 on the internet. My family was fortunate to have a computer. And I remember sneaking up to the computer room in my house and stealing my parents' AOL login. And it took forever. I see some nodding heads that would make all these noises. You had to use the telephone line. Boom, you're finally on. And even then, as a 15-year-old, I recognized that it was worth stealing my parents' login because there was something interesting going on on the internet. And I would be missing out if I didn't have it. And I would berate my sister for picking up the phone and interrupting the line and cutting the connection. And where I'm going with this is to try to say that even in those early days of the digital revolution, the digital economy, we understood that there was going to be this massive divide between people who were online and people who were not. And as a global community, we've done a pretty good job of trying to solve that divide. The United Nations recently said that half of the world population now has access to the online and digital world, which is a pretty good milestone. We still obviously have a long way to go. But what we're here today to talk about on this panel is some of the divides and inequalities that have popped up that we didn't anticipate back in the 1990s and early 2000s. So to begin, we're going to do what I like to call a lightning round. So we're going to give everybody on the panel, maybe 20 to 30 seconds, to tell us, in your mind, in your thinking, what is the number one top divide that you see from the digital economy that's really concerning to you, that's really on your mind? We'll start with Keith. Well, thank you, Heather. Look, I think we obviously live in this world where we have massive digital transformation in this fourth industrial revolution. And this is very different than any of the other industrial revolution, because the convergence of all these amazing technologies has created opportunity and divide, as you suggested. And probably the thing that I think about that is not so much a technology. It's society, government, public sector, private sector working together hand in glove to effectively absorb those technologies, not just provide access to that technology, which of course is important because that will drive opportunity and quality and eliminate that divide. But how do we absorb this technology so that we make sure that people are reskilled in the workforce, that people are able to embrace that technology, that we don't have massive job loss without massive job creation? And sort of that transition, that's the sort of thing that keeps me up at night. It's not any one technology because there will always be new technologies. I think we've learned that. Gail, we'll keep going. All right, so the gulf I'm the most focused on is urban rural. Even in the United States, one in four rural Americans will tell you that access to equality of the internet is a problem. Globally, about 85% of households have access to the internet. Now that's households, so that qualifies a bit larger than individuals. But if you break that down, in Africa it's on average 18%, in least developed countries it's about 14%. In least developed countries, the biggest gap is in rural areas, and that's what those countries rely on the rural economies to develop. So if we have no access there, we're gonna have highly distorted economies that don't work. First of all, I would say that there are many reasons to be optimistic. And I think there is a great deal of progress that's going on in the world today on this topic. The thing that we're worried and concerned about is actually the skill shortage because of the rate and pace at which the world is digitally transforming. And that is very much a topic where everyone has to be included because we can't overlook anyone when we deal with the question of how do we create all the skills required for the future? I wanna double down on what Michael said. There's actually a lot of reasons for optimism. And I wanna, I know those panelists can be talking about all the challenges, but we shouldn't lose the message that we need more technology and we need to grow the pie bigger. That said, there are some challenges that are getting in the way, and I think we'll slow down tech progress if we don't address them. And a lot of them have to do with inequality. While technology makes the pie bigger, there's no economic law that says everyone's gonna get a share of that or even everyone's going to benefit. And unfortunately, the challenge that I've been worrying about a lot, and Andrew McAfee and I write in the second machine age, is that median income has stagnated, which means about half of the population in the US and other developed countries has not been participating in this bounty that the digitization has created. And that's visible not just in the economic statistics, but if you look at the opioid crisis, life expectancy in that part of the distribution hasn't kept up. And we are seeing a backlash that's resulting from that. So we need to work harder to not just make the pie bigger, but to make sure that in principle, everybody could be getting better off. The rich could be getting richer, the middle class can be getting richer, the poor can be getting richer. It all adds up, but we haven't been doing it. And the last thing I wanna just say on that is that it's really not the technology that's doing this, it's the way we're using the technology. The technology is a tool that can be used in lots of different ways. And I don't think we've been using it as effectively as we could be to make sure that there's more shared prosperity. From my perspective, I think a digital literacy, I think is the biggest divide, right? From a digital literacy perspective. I think the biggest opportunity and an area where we can make the biggest impact will be in the area of skill development. I think some very startling statistics, for example, 65% of the primary school children, when they get into workforce, they'll be doing things that none of us have heard of, right? 50% of the work that's being done today can be automated by technologies that are already available. That's equivalent to 15 trillion of wages. So these are some very, very long-term consequences that are there. And I think the biggest impact can get created by focusing on skill development, I would think so. I agree with much of this. But the divide I'm most focused on is the emerging gap between the data capabilities of the private sector, which are immense and growing exponentially, and the lack of those capabilities in the public, civic, and non-profit sector. And I think we have an obligation, those companies and those of us who are focused on technology and harnessing the power of technology to also create the opportunity for those skills to be applied by the public, civic, and non-profit sector on some of the globe's most significant social and economic challenges. Yeah, that's great. There's so many different issues that have come up, but the common theme, the most common thread, is definitely the skill shortage. Maybe Michael Dell will go to you first, since you were more optimistic than most, perhaps. What's your advice to the millions of workers who have lost a job to automation? Well, look, I think, you know, if I look at what's going on in the world today, I don't know if robots per capita is a measurement, but if it were, it seems to me the countries that are most roboticized actually have the lowest unemployment rates. So I'm not convinced that, and you've written about this quite extensively, I'm not convinced that technology is necessarily a big part of the problem. We do need to develop skills, I think. Companies play a big role here. I mean, we've invested $50 million in STEM. We are spending $3 billion plus a year with diverse and small suppliers. We have our Women's Entrepreneur Network now in its ninth year, and so every company will have examples like that. I think all of us collectively can do quite a lot to create opportunities so that everyone is included in this growth. And it's going to require lots of new skills, lots of new capabilities, and, you know, it's, from our perspective, we see a shortage of talent and a shortage of skills, and the only answer to that is not to take them from the other companies because the math just doesn't work. You have to hire them, train them, and grow them from within the company, and you have to retrain and reskill the existing workforce. Yeah, let's dig into how we do that, because almost everyone here at Davos has made the point that we need to upskill and reskill and moreskill, however you want to say it. And yet, there haven't been a lot of tangible discussion about exactly how do you do that. CVK, I see you nodding a lot. Why don't you jump in? Yeah, I think, see, we are a technology services company, right? We employ 130,000 people, and technology is changing at such a random pace. So it's hard to get skills that we really need for cybersecurity, analytics, and big data, and things like that. So the biggest theme that I tell my teams, I really picked this inspiration from Alvin Toffler. It says that illiterate of the 21st century is not the one who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. I think the emphasis is on continuous learning. I think as businesses, we are doing a lot of things to enable and train our employees to upskill themselves and learn new things. I think the biggest opportunity is the people who are getting into the workforce are really not well-trained on some of the new skills that are really required. That's what I called as digital literacy in some of the emerging areas. The academics need to focus a lot more in making the graduates highly employable and well-trained. I think that's where the biggest opportunity is. So you see a more of a role for the government to improve education. I'm the academia. Yeah, okay. I think businesses, because it's so compelling on them to fulfill the service demand, they will anyway continue to do whatever they need to do. But I think it's just, again, a lot of relearning for people who are coming out of educational system to learn new skills. I think it's better that we put a lot of focus in training them in the right manner so that they're highly productive when they hit the workforce. Keith, can you jump in on this in terms of what role private sector should play versus government in this reskilling? Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting to hear my fellow panelists talk about this. Personally, I don't think this falls just on the private sector. I don't think this falls just on the government. In fact, I would say that as a model for the future. I think that's the world that we live in. I think there has to be this hand and glove situation where there's a partnership between both parts of society to make this work. As CEOs and leaders, we are keenly focused on reskilling the workforce. I think certainly in the United States and parts of the world, we're trying to focus on STEM education in K through eight or K through 12, and I think that's important. We also have to remember that we have to think about people who are already in the workforce. We saw something in the United States in the last few weeks where we had a large automotive manufacturer who's announced they're laying off thousands of people. And you have to wonder or ask yourself what part did the government play in terms of providing an environment, providing a process, providing programs or economic incentives to reskill those workforces that have been displaced, as opposed to just saying those jobs are being eliminated. As private corporations, certainly Salesforce, one of the things that we've done is we have a learning platform called Trailhead. And as we take our customers through digital transformation, we offer reskilling programs as well. So it's not just the digital transformation. It's also those people who may be displaced. And what does that look like? Like, is that sort of people go to a two or three week power camp or is it? Well, it's all online. But essentially, as Michael said, the problem isn't the availability of jobs, it's matching the skill sets to those jobs. So we have to make sure that those skills are available because the jobs are there. I mean, look, the net net is that we have to get into a motion. And that motion is both public sector and private sector in terms of getting used to this new technology is coming, it's coming, it's coming. So we have to be reskilling and reskilling and reskilling. This is not one and done. This is something that is continuous. Michael Froman. Yeah, I wanted to jump in there because I think the historic model we've had of people being trained for 20 years, working for a company for 40 years and then retiring for 20 years is probably somewhat outdated. And we need platforms that allow for lifelong learning. It's great if you work for a company that provides you that training and those forward-leaning companies are really at the leading edge. But for those who are holding down two or three part-time jobs, gig economy jobs, none of which are providing benefits. And at least in the United States, there's not a robust training program for folks like that. Having some platform that allows for portable benefits, whether it's coming from the government or from employers or philanthropies and allows people to have a lifelong learning capacity is going to be critical. Yeah, that's great. Eric, I want to jump to you. You made a slightly different point than the others. You went to the notion of wages and wage inequality and your colleague at MIT, David Outor, has done a lot of work talking about how this digital economy has basically eliminated the middle-class type of jobs. We now have a lot of high-paying jobs and a lot of lower-paying jobs and what we're really losing out is in the middle. How's that the stage for us in this fourth industrial revolution? Is that trend likely to get worse? It's going to change. I think that the technology continues to advance as we've heard and the sets of skills continue to change. And at the same time as there are people and companies that can't find the workers with the right sets of skills, there are other workers that have spent their lives in doing one kind of job where machines can now do big parts or even all of those jobs. And so this is the essence of the mismatch and simultaneously have people who are finding their jobs automated at the same time technology is creating other new jobs. In the past 20 years, as David Outor pointed out, a lot of that has happened in the routine information processing work. Clerks, people doing information processing work that machines can now do. And a lot of those are middle-wage, middle-skill kinds of jobs and those started disappearing. In more recent work, we've been doing with Tom Mitchell and others that just came out in science. We're looking at the types of tasks that machine learning affects. And for better or worse, it's a much broader spectrum of jobs. At one end, you see radiologists and medical imaging being able to identify cancer as effectively or more effectively than highly trained medical professionals. At the other end, some of the tasks that were relatively immune, some of the physical manipulation type tasks that used to be machines couldn't do, now machines are learning how to do them as well. So there's parts of tasks all up and down the spectrum that are being affected. At the same time, I think it's very important to understand, we are very far from artificial general intelligence or what you see in Hollywood, where machines can do everything. And I think it's many decades away. And the folks who are talking about a massively jobless future, that is not the relevant question for now, if it ever will be. The relevant question right now is that there's so much work that only humans can do. A lot of the caring work, a lot of creative work and a lot of interpersonal work. And what we've got to do is find ways to retrain and repurpose the workforce towards those massive problems that we have in those areas even as some of the other jobs disappear. Yeah. I want to stay on the inequality theme for a second. There are growing calls to address these inequalities, particularly the wage inequality, with more taxes. In particular, in the United States, there's been a call by Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez to tax people earning over 10 million at a 70% tax rate. The current top rate in the United States is 37%. Michael Dell, do you support this? I just want to say I'm thrilled that they're asking me. Wow. Well, look, I mean, my wife and I set up a foundation about 20 years ago and we would have contributed quite a bit more than a 70% tax rate on my income, on my annual income. And I feel much more comfortable with our ability as a private foundation to allocate those funds than I do giving them to the government. All right. So no, I'm not supportive of that. Well, Keith. And I don't think it would help the growth of the US economy. Oh, that's interesting. And can you say a little bit more about why? Why you don't think it would... Well, name a country where that's worked, ever. United States. Briefly in the 80s. No, no, no. From about the 1930s through about the 1960s, the tax rate averaged about 70%. At times it was up as high as 95%. And those were actually pretty good years for growth. So I don't have a strong opinion on that proposal. A lot of the devil is in the details. But I think it's... There's actually a lot of economics that suggests that it's not necessarily going to hurt growth. And I think we have to examine it more closely. There are people, Joe Stiglitz and others, who have looked at that and argued that the optimal tax rate actually is on very high incomes, closer to that level. Well, that's a debate we're gonna be continuing to have, I think, in the United States. But there's another part of the debate, and that's the notion of whether companies, particularly in the tuck space, but across industries, are paying their fair share. And that calls the United States for, and actually in Germany, Chancellor