We're going to start the recording in just a second. But we're so happy to be here. It's exciting.
It's very exciting to be here in our first ever Bloomberg house, this beautiful space in the city. I think it's in the chalet. I think, isn't it the is I think what we should be calling. But it does feel like the whole world is sort of ascending here, economics, business, finance, but most of all tech.
Right.
I took a walk down the promenade there and it is a little bit like sort of AI trade fair. Right, every single shot front is trumpeting something about AI. So something we're going to get into a bit of a conversation.
Right, So we're starting Welcome to in the City, Everyone, Bloomberg's podcast, connecting you to the conversations and the stories and shaping the world of finance.
And Franci Laqua and I am David Merritt. And this week we are in the mountains of Switzerland in Davos as global leaders and quite a few journalists descends on this outpoint village for the World Economic Forums annual meeting, and we're going to be looking at the challenges facing the world, of which there are many in twenty twenty four and talk a little bit about how prepared we are to face them.
Yeah, so with us, and we are really delighted and honored. Saja Sahidi from the World Economic Forum, a Zimazark, creator of the Exponential View of Global platform for in depth tech analysis, and the host of Bloomberg original series Exponentially, So thank you both for joining us. Sajia, you actually published a report looking through the global risks, the top global risks in the next twelve months and then longer term. Can you run us through your top risks?
Yeah? Sure, Well, thank you for having me number one miss and disinformation and to some extent, we were surprised this was down at number sixteen last year and it shot up to becoming the number one risk so quickly, and of course understandable because we've all seen low cost or zero cost technologies in our hands that can produce
a lot of synthetic content. So a lot of concern around that, especially in a year where so many people around the world are going into elections following on right from that extreme weather, beyond that, societal polarization and obviously that is deeply connected to what's happening with miss and disinformation, but the economic risks are not that far behind. There's still concern about inflation, there's still concern about the potential
of an economic downturn. That's still number nine in the two year timeframe, So looking out over the next twenty four months, quite a bit of concern about that. And then you look ten years out and it's really all about climate, so extreme weather, potential changes to the Earth's systems, loss of biodiversity, and a lot of concern around loss of natural resources. And again they're miss and disinformation. And what rises really to the top is other adverse effects
of artificial intelligence. That's very low down in the two year timeframe, number twenty nine out of thirty four and then jumps up into the top ten in the ten year timeframe.
And as in, can we even tell when it's fake news or fake information and the real one? Given how good some of the AI stuff is right now.
Oh, I think one of the reasons why it's jumped up so much is that this past year is in the year of generative AI, and it's getting better and better. Although and there is an important although it's one thing for it to be created it's another thing for it to be distributed, and it's another thing for people to read it, and it's another thing for people to believe in it. And I do agree with the experts who contributed to the Forum's Risk Report that misinformation and disinformation
should be really high off our agenda this year. But I think it's also important to recognize that the academics are still to pronounce as to whether these things really are real, and a lot of the worries we had around in misinformation disinformation stemming from as early as twenty sixteen seem to have mixed evidence as to whether that's really.
The path.
And I think one of the risks that we run is not that we don't face a more challenging environment as it pertains to truth and fact. It's that the AI component is only one part of it. There are other aspects in this ecosystem that are weak politicians willing to.
Exploit these types of stories.
There are the distribution patterns that occur over social network. There's the capacities of media organizations to verify and validate this stuff, or even sometimes, as we've seen in the last few months, spread the misinformation themselves. So when we look at this problem. If we cry wolf and simply point towards AI as a source of mis and disinformation, will issue the wrong prescription.
You know, in the podcast we had last week with Ian Bremer for the Eurasia, we were talking about their risks as well, and he said something which struck in my mind. Their top risk, by the way, was the United States versus itself thinking about the election and the potential outcomes. But he said, in the last twenty years, the United States has gone from being the chief export of democracy in the world the chief exporter of tools
to undermine democracy. And he's talking obviously about social media and the growth of that is the way that people consume their news. Do you agree with that, a z eem And does that answer the question of why this particular concern is shot right up to the top again.
Well, the US has exported tools like that, but the US also has companies like Google and Microsoft and Meta who have election integrity teams who are working on sharing with their their private competitors, but also with the public sector tools and technologies for video stamping and authentication and watermarking,
and they have incident responses as well. So I think there is an important part of this picture, which is is that sufficient though I mean, well, I mean, you know, I think that the trouble is that you see the fire and then the fire and arrive. But I think we can say that when it came to extreme content on YouTube, YouTube or alphabet was able ultimately to do
a great job in in tackling it. And I think that it's really telling that a number of the large technology platform firms have already announced that they have election integrity strategies in place, ahead of actually what I've heard from Nation States themselves saying. And so I think, yes, of course technology is a problem, but it can also be part of the solution.
