 It was a very inspirational start asking the big questions that we need to ask here at this gathering so that we can get to that more inclusive, more sustainable, more resilient future. Ladies and gentlemen, excellencies, partners, friends, welcome to this 14th annual meeting of the Global Future Councils. I'm delighted to have you back here again after four years and to help set the stage with this illustrious panel. Perhaps just a little bit about the Global Future Council network. It's unique because we aim to construct every single council in an interdisciplinary manner. No opportunity for group think and to ensure that we challenge each other across each one of those topic areas. The second element is we design this summit to connect across different topics, to deliberately be interdisciplinary, to deliberately cut across different topic areas and again to challenge each other and to see how we can get to more constructive solutions. And third, while we're very proud of this global brain trust, if you will, there are more than ideas that are generated through the Global Future Councils. We take a lot of the views that are generated by the council members, the many reports and documents and frameworks and roadmaps, and they go into the work of the World Economic Forum on an ongoing basis. From here to the annual meeting in Davos, from here to the 10 centres of the World Economic Forum that set up the public-private collaboration that is necessary to address many of these challenges, and where the work of these councils serves really as the source of inspiration to generate those new ideas and take this work forward. We're delighted once again to be partnering with the United Arab Emirates and having their support in bringing all of you together here for this meeting. This term, for 23-24, the network is composed of about 30 councils. More than 400 of us are gathered here, and it's everything from the metaverse to synthetic biology, to job creation, to cities, to clean air. Very different topics, perhaps at a first glance, but deeply interconnected as we will go over the next couple of days. I have four panellists from those 400-plus that are gathered here, and I'm going to very quickly introduce them and then move into the questions in the session. Sally Davies, Master Trinity College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom at the extreme end of the panel, and a co-chair of the Global Future Council for tackling antimicrobial resistance. Welcome, Sally. Second, we have Stuart Russell, Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, and a co-chair of the Global Future Council on Artificial Intelligence. Welcome, Stuart. Third, Massoud Ahmed, President, Centre for Global Development, and a co-chair of the Global Future Council on the Future of Growth. Welcome, Massoud. And finally, last but not least, Dr. Melissa Lott is the Director of Research of the CEPA Centre on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, and is a member of the Global Future Council on the Economics of an Equitable Transition. A big round of applause welcoming our panelists. We're going to try to do this conversation. We don't have a lot of time. We're going to try to do it in two parts. First, we'll try to deep dive into each one of your specific areas, but do some level setting, some back-to-basics questions around the specific areas that you're dealing with, your own views and your research and your expertise, but also what you're hoping your council will do. And then in a second round of questions, we'll try to start looking at the interconnections between these topics. And Melissa, maybe let me turn to you first. We thought it would be helpful to simply describe what is net zero. So when we talk about net zero and we talk about what all the science is saying about how climate change is affecting our health, our communities, our environment today, the pathway to net zero is something that we discuss where net zero is our end point, where we found that balance between the emissions, the greenhouse gas emissions we're putting into the air and those that we are removing. So we're bringing down emissions as far as we can, sure, but then we're balancing out what we can't remove. The really important thing when we think about it is that it's a transition to net zero. So it is not, we're here today and tomorrow we're at net zero. It's a pathway down. And what that pathway looks like will affect different communities in different ways, very meaningful ways. There's a lot of opportunities and also risks in that transition. What we know overall is that going to net zero means building a lot of stuff and it means doing that very, very quickly. Which comes, like they said in the video at the beginning, with some risks. We may break things along the way, but if we don't move very, very quickly, we know we'll break a lot more and we will harm our health very, very deeply. How far away are we? We're quite far away right now, but I will say in doing this work for about 20 years, this is my 20th year of doing it, we are a lot further down the path than I thought we would be. And a lot of that is due to policies, but also driving down the costs of the technologies that can help us to, in particular, reduce emissions in our energy systems, which globally represent around 73, almost three-quarters of global emissions. You mentioned some of the risks. Give us two or three examples. How to pick two or three. I think the one that we focus on so much in the council is the idea of today we have gaps between the opportunities that certain communities have realized. I know we'll talk about development quite a bit, but how do we think about creating a future and having a transition pathway that doesn't make those gaps wider? How do we think about not just minimizing risks to communities that have faced risks in the past and faced risks moving forward, but also where