On January 19, the 54th World Economic Forum (WEF) ended in the small Swiss town of Davos. It was attended by the world’s business elite, leaders of states and international organizations, to traditionally discuss the state of affairs in the world and the economy.
This year, the theme of the WEF meeting was “restoration of trust”. And these words can be interpreted in very different ways: restoration of trust in a world surrounded by more and more conflicts; restoring confidence in monetary policy, which appears to have tamed the record inflation of the past few years at the cost of economic growth; restoring trust in artificial intelligence, which covers more and more areas of human activity.
In addition to current topics of geopolitics, technology and the traditional issue of climate change, on the sidelines of the forum they talked about the elections in the USA and the chances of Donald Trump winning them, investments in the green economy and growing tensions between the West and China.
What else was interesting to hear during the forum in Davos and what was said there about Ukraine?
Artificial Intelligence
One of the hottest topics for discussion at this year’s WEF was artificial intelligence (AI), especially in the context of the dynamic development of such generative AI systems as ChatGPT.
The head of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and Chinese Prime Minister Li Qiang mentioned the risks and opportunities created by AI in their speeches. The latter emphasized that the achievements of AI could be used not only by the countries of the West, but also by the whole world.
“Scientific and technological “fruits” should benefit humanity as a whole, and not become means to limit the development of individual countries,” he said during his speech.
The complaints of the Chinese prime minister were heard against the background of worsening relations with the United States. In particular, Washington is currently seeking to limit Beijing’s access to advanced technologies, particularly in the field of microchips necessary for the development of AI.
The topic of AI regulation was particularly actively discussed at the forum. China insisted that the world community create “universal red lines” instead of restrictions to be developed and implemented by individual countries.
Ursula von der Leyen, for her part, mentioned the legislative norms adopted in the EU, which limit the possibilities of using AI to spread disinformation and are aimed at increasing control over this technology. At the same time, she is convinced that AI will bring more benefit to humanity than harm.
“Our future competitiveness depends on the implementation of AI in our everyday business, and Europe must show leadership in the responsible use of AI,” she said.
Representatives of private business also expressed concern about the rapid development of AI and insisted on the need to develop principles of trust in the development of new AI models. In particular, Marc Benioff, CEO of Saleforce (which develops CRM systems), warned against “nuclear threats” in the field of artificial intelligence.
“We don’t want a Hiroshima moment” where we see technology used in a very bad way. We don’t want to see anAI-Hiroshima.” We need to make sure we’re up to the challenge,” he said.
Sam Altman, the “culprit” of the revolution in AI, was also present at the WEF. In particular, he responded to the concerns of politicians about the potential use of AI to interfere with the electoral process and create deep fakes. Thus, the CEO of the OpenAI company noted that to combat the use of AI to influence elections, increased attention is needed not only to chatbots, but also to social networks, where AI-generated content is distributed.
Altman also commented on the lawsuit filed by The New York Times newspaper, which demands compensation from OpenAI for using its articles to train the chatbot. “It was as much of a surprise to us to read that they were suing us as it was to everyone. It was pretty surprising,” he said, adding that ChatGPT doesn’t actually need to be trained on The New York Times articles.
The impact of artificial intelligence on the world economy may amount to an additional 4 trillion dollars, which will be manifested in increased labor productivity, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said. At the same time, UN Secretary-General Anthony Guterres warned that not all countries may feel the additional benefit from AI, because rich countries will benefit from the use of this technology, first of all. In the future, AI may lead to a growing gap between the rich and poor countries of the world.
Energy and climate change
Ursula von der Leyen used the theme of this year’s WEF – restoring trust – in her speech. She told how the Europeans, having joined their efforts, managed to diversify the consumption of energy carriers and radically reduced the consumption of Russian gas and oil.
