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“People are looking to achieve very big numbers,” said Mohit Joshi, the president of Infosys, a technology and consulting firm that helps other businesses automate their operations. “Earlier they had incremental, 5 to 10 percent goals in reducing their work force. Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?’”

they’ve come up with a long list of buzzwords and euphemisms to disguise their intent. Workers aren’t being replaced by machines, they’re being “released” from onerous, repetitive tasks. Companies aren’t laying off workers, they’re “undergoing digital transformation.”

IBM’s “cognitive solutions” unit, which uses A.I. to help businesses increase efficiency, has become the company’s second-largest division, posting $5.5 billion in revenue last quarter.

The investment bank UBS projects that the artificial intelligence industry could be worth as much as $180 billion by next year.

“On one hand,” he said, profit-minded executives “absolutely want to automate as much as they can.”“On the other hand,” he added, “they’re facing a backlash in civic society.”

In an interview, he said that chief executives were under enormous pressure from shareholders and boards to maximize short-term profits, and that the rapid shift toward automation was the inevitable result.

it’s probably not surprising that all of this automation is happening quietly, out of public view. In Davos this week, several executives declined to say how much money they had saved by automating jobs previously done by humans. And none were willing to say publicly that replacing human workers is their ultimate goal.

Kai-Fu Lee, the author of “AI Superpowers” and a longtime technology executive, predicts that artificial intelligence will eliminate 40 percent of the world’s jobs within 15 years.

Terry Gou, the chairman of the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn, has said the company plans to replace 80 percent of its workers with robots in the next five to 10 years

Richard Liu, the founder of the Chinese e-commerce company JD.com, said at a business conference last year that “I hope my company would be 100 percent automation someday.

One common argument made by executives is that workers whose jobs are eliminated by automation can be “reskilled” to perform other jobs in an organization

There are plenty of stories of successful reskilling — optimists often cite a program in Kentucky that trained a small group of former coal miners to become computer programmers — but there is little evidence that it works at scale

A report by the World Economic Forum this month estimated that of the 1.37 million workers who are projected to be fully displaced by automation in the next decade, only one in four can be profitably reskilled by private-sector programs

The rest, presumably, will need to fend for themselves or rely on government assistance.

In Davos, executives tend to speak about automation as a natural phenomenon over which they have no control, like hurricanes or heat waves. They claim that if they don’t automate jobs as quickly as possible, their competitors will.

these executives can choose how the gains from automation and A.I. are distributed, and whether to give the excess profits they reap as a result to workers, or hoard it for themselves and their shareholders.

“The choice isn’t between automation and non-automation,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, the director of M.I.T.’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. “It’s between whether you use the technology in a way that creates shared prosperity, or more concentration of wealth.”

What Bregman said, put simply, was the Davos emperors have no clothes. They talk a lot about how something must be done about inequality and the need to address social unrest, but cavil at the idea they might be a big part of the problem.

He told his audience that people in Davos talked about participation, justice, equality and transparency, but “nobody raises the issue of tax avoidance and the rich not paying their share. It is like going to a firefighters’ conference and not talking about water.”

He said he is part of a generation not traumatised by the cold war and radicalised by the financial crisis of a decade ago. “When we say what’s needed are higher taxes and the response is ‘that’s communism’, we say ‘whatever’,” he said.

“I am part of a broad social movement. Ten years ago, it would have unimaginable for some random Dutch historian to go viral when talking about taxes. Yet here we are.”

As a historian, Bregman noted the most successful period for capitalism occurred in the years after the second world war, when the top rate of tax in the US was above 90%.

“This is about saving capitalism,” he said. “Most innovation has come about through government spending. During the golden age period [after the second world war], there were way higher taxes on wealth, property, inheritance and top incomes. That’s what we need today if we are going to tame this beast called capitalism.”

“I thought that we needed historians to take the stage and explain what’s going on. When I watched the crisis on TV, the only people being interviewed were economists, and these were the guys that didn’t see it coming. I thought that we needed some historians there, so I left academia,”

He spent a year working on a left-of-centre Dutch paper before joining a new journalism platform that paid him a basic income and provided the freedom to write about anything he chose. Utopia for Realists was the result.