opportunities are realized? How do we provide accessibility to these opportunities? So the risks are we don't go fast enough and we end up dealing with the really severe impacts of climate change as you get to those higher-degree worlds, well beyond 1.5 or 2 or even 2.5. The other risk is that we don't move the money that we need to into all the different places in the world, and so we end up creating gaps that just are ever-expanding instead of narrowing. So we reach that zero, but we don't reach our sustainable development goals, those types of things. Thank you. So let me turn to you next. We're all watching what is happening in the global economy. We're all watching the many pressures that are likely to impact the global economy. How would you define global development today? What's the outlook for global development at this moment in time? I think Minister Gurgawi gave us the various dimensions of how we think about global development. It's really about making people's lives better in a material sense in terms of access to services, in terms of the way they have access to technology, the way they can live in dignity, and the big story about development is that the last 30 years have been really huge success, in the last 75 even more so. I can give you many numbers, but half as many women today die in childbirth as used to be the case, and there are many different numbers, but there are two things that are left that I want to put on the table. First, that while there's been huge success, there's still pockets of communities, countries, people who are not participating in this success, and it's harder to reach them and provide support to them for a variety of reasons we can get into. The big challenge for the future is, can we find ways to actually help them catch up with what's been the rising tide that's lifted so many boats? Second big challenge, the shocks that have hit us, COVID food security, energy prices, wars and conflicts, have set back this momentum of progress that we were seeing for many decades, and now today you see income growth stalling in many countries, the gap between the rich and the poor countries, which was narrowing, is now stagnant or widening in some cases, and the combination of global challenges, of which the climate is the most biggest, but it's not the only one, pandemic is another one, AMR is another one. Global challenges and the geopolitics that have now made it harder to cooperate to deal with global challenges actually poses a big threat to the development progress that we've seen and that I think will hold us back. So I would say development today is a more challenging environment than it's been in 20 years. I can see lots of opportunities, but I see reasons why those opportunities are being held back because of these issues. Can I ask you the same as Melissa, just a couple of examples of those opportunities and those risks? I think the big opportunities helps too, it's not a picture that's down on this, but I think the big opportunity is can we harness digital and AI? I kind of, you know, I'll group them for a moment, in ways that will help us to accelerate the process of development. Can we harness the progress that's being made in terms of bringing down the cost of green energy and bringing down the cost of green development in ways that can also accelerate the access of communities that don't even have access to dirty energy today? Can we do that better? And I think those are just two examples that I'll give you, and the final example is you only have to go to any community to see the optimism and energy amongst a whole series of young people who want to do better. As always, I have to say that what I find most exciting is to watch the energy innovation and optimism in young communities, even in circumstances where if you look at it, you will say, you know, the opportunities for realizing these are limited. Thank you. Sally, one of the reasons that we're only back here after four years is of course the global pandemic that the world lived through. You've described antimicrobial resistance as a slow-moving pandemic. Help us understand the issue. I stopped calling it slow because people ignored it, they discounted it. So now I'm calling it the grand pandemic. Let me make every person in this room shudder with the reality. We're talking about superbugs, infective organisms that by chance develop a resistance to the treatment, by natural selection that proliferates and that maims and kills. It's the third most important underlying cause of death across the world. It causes the deaths of more people each year than each of HIV, TB, malaria. But it's not just human security we're concerned about. It's food security. We need treatments for sick animals, sick plants. It's environmental security. Animals including us and fish treated with antibiotics, pee and poo out more than 80% contaminate our environment through the water systems. Meanwhile, manufacturing the effluent is disgusting. What about economic security? Well the cost, the latest is OECD a couple of weeks ago report. We lose every year at least to the OECD countries so it's even greater, 36 billion US dollars a year equivalent to a fifth of Portugal's GDP. So it happens, it's a risk for all of us and yet I'd hazard a bet most of you haven't even heard of AMR and superbugs before today. So what are you going to do? Because frankly it impacts all of us across every bit of our life and it's much worse in the low income and middle income countries and we owe it to them to sort it out. But like COVID no one's safe until we're all safe. So the rich countries do have an interest which they don't seem to be acting on particularly to sort it for everyone. What are some of the solution areas and especially what will your council be working on? Well I think the exciting thing about the council is across disciplinarity where else do we get someone from Nigeria who works at