Merkel made it earlier today, a call for some sort of minimal tax on corporations. So you couldn't find ways to lower your tax by going to different jurisdictions or whatnot. There would be some sort of minimum international tax. Keith, let's turn to you. Is that something that you could potentially support? Obviously the rate would be very important, but is that a part of this message of trying to solve some of these inequalities and pay the fair share? Well, I can't tell you how thrilled I am that we're gonna be talking about tax policy on this panel. So it's, and I wholeheartedly, actually I do align very much with what Michael's saying. Look, I think the government has to play its part. And certainly as a responsible corporation, we would adhere to any sort of tax policy that was put in place by any country throughout the globe. I think the thing that we have to look at is let's look at the root issue. The root issue is opportunity. The root issue is equality. And that starts with accessibility. And to the point of providing accessibility to technology, technology is the great equalizer. If people have access to technology, there is so much opportunity to create jobs, to create wealth, to do the right thing as good corporate citizens, to be good citizens of this world. So it's an easy fix, I think, for many people to say, well, let's just tax. And I really think the longer, more strategic play is, how do we provide equality through access to technology that can enable growth and enable opportunity and enable equality? And I think that's where we should be really focusing our attention. But how do we make that access happen? Again, that's the tricky part. I think a lot of that is through education. And I come back to what I said earlier. I think there has to be a public-private partnership on this. I learned this morning that Canada has allocated a billion dollars. The country of Canada has allocated a billion dollars towards education and reskilling. Now, is a billion dollars the right answer? I don't know. But the thought of a country saying, look, we're gonna work together with the private sector to reskill people and make sure that when there is displacement, that these skills are in place so that people can participate, people need to be able to participate. We need to create a platform for them to participate. And I think that's the answer. But it can't just be the government. It just can't be the private sector. It has to be together. Gail and Michael from it. I wanna bring you two in on this. And this was a point you made earlier, Michael. And that's this notion of what is the corporate responsibility to work with government and whether it's sharing data or sharing resources or sharing in this training. And in the United States, we just had a bit of this debate during the Amazon HQ2 search. And once those cities were selected, people were really asking what obligations to companies have, especially in the tech space when they, to that community that they decide to locate in. And so I'm curious to hear what you think sort of tech is obligated to do. Well, I think we very much have to make it possible for the technology and the capacity that the private sector is developing to be made available for public purposes. And we announced yesterday a major new philanthropic initiative with the Rockefeller Foundation to build a new field of data science for social impact that'll be about creating leadership and capabilities and tools and focus on policy and governance to bridge that gap. The challenge is you take a city in the United States, they may have a ton of data, but they may not have any data scientists who can clean the data, use the data, analyze the data, put it to good use for public policy purposes. And I think the private sector, we're working with a lot of cities to help them with their data to be able to make better economic development decisions to attract investment into some of the more distressed areas of their town. I think that's one example. But I would say just to go back to Keith's point earlier, financial inclusion is a key area. This was about inclusion and digital globalization. We're working with Queen Maxima and a group of CEOs to really drive commercially sustainable financial inclusion efforts. And using digitization to be able to digitize the relationship between a micro merchant and its supplier so it can buy more, it can get credit, it can join the financial system for the first time. Or helping an individual who's a worker in a factory who's currently getting paid cash and is not safe, not secure, not able to pay their bills, being able to put them into the digital economy, that's a first step towards financial security and digitalization makes that possible. So I think the tools are there. I'm on the optimistic end of the spectrum that the digitalization is creating tremendous opportunities for inclusion, but we all have to be focused on how to make that happen. Yeah, Gail, do you wanna jump in on that? Yeah, so look, income inequality, rising income inequality is dangerous. Sharp and acute digital inequality will prove very dangerous. And it may, you can have any point of entry. It may be a moral point of view that it is simply wrong that millions and millions of people have no access and no hope of access. It may be an economic argument that the sustainability of small businesses, medium-sized businesses, and indeed some big companies may not be viable if we've got that level of acute digital inequality. And it may be a security argument because the kinds of tensions we are seeing around the world now that are revolving increasingly about the pie are gonna grow more acute when it's a digital pie. So what do we do about it? I don't think ad hoc solutions as good as they may be individually are gonna solve this. We've gotta think systemically. I would throw out two things. One is measuring, you talked about digital literacy. We don't measure where we are on digitization and inclusion in the right way. Who's got a phone doesn't really tell you what you need to know. We gotta think about how do we measure in a way that's gonna tell us what we need to know about where to fill gaps? The second is, and this is where there's great optimism but I think we're missing an opportunity. I lived for a long time in East Africa. Somalia had digital phones and a network before any country in that region. Why? Those are the most entrepreneurial creative people I've ever seen in my life. They live in harsh conditions. They essentially invented it. The use of telephones in markets in rural Uganda was because people wanted to know poor farmers before they went to market what the guy was gonna buy their tomatoes for so they could start to influence that price, start cutting out middlemen. The kinds of not only creativity and entrepreneurialism which are available among the poor are extensive but they're the ones who know what the applications are that they need to change their lives and I think we have a little bit of a tendency. I've certainly done it. I know exactly what those people need. I have never been a poor rural farmer and we've gotta figure out ways, I think, to go to those who don't have a big enough piece of the pie with basic digital literacy. They can invent all sorts of ways that can give them paths towards greater equality. So I think we've gotta do that also. Yeah, that's really powerful. Does anyone else want to say a little bit more and want to jump in on how we do that? I think everyone's nodding when you say we want to give that digital literacy around the world. I think the measurement is really, really important because I think the discussions, when I listen to a discussion here or in New York and then in a rural area of the development, they're very different discussions and the assumptions are different about what people need. The other thing is we've gotta figure out how do you cut out the middleman, essentially? How do you create a space? There's a difference between being uneducated and being ignorant and there are a lot of people who don't have a good education but they're very smart about what they need to do to change their lives and we've gotta figure out ways to hear from them. The creativity I have seen on the ground among some of the poorest people I've ever met in my life about whether it's applications, whether it's platforms that have been created, I served in the US government with Mike for many years. We used a platform in the Haiti earthquake that was developed in Kenya. I could use mobile money when I lived in Africa before I could when I moved to Washington D.C. So how do we not go to them and say it's great, we wanna do a small fund for entrepreneurs but do the kinds of things that will allow them to help shape what is needed? I think the same applies to the United States. Mike, I think a lot of what you're doing in this partnership could do that kind of thing. Well, you sort of touched on this issue and maybe we'll go there and that's the notion that one of the biggest criticisms of the tech world is that it is mostly