Bregman bridles at being called an optimist. “I prefer the word possibilist,” he said. Optimists are the sort of chief executives found at Davos, who think globalisation is working, neoliberalism is a good idea and inequality is on the decline, he added.

Even the International Monetary Fund has warned of the perils to growth stemming from this gap.

e the governments, companies and elites at Davos to play their part in ending the era of tax havens, which is fuelling economic inequality and preventing hundreds of millions of people lifting themselves out of poverty,"

Edelman found general level of trust in institutions — government, business, media and non-governmental organizations — among college-educated people around the globe up 4 percentage points at 60 percent, its highest level in the survey's 16 year-history. For the wider public, Edelman's trust gauge was up 2 percentage points at 48 percent.It noted that the U.S. has the biggest disparity in trust within its population, followed by Britain and France. Edelman's online survey of 33,000 plus respondents in 28 countries, was conducted between Oct. 13 and Nov. 16, 2015.

in some of capitalism’s most rarefied circles including Harvard Business School, where last fall Seth Klarman, a highly influential billionaire investor, delivered what he described as a “plaintive wail” to the business community to fix capitalism before it was too late.

“It’s a choice to maintain pleasant working conditions . . . or harsh ones; to offer good benefits or paltry ones.” If business leaders didn’t “ask hard questions about capitalism,” he warned that they would be asked by “ideologues seeking to point fingers, assign blame and make reckless changes to the system.

Leading politicians, such as Trump, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), were advocating positions on tariffs, wealth taxes and changes in corporate governance that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

One of the most popular classes at Harvard Business School, home to the next generation of Fortune 500 executives, was a class on “reimagining capitalism.” Seven years ago, the elective started with 28 students. Now there were nearly 300 taking it

“Winners Take All,” a book by Anand Giridharadas, a journalist and former McKinsey consultant, that had hit the bestseller list and was provoking heated arguments in places like Silicon Valley, Davos and Harvard Business School. Giridharadas’s book was a withering attack on America’s billionaire class and the notion that America’s iconic capitalists could use their wealth and creativity to solve big social and economic problems that have eluded a plodding and divided government.

For many of the students, schooled in the notion that business could make a profit while making the world a better place, Giridharadas’s ideas were both energizing and disorienting. Erika Uyterhoeven, a second-year student, recalled one of her fellow classmates turning to her when Giridharadas was finished. “So, what should we do?” her colleague asked. “Is he saying we shouldn’t go into banking or consulting?

Added another student: “There was a palpable sense of personal desperation.”

“The best thing that happened to me was that I lost my 2014 election,” he said. “Had I won . . . maybe I would’ve been a traditional neoliberal. It really forced my self-reflection and it pointed out every weakness I ever had.”

Mixed in with the valley’s usual frothy optimism about disruption and inventing the future was a growing sense that the tech economy had somehow broken capitalism. The digital revolution had allowed tech entrepreneurs to build massive global companies without the big job-producing factories or large workforces of the industrial era. The result was more and more wealth concentrated in fewer hands.

some feared things were only going to get worse. Robots were eliminating much factory work; online commerce was decimating retail; and self-driving cars were on the verge of phasing out truck drivers. The next step was computers that could learn and think.

thinking computers might be able to diagnose diseases better than doctors by drawing on superhuman amounts of clinical research, said Brockman, 30. They could displace a large number of office jobs. Eventually, he said, the job shortages would force the government to pay people to pursue their passions or simply live

To Brockman, a future without work seemed just as likely as one without meat, a possibility that many in the valley viewed as a near certainty. “Once we have meat substitutes as good as the real thing, my expectation is that we’re going to look back at eating meat as this terrible, immoral thing,”

The same could be true of work in a future in an era of advanced artificial intelligence. “We’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was so crazy and almost immoral that people were forced to go and labor in order to be able to survive,’ ” he said

Khanna had a different view. He saw the country’s problems primarily as the product of growing income inequality and a lack of opportunity.

US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who will attend the Davos meeting, rejected the idea that the upheaval in American politics is a threat."I don't think it has any impact on the world economy," Mnuchin told reporters on Wednesday, adding that other political issues such as Britain's departure from the European Union and last year's deadlocked elections in Israel were similarly inconsequential.

"In 2020, we have a combination of negative trend lines that we've not experienced in generations. This deteriorating environment is much more likely to produce a global crisis," warned analysts at Eurasia Group.

