AI Goes to Davos
An opportune time for some essential conversations
For certain classes of people, it’s the most wonderful time of the year: Davos Week. Thousands of world leaders, billionaires, intellectuals, and CEOs descend on a small Swiss ski village for the World Economic Forum. Tens of thousands more show up for hundreds of side events, because of, well, who else is in town. Whether one views Davos as a diabolical gathering of the global elite, an earnest effort to improve the state of the world, or a week-long party, it occupies a preeminent place in the ecology of ideas. Who and what are celebrated at Davos each year crystalize something about the political and economic moment.
Each WEF Annual Meeting has a theme, but it’s necessarily broad: this year it’s “Rebuilding Trust.” You can tell what’s really top-of-mind at Davos by the subject matter of the side conferences, and the signs along the Promenade through the heart of town. Virtually every business is cleared out and turned into a corporate meeting and event venue for the week. The new temporary marquees promote everything from major global corporations to up-and-coming countries to buzzy startups that want to make an impression on the Davos crowd. The big issues like global security, climate, economic development, healthcare, finance, and technology are always well-represented, but certain topics bubble up to the top each year. Blockchain had the most notable presence the past two years, but has relinquished the crown.
In 2024, the unofficial Davos theme is, unsurprisingly, AI. (In fact, it’s so central that the WEF itself called out “Artificial Intelligence as a Driving Force for the Economy and Society” as a bullet point in its official description.) What should we make of this?
It’s a good thing that the world’s most powerful people, and the rest of the Davos crowd, are talking about AI. It promises to be at once a technological, economic, and social revolution, much as the internet has been over the past thirty years. As with the internet, there will no doubt be great benefits and frightening harms, overblown hype and unanticipated successes. AI will influence the fate of nations, companies, communities, and individuals. How, though, remains to be determined. The actions of firms and governments will impact both the success and the societal benefits of AI in its varied manifestations.
AI is not something that can simply be left to the marketplace, its benefits and dangers evaluated only once it reaches maturity. In other words, AI must be accountable as it develops.
Fortunately, unlike social media and digital platforms earlier in the 21st century, AI is hitting the radar screen of policymakers and the public at the same time it hits the adoption inflection point. The world’s governments, and their intergovernmental organizations, launched a flurry of major AI initiatives the past year, including UN High-Level Advisory Body, The G7 Hiroshima Process, the UK AI Safety Summit, among others. The European Union reached agreement on adoption of a comprehensive AI Act, the Biden Administration in the U.S. issued a massive AI Executive Order, and China finalized regulations on generative AI. The WEF itself issued responsible generative AI principles in June and hosted an AI Governance Summit in November.
It’s inevitable that Davos is something of a lagging indicator. Much of the official program must be assembled, and those side-conference venues and storefront meeting spaces rented, many months in advance. Still, there is an important aspect of AI being so prominent at the WEF. As I discovered when I was fortunate to attend last year, for all its fabled exclusivity, Davos is unique in its relative openness and certain forms of diversity.
The Congress Centre is off-limits beyond attendees at the Annual Meeting, but anyone able to spend three hours on three trains from Zurich, and find lodgings within striking distance, can walk the Promenade, gain access to many side-events, and rub shoulders with some of the billionaires, CEOs, and politicians trudging through the snow in the same small village. While there are innumerable private meetings, there are also moments for conversation across communities that don’t exist at high-level gatherings in government facilities, private islands, exclusive resorts, or corporate campuses. And not just between the powerful and proletarian. The crowd hails from a range of backgrounds—different parts of the world, ages, and interests—given the enormous scope of Davos and the WEF’s inclusivity efforts. Finally, the Annual Meeting itself is a rare gathering that attracts the highest levels of government officials, corporate executives, intellectuals, and civil society leaders.
Cross-cutting conversations are critical for a healthy appreciation of Accountable AI.
At events dominated by corporate leaders, the business potential of the technology always risks crowding out accountability. Academic conferences are rife with discussions of AI harms, but often don’t include those who most need to hear about them. Government officials may have their hearts in the right place, but they need to understand what is happening on the ground in the real world.
Because these groups are all in Davos this week, the conversations they’re having necessarily include the societal considerations and risks of unfettered AI deployment. (For example, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres used his speech to blast major AI companies for “pursuing profits with a reckless disregard for human rights, personal privacy, and social impact.”) And Davos being Davos, those conversations resonate far and wide through streaming content, media coverage, and social media.
Of course, a weeklong conference can’t solve all the world’s problems. The hubris of Davos may even contribute to them. The best conversations imaginable cannot substitute for the hard, slow, and imperfect processes of legislation, standards development, and regulation, nor the complex technical and management efforts needed to instantiate Accountable AI in organizations. But they can help.