Zadia.
I mean just one other point that I think it's also about how people are receiving that information. It's about media literacy as well. And we also went a little deeper into different countries and in the US, miss and disinformation doesn't show up as a number one risk despite being in that election year. In India and in Pakistan also having elections this year, it's among the top five risks.
So it's also a little bit about what citizens are able to consume, how much media and digital literacy they have, and so it pops up much higher in certain parts of the world.
But when you look at, for example, the US election, I guess the concern is meddling right from other countries and people are worried because this could spread. I mean, again, in your research, can you give us a little bit of a worst case scenario.
On the US based risk? Almost all were economic, and that seems to be top of mind. But I think there's a connection between those two things. Where you have economic hardship, where you also have societal polarization. Those two things together provide pertile ground for disinformation, for misinformation, whether that is state sponsored or whether that's spread through other sources.
I mean, the problem, Dave, is that I look at so I'm on social media a lot, probably too much, and a lot of the things I watch I don't really I mean, I know because I work at Bloomberg that it's fake information, but I don't see the watermarks. Frankly, I don't see like in the stuff I consume. You don't know how news works.
Well, I'm saying more now is people saying images of things and instantly saying, well, that's just a I or that's generally that's fake. There's a kind of there's a skepticism now led on everything and news reporting, journalism that wasn't there, particularly things like images, which in the past people would trust, and now that trust is really eroding.
Well, I mean the Pope wasn't worrying about.
Right, Puffer, we sure about this?
I mean, you're no, franc I would say if anyone. But I think that that that takes us to a really really important risk, which is that by by flooding the phrase was flooding the zone, right, With flooding the zone with material that might or might not be believable, or might or might not be true, what you end up doing is weakening the trust in the few institutions
that are are arbiters of that factuality. Now, I think Bloomberg and some of the other media businesses generally do quite a good job, but the ops now a nice
cookie earlier on. But the onus is going to be on you and your peers as well to increase your capabilities of identifying what these issues are, raising the level of factuality across this information ecosystem, because if we start to distrust the likes of the story newspapers, because they do make mistakes from time to time, and because the zone is full of synthetic material, I think we then do make ourselves susceptible in the way that some of
the populations that Salia alluded to are more susceptible to misinformation.
Is it because it's such a big political year this as well?
Like people, I mean, everyone's talked about this, the Great Democratic Exercises, there's twenty twenty four, huge amounts of the world are going to the polls. Is that why this is such a hot topic right now?
I think that's certainly some of what we've picked up from the experts that the fifteen hundred or so experts that fed into this, as to the reason why this raise up to the top. But I think the longer term sort of erosion in trust in truth and objectivity in facts, I think they're it goes beyond that particular election year. It can affect everything from you know, health
and I think we've seen that through the pandemic. It can affect what we believe in terms of social justice, It can affect what people believe on so many different topics. So I think it affects more. And of course climate change is another big one where there needs to be some agreement around science and objectivity in facts.
AI is everything from I guess if you're you know, googling something like color matching, if you need to get a foundation, to people saying actually, you don't put the human you know, in the middle of this technology anymore. And so we could literally end up like Terminator two or three or I don't know how many terminators they did, like where are you? And how ugly AI could become for humankind.
Well, I think we do that partly because it's more interesting to have lurid conversations like that than to talk about questions like workforce transformation. As we start to automate certain business processes. I mean one is it feels offices and you know the other films consulting firms, So we
need have to to pick you pick your stories. But I think one of the things that's happened with with AI is that, compared to other technologies that I've tracked from the Internet and beyond, there is very very strong osterroots adoption of AI tools like chat, GPT in organizations, even if there isn't an official policy, and increasingly the CEO is the one who's racking the cage saying what are we doing with the generative AI? And that wasn't the case with the Internet, and it wasn't the case
with mobile or cloud computing. And I think that creates the conditions for a perfect storm in the next year or two for firms to really build lots of AI tools because their frontline employees want them and the bosses at the top want them, and that that will compress the amount of time it will take for these these things to become quotidian within large firms.
And then of course with us as customers of those businesses.
But do we do we have for Axlvis a number of how many jobs will be lost? I was speaking to the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth fun head, the biggest sovereign wealth in the world, and he was saying, you know what, You're going to be twenty percent more productive when you use AI. I was like, twenty percent, But then you don't really know the timeframe. Again, are we over optimistic about how fast the transformation happens?