And the devastating bush fires in Australia have underscored why concerns about the climate dominate in the longer run. According to the World Economic Forum survey, the top five risks over the next decade all relate to the environment, including increased extreme weather events and the collapse of ecosystems.

After a month in which bushfires have raged out of control in Australia, Brende said there was a need for urgent action.

“Biologically diverse ecosystems capture vast amounts of carbon and provide massive economic benefits that are estimated at $33tn (£25tn) per year – the equivalent to the GDP of the US and China combined. It’s critical that companies and policymakers move faster to transition to a low carbon economy and more sustainable business models.

“We are already seeing companies destroyed by failing to align their strategies to shifts in policy and customer preferences. Transitionary risks are real, and everyone must play their part to mitigate them. It’s not just an economic imperative, it is simply the right thing to do,” he said.

Oxfam blamed rising inequality on aggressive wage restraint, tax dodging and the squeezing of producers by companies, adding that businesses were too focused on delivering ever-higher returns to wealthy owners and top executives.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) said last week that rising inequality and social polarisation posed two of the biggest risks to the global economy in 2017 and could result in the rolling back of globalisation.

Oxfam said the world’s poorest 50% owned the same in assets as the $426bn owned by a group headed by Gates, Amancio Ortega, the founder of the Spanish fashion chain Zara, and Warren Buffett, the renowned investor and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway.

The others are Carlos Slim Helú: the Mexican telecoms tycoon and owner of conglomerate Grupo Carso; Jeff Bezos: the founder of Amazon; Mark Zuckerberg: the founder of Facebook; Larry Ellison, chief executive of US tech firm Oracle; and Michael Bloomberg; a former mayor of New York and founder and owner of the Bloomberg news and financial information service.

“While one in nine people on the planet will go to bed hungry tonight, a small handful of billionaires have so much wealth they would need several lifetimes to spend it. The fact that a super-rich elite are able to prosper at the expense of the rest of us at home and overseas shows how warped our economy has become.”

the WEF released its own inclusive growth and development report in which it said median income had fallen by an average of 2.4% between 2008 and 2013 across 26 advanced nations.

The body that organises the Davos event said rising inequality was not an “iron law of capitalism”, but a matter of making the right policy choices.

The WEF report found that 51% of the 103 countries for which data was available saw their inclusive development index scores decline over the past five years, “attesting to the legitimacy of public concern and the challenge facing policymakers regarding the difficulty of translating economic growth into broad social progress”.

the vast majority of people in the bottom half of the world’s population were facing a daily struggle to survive, with 70% of them living in low-income countries.

“From Brexit to the success of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, a worrying rise in racism and the widespread disillusionment with mainstream politics, there are increasing signs that more and more people in rich countries are no longer willing to tolerate the status quo,” the report said.

Last year, Oxfam said the world’s 62 richest billionaires were as wealthy as half the world’s population. However, the number has dropped to eight in 2017 because new information shows that poverty in China and India is worse than previously thought

The Oxfam report added that since 2015 the richest 1% has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet. It said that over the next 20 years, 500 people will hand over $2.1tn to their heirs – a sum larger than the annual GDP of India, a country with 1.3 billion people. Between 1988 and 2011 the incomes of the poorest 10% increased by just $65, while the incomes of the richest 1% grew by $11,800 – 182 times as much.

Oxfam called for fundamental change to ensure that economies worked for everyone, not just “a privileged few”.

If and when recession comes, the world will have much less room than usual to maneuver.

The world can accept a message that the United States wants a fairer allocation of the burden of upholding the global system, that after a period of weak economic performance America needs to concentrate more efforts at home, and that it will be guided by its economic and security interests, not the promotion of abstract values.

If the short-run concern of those gathered in Davos will be how the world will deal with the next recession, the long-run one has to be declining appeal of democratic global values. In countries as diverse as the United States, Britain, Turkey, Russia, Israel and China, it appears that the governmental platform that commands the most popular support is rooted in nativism, nationalism and negativism. Populist nationalism eventually produces bad economic results, leading to more pressures for anti-establishment leadership and extreme policies.

At the political level, the kind of agreement forged in London in 2009 between the G20 group of most developed countries to keep markets open, support international institutions and cooperate to stimulate their economies seems much more difficult to achieve today. And there is the real risk in many countries that recession would reinforce tendencies toward authoritarian nationalist politics.