white men who are sitting in a handful of locations around the United States or in some cases maybe London or other places and that how can we be more inclusive when that's the people who are the architects of the digital economy right now. And so I'm curious, I won't put anybody on the spot in particular but if somebody wants to jump in about whether this, how we can change, how we can change and make the face of technology more inclusive as well. The panel looks quite white, I'm sure. And pretty male. I think every company, every business is looking at promoting gender diversity and racial diversity. I think that's a core charter. Even at HCL, we have a 25% diversity, gender diversity and we want to continually enhance it. Like there is a massive program around localization of our workforce. Today about two-thirds of our workforce in the US and Europe are locals and rest of them come from other parts of the world. So we're trying to see how can we create more awareness on STEM, how can we kind of be part of the educational ecosystem to get more workforce. And just picking up on the point that Gail made about how do you measure digital literacy. I think that's a very, very important question. I don't think there's going to be just one single answer. There are many dimensions like phone connectivity, internet. They're very infrastructure oriented. But if you really look at skills, the world is, every business is becoming a digital business. So I would say software programming is one very, very basic skill that should be a good measure of digital literacy. I think almost half the world should be very familiar on how to write a code. I think that in my mind is a big equalizer that will make you relevant in any scenario to kind of relearn and adapt yourself to the changing demands of the technology world. Eric, you're... Yeah, and this is a place where the technology is proposing challenges, but it's also creating a lot of the solutions. I mean, this tool is giving access to people around the world to digital information. A child in East Africa can have more real time, broader set of information than the president of the United States could have 20 or 30 years ago. And we're delivering a lot of courses. There are... MIT is making their courses available for free online, Udacity, Coursera, others. There's a kid in Mongolia who took one of our circuits courses. 140,000 people took it. He got a perfect score on that. He was 16 years old. He would not have been able to have access to that kind of information before these tools were available. I think we're still in the early stages of making that kind of knowledge and information available. One of the next stages is not simply making it available, but personalizing it with artificial intelligence so that different people learn at different rates of different strengths and weaknesses and we can customize it in a way. I think that is going to massively accelerate the learning. And the last thing is it's a two-way learning that we can not only simply broadcast it from MIT or wherever, but there are billions of brains out there that know a lot of information, like what is like to be a poor rural farmer that I don't know about. And they're able to share that information with each other and tips and tricks. These tools for creating marketplaces in commodities and cutting out the middleman have had a huge effect. There have been a number of economic papers about that. So we have a set of tools that have the potential to change things a lot. I still think we're in the early days of it. And what's needed is not simply the technology, but reinvention of some of the way we work markets and the skills and the way we do education. I think inside our companies, many of us are doing quite a lot on this front and have been for decades or more to improve. I also think we shouldn't overlook the role that technology is playing in enabling small businesses and medium businesses to scale up much more rapidly. And those are tending to be far more women-owned and diverse. And we're certainly quite involved in a number of programs to do that as are many others. If I may jump in on this, because I think it is very, very important. I mean, look, this whole issue around diversity and inclusion, there's no end of job on this. And I really think it has to become part of our cultures as corporations. And it has to be part of everybody's consciousness. And that's just a reality. And it's something that we have to focus in on every day. And it's not just talking about it. You actually have to take action. One of the things that I would self-apply to Salesforce here is that when we looked at equal pay, every year we go back, we look at our payroll and we say equal pay for the same job. So you actually are changing. We're doing it. And we will continue to do it until we stamp this out. But that just, and of course, and we're raising the level of consciousness inside our corporation and outside the corporation. So it's one thing to talk about it and a lot of good stuff is happening here. And I applaud all the actions that everybody has taken, but we have to actually take action. And we did the same about a decade ago. Yeah, just one more very important point is, I think one point which we are all missing is technology can really solve some of the problems at very, very large scale. I think that's something which we should not undermine. And one brilliant example that I can give is government of India implemented a unique identity for citizens, for 1.2 billion people which is simple and secure. And I mean, which is biometric, which is more advanced than any other ID system that's there in the developed world. And it's just open source technology which enabled it. And we had a big role to play in implementing the program. So most challenges can be, we can take a shot at solving them with technology at the core. Yeah, I would say that. I want to touch on one more thing before we do wrap up question and open up to the audience. Michael Frome, maybe we'll push this to you. Michael Dell had brought up small and mid-sized businesses two years ago on the stage at Davos, Jack Ma had brought up the point that he thinks that the digital economy is controlled by a small number of companies and it actually makes it very difficult. There's a divide where it's really hard for small and mid-sized companies to be able to break in and to be able to take advantage in the way that we all thought they would be able to once they get online and get access. I guess, do you see that, believe that is a problem? Is one of those companies Alibaba or? Yeah. Sure, very good. Is that a small company or a? Very good. Look, I think what we're seeing is that digitalization is creating a lot of competition as well. I mean, I'll talk about the payment space which I'm closest to, but certainly there are some incumbent players, but there's a slew of new FinTech players. And of course, Alipay and WeChat, who are dominant in their own markets for a number of reasons. And I think we're seeing more and more competition and that's good. As people move from cash to digital and electronic payments, we're gonna see more and more people come into the area with greater innovation and that'll be to the benefit of the consumer and to small businesses in the ecosystem. And we partner with FinTech all the time and we look forward to working with more and more entrants into the market. Yeah. All right, we're gonna do another lightning round to give everybody a chance to weigh in and then we'll open the floor up to questions and comments we're eager to hear from you. And we'll try to be a little bit more uplifting. So we'll go with this lightning round. What gives you hope? What gives you the most hope that we can bridge some of these digital inclusion problems? And since we started with Keith on the hot seat, we'll start at the other end with Michael. Yeah, I'm very hopeful. We're very focused right now on digitizing the base of the pyramid. And what do you mean by that base? People at the very lowest end of the economic spectrum. We committed a few years ago to bring 500 million new people into the financial system and 40 million new micro merchants into the financial system. We're about two thirds of the way there on the individuals and we're well on our way there on the merchants. And it's only possible because of digitization. And so for us to work, for example, with Gavi to digitalize a parent's relationship to the vaccinations of their children to keep track of their vaccinations or to work with UNICEF on helping parents pay school fees in an electronic way and manage their school fees so their kids can stay in school and graduate or to bring farmers into the global market through our farmers network. Or as I mentioned, bringing micro merchants into the financial system so they can get credit for the first time. All of that is only possible because of digitization. And I think there's a great opportunity there. And the challenge is digitalization is transforming the global economy. But I'll put my old hat on. We also see