Yeah, so I think the pictures of it mixed. Overall, what we found is that roughly a quarter of all jobs could go through some kind of structural churn, both increasing and decreasing over time in the next five years. So we did this last year up to twenty twenty seven. The second thing we did, though, is try to go deeper into where are llms actually most likely to be
impacting different roles. And there's a set of roles that will be displaced because so much of the tasks within those roles are essentially repetitive language based tasks, and so they can be displaced. There are roles which will be automated, and that's the big firms, where there will be product increase in productctivity and increase in efficiency because we will all be able to, you know, find that twenty percent extra time and space because we'll be using some of
those tools. And then there are roles that will remain untouched because they're going to be very much about physical activity and labor, whether that's in retail or in care. Maybe they will become more efficient because planning tools will be better, but the core of the role is going
to remain fairly untouched. So we sort of ran through that, and I don't think that we can conclusively say how many roles that's going to be impacting, but what is clear is that given the nature of these types of roles, there's going to be a win for a lot of developed economies, and it's going to be more disruptive in developing economies. Again, it depends on what type of task and role somebody is doing.
I mean, as I was saying, when you walk around with the you know, the AI badging in all the companies, I mean, does this feel like and you're a veteran of Davos as em and YouTube fancy, does this feel like the AI DeVos where this is.
Going to be totally dominant this conversation.
Well, I think the Davos represents the forces that are shaping the world in some way. And of course we are in a world where it's the technology companies that are the commercial businesses that drive things in the way that thirty years ago it was the oil businesses. So I think it's not surprising that you see quite a lot of AI companies. You know, there are a lot of prime ministers here, and we know that society has woken up to the fact that technology is not just
about productivity and efficiency. It's also about the impact it has on people's lives as citizens, their sense of belonging, their sense of worth and actually how well they feel they're doing. So I'm actually pleased that the AI discussion is not one that's restricted to boardrooms but is also taking place in cabinet rooms as well.
Just thinking about, you know, the image that Davos has as a convening around the world. It is about the elite, isn't it? And over the years, questions are asked about Davos man or woman and the relevance to the real world. And on this question AI, if it really is going to cut fifteen percent or twenty percent of jobs that has a huge impact on the average person who works for an organization. Is this debate, is this discussion of the elite talking to themselves about these efficiencies?
Is it going to be?
Is that just going to drive home that stereotype of this bubble up here in.
I mean, I would love to, but my impression is that I just was one sentence that it isn't I rarely in the last year or two have had conversations. There's one exception when I was in a room full of CFOs where the only chief financial officer is the only thing we talked about they talked about was efficiencies. But in every other conversation that I've had, whether it's policymakers or business leaders, they're really really aware of questions like reskilling and displacement.
But you have a much better picture.
I'm Davis community glad you said that.
I think there's really a positive trajectory here because I think we all recall twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen Rise of the Robots. Everyone's talking about how the integration of robots into manufacturing could be so disruptive to workers that are in factories, and I think we've seen that the reality play out there where yes, there has been integration of a lot of that technology, but there also hasn't quite been in the same way that people thought it would be disruptive.
Now, because of.
Some of that conversation, we kicked off in twenty twenty, this ten year initiative on the Reskilling Revolution with a number of the ministers, the companies that are really in a position to actually provide some of that reskilling and upskilling, and that kicked off a movement where we said we'll get there in ten years, reach a billion people, and we're going to be announcing this week that we're crossing the six hundred million mark with that effort so across
thirty economies, across I think one hundred and fifty different companies, so a lot happening there. And now, of course this year the conversation is going to be how do we orient that that specifically to the jobs that are going to be disrupted because of artificial intelligence, and how do we take some of that reskilling towards the new roles that will be created because of AI.
Can I pivot a little bit to some of the geopolitics you mentioned There are a lot of prime ministers and wildly, I mean it struck me seeing the presence of the Ukrainian delegation here and you know, this forum making headlines over the weekend and an attempt to put forward a proposal potentially for peace. I mean, that's a you know, one of the biggest geopolitical problems basing the world, and the Ukrainian President will be here this week making
an address. What role can this convening make in solving auguably one of the most attractable problems in the world at the moment.
