 So welcome, everybody, to this CNBC panel. We're going to talk about the future of the human race, the specific question we have for ourselves on the panel, what systemic changes are required to ensure that technology can serve humanity to its fullest potential. So we're going to talk about robotics, we're going to talk about AI, evolution of the internet, smartphones, digital disruption, all the things at the moment that are a challenge, but also offer tremendous opportunity for where we go tomorrow. And I'm excited to tell you that we have on our panel here and let me run through the order, Mark Benioff. He is the Chairman and CEO of Salesforce USA. Thanks for being with us, Mark. Maurice Levy, the Chairman and CEO of the Publicist Group, Sharon Burrow, General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation and Eric Brynjolfsson, the Professor at MIT, who is also a co-author of the Second Machine Age. Thank you, everybody, for joining us for this CNBC event. Sharon, can I start with you? And I want to go straight in on the issue of the impact of technological innovation right now on employment. Is it a positive or a negative as far as you're concerned? Well, for us, it's not about technology because we've been dealing with technological change, displacement, the issues around upskilling, new industries for decades. We accept that it will be deeper and faster. For us, it's about what kind of economic model is technology being grafted onto? If you look at the global environment right now, you all know the economic vulnerability, but let me tell you just briefly about the vulnerability for people. We have a global workforce that has 60% of people only in the formal economy, and less than half of those have secure work. Then we have 40% of people who are actually in the informal economy, no rights at all, no social protection, no minimum wages on which they can live, desperation. They can't participate in terms of growth through demand in your economy today. And then we have, sadly, about up to 30 million people enslaved in businesses around the world through supply chains, where 94% of the dominant model of trade, 94% of the workforce, have no relationship with the companies that they actually make wealth for. And that's without the refugee crisis, the desperation from economic plight, or indeed, of course, conflict, and the climate issue to come. So for us, the central question is, can technology be harnessed for systems change? Can we actually get to that zero-carbon, zero-poverty world where people are at the center, and the 1%, the capture of the 1% is not the model on which the technology is harnessed? How are we doing at the moment? I mean, obviously, governments are grappling with these issues. We also see companies trying to work out how they can best put technology into their operations without damaging the morale of their workforce and clearly hurting a very important part of their business operation. So how do you think we are faring at the moment, and if not well, how do we change that? I think we have a huge divide. You know, governments are struggling. It's that simple. You know the economic vulnerability and the orthodoxy that demand will come back if we just actually, you know, graft on technology. I've heard some massive figures. $3 trillion will be added to wealth. You know, I just don't believe it. When we can't raise about $700 billion for the G20 commitment to infrastructure, the fastest, indeed, medium-term multiplier of jobs, then, you know, that's just a massive overstatement. So what I'd say to you is there are great business leaders grappling with this. I've joined the B team. We supported We Mean Business because the commitment to a zero-carbon, zero-poverty world that the world leaders decided on last year is the hope of the future. So the question really is, will technology play a role in helping us achieve that? Well, we share technology because we don't now. Existing technology is not implemented on an equitable basis around the world which might do something about development. So really, we're worried that the design of, it's not about technology. I think there are some ethical questions the world has to answer. It's really, will it be captured by the people who have captured the 1% who own the equivalent wealth to the rest of the world? Because if that's the model, demands and growth is not coming back any time soon. You have said greed is outstripping opportunity. Now, that's fighting talk. I mean, do you really believe that what is happening at the moment is purely about people filling their pockets at the expense of the workforce because technology is increasingly allowing them to do that. It's creating inequality. I think the model, I don't think it's human beings. I think CEOs, in fact, I know. CEOs are human beings. Exactly, I think CEOs don't know, frankly. There's a woman in the Philippines who, you know, I'd love to introduce to the CEO of Victoria's Secret. She actually says to me, her wages are barely enough to live on, barely enough to live on. I'm talking desperation wages. But that's not what worries her. She has absolutely to accept forced overtime or lose her job, so she can't tell her 12-year-old son that she'll go home at night to cook him a meal or even say goodnight to him, 10, 12, 2, 4 in the morning. That's not a model any of you could endorse. But I can take you through the workforces of the world, the working places of the