Thus, according to the President of the European Commission, over the past two years, since Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the share of Russian energy carriers in the consumption of Europeans has decreased from 25% to 5%. The “green course” of the EU played an important role in this. “This year we will receive more energy from the sun and wind than from Russia,” she concluded.
The need to combat climate change
was one of the key topics raised by Antonio Guterres. He called on the world to start implementing the fossil fuel ban agreement reached the day before at the COP28 summit in December. “2023 turned out to be the hottest year in history, but in the future we can remember it as the coldest,” he said.
Countering climate change requires time and policy consistency, which is difficult to expect in the year of the most massive election in human history. However, US special climate envoy John Kerry said during his speech in Davos that his country will continue the “green transition” regardless of who wins the presidential election.
“This economic revolution has already begun and it is much bigger than any politician or any individual,” he said, while adding that he would resign from his post to join Joe Biden’s campaign.
In turn, Canadian Finance Minister Khrystia Freeland noted that “greening” the economy does not necessarily mean deindustrialization. She gave the example of Canada, where projects in green energy are implemented carefully to save jobs.
“Canada is absolutely confident that decarbonization will mean more jobs, more growth and more production for us. And we understand that government has a role to play in making that happen,” she said.
Prospects of the world economy and “socialists are to blame for everything”
The weather in Davos itself was not conducive to thinking about climate change. The snow level in this resort village reached 80 centimeters against the 55 centimeters that are usually observed in January. Although there was much less snow in nearby towns, which are not as high in the mountains, the snowy winter gave confidence to global warming skeptics, including the newly elected president of Argentina, Javier Millais.
The leader of the South American country devoted his speech to the threats that “leftist” ideas pose to the world order. In the media, Miley’s speech was dubbed “an ode to capitalism.”
“Today I am here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And this danger has come because those who are supposed to defend the values of the West are captivated by a vision of the world that leads inexorably to socialism, and therefore to poverty,” he said. he, after giving a lecture on the history of capitalism and libertarianism.
According to him, social justice, which is advocated by many politicians, does not actually exist, because behind it is the forced extraction of resources from entrepreneurs and people. “States exist at the expense of taxes, which they collect by coercion. The higher the taxes, the less freedom there is,” he said.
Miley, known for his promises to dissolve the central bank and dollarize the economy, promised to reform Argentina on the basis of libertarianism. In his speech, the head of the Argentine state called the state a problem, and businessmen – heroes, whom he promised to “protect” in Argentina.
The rest of the WEF speakers had less radical views on the future of the economy. Monetary policy, inflation and economic growth were not the biggest focus of their attention.
Despite the significant reduction in inflation that the leading central banks managed to achieve during 2023, the economy is still far from normalization, according to the head of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde. “In 2023, we saw only the beginning of normalization,” she added.
The director of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala agreed with this opinion, noting that although the world is moving towards normalization, it is far from normal that the growth of world trade volumes is much lower than the growth of world GDP.
German Finance Minister Christian Lindner, for his part, described the situation in the world economy as a “new norm”. The development of AI, geopolitical tensions and the threat of global fragmentation, a higher level of global debt after the pandemic and jumps in energy prices – all this gives little prospects for the growth of the world economy, he noted.
“Did 2023 give me hope? I would say this: it was a call to action, because we needed to revise some of our policies and maybe now we are at the beginning of an era of new structural reforms,” he concluded.
The representative of the IMF, Gita Gopinath, said during her speech that the markets should not count on a rapid decrease in the discount rates in the world. At the same time, ECB representative Francois Villerois said that rates will remain higher against the background of economic transformation, in particular the “green transition”.
War
During the WEF, special attention was paid to wars. The focus of discussion was Israel’s war against Hamas, the reverberations of which are already reverberating throughout the Middle East, undermining the stability of vital trade routes.
During their speeches, European leaders spoke about the need to solve the Palestinian issue by creating an independent Palestinian state. The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Germany, Annalena Berbock, emphasized the need to de-escalate the situation in the Middle East and establish a long-term