new forms of protectionism coming up, new innovative forms of protectionism with countries jumping to ideas around nationalizing the internet, creating a vulcanized internet. And I think governments very much have legitimate concerns around privacy and data and how to properly manage it and protect it. I hope we'll get more questions on that. But there may be ways of getting there without actually creating barriers to innovation that will be against their interests in the long run. CBK. Yeah, I'm very optimistic that digital divide can be bridged relatively easier than the physical divide. For example, today we have access to internet for half the world population. But we still don't have access to safe drinking water for 30% of our population and even safe sanitation for 60% of our world population. So the physical divide is a lot more complex and a lot more difficult to solve. And digital divide, while internet has been a need in the last couple of decades or three decades, we've bridged the gap significantly. So I am really optimistic about solving some of these challenges. You know, if you look at the arc of history, we are 50 to 100 times wealthier than our ancestors a couple hundred years ago. And the reason for that is because technology, not because we work so much harder, it's because technology has given us much better tools. We now have the most awesome tools ever in these digital technologies and artificial intelligence. So you have to be hopeful that we are able to change the world in a bigger and better way than ever before. But also, I want to temper that with what I said. The outset, there's nothing automatic about these tools leading to more prosperity or more shared prosperity. It's going to depend on our choices. It's not the tools that decide, it's we that decide. And those choices are going to depend ultimately on our values. So what gives me hope is that we're having a panel discussion like this where we're grappling with what kind of a world do we want to build. And I don't know, maybe I'm naive, but I'm ultimately optimistic. And when we think carefully about what our values are, we're going to decide to make the right choices and use these tools to create not just prosperity, but shared prosperity. I am also very optimistic. I think if you look at the last 30 years, the general state of the world and the outcomes for most people have improved far more than anyone would have expected. So I think of it as the digital opportunity. And I think we're just at the beginning of that as we look out toward a whole new wave of technologies that are just arriving. The other thing that gives me great hope and optimism is that the rising generation doesn't see it the way the old folks may have seen it enough. I guess we can include ourselves in that. So in our own company, for example, the rising generation is far more diverse than ever before. And all of that gives me great hope. So I would certainly echo that, because I think it's also a generation that's more worldly and has had more access to more things. I'm always optimistic, because I find that pessimism, I don't know what job I would pursue if I was a pessimist. But I think there are two things that give me hope that are things, I think, pages we can take from the development field on this. And one is one of the things we've learned is that where is there is a model of success? People want to follow it. And we've seen that consistently. So that when you are doing what you're doing on income inequality, making it public and setting the example, when more companies are doing more things like that, there will be companies that want to follow. And there will be companies that will be urged to follow by this rising generation. That's a good trend, I think. The second is something we've learned from the health field, which is where we've probably seen some of the greatest also the most measurable gains in global development. And that is that additives were good at topping up the numbers. But what really changed the game was when there was enough capacity building that meant that people could start to own and then manage their health systems. And I think there's an opportunity to bridge this huge, and I think growing divide, digital divide around the world if we figure out how do we build the capacity so the playing field is a bit more equal going forward. We know how to do it. And I'm an optimist, so I think if given the choice, we'll do it. Final thoughts, Keith. Well, look, I think that technology is setting the table for our future. And I very much echo what Michael said. I think we have to look at a younger generation who views things through a very different lens. They're more community minded. They care about how they live. They care about their environment. They care about other people in a different way. And I get very optimistic when I get to spend time with these people, because they just bring a different perspective. And it's a cliche, but everything is in their hands. They understand technology. They understand the implications of technology. And we all have made decisions. Some of them have been good decisions. Some of them are opportunities to make better decisions. But when you sit down and you work with these people, people in the YPO, others, entrepreneurs, founders, they have a lot of great ideas. And I think that they will figure out a way to leverage this technology to improve things. And it's more of a stakeholder theory play than just a classic, what's good for the corporation play. So I think there's a lot of reason to be optimistic. On that note, let's open it up to the floor. Please state your name and your organization or affiliation. We'll start over here. I think there's some microphones. Yep, this gentleman here. Hi, everyone. I'm Isham Sabir, a global shaper from San Francisco. And I lived in a tech capital of the world where there are more than 7,000 people living on the streets, and it's a kind of digital divide that I feel we haven't really spoken of here. Do you think that there's a role for your companies to play in bridging that digital divide? Well, you're the Silicon Valley person. Yeah, so I'll take that one. So look, absolutely, I live in San Francisco. We see the situation every day. If you're familiar with Proposition C, some of you may not be familiar with it. But there is a terrible homeless situation in many cities and certainly in San Francisco. And you can go through many of the streets in San Francisco, and you'll see people living in a terrible condition. Salesforce is very values-based as a company. We've taken a very strong position with Mark's leadership on this and Proposition C and getting the homeless off the street and providing for them and giving them opportunities. And I think that is step one. And that is part of corporate responsibility and giving back to the community, which is very, very much in line with our values. These are human beings. They cannot be ignored. A lot of this is not within their control. And we have a responsibility to do something. And in that particular case, we live from the front. And I think that's a good example for other companies and organizations to do as well. I think there's a question up front over here. Hello, Annette Clayton, Schneider Electric CEO of North America. Hey, Mike, question, you talked about artificial intelligence, but what about quantum computing? Does it increase the digital divide? I mean, where does it take us? I defer to my esteemed colleague. Yeah. We were worried we'd get a question. Rehearsed that backstage, yes. So, it's simultaneously here and not here. But the truth of it, it has profound implications for a lot of things, most particularly cryptography and what's happening there. And it's an area where some of the investments in China are very far ahead than what some of the things we see and even some of the best laboratories in the United States. I think it's something that is an example of an area where more basic research would go a long way towards opening up some of those possibilities and also from a defensive point of view, if our, say, cryptographic infrastructure became obsolete, the good news is that there are other ways of doing it while still being robust to quantum computing. The bad news is it requires major reorganization and re-engineering. I think it's one of the many places where we haven't been keeping up with the fundamental, the basic R&D and the United States for a long time was such a leader in so many of the different fields and the West was more broadly. I think that it's something that poses a real challenge to the society. There was a question here, yes, thank you. The microphone's coming, yep. Takahiko Nakao from my ADB, a president. And my question is, as Eric mentioned, the technology have developed the countries and our life much better than a hundred years ago and people enjoy leisure and better life. But it is not just by happening, it is by designing. So we adopted income tax instead of just real estate tax and tariff, and we employed universal health care and health systems and public education and also other ways of reallocating resources and so on. So we need a new design for new technologies, new systems, but there is no trust in the government today. So who can start designing new world which can be adapted to the new framework of technologies? This is a tremendous change and wipe out so many results and so on and we need a reaction, but can the private sector alone do that? That's a deep question that many of us are asking here in Davos, can the private sector alone do it? Does anybody want to jump in with some thoughts? All right. I don't think so because a private sector has a play which is somewhat limited. I would think today there are many policy making bodies, whether it is WTO or European Union, G20, all of them are trying to, they're all working in silos to look at how do we bridge the digital divide, how do we handle data, a lot of countries want data to be resident in their country. I think some of that are actually a retrograde step. I think some of this policy making bodies will have to look at this a little more holistically and build some standards which are common across the globe. Otherwise we are reinventing a lot of things, we are creating a lot of hindrance to bridge the digital divide. I would think so. There was a question in the back. Anil Gupta, Professor University of Maryland. So as Eric Gale, Mr. Vijay Kumar talked about that digital connectivity is pretty much becoming universal. And I think we can also probably agree that technology leads to more innovation, leads to more productivity and leads to economic growth. But the question perhaps on that, the answer is not so obvious and I'm curious, which is that does this ubiquitous spread of digital connectivity, does it reduce economic divide, have no impact on it, or does it increase economic divide? The answer is yes. And I mean that it can do all those things. You know, digitization networks, the automation of different tasks, these forces are all happening simultaneously. But as I've said before, I wanna re-emphasize, the same tools can be used in lots of different ways. They can be used to concentrate wealth and power, to disenfranchise people, to violate privacy. It can be used in lots of ways to create a surveillance state. They can also be used to share knowledge, to get more people engaged, to make it easier for people to start new businesses and innovate, which way it's used depends a lot on how it was implemented. And we've seen this with earlier technologies as well. Different countries had the same set of technologies available to them and they've showed many cases throughout the 19th and 20th century, chose different paths and had very different kinds of outcomes. So I wanna very much change the conversation from what is technology going to do to us and what does technology do? Technology doesn't do things. We are the deciders. We are the ones who decide how to use it. And the fact that we have more powerful technologies now than we ever had before actually means that we have more power to decide what kind of world we want to live in. And so I wanna put the agency back on us, which comes back to the point about, let's make conscious choices about what we wanna do, whether it's with homelessness or inclusion or other areas. And I have zero doubt that we can use these technologies to address and solve those problems if we choose to. Dale, you wanna jump in? Yeah, I've been in the development field for a long time and about every five years there's a new silver bullet. And now it was innovation, now technology is the silver bullet. And to your point, it's a tool and it doesn't unfold in isolation. So there are choices to be made. I agree there's a loss of faith in government, but governments have to provide some sort of legal regulatory framework. Governments have agency with respect to equality of access and some of those things need to happen also. It also doesn't happen in isolation with respect to sectors. So is it applied to health? Is it applied to education? Is it applied to the business sector? So I think we've gotta look holistically, it's a really powerful tool. And it's a tool, I mean, look at some of the greatest gains in the most creativity in this space have come from people who are operating in the illicit market, right? I mean, it's so unmanaged, it's a powerful tool and sometimes a very dangerous tool. But I think this point about it being a tool and not the answer is really, really important. Because again, I've lived long enough to see about 15 answers. And the fact is that it's gotta be a systemic holistic approach that's gonna bring about the equality that it is. I see some more hands. Let's, I think there was one at the front and then we'll go to the woman here. So there was a- Can you say your name? My name is Ajay, I'm from India. I have two questions. One is, everyone talked about rescaling the population. Is there any effort by the industry to scale those governing us, policy makers? And I'm not referring to politicians and presidents. I'm referring to the bureaucracy because in the developing countries, I don't think so. They are capable of taking informed decisions. So is there any effort to rescale them? I mean, scale them first and so they can take better informed decisions. And second is, what about taxing data for generating revenue to help the really poor people? I mean, if I use a Dell computer and so you could answer that. No. No. Michael, you wanna address the first part? No. I'll try to address the second part. I want you to take the taxes. You get all the good questions. Look, I think that's absolutely right. I think that because the capacity doesn't always exist in governments, the governments are, by definition, operating much more slowly than the private sector. And so now the private sector can sit back and say, well, that's the government's problem. And they've got to do this. They've got to create trust. We're just gonna wait for them to regulate. But I think that's the irresponsible thing to do. One, I think with governments, more and more looking inward and being less and less functional. And this isn't just a comment about the US. I think it's a comment about a lot of governments around the world at the moment. The role of the private sector is even greater to step in and to try and address some of these societal issues and to try and create ecosystems that are built around trust. Otherwise, you don't have a permission structure to really take advantage of the technology and to harness the technology. So that's why, whether it's creating capacity for government officials to understand these issues, training people. 50 years ago, I went to law school, not 50 years ago, I went to law school. 50 years ago, the Ford Foundation decided to invest in creating a public interest law regime. The courses, internships, career paths. And so that people would go to law school with the idea that they want to serve in the public interest. Now we need to do the same thing when it comes to data scientists and technologists. Training people to go into government. We're doing some work on cyber, creating cyber fellows that will go into government and then come back out into the private sector or create cyber readiness institutes. I think that's just one piece of a much larger puzzle. But the private sector, it's in the private sector's interest to play a proactive role in trying to address this gap. Otherwise, I think we're gonna find ourselves with a backlash against the use of technology and AI and data, and that is not in our interest. All right, Keith is gonna jump in quickly before the tax. I can't help myself here. So I completely agree with this. Look, I think this is a leadership moment. This is a leadership opportunity. Typically, experience dictates policy and that can be very reactive, as you suggest. I think this is one where we have to get ahead of it. And that is working, again, very, very closely with the government, making them aware, making them understand. I think we all as citizens have enough of a harder time keeping up with technology. Now, think about how we have to do that to educate policymakers. So if we're not working closely with corporations together with government decision makers, we will find ourselves in a situation where innovation could be stifled. And that's not gonna be good for anybody. So we have to get ahead of this. There's no question about that. But how do you get ahead of it? I mean, everybody says, okay, we gotta work closer together, but... Well, I think it starts with education. I think it starts with awareness. I think it really sits down with responsible leaders in our government and responsible leaders in the private sector talking about policy together, as opposed to being reactive and lashing out and trying to band aid solutions like tax policy, quite frankly. I'm all for tax policy. It just should be a responsible tax policy that promotes growth for the future and access for many people. So I think people have to be proactive. We can't just wait. Private sector can't just wait. And the