock, a gigantic $13, $14 trillion plus asset manager.

This is the new generation of global finance. If JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs were the 2008 star players, we’re now in a new world. And he, through extraordinary efforts, has convened the most amazing gathering of both political and financial firepower.

and it’s quite obvious what it’s for. It is a, I would say, maybe last-ditch, certainly important effort to try and contain the impact of nationalist populism in the most powerful state in the world, the United States. That’s, those are the stakes, it’s no less than that.

And this won’t be the last effort, but this is an important moment and the Europeans are clearly going to need this as a venue for discrete talks with the Europe, the Americans over Greenland without having to be too far out in public.

And that’s, that no less, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s up this week in this town, is we’re trying to, we’re trying to figure that out. So that kind of answers, answers your question. You don’t, you don’t need much personal motivation to, to, to contribute, well A, to witness it and B, to contribute whatever you can to an honest conversation.

I was very struck by Fink’s remarks about how his project and with the authority of BlackRock behind him is to raise and to elevate the conversation and to the level of frankness and also, you know, whatever my remarks were about the Trump administration, I’m wholly committed to trying actually to talk with American Republicans, which is not something I get the chance to do very often in New York, right?

We live in bubbles. I am very conscious of living in the liberal bubble and this is the first time I actually get to encounter my own government and on a, on a stage. So those are the, it’s, it’s, these two questions are directly powerful.

I think this is true for the, very, very many of the people who are in the official delegations and so on are here because they are concerned with your question.

Thank you. Does anyone want to take a stab at the spirituality questions with, with respect to looking inward and that’s solving the issues that we’re seeing? All right, Taylor, take a swing at it.

Go ahead.

For me, what came up for me is that I have the privilege of living in Australia, which has the longest unbroken thread of human culture in the world and we should be a world leader in thinking about the future, thinking intergenerationally, being connected with these incredibly deep wisdom systems of knowing and being and doing and the spiritual practices that surround that and yet we find ourselves entirely detached from it.

Had we never forgotten how to practice leadership in the way that First Nations people still do and that they have for over 65,000 years, we’d be in an entirely different governance situation than we are right now.

And so for me, so many of these sort of introspective prompts that I’ve been giving us tonight come to remembering what’s at the core of our humanity, not starting to do something new but remembering these incredible practices that, you know, First Nations people has never left.

We just have forgotten, often in the horse of power, and let that slip out of our grasp. So I think that piece of how do we remember what’s at the core of our humanity is, we can’t leave that behind.

All right, got nine minutes to go. So let’s, all right, we’ve got a gentleman here. Okay, we’ve got so many hands up.

All right, go ahead.

Hello, my name is Akonjo. I’m just a master’s graduate and I’m from France, and pardon my French. But I think we can all agree with the many points that were mentioned this evening.

It’s, we’re not the ones who need convincing, and at some point there was a case made on education, which is long term. And I wanted to ask if any of you had any idea about the how we could do this. For example, AI Slop is Slop, that it works, it’s fun, people like it, and it has an effect.

How do we fight this, the dopamine receptors that people will just follow?

Okay, all right, great. Second question. We’ve got someone in the front.

Well, okay, I guess the back is still getting some love. We’ll get to you as soon as possible.

Hello, I have a mic here. So my name is Lea, I’m from Romania, from Bucharest. And I have a question for Professor Tuz.

I want to ask you, considering that you are at Columbia, and considering international students, but as well domestic students who get admitted into Ivy Leagues. What would be the first skill or the number one skill that the student need to develop before getting into university in order to do well at the university and after university? Because I see I’m working in this field and for 15 years and I’ve done research in the last four years and I see a lot of students from very good schools and they don’t achieve the type of success that they want or they are successful or in their professional life but not in the other part of their life.

So there are one medication or they are depressed or anxiety overwhelming and so on.

Thank you. I’m so sorry to make you walk, but this gentleman, we have to get this gentleman in the front, right? He’s had his hand up for quite a while and he’s gonna, he’s very close to me.

So, you know, I want to make sure he asks his question.

Thank you so much for giving me some attention. My name is AB Abidanshu Khare from London and first of all, thank you so much for the fantastic insight. I really appreciate that.

My question as a lawyer is very simple. The opposite of law is anarchy. How do you think and what is your take how strong the law is and give it a chance if if you think you can change one law which can bring a massive improvement, what that law gonna be?

All right. Thank you so much. So this is the…

Arjun, I think you should take the dopamine question, the AI, the addiction part if you want to take a stab at that and then maybe we’ll have Agnes and Zainab on the other. And to Professor Soons, you have another question for you as well. Go ahead.

And just to make sure I get the question right, it’s how do we deal with the AI slop that leads to just creating a lot of… Addictive effects, right? Addictive effects, yeah.

Listen, I think a lot of… In my opinion, it’s not the addictiveness that’s the problem, it’s accountability that’s the problem. I keep going back to this.

I think there is a beautiful quality to addictive material that is constructive. I think there is a destructive quality to addictive material that is benignly a waste of time, but also more destructively spreading misinformation. And I fundamentally think tracing that back to the provenance of the creators will automatically introduce an incentive for people to stop producing things that are destructive and I think we don’t have that with social media, but I think we have the opportunity to do that with AI.

Thank you. Professor, is there one skill that a student should have to, you know, have success or something?

I mean, so many people have iterated in different ways, but it’s a sustained attention. I mean, that’s the fundamental thing, the ability to sustain prolonged serious attention to a text, to read, to think, to add a problem, to solve, to work at a problem. That doesn’t necessarily mean, like, just strapping yourself to the desk and lashing yourself.

It means learning your own internal rhythms. Like, where does your spirit go? Where does your mind wander to?