world and actually show you the vulnerability. Now, if you can help us solve that, then we're all on the same planet. Zero poverty, zero carbon, technology, I'm in. But not if it's more of the same, on the same economic model. Mark, do you accept the points that are being made? I mean, is digital innovation now contributing to the stagnation of incomes and also a loss of jobs, particularly sort of mid-level jobs? Well, I mean, I agree, I think, on every single point she said, and it's also one of the reasons I joined the B team because we are in a leadership crisis. It's not, we're not in a technology crisis. We are in a technology revolution. We are gonna see technology shifts and changes at a scale that we have never seen on this planet. And you know that this week at the World Economic Forum, we've been talking about the fourth industrial revolution and how that is not just about digital technology, that's about many different types of technology, including bioengineering technology and advancements and genetic engineering like CRISPR and others. These are things that the world has never seen. I mean, of course we're gonna hear about artificial intelligence on this panel, but there are many exciting technologies that are happening. But this amount of change, this amount of transformation that is underway requires severe and extreme leadership. And that is what we need. We need stronger leaders who are able to give us a stronger vision for where we are going. And the countries that are having the problem are the countries with the weakest leadership because that is the reality today. We have a wealth of opportunity, but if we don't have the leadership, we're gonna end up in unbelievable levels of inequality like we're seeing in many parts of the world. We don't have a policymaker on the panel here, so I can't direct my fire at them on this issue, but I know what they would say. This is you passing the buck because you have to take responsibility as the leader of a business. That actually has a role in changing the way the business operates. But let me tell you why that's not true. The reason that is not true is technology is a continuum. It's constantly getting lower cost, easier to use, and the rate of technology change is getting faster. So it's really the leader's responsibility, these leaders that you're talking about. They have to accept that. We are servants to this spirit of technology. This is happening. It's not any one person or any one organization or one company or one country. This is happening. It's the leaders that need to step up and acknowledge that the world is changing and they need to do things now to make the world better. And that's I think the message of the conference this week is that there is a leadership void in the world, and we need people who are here in this audience, people in this conference, people who are watching online to step into that leadership void and help us to get to where we all know that we need to get to because the technology is going to be there. Don't worry about that. That's going to happen, but will the rest of us get there? And I think that's the point that she's making very clearly and it's a leadership void. It's a leadership vacuum. And it's a crisis of leadership. All the surveys are unfortunately confirming what Mark has said, which is the fact that people have very little trust in the leadership. And unfortunately, I must say that including on the CEOs, it's not only the leadership of the countries, but when you ask the people how much trust they should put on the way company are run, the polls are not very encouraging. It's very different that this is where I may differ from you is when you are asking the people of one company, they love the company they work in and they love their CEOs most of the time or the management and the way the company is run. So there is a crisis of leadership. And when you look at the current situation, it is one of the situations that we have barely seen in the past because it's a combination of crisis. There is the financial crisis which hurt us in 2008, which is not yet finished. We should all be clear about this. The decision which had to be taken, and this is where we are in total agreement about the void of leadership. The decision which had to be taken in 2009, 2010 have not been taken. And today we are still carrying the load of the void of decision or the decision which have been made only halfway and people have failed that they have made the right decision and unfortunately they have not done the full job. That is one thing. And if I could just build on what Marisa is saying which is that technology is never good or bad. It's what we do with the technology. That's the leadership issue. That's the second aspect that we are in a transition. And when you are in a transition, if on top of this you have the GDP growth which is against you, it is making that transition much more difficult because people see the negative impact and they don't see the positive impact or they believe that the positive impact is only on a handful of people or a handful of companies which are becoming very rich, very strong and they don't see all the effect which is affecting the whole industries and that effect is extremely positive. Yesterday we had a very interesting session about the future of the internet and a presentation has been made that we should by and large add 100 trillion. So maybe it's 98, I don't