the front line seeing the reality of poverty and infections and the causes of infections the lack of antibiotics the poor quality antibiotics and the many deaths outside people from the industry who can make new treatments and provide the supply chains to get them to people. Yet we've got market failure so it's not happening with civil society academics this cross disciplinarity looking at what the issues are coming up with the solutions and really I hope using the power of the World Economic Forum to get some grand bargains agreed to help humanity. Thank you. That was the right start but you've got to follow through. Thank you Sally. Stuart many of us here would be looking at technology but especially artificial intelligence as a potential silver bullet for many of the topics that are going to be discussed here. You and I talked about how one it might be good to actually define artificial intelligence and second to actually tackle that question how much of this is an opportunity and how much of it is an additional challenge? Yeah so I think it's sort of surprising that something we see on the front page of every newspaper every day is something that many people have a hard time even defining. So first of all artificial intelligence is not a technology. That's the first mistake that many journalists make. It's a field of study. It's defined by the problem of how to make machines intelligent and it also comes as a surprise to many journalists that it's about 80 years old. So we've had many breakthroughs over those 80 years. There have been many breakthroughs in this decade and there have been breakthroughs even in the last month. So it would appear to be accelerating towards the goal that was stated very early on in the field of creating machines that match or exceed human performance across every conceivable task. So that's what we are trying to do. So if we did succeed if we had that capability then sure, we could simply turn over every problem to AI. And my friend, Demis Osabis who founded DeepMind puts it this way, first we solve AI then we use AI to solve everything else. So there's now a word for this mental attitude it's called solutionism. And you might think, well, solutionism sounds like a good thing, right? It's better to solve things than not solve them. But honestly, it isn't a solution to everything. You take climate, for example and people say, oh, you know, AI will solve the climate problem. I mean, it'll help around the edges. But climate is really a collective action problem. We know what to do, we're just not doing it. AI isn't going to make us do it somehow. I think on development I think AI can help. And I think there are some leapfrogging possibilities. You know, we've already seen some countries leapfrog in telecommunications. So instead of developing a big expensive fixed line telephone network, they've gone straight to mobile and microwave networks and that's been much cheaper and has rolled out much more quickly as a result. And in some cases, financial systems built on top of that. We might see actually a leapfrogging on education. Education has always been this very difficult bootstrapping problem because you can't have a really good education system unless you have really good teachers and you can't have really good teachers unless you have a really good education system. And it's compounded by the fact that as soon as you have a really good professional in a particular area they're spirited away by one of the giant international companies to go work in California or London or New York or wherever. And this is a real problem, I think. But AI can deliver extremely high quality, personalized tutoring to every child on Earth that's going to maximize their potential. There's still quite a bit of work to do on that but I think it's something that we could if we focused on it instead of focusing on advertising we could deliver within this decade. So that's on the upside. On the downside for development I think there's a risk that the export-led pathway whether it's manufacturing or services could be closed off by the wealthy countries on-shoring using AI. So on-shoring manufacturing with robotics, on-shoring services with large language models to do all of those customer interactions, for example. So that's a risk to a traditional development pathway and countries may bypass that actually by simply developing their own interior economy using AI and again sort of leapfrogging that traditional step. So I think it's very much up for grabs what the effect on development is going to be. And on medicine I would love it to be the case that AI is going to deliver high quality medical care again the possibility of customizing to the individual. So far progress it has to be said is extremely slow. But the science-based part of AI the use of AI to for example simulate molecules is seeing really incredible progress to the point where we're now able to simulate molecules about a million times faster than we could a few years ago because we've gone from purely physics-based numerical simulation to simulation based on a combination of physics and machine learning that is much, much more effective. So you've slightly tempered our enthusiasm for the solutions provided by artificial intelligence and really important to recalibrate that. But what about some of the risks? Is the downside as risky as what we hear? So if you recall the goal of the field to create AI systems that match or exceed human capabilities our intelligence is what gives us power over the world. To a first approximation the other species don't have a look-in and many of them survive only because we deign to allow it and many other species have not survived at all because we didn't deign to allow it. So if we're creating systems more powerful than ourselves then there's an obvious question how do we retain power over entities more powerful than ourselves forever? That's the question. And