But such a message needs to be accompanied by clear signals that the United States will strive to be a reliable and predictable partner, that it understands its interest in strong effective global institutions and that it recognizes that even self-interested nations can benefit from thoughtful diplomacy

Between globalization, the Great Recession, and the not-so-great recovery, the middle class was slammed.

they felt it, too. Manyika’s research team asked more than 6,000 people in the United States, the U.K., and France to describe their economic status. Between one-third and 40 percent of respondents in each country felt that their incomes were falling behind. “And these people tended to blame free trade and immigrants for hurting their wages and ruining their culture,”

Anti-elite sentiment “has become the most potent political force in Europe,” writes Martin Gurri, author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. “It brought Brexit in Britain, electoral defeat to German chancellor Angela Merkel, drove protests in France, shattered so many political coalitions that governed Europe since World War II, and raised to prominence new parties and persons nominally attached to the right or the left but always fractious, sectarian, ‘populist.’”

The changing media landscape is part of the story, too

In other words, saving the American middle class might take a leftist intervention, but saving the world will also require something very much like free-market globalism

iss conference.Right-wing nationalism is the solution that solves nothing. What’s needed instead is a movement that doesn’t just succeed in outraging voters, but actually seeks to use government to address the source of their outrage.

some members of the American left seem to be pointing to a compromise: a new system of universal guarantees supported by higher taxes and higher peacetime deficits in this context of a capitalist system

For all the hatred directed toward the Davos crowd, there will be no economic growth in the West without policies that promote entrepreneurship and innovation.

any realistic plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy will almost surely require the sort of commercial technological breakthroughs that tend to come from private entrepreneurs tinkering with the products of publicly funded research

And to reduce global emissions, the United States will have to share its eco-technology with China, southeastern Asian countries, and African nations, which account for most of the growth in future emissions

Globalization and poor governance created the conditions in which nativist insurgencies can grow. Social networks made it possible for political cults to organize around outrage.

For years government elites could silence political outsiders by denying them an audience. In the late 20th century, the Democratic and Republican Parties were terrifically effective at marshaling elite power to shape public opinion during the presidential-election process. Voters didn’t select candidates at random; rather, as political scientists like to say, “the parties decided” on the favored candidates and used their power to funnel voters toward these insiders.

That was before the Cambrian explosion of digital media made it impossible for insiders to control their nomination processes

nativist movements are gaining power by opposing the values of openness and empiricism. These nativists have often thrived by arguing that free markets and globalization have impoverished the middle class and destroyed all sense of national identity or sovereignty.

What’s more, taxing the rich to fund universalist programs directly addresses middle-class insecurities caused by global capitalism—unlike, say, building a giant border wall. Free markets without income security have been a recipe for instability. So have socialist policies that stamp out free markets.

But there’s a good reason that commentators tend to lump together Trump, Brexit, and other “populists” and “populist” movements: They’re built to oppose rather than lead, and right now it’s fair to say they’re in a shambles, unable to fulfill their nativist promises. In the U.K., Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal was voted down in humiliating fashion. In the United States, Trump’s record-breaking government shutdown led not to a wall but to declining poll numbers for the president. Both May and Trump had to cancel their appearances at the Sw

“All this has happened chiefly because countries—from China to India to Ethiopia—have adopted more market-friendly policies,” the CNN host Fareed Zakaria wrote in The Washington Post.

At a conference symbolizing the promise of capitalism, every non-plutocrat is fighting for scraps.

Shell has a three-year target beginning in 2019 to reduce its carbon footprint by 2-3%, while ExxonMobil has invested $9 billion over almost two decades in lower-emission energy solution

The cost of developing these technologies represent an investment in companies' ability to prosper in the long term, the report said.

"As of today, around 15% of global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions come from the process of getting oil and gas out of the ground and to consumers. A large part of these emissions can be brought down relatively quickly and easily," he said.

"The first immediate task for all parts of the industry is reducing the carbon footprint of their own operations," said Birol.

The seven largest oil and gas companies account for just 12% of oil and gas reserves, 15% of production and 10% of emissions from industry operations, according to the report.

The International Energy Agency's report will be presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday.