know but 100 trillion to global GDP by 2025. If that is true, I think that we can expect very golden days in the future. I don't know how much of this will happen but certainly a lot will happen. And what we need to do and that is where we have a responsibility as CEOs is that we cannot just sit and say we have to wait for the decision from the politicians. We have to push, we have to help and we have to convince them that they have to take the right legislation in order that we can transform our industries. Otherwise what will happen is even more crisis, even more Greek situation or Spanish situation or the current French situation and we will see all this transformation happening without the right effect on workers, on enrichment of the society and the fact that we will be in a much better society. Okay, look, let me just show my age for a moment here. I remember a technological battle and many of you may as well and it was VHS, Vs VitaMax, right? And leadership is about taking a decision and sometimes picking a winner but you basically have to make a decision. Now if you made the wrong decision, as some did back then, you ended up with a Duff machine that you couldn't get the cartridges for anymore or at least there was a whole subset of industries that went out of business because they backed the wrong technology and that's why we have stasis in leadership at the moment because governments don't want to back the wrong technology and they don't want to make the wrong decision. So Eric, how can we find a basis to move forward where the policymakers and the business community can work in partnership, can lay down a set of guidelines or rules that everybody can work with and that leads to what Sharon is asking for, a protection of workers' rights? Well it starts with the understanding that we just heard from all three of my colleagues here and that is that technology is a tool. The biggest misconception I've heard here at Davos and recently is this idea that technology is gonna come for all of our jobs and there's nothing we can do about it. The reality is that it's a tool, it's a more powerful tool than we've ever had before, whether technology is a hammer or an enterprise resource planning, that means we have more power to shape that going forward. Now one way you can use that technology is to automate jobs and to eliminate existing tasks and technology in many cases is a good substitute for humans but the bigger opportunity is using technology as a complement that is to enhance human capabilities, augment them and there's a whole set of ways that that can be done. We were talking just earlier in the room before we came out here, Mark was describing how in France, Salesforce is likely to add tens of thousands of jobs and that's because you think about what Salesforce does, it makes a salesperson more effective. When you're selling something, you are interacting with somebody, there's a human touch, there's a communication, there interpersonal and emotional relationship that a machine can't replicate and it shouldn't. The reality is that machines and humans have very different strengths and weaknesses and if we build on that, we're gonna build systems that combine humans and machines in ways that they can do things that could never have been done before. Now policy makers too often I think are focused on this idea that technology may be automating jobs and there's a tendency to try to protect the existing jobs or if you will, protect the past from the future. But if anything, we should be protecting the future from the past and embracing it. Technology can be used to create jobs or destroy jobs but the answer is not to hang on to what we have, it's to increase the speed at which we develop the new jobs, the new opportunities. That's what Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction and the economies that do that faster, the companies that embrace that, they're the ones that are gonna be more successful and ultimately that's the best way to raise up living standards broadly and create wealth for the many, not the few. Sadly, I don't think we've been doing that well enough so far. The reality as you may know is that the statistics are that although we have more millionaires and billionaires than ever before, we have record wealth and maybe we'll have a hundred trillion dollars of wealth added in the coming years. That's all great news but there's simply no economic law that says that everyone is automatically going to benefit evenly. It doesn't just happen. You have to put in place policies and over the past 20 years, sadly, median income has stagnated in the United States and other developed countries. The median worker, the person at the 50th percentile is poorer or no richer now than they were back in the 1990s even though the overall pie is much, much bigger than it was then. And that's because the way the policies have been put in place that those technologies have disproportionately been used to add to the wealth of the 1% at the top as opposed to creating this broadly shared prosperity. But I want to stress is I think all of the panelists have been saying this is by no means inevitable. It's a choice. And I wouldn't put it all on policy makers. I wouldn't put it all on CEOs. I wouldn't put it all on laborers, individuals. Everybody has to contribute to that. People have to develop new skills. Policy makers have to reinvent education and foster entrepreneurship. CEOs can