How do you contain that? How do you manage it? And that, I think, is the absolutely key thing.

And it is rare, and it’s difficult, and it takes habit. And it’s a kind of training. It’s like learning to play an instrument or perform well in sport.

It’s that kind of habit. And it requires a kind of bravery, because you have to be willing to be lonely. You have to be willing to be on your own.

You have to be on your own with your own thoughts, not constantly just in the loop with the thing that’s feeding your prejudice, but actually pursuing your own thread. So that would be challenge students to read for half an hour suddenly, then 45 minutes, then an hour, and so on from there. And once they’ve gotten up to several hours, they’re already in the Super League.

All right. Thank you. Agnes, let me give you a chance to answer the question on law.

So the law is, you know, anarchy.

I don’t know. Law on death penalty in too many countries. Law on female guardianship in South Africa and Afghanistan.

Law that prevents a woman from accessing education in Afghanistan. Law that declares that your support to Palestinian rights is amounting to terrorism and must be stopped. Laws that describes an organization like Extinction Rebellion as a threat to national security.

I have so many laws that I want to get rid of it, that we make the world a better place. Many.

Thank you. I think you might be the last question because we’ve only got three minutes to go.

Hello everyone, my name is Nahid Ghazdoul. I am the president of the Syrian National Dome. Nationality is Syrian and it is political organization.

Actually, my question is to Ms. Amnesty and also speaking about refugees as well. When we see that we have more than 88 million refugees around the world, they are not welcomed, they are undermined.

They are heavy burden on the whole international society. At the same time, you can see that perpetrators are doing their deeds openly with authoritarian regime, I mean. And they don’t fear any consequences or even a kind of punishment.

What we see is just, you know, the verbal denouncing and, you know, in worst scenario, just Mr. Trump bring somebody to, you know, uproot a dictator. So, do you think there will be any kind of mechanism that can really and truly be applied to stop those authoritarian regimes before they go on and on in, you know, grinding people, committing genocide, fleeing like Assad.

Just, you know, he is enjoying the fortune in Russia and also the Iranian regime and everybody else. Thank you.

All right. So, you guys, you both get the last word. Zainab, let me have you kick and take a crack at that.

I’ve got a minute. Actually, I really had Zainab to just jump on that. You get the last word.

Look, it’s a fundamental question that you are asking. Are there mechanisms to hold them accountable? Are there mechanisms to prevent them from getting into power?

I think there are, but there is no political will to implement them. Throughout the last 20 years, particularly the last 20 years, we have seen time and time again governments using double standards in order to protect some of those governments and denounce others, in order to make deals with Syria or Egypt and so on, while denouncing other governments.

It is eating at any kind of rule-based principle system that we need to establish. The double standard, the rejection of any universal approach to how we see the world, how we protect rights, how we hold others accountable, that is killing the international system. That is killing any pretense of creating an international system.

But the alternative, as you say, it’s real anarchy. So, the answer is not to destroy what doesn’t work very well. There is absolutely no doubt that the global rule-based system of the last eight years has left many people out, has made millions.

I was in Syria, so I know the cruelty of that regime, and I cannot tell you enough how deeply, deeply touched I was by the family of the disappeared. This was the most cruel regime that has gone on and on and on and on. And we have plenty of examples like this around the world.

The world, the rule-based order was and is not perfect. Destroying it, like Donald Trump is doing at the moment, like Putin is doing, like Netanyahu is doing, that is not the solution. Trying to tackle the limitations and the problem, trying to reform what can be reformed, strengthening the accountability dimension, tackling the double standard, truly, truly ensuring a universal approach to what we believe must be implemented around the world, that is the solution.

But the destruction will only bring us to annihilation. So I’m calling on all of you, when we say that the rule-based order is on its way out and that it is a problem, We don’t mean that the rule-based system was perfect, and we need to acknowledge that. We must continue to have a transformative agenda.

We cannot be cornered into protecting what should not be protected. But we also cannot be forced into destroying something that has held us together, not perfectly, but has held us together. So we must absolutely resist the destruction of that system that is being put forward by Donald Trump and others with the complicity or the silence of our leaders here, because many of you are European, I think.

I am here at Davos because I want to send a message of resistance. We must resist what they are planning right now. We must resist the destruction of the system.

We must resist the notion that corporate actors can rule every aspect of our life. We must resist the destruction of the environment. And I wish I will be as hopeful as you are.

I’m not at all that hopeful. I’m not at all that hopeful. But I think it could come about if, together, we say no and we stand up and we resist.

It cannot just be about Greenland, but it also must be about Greenland. But it cannot just be about territorial integrity. It must be about values.

It must be about the Syrian people who are still demanding accountability. It must be about all of our rights that must be protected. And for that, we must be bloody brave and bloody courageous, because those people have no limits.

Dana, we’re unfortunately out of time, but I take it you agree with that comment.

Okay. Honestly, I tend to avoid political questions overall, and that’s for some reasons that you would understand. from those who have been through what I have been through.

But in short, as long as there is a security council that’s governed by just certain countries and it’s not rotated, it’s not allowed to have, like it doesn’t provide the seats for other countries to take over.

Like just make it a rotational, not make it power-centered, but more of a representation-focused, then the whole world order, the legal system, everything will remain the same. So there are questions around what things in the current legal order should change for it to respond to our needs better. We will never have a perfect world, but how can we make it better is by questioning the current system.

You don’t need to just like completely remove or replace the system, but rather find the solution. We often talk about disruption, but we forget that some of the solutions, some of the boundaries that we can create right now exist within the current system. So I’ll stop there.

Thank you. A round of applause for our panelists. Thank you also.

Thank you. You guys have also been here. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much. Thank you also, our panelists. You guys are fantastic.

Thank you.