public sector can't sit back and cast judgment. It has to be done in a thoughtful collaborative way. All right, Michael Dow, you're up again on taxes. You can't seem to escape it. Taxing of data though, a little bit different way. Well, look, the rate of data growth is really quite tremendous. And if you want more of something, putting a high tax on it is not a good way to get more of it. So I would come from the approach of if you want less of something, put a high tax on it. If you want more of something, put a low tax on it. And certainly data is the fuel for all the artificial intelligence, the progress, the machine learning, and the amount of data is doubling at, some people would say every 12 months, some people would say every 18 months. So trying to sit from a legislative standpoint and taxing something that is growing at that sort of rate, I think a lot of mistakes could be made. Let's get one more voice in. Yes, let's see if we can squeeze one more in. Thank you, Karen van Bergen, Omnikom. I'd love to go back to education, but at schools. Mr. Vijayakumar, you talked about coding, learning coding. I learned this morning that machines are already writing software. So I'd be really interested in what do you think the curriculum of middle school and high school and maybe even before that needs to look like. Thank you. If the point is even to create those machines and programs, you need to know how to code, right? Even to write a program which develops code automatically, it's very important for people to understand the software as a technology. So I think it's like learning alphabets, right? I think programming or coding should be as common as that for really bridging a big gap from a long-term perspective. That's what I would. So maybe do we need sort of a global test like we test students around the world on math or on reading, do we need a coding test? Yeah, I'm sure we can do that. And also I think data analytics and being able to actually use the data in a way that can create better outcomes in whatever it is you're endeavoring to accomplish. Final thought, Eric. Well, I teach at MIT, so I'm a huge fan of more data analytics and I like the idea that in Congress we had, with all due respect to all the lawyers in the audience here, more data scientists and more people familiar with the technology and not just legal scholars. But I also want to say that as much as I'd like to see more people with those technical skills, we shouldn't forget that humans have a lot of skills that machines are not very good at, interpersonal skills, empathy, creativity, that at least for now and for as far as I can see, machines aren't going to be doing those sorts of things and teamwork, persuading. These are things that will be in great demand in the workforce and we could do more all the way from K through 12 afterwards to encourage people. Kids love to be creative if you let them and a lot of our schools have actually been trying to stamp creativity out of kids for a couple hundred years and I think if we let them flourish, that'd be better. They like to work with each other and play and interact and those are the kinds of skills that the workforce of the 21st century is going to need just as much as the technical skills. That's a great final thought. We're gonna be Swiss and end on time. Thank you so much for being here. And welcome to our very important session, Taking Action for the Ocean. I'm Francine Lacroix of Bloomberg. Now we're trying to do a little something different this year. For the first time, we will be broadcasting the panel live on TikTok, our social first global news network. Now this panel will seek to engage viewers, of course our audience, so please ask your questions and remember to hashtag, hashtag, web 19, hashtag, TikTok Davos. Now our oceans are really the basins of life and cover three quarters of our planet. Think about that. As vast and powerful as they can be, they are also very fragile. They suffer from overheating and acidification. Fish are being pulled out, plastic is being poured in, very few of oceans are protected habitats. So discuss this panel today, World Leaders, Philanthropists and Activists, but most importantly, it's a panel of people like you and like me who are acting, but are we too late? Let's welcome our panelists today, Al Gore, environmentalist, Nobel laureate, and the former vice president of the United States of America. He's the chairman and co-founder of Generation Investment Management and investment manager with a focus on sustainability. Michelle Bachelet was a political prisoner in her home nation of Chile where she would later serve as president twice. She has devoted her efforts to human rights activism in UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Mark Benioff, an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and the founder, chairman and co-chief executive of Salesforce. He also founded the Benioff Oceans Initiative, which runs a crowdsourcing platform to identify problems and fund solutions for ocean conservation. Nina Jensen, a marine biologist, she's the chief executive of REV Ocean, whose mission it is to explore and better understand the ocean. And in Rick Sala, a marine ecologist and a National Geographic Explorer in residence, dedicated really to restoring the health and productivity of the ocean. So thank you all for joining me. How bad is it? Do we actually understand the reality of what we're faced? It's a harsh reality. Vice president. I don't think there's a widespread understanding, at least not a sufficient one of how bad it is. We have a true full-blown global emergency. And if that phrase sounds too hyper, I'm sorry, it just reflects what the scientific community tells us. The fact that their predictions have been spot on from what they've said in the past should lead us to listen to them about this. It's connected to the climate crisis, by the way. As you said, we're taking fish out and putting plastic in. We're also putting heat in. The global warming pollution that has the man-made global warming pollution that's accumulated in the atmosphere now traps as much extra heat energy as would be released by 500,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every day. 93% of that heat energy goes into the oceans. And with all due respect to Las Vegas, what happens in the ocean doesn't stay in the ocean. The stronger storms, the disruption of the water cycle, it's being acidified and there's more. And I look forward to this panel because we've got some real experts here. What's the reality you saw? Well, the same. I mean, I believe that majority of people are not really understanding the problem. I mean, not everyone is understanding. Even though I would say that you have seen a trend, particularly in young people, we do understand that climate change is a terrible threat and do understand also the role that oceans play on it. That can be a very positive one or a negative one, as we all know. We all know that, of course, temperature of the seas are rising, acidification is happening, and that means a lot of consequences. And we already seen in the video the positive side of oceans. And so many people. It's like 30% of the population that live on coastal areas and live in their livelihood depends on the possibility of ocean. So we have lots of issues that need to be addressed because not only on climate change, but also on illegal fishing, on overfishing because of a lack, I would say, of understanding sooner of how important this is. Mark, do people understand what acidification is? I can barely pronounce it. Well, I think that now is an incredible time for everyone to decide that they're gonna do one thing for the ocean. Certainly, we also have to decide we're all gonna do something for the environment. But let's specifically talk about the ocean. About 18 months ago, we started here at the World Economic Forum, our friends of ocean action, which I'd like to invite everyone here to join. This was started out of our Benioff Ocean Initiative, which is led out of the University of California, Santa Barbara. And it's been an incredible set of learnings for us, but also a very optimistic year because one year ago, Justin Trudeau was here who went through briefings on the ocean for the first time with us at the World Economic Forum. And that's why you saw a prioritization in June with the G7 for the first time, saying that oceans is one of their top five priorities. The G20 is- And it's not too late. It's not a little too late. I'm an optimistic person, and I believe that we can take change and create change. Right now, there's very specific actions that we can take. And we can talk about some of those things as well. But I think having the G7 and G20 start to prioritize ocean health, this is extremely important because sometimes the ocean is out of sight, out of mind. It's so big, everyone would say, oh, it looks fine. I don't know, it looks like it did six months ago, but things are changing. It is getting hotter. We do have overfishing. We do have things going on that we need to directly address, coral