take different policies about how they grow their companies. They can have a good job strategy that has high wages and engaged workforce that could be just as profitable or more profitable than one that tries to squeeze wages. So there's opportunities across the board. In fact, that's the call that we've asked for is the dialogue. Social dialogue works. When everybody is involved and you can make informed decisions, then you're right. People are loyal to their companies. People have more trust in governments, in us, in civil society. You know, there's a confidence that drives something that's different. We've seen it before in intractable decisions. The problem is we've had a kind of selfish economy where people are simply driving, you know, the notion of wealth for wealth's sake, as opposed to why we build economies, which is actually to create decent living standards for all our sons and daughters. And I want to say that if we're going to have 100 trillion extra, I'm going to raise the wage claims of the world today. But on a serious note, our wealth today, and I want to bring it back to people, our wealth today cannot pay through the current business model $178 US dollars a month for workers in Cambodia or $250 a month for workers in Jakarta or $320 a month for workers in the Philippines. And I could go on. I could tell you our wage claims in every country globally. They're very tiny. But if we don't think about that reality, who's going to buy your product, technologically smart or otherwise? You have said that Amazon treats its workers in Germany like robots. And you have talked about the lack of dignity for those workers. What needs to change in the economic environment to persuade companies like Amazon to behave differently towards their workers if you feel that there is a problem? Well, I call it the sons and daughters test. The B team has an initiative called 100% human. You know, we've all got an agreement, business workers, governments, on the UN business and human rights principles. They are about due diligence, but they're about dignity. They're actually about dignity. And I say it's this simple. If you want companies that are human and we're very committed, Mark and I, to this initiative, then what would you want your sons and daughters to be treated like? And that's the test. If you pass that test, you can be very proud of yourselves as a CEO and a human being. If you don't pass that test, something's wrong. Look, Amazon are not here to defend themselves, so I'm not going to dwell on their story, but Mark, I think you've made comments about people want to work for businesses that have a heart, that display some kind of love for their employees and hope that that love will be reciprocated. Well, love for their employees and how about less love for the world and love for the planet and love for everyone. We don't have to just limit it to the employees. Why don't we just make it for everybody and everything? You know, I think that what she said is square on, but there is a undercurrent in the conversation, which is that, you know, there is this incredible change underway and these incredible technology leaps that you're going to see over the next one to two decades are going to yield incredible miracles in the world and they're also going to yield potentially, and God forbid, incredible horrors. We need stronger leadership and it's going to take CEOs to redefine and reconceptualize their role. I think that CEOs maybe have been somewhat isolated to thinking maybe that all they need to do is lead their companies and I think CEOs need to take a higher, more abstract position. That's why we joined the B team because our message is as CEOs, we want to help guide this future. We know that there are many different futures ahead of us and the future that we end up with is going to be a result of the leadership, but it's the CEO position that has to transform and change. Now in your example of Betamax versus VHS, we can go back to that for a second. You probably remember that was also one company, Sony Betamax, against a coalition VHS. Ultimately it was the market that decided what the best technology was, but it is very much a leadership crisis and so we have to reconceptualize in our minds who are our leaders, who can help get us there and if our political leaders are not taking it on, then we can't just say, oh well it's over, that's it. No, we have to take it on ourselves. People like you see here at this conference, like Paul Pullman at Unilever, Richard Branson, or Maurice and others who are CEOs of some of the largest and most important companies in the world, they need to be right there, hand in hand with the political leaders, with the NGO leaders, with the societal leaders, with the religious leaders. Everybody has to work together in a new way and we have to redefine that leadership is not just about who the head of the country is. Leadership is about all of us and if we can do that, then we are gonna create this incredible new world. Well, let me take this forward a step because I want to move on a little bit from workers' rights but I think that we are already seeing the battle taking place over technology when it comes to privacy where governments and policy makers are falling out of love with the market solutions and you can see this very clearly now in the way that some European governments are saying, we want our data within our borders, we are no longer going to allow it