Alan Turing who founded Computer Science gave a speech in 1951 where he said once the machine thinking method had started it would soon outstrip our feeble powers. At some point we would have to expect the machines to take control. So that was his answer to that question that we can't keep power forever over machines more powerful than ourselves. What's clear is that we had better produce an answer to that question before we developed those machines that are more powerful than ourselves. Thank you. Is that partly what your council will be addressing? As a matter of fact, yes. So I would say we have some partial answers to that question but those partial answers are not market ready. They are not scalable. They don't compete with the technologies that companies are putting out there and technologies that they are investing tens of billions per month to develop and scale up and make even more powerful. And those technologies really have no possibility of being safe. If those technologies become more capable than human beings we will not be able to control them because we don't even understand how they work. And that to me seems extremely irresponsible. So the question we have to ask is how do governments devise regulations so that companies build AI systems that are safe by design rather than just building AI systems and then trying to make them safe and failing? Thank you very much. I think underlying all of your comments has been this need for cooperation for cutting across different sectors for collaboration potentially between the private sector and the public sector for innovations within policymaking that haven't existed before and addressing many of these topics in ways that we simply haven't done before. So maybe in our next round of discussion it would be helpful to define what are some of those white spaces and what are some of those grand bargains to use your word that we need to have in each one of your fields. And Melissa, I'll start with you when it comes to that equitable transition from your council side more broadly on the energy transition. What are some of those areas that require collaboration across sectors and a grand bargain? I mean the reality is with the transition to net zero it is all multidisciplinary. It requires engagement across the entire stakeholder chain and that isn't just those who move money around or build the technology and pour the concrete or put the steel in place. It's the communities that will have different technologies or different systems in place and will use the energy, will grow the food, will be part of that entire conversation. And so when we look at the challenges it does take grand bargains, it does take big bold movement because we aren't talking about small incremental changes over long periods of time. We're talking about massive shifts that achieve scales and speeds that we have very rarely done in our history and that when you study history you have most often come in the face of wars and pandemics where you've made big bold moves. And so the question is are we going to be able to do that in a way that is inclusive that respects all the different goals of not just country priorities but community priorities, regional priorities all these different scales of priorities when it talks about realizing those opportunities. The white space is having those conversations. I will say when I started in this field the idea that the engineers would spend time and hang out with the policy makers was kind of funny. When I was in the White House in 2009 I was the engineer at the table and that was actually an exception. That was not the norm to have someone there to bring in the technical into the policy and into the legal conversations. And so as we bring folks together we bring different lenses and we see this with our councils. We all bring different lenses to the table and that allows us to get practical pathways forward. So in my field we do these techno economic pathways where it's the cheapest pathway forward and the practical one that can be achieved because that's what we're talking about at this stage. And when you go into the practicalities you need everyone else at the table as well. And when we look at the transition something we talk about is the speed of trust and how the whole transition only happens at the speed of trust. And so involving all the different folks in the stakeholder chain that need to be there is vital or you won't get much of anywhere which leads to a lot of negative repercussions. Can we get a little bit specific about what some of those repercussions may be? Where are some of those tension points? We talked recently in a session at our sustainable development impact meetings on what that means for jobs. We also talked about what that means for energy accessibility and energy security. Tell us a little bit more about what those tension points are and which stakeholders that are not yet talking to each other need to be talking to each other. Yeah, so it's interesting, even those of us who work in the equitable transition just as a phrase, the equitable and just transition don't agree on what the definition of that is. So we're fairly on the same page that it includes rights, land rights. We're fairly on the same page about it having workforce transitions needing to retrain people train up the next workforce that is needed to get to net zero. But we don't all agree on development and equity in that. We all think about accessibility of technologies. And so in terms of practical step forwards bringing those two worlds together where it's not just about moving money into places it's already been but actually thinking about how you practically move forward to eliminate the gaps I talked about earlier where you have hundreds of millions of people without any access to electricity today as one example but actually billions who don't have access to the amount of reliable affordable