bleaching. We have seabed mining. I'd like to talk about that at some point, but there's many things that we all can do right now to make the ocean much healthier. So Nina, in 2021, you want to launch the world's largest research, an expedition vessel to acquire more knowledge. Why don't we have that knowledge now? Well, we do have a lot of knowledge that we should act on already now, but people on this planet seems to be more insistent on exploring outer space than what is actually here, which is also kind of surprising given the oceans importance for our mere existence. I mean, all life on this planet originated in the oceans at the same time we're treating them as a waste dump, which is awful. And I think if everyone knew how serious the situation for the oceans actually are, everyone would be activists. And to put it in perspective, in my lifetime, our lifetime over the past 40 years, we've lost more than 40% of life in the oceans and it's accelerating as a result of climate change, ocean acidification, pollution, and the like. So what we want to do is obviously improve our knowledge and understanding of the oceans, bring that knowledge to decision makers in a much better way and make it more understandable, but then most importantly, turning that knowledge into very concrete solutions and act now. Enrique? I think we know enough, right? It's difficult to overstate the problem. Just some examples. More than half of the surface of the ocean is targeted by industrial fishing. That's a footprint that is larger than agriculture's. 90% of the large fish in the ocean, sharks, tuna, cod, are gone. We ate them in the last 100 years. 90% of the fisheries of the world are either fully exploited or over exploited. By 2040, and I'm going to depress everybody now, by 2040 there's going to be no sea ice in the Arctic Ocean during summer months. Coral reefs are going to be a thing of the past by 2050 if we continue our ways, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But this not only affects marine life, it affects people too. Think about the humanitarian crisis when we have fleets from industrialized countries fishing off the coast of West Africa, for example, and legally and illegally, and depriving those local people from food security, and these people then have to go to Europe. We have a real problem and it's only going to get worse and the economic implications are huge. Right now, $23 billion every year are lost because of illegal fishing, right? And we subsidize the overexploitation of the ocean with $35 billion per year, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really bad. We don't know how many species are in the ocean. We only know 20% of what's there, but we know enough to know it's bad and we need to do something now. If I could add just a couple of brief points. First of all, you said, is it too late earlier? I would like to briefly make the point that none of us has the right ever to say it's too late. It is never too late. But back to this, you know the statistic that by 2050, at current trends, the weight of the plastic in the ocean will exceed the weight of all the fish in the ocean. And we are still taking out of the ocean each year the human weight of China in fish and the illegal fishing, pirate ships. Now, another point. The oceans and the atmosphere are very tightly coupled. And as the oceans warm all the way down to 2,000 meters, the capacity of the oceans to absorb CO2 diminishes. And up until now, the oceans have been a sink for CO2. That's caused the acidification, unfortunately, which contributes to the loss of corals. But as the oceans warm, we will not have that buffer. So it makes it more difficult to deal with climate. But the good news is with satellite tracking and with all of the new digital tools we have, if we decide as a world to protect the oceans, we can do so. We need governments to be activated. We need policy changes. And those of us who are privileged to be alive at this hinge of history moment need to make a decision that we will protect the oceans and protect our planet. Well, I've heard here that 18 months ago, the World Economic Forum started thinking on those issues and then the G7, G20. But let's just remember that in the Paris Agreement, I mean, a long time ago, like three or more years ago, there was this because the Ocean Declaration that many countries committed to. So even though I understand when Al said, it's never too late and you never have to give up because I have the same attitude at issues, I think we have to, we're obligated to accelerate action because, you know, Paris Agreement was many years ago and Katowice, a COP24 last year, they approved a plan of action on many issues in climate change also on oceans. So that's positive, but it has to have three years afterwards. And if we continue doing business as usual, we're not gonna get there. We're not gonna meet the objective of the Sustainable Development Goals and we're not gonna be able to stop this. So I'm fine to say it's never too late, but I'm a little bit concerned because I think we countries and companies have not taken enough understanding and efforts on changing and doing the right things. Nina. I agree, I think there's every reason to be concerned, but at the same time, the problems that we're seeing in the oceans are caused by humans, which means we also have every opportunity to do something about it. And what really gives me reason for optimism is seeing how high the oceans are actually on the global agenda at the moment. I don't think I've seen a single issue like plastics where companies, business leaders, governments have come together to really try to solve this and even seeing all the commitments from the World Economic Forum and what's happening here, I think is a great cause of optimism. Let me give you one specific case for optimism. For those of you who know, we have the Fourth Industrial Revolution underway and it's one of the major topics here at this conference. We also have the World Economic Forum's Fourth Industrial Revolution Center in San Francisco that studies and also articulates that on global policy issues. That that's things like autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, all these incredible new technologies. Well, currently underway, there's quite a few companies that are assembling these incredible new 4IR technologies to create vehicles that will do seabed mining. Seabed mining is the pursuit of all of these kind of precious stones and minerals and gases and all the things they'd like to go find in the ocean and they're assembling these vehicles now. You know, you all seen what autonomous vehicles look like but once they disappear under the water, nobody's gonna exactly know where they are. Well, they're all about to go under there and as they're digging and grinding things up and chewing up the bottom of the ocean, also we're gonna go get all these toxic plumes that are gonna be coming up and fish are gonna get it being absorbed into all that and it's all gonna come into our ecosystem and in our food chain. It's gonna be one of the most devastating things that's ever happened to the ocean, seabed mining. Well, guess what, hasn't started yet. So we need everyone here to start becoming an expert on that, to think about that, to get to your local politicians. We have Peter Thompson here who is our UN ambassador for the ocean. He's working on that but we need declarations around seabed mining that are gonna protect the ocean and make sure that as that happens, it's gonna need, we're gonna need to have authorities and auditing and proper governance around that but it does not yet happen. So that's a case for optimism that we know that there's things today that have not happened that we can stop or manage better than we would without knowing about them. That's an awareness issue. On the second point, we also know that when we look at plastics in the ocean, we heard about more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050 and nobody wants a plastic ocean, right? So, but we also know that it's nine rivers that really contribute the vast majority of that plastic and that river management needs to become a critical part of policy and work and we're seeing river machines getting built and generated to get that plastic out of the rivers before they start. That's something that we can do now. Who's causing plastic pollution? Is it certain regions in the world? Is it business? And are they willing to try to produce something? Plastic has become the nuclear waste of our generation. It has been generated and it is not going away. All of this mythology about being recycled is crazy. It's not really getting recycled that I can find and we need next generation materials, which we can do, great companies who are experts in this area, like Dow, DePont, Honeywell and others who create plastic need to create biodegradable plastic and they are. But we need that, we need that now. So that's another thing that we'll get before I are. I hope that innovation, technology, risk-taking, entrepreneurship, the things that we know.