So do for us? I mean, we look at the theme of this meeting, rebuilding trust. It is a particularly polarizing moment. We believe that people have to talk to each other, and so a big part of what this meeting is about bring together people from across the world. We have over one hundred countries represented, nearly sixty heads of state, two hundred plus ministers across various portfolios, sixteen
hundred businesses. There's a reason I think that everybody's coming together because they have the same sense that we need to have that conversation. I think a second element is there has to be alignment around some of the things
that need to be done. And certainly on the geopolitical side, there will be quite a few private meetings, including the meeting that was hosted by the Swiss and the Ukrainian governments here in Dabos, but on a number of these other topics, So what we just discussed AI and reskilling, there has to be an actual alignment around Okay, what next, what's the next two years sort of plan? Where is
it that the focus areas should be. And then the third element is I think for any of that trust to be rebuilt, there has to be a focus on action. There has to be delivery, there has to be accountability, and there has to be transparency and that is where actually reporting out on the proposals that were made last year. How did that go? How have we delivered against that? I think that's key.
I guess when we were talking about trust and the fact that you know the need to talk to each other. Is AI an enabler of people coming together or is it not?
I think it is an enabler. And we all have had this experience because if you've ever used Google Translate, that is AI. Because it's become so commonplace, we don't think of it as AI. But when machine translation, the idea that I can communicate to someone who is in Thailand and doesn't speak much English and I don't certainly
speak no taie is remarkable. And so we've already seen we've already benefited from the dividend of AI in that in that way, now we have a new set of tools, and I think there's this sort of ironic workworld where we can all produce perfect email sales pitches because we've all used chat GPT, But at the same time, none of them are being read by humans because they're being read by my chat GPT enabled email clients. And you know that all the beauty is all the beauty is lost.
I do think that you know, people do remain social creatures.
They come to Davols.
It's not the easiest place to come to, it's cold for most of us, and they come because there are things you can do when you're with other people. And AI has the capability to allow us to do that, to create the space to spend time.
To do that.
It could also be used to create solipsistic digital virtual worlds where we just you know, sit in our headsets and never meet another human And in that in some sense that's our that's our choice. But I think, you know, in absence of other sort of strange things happening, it should create the space and also the motivation to sit down and work with people, to get face to face.
How long does it take to understand what we want AI to be, how we'll use it.
I think much of what we've been discussing is sort of you know, where most of us work in the sort of knowledge economy that we're in. But I think we shouldn't forget there's massive potential, for example, for a drug discovery, you know, in just in purely the field of medicine, what artificial intelligence could do and You're going to see quite a lot of that in the forum this week, just the potential of what we can get right. And I think that's where there also needs to be
a lot of focus. We absolutely need to be watching out for the risks, but there also needs to be a focused on the opp.
Is that part of the solution to solving or dissipating this misinformation, this suspicion, this fear that everyone's got, that we're being fed bake stuff, but focusing on some of these positives instead.
Are we going to hear a lot of that this week? Do you think?
I think both things have to be done. I think the risk around miss and disinformation is real. I think that has to be dealt with as well. And then there is, at the same time an enormous amount of opportunity of the use of artificial intelligence, whether it's in public services or medicine or other fields or education. That's going to be a big piece of what we'll look at this week, education meeting AI and what that can do.
And again it contains just even within that topic alone, there are both risks and opportunities.
Well, thank you both for joining us.
You, Dave, that was a great conversation. It was interesting to actually look at AI not only as you know, doom and gloom or it's going to save us all, but it was a very nuanced and bounds conversation on the benefits and actually how it will transform business.
I mean, it's the theme of this week, isn't it?
And I remember a couple of years ago it was all about cryptos. So you have a congress center, and of course inside the Congress Center there's no ads. It's panels about the global economy, about inflation, about Ukraine, and then you come out and it's really all about AI totally.
I mean, every shop front has got a sign in it, and it's whether it's a bank or whether it's a technology company. They're stapping those two letters everywhere to try to badge themselves as being part of that conversation, right, And you know, I guess the question I have after listening to all that is is it all hype? Is it just this year's crypto or is this a little bit more significant?
Yeah? And I think so.
The way a couple of chief executives say they look at it is actually it changes what we do, So it has to be in everything you do. So it's you know, how you use your phone, how you market, how you speak to clients, and so it's a bit of a strange that it could really change basically productively.
I was worried.
Do you hear the Sovereign World's Fund of I think Norway telling me that I have to be twenty percent more productive.
They I just make sure Dave doesn't listen to this. I'll be watching. But what did we think first podcast? In front of the audience. I'm addicted? All right, I think we need to We need a bigger venue next time, right, we need donuts an audience. So shall we do the sign off? Do the sign off? Do you remember off the top of your head, I am very blonde. I have no idea what the sign's been doing.
Back back interview, So it's thanks for listening for this week's in Michale.
This episode was hosted by Me, David Merritt and I'm Fronzie Laqua, and it.
Was produced by Somersardi and special thanks to Saudia sa Hidi and Azim az are Boom.
I'm glad he switched up. Thank you day for saying okay, thanks for listen.