and clean electricity that they want to support development as defined by their priorities. And so actually bringing those groups into a room and saying yes we acknowledge there's a problem that money isn't flowing development isn't happening at the speed that we may want it to. So what is the next step in this? How do we address very nichey things like currency risk exchange and finance and then how do we think about broader things about what a net zero future looks like for individual communities. So in my home state of Texas we talk a lot about transitioning energy communities. Ones that historically had opportunities to re-train and reuse those workforces but what about the communities that were left behind in the last wave of energy development? How do we think about that? And we are seeing some beginning steps when it comes to developing policy around equitable transitions around how we think about those low income and disadvantaged communities even in high income countries. Thank you. Sally you gave us all that challenge of thinking about the grand bargains and thinking about connecting to each other and the fact that you're a particular topic but many of the other ones that we're discussing here are collective problems. The white space in your area. So antimicrobial resistance AMR is a one health issue impacting health security food chain security and economy. Let me give you one for each quickly. In health we have an empty antibiotic pipeline. Can the rich countries develop what G7 finance ministers have been discussing and there are some pilots some pull mechanisms to unlock the market failure but if they do that will pharma and biotech come forward and move back into making new drugs and then make them available with tiered pricing and licensing agreement and maybe even local manufacturing for low and middle income countries. We need that. And after all tiered pricing has been done for HIV and all sorts of things before so it's putting different bits together. In the animal the food chain antibiotics are being used for growth promotion that drives more resistance. It's not needed there are beginning to be other methods we need to phase that out but we need more innovation. I heard the other day that some phages can help with growth promotion as well as keeping the animals healthy. Innovation but let's get rid of that. Environment why don't we go for the BSI standards for wastewater from factories and get governments and manufacturing to abide by those. I mean there's a start of some white spaces we could cover and can I have an ask too of my neighbour Stuart when we make chatbots can we make them kind and decent unlike some of those first ones that were rude and horrid. Do you have a response to it? Well if you're doing regulation you might just... I would say not my fault. Yeah it's interesting actually so they do train them so what happens with the large language models the chatbots they're trained on vast quantities of text and that text is dredged from the internet and if you take that raw model trained on all that text it behaves exactly as Sally says absolutely awful and then they have a post-training phase where they try to make it behave better you know my colleagues don't like it when I describe it this way but essentially you just say bad dog whenever it misbehaves and that bad dog then that causes the parameters of the systems to adjust so that it does that thing less often but it turns out that all of that bad behaviour is still in there and you can unlock it the term we call it is jailbreak right there are simple peculiar prompts that you can supply to these systems which will cause all of that bad behaviour to come out all the stuff where it advises you how to make biological weapons or how to break into the White House security system all of that is in there and just these little jail breaks will let it all out again so it hasn't really learned to behave well it's just learned to hide it underneath a veneer of civilised behaviour thank you your council will spend some time thinking about those big questions where is it that you need support and collaboration across the council network so I think the biggest problem we face is that unlike some other areas for example civil engineering kind of teams up with urban planning environmental studies to curb the worst tendencies of civil engineers to cover everything with concrete urban planners say no not everything you can put some concrete there but not here and not there and we don't have that the whole digital industry doesn't really have the equivalent of urban planning and environmental impact reports and all that stuff so we just get to drink a lot of coffee write a few million lines of software and then stick it on the world whether the world likes it or not and this I've been seeing the phrase coming up more and more socio-technical embedding what happens when you take a big chunk of software and stick it in the world in a particular place let's say you have some software that does triage for emergency cases in a hospital and you put it into the emergency room what happens does it actually make things better or worse well in computer science we don't ask that question we just ask is it good at triage on the training data it's 92% accurate so we'll stick it in but that's not the right question the right question is what happens does it actually make things better and this is a question for sociologists for psychologists for the human sciences if we develop one more capable large language models what's the impact on employment we need help from economists business specialists there's studies showing that AI is going to generate tens of millions of jobs there are other studies saying that AI is going to destroy hundreds of millions of jobs and these are both produced by very reputable institutions which one do you believe doesn't really have enough science yet to answer that question properly and in the long run the big socio-technical embedding question is if we have general purpose AI can the human race coexist successfully with it even if we fix all the safety problems and we make sure that it's beneficial and all that so it doesn't take over the world it doesn't kill us all can we coexist what roles will humans have when machines can do everything better than we can will that destroy motivation, will it destroy our education system will it take away our purpose for living will it basically infantilize and enfeeble our civilization so that we end up in the warly world where everyone is essentially incapable of everything that's not a future that we want so what is the future where we have this technology and yet we are a vibrant forward thinking and hopefully much better civilization than where we are now and if you can't think of that future if you can't describe it then you have to think well why are we going there and that's a question that I think everyone we need every single council and another 2,000 councils to figure out the answer to that we need a poetry council we need a filmmaker council etc etc because this is a question for our whole civilization thank you Masoud everybody on this panel has pointed in some way or the other to the impact on global development of their specific area of work the impact of artificial intelligence the impact of the energy transition certainly the impact of AMR your council has been working on from the development we have or from the growth we have to the growth we want how would you define the growth that we want and what collaborations would you invite across the network let me say first Sadia that I think the common thread running through all of these interventions is the need to have more difficult conversations and the big challenge that I see today is that we have compartmentalized conversations mostly amongst communities that largely agree with themselves they disagree on the technical bits but they broadly have the same world view but these conversations are being done in parallel and actually the real issue is they have conflicting world views and priorities and values and unless we bring them together we're not going to solve the problems that all sit in the middle of these different areas and I'll give you two very practical examples one where I think things are getting better is the conversation between what I call the sort of climate folk the climate community basically approaches the problem in terms of 1.5 is it basically our target need to do everything we need to get there and if that means we've got to sort of wait until you can get all renewable green energy in Africa that's fine and we've got to design all renewable energy supply system for them the development people are sitting on the other side having their conversations where 700 million people in Africa have electricity and in the scheme of things if they use gas it's not going to make much difference we really need to focus on giving them electricity and there are lots of other issues to deal with 1.5 and we've got to have that together and then come to compromise so that we can make progress another example where we're not making progress this one I think we are beginning to is one group of people who sort of start from where I think we are you need cooperation the clear answer to a lot of our problems is sort of multilateral cooperation across countries and yes there are some issues about de-risking and security but we'll manage that let's focus on the cooperation let's assume that all sensible people will come to that and design our solution in all our councils on the basis that we will cooperate there's another conversation going on generally with a little less public which is really a conversation about de-risking security geopolitical rivalries where they say you know we're not going to cooperate on most things because cooperation is a threat to our de-risking strategy and I think we have to really have a tough conversation about going from the mindset that we will be multilateral and cooperative everywhere to saying where do we absolutely need to cooperate in our own self-interest because until we have that hard conversation we're just going to come up with grand plans on the one side that are based on cooperation and inability to move on the other side because we are constrained by our view of de-risking and I think one of the challenges, sorry that wasn't your question about what our council will do but I really do think that in this gathering every council has to focus on where do we need to have these difficult conversations and where is it that we really need cooperation to make progress thank you very much we are out of time although I'm sure we could continue for much, much longer I will not try to summarize our conversation you'll have a chance to speak to our panelists over the course of the next days I have three points before we wrap up one, thank you to Melissa, to Masoud, to Stuart and to Sally, thank you very much second, I think you have inspired all of us over the next couple of days to deliberately seek each other out to pose the challenging questions and to find a space for cooperation and I hope that that will be a guide for all of us over the next two days as we connect with each other and wishing you much luck for those conversations within each one of your councils as well as when you connect with each other across the different councils and third, as we draw this session to a close we will transition to a performance by an Emirati artist Rashid al-Nuemi his performance will blend English and Arabic lyrics as well as orchestral and Emirati musical elements with a unique impression of musical inclusivity and cultural harmony please bear with us as we change the setup on the stage but please stay seated as we welcome Rashid and enjoy this special performance, thank you very much