Other pundits and entrepreneurs say concerns about the tech are overblown and risk pushing regulators to block innovations that could help people and boost tech company profits.

Last year, politicians and policymakers around the world also grappled to make sense of how AI will fit into society. Congress held multiple hearings. President Biden issued an executive order saying AI was the “most consequential technology of our time.” The United Kingdom convened a global AI forum where Prime Minister Rishi Sunak warned that “humanity could lose control of AI completely.” The concerns include the risk that “generative” AI — which can create text, video, images and audio — can be used to create misinformation, displace jobs or even help people create dangerous bioweapons.

More seriously, the worry is that America is abandoning the economic leadership that saw it champion free markets. Here is Erik Nielsen of Unicredit, an Italian bankI don’t think we can escape the conclusion that “the free world” has lost its leader. After all, a leader needs followers, and who’ll follow someone whose guiding principle is “me first”? To define his “America first” mantra, President Trump announced “two simple rules: Buy American and hire American”, and he promised that “America will start winning again, winning like never before”. Donald Trump’s world is principle-free and transactional. Every interaction is a zero-sum game with a winner and a loser—and the US will win “like never before”. Good luck, trade negotiators from the rest of the world…

Jan Dehn of Ashmore, an emerging markets investment groupRevealing a shocking degree of economic illiteracy, US President Donald Trump claimed in his inaugural speech that protection will lead to great strength and prosperity”. His bleak, defensive and atypically American vision of pessimism and defeatism was a de facto abdication of America’s erstwhile role as undisputed global leader on economic issues. By contrast, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s message at Davos spelled out a positive and ambitious agenda of openness and support for globalisation with the words “protection is like locking yourself in a dark room”

the fact that China is aspiring to global leadership is significant. In the brief unipolar period of the 1990s, it was possible to believe that counties would aspire to the liberal democratic model. But China’s growth has been so strong that many countries may feel they can get prosperity without the messy democratic stuff. The Iraq war, the financial financial crisis of 2008 and now the election of the mercurial Mr Trump have not been great adverts for the American system.

In a splendid piece for the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman worries that:If the Trump administration now destroys American credibility, it will have handed the Russian and Chinese governments a victory of historic proportions. The cold war was a battle not just about economics or military strength, but also about the truth. The Soviet Union collapsed, in the end, partly because it was too obvious that it was a regime based on lies.

Taken literally, Tillerson’s proposed approach would violate international law and require a naval blockade, which would be an act of war, experts said.

After the hearing, lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gave Tillerson a chance to clarify what they assumed was an ill-informed gaffe, but neither he nor the White House took up the offer, aides told Foreign Policy.

The bellicose words on the South China Sea follow a host of other provocative statements and actions by Trump since his election. H

The idea behind Trump’s approach seems to be that the United States has been weak in its dealings with Beijing, and that a strong hand is needed. Experts said the Trump administration is testing the hypothesis that if the Washington simply gets tougher with China, Beijing will back down.

Washington and Beijing could be headed on a collision course, as both countries could be overestimating their own power and misjudging how the other side will respond, former officials and policy analysts said.

“They have been signaling subtly but clearly that they have cards to play as well and that they’re not going to back down,” one congressional aide said.

military leaders are not keen on provoking tensions with China or threatening a naval blockade that Washington won’t be ready to enforce.

Even as it seeks to squeeze China, the Trump administration has lost crucial economic and diplomatic leverage in the region by abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed 12-nation trade pact with strong support among Asian allies and partners. It offered a counterbalance to Beijing’s economic heft, particularly among countries with rival claims in the South China Sea.

China is trying to fill the void, eagerly expanding its own trade grouping to attract countries like Japan and Malaysia. For Asian states gauging U.S. power, “their measuring stick isn’t just one or two aircraft carriers, it’s trade flows,” the congressional staffer said.

Allies are dismayed by the administration’s embrace of protectionism, its aggressive and improvised rhetoric toward China, and the wide gap between the president’s views and those of his Cabinet, said diplomats and former official

long-established allies are looking at exploring other trade and diplomatic options if the U.S. loses its status as a reliable partner.

While Tokyo and other foreign capitals have been reassured somewhat by officials named or expected to serve in the Trump administration on Asia policy, the president’s unpredictable tweets and impulsive policy making are a source of anxiety.