to be stored on a server in the United States or somewhere else. Maurice, I want to bring this to you because on the one hand, we have seen people be very generous with their private data because they've had an opportunity through social media and other technologies just to put information out there which they feel they're doing in their own best interests but we've also seen that data used for the wrong purposes and increasingly so. So I would ask you, where is the line? At what point do we step in with legislation that is restrictive on the access to private data that companies have or at least how they intend to use that data? I think that the consumers have not seen how important the private data are where and they have shared this very generously and today there is a very important question about who owned the data because we know who sell the data but who own it. Is it the people who are agglomerating, getting the data from the transaction and from the cookies and from following the people or is it me as a consumer that I do own my own data? So that is a very important aspect which today has not yet been tackled and I believe that there will be a point in time where the consumers say, okay there is a whole of wealth which is developed around my own data and they want my share of that wealth and it is also in the shared economy something that they will claim to get it back. So that is one very important aspect. Then we have a divide between Europe and the US the US are more open about the use of the data. The Europe countries have been maybe damaged in the way data has been used in certain period of time where files have been misused for all the reason and they are very strict about the use of private data. For example, if you look in France you cannot have information about religion, race and I have been shocked the first time that I was working in the US when they asked me, okay give us the breakdown between Jews, gays, black, red, white, whatever. This was for me absolutely shocking and it was a request made by the city of New York and they had to comply. So I went to lawyers to see if I could avoid to comply and they have been forced to give this information to the city of New York otherwise I would have been sued for I don't know which reason. In France if you put on a file that someone is homosexual or that he's a Jew or a Muslim you can be taken to court because you are building discrimination. So based on this you have a feeling a temptation by the states to be highly respected and destructive about the information and on top of this they are extremely worried to see that three or four companies are controlling most of the information and their own information and the conversation they are having are stored in the US and they don't feel comfortable to see that all this information are not in the European Clouds. So all this will lead to legislation which is not always a good thing because when you start elaborating rules on something which is moving so fast you may first take decision which are already outdated and after two years it will be hugely outdated. So I think that the right decision is to put all the people in a room the people who are selling the data the people who are using the data the representative of the consumers and making sure that we have a reasonable use of the information otherwise we will have a huge problem in society. But I would like for... Very briefly you've talked for a while here so very briefly. I need to say something which is extremely important not regarding the data but regarding the other aspect that we were covering a few minutes ago which is very quickly just one second which is we are all forgetting one thing that in that economy that we are living in today we are in a deflation mode and we are still in a system in the economic system which is in the deflation mode and this discrepancy is leading to the issues that we are facing with wages and how to pay correctly the people and how to generate enough growth and revenues in order to have a better spread in the distribution. Sorry for the... No, no, no, I mean this is the wrong panel for this conversation it should have been the panel that I had yesterday when we were talking to... You should have been facing me... Fine, it's because to be honest with you I think deflation is not a bad thing if you're a consumer. You know what, I don't necessarily like the fact that prices go up every year and my petrol goes up every year and so on and so forth but it's a totally different conversation and a totally different panel but I want to get back to the big data question because big data has tremendous opportunities. It makes governments smarter about how they provide services. It makes companies more efficient about how they offer up what they offer up in any sector but we have got to a point and I think Morris you elucidated that very clearly where we are almost starting to look at governments pushing back the progress in big data because they have become suspicious about how it's being used. What's the solution? Well, the reality is that big data can be used to create tremendous value but it also has these privacy issues and you have to strike a balance and I fear that in many cases some of the governments, especially in Europe, frankly have gone a little too far. Big data in some of the studies we did at MIT with Christina McLearn and Hikion Kim has added significantly to the productivity of firms, 8% productivity improvements and it can be used to improve targeting of ads and other things and there was recently a study by another colleague of mine, Catherine Tucker that looked at some of the restrictions that were put on data sharing and the intention was to protect consumers by not allowing companies to have specific information about individuals when they targeted the ads but it had these unattended side effects. One of the effects was that the revenue fell tremendously for the companies in Europe that previously had been able to target their ads and untargeted ads much less valuable and less news and other information was provided. Another side effect was that they responded by trying to get the consumer's attention more aggressively and they had more of these interstitial ads, these 30 second flash ads that are very annoying to consumers and after a few years they had to withdraw some of those regulations. So there's a trade off there between trying to harness the benefits of big data but also protect consumers and we have to be realistic about striking that balance in the right way. It's an example of how these new technologies are creating enormous opportunities. We've used the word trillions, there are trillions of data points that'll be available through the internet of things that will be connecting the planet but as we do that we have to come up with new regulations. It used to be that the laws of physics constrained what information could be shared if someone did a transaction and there was a receipt in the cash register it was very hard for that information to be shared with people on the other side of the planet. Now when everything's digitized the laws of physics no longer constrained how the information is shared so we have to come up with our own rules and regulations about how we want to share that but again I wouldn't want to be too aggressive about stifling the innovation in how that information is shared lest we end up doing more harm than good. Isn't there also a battle about connectivity and who owns and has access to the internet? I mean half the planet doesn't have access to the internet, it's that simple. So when we're talking about building huge digital platforms that's one thing we've got to do something about but the other thing that worries us is that you have a battle now between well companies who want secure access to the net you have dictatorships who want to prevent people from connectivity and freedom of expression even simply your commercial transactions is a worry for CEOs but for us it's about the democracy that comes with the internet and connectivity. So I think that when cyber security is not up to the task without actually infringing people's human rights and we've got a problem and when 80% of the insurance against cyber attacks is actually located in the US there's probably a problem as well but for us it's about how do you get access? How do we actually drive a world that is interconnected without the constraints either on your capacity to learn or to interact with people or to transact but most of all to express in a modern democratic way your views about what kind of societies we want to live in. But Sharon is not one of the great success stories is that because of devices like this billions more people are being connected and soon almost all the world's population will be connected. Absolutely, we're just impatient about it. Like there's no question that but when I see the possibilities of people being able to live freer lives and yet you see that too many of our people I think it's way over a billion don't have electricity and indeed half the planet doesn't have connectivity to the internet then this is my point about sharing today's technology. If we're gonna get to a zero carbon, zero poverty world and we don't share technology for renewable energy for the internet of things sounds fantastic around moderating our behavior consumption behavior as well by the way which is probably a good thing for planetary boundaries. But you know half the planet come on what's wrong with our model of IP and technology sharing that we exclude human beings to that extent. Mark just to come back to you I mean you've talked a lot about leadership we need to see leadership and I think specifically you've focused on governments and policymakers here. Anything involving the human race that is so important or significant in the consequences that it may lead to clearly needs a global level set of standards or agreements. But we can't even get agreements on basic trade deals. We can't get agreements on what kind of military technology countries are or are not allowed to have and there is always this sense that one country or other is pursuing in its own interests a one up and ship style approach where they decide to sit out of the conversation and quite often if you look at the negotiations around the AIIB quite often that country is the United States where you would hope there would be leadership. So how do we get all of those governments around the same table to come up with a set of standards that we can all accept? Well it's why we come to Davos and we have to have these multi-stakeholder dialogues. That's the genius of Davos. The genius of Davos comes out of this stakeholder theory that Klaus Schwab created in 1972 and first Davos here talking about if we don't have multi-stakeholder dialogues multi-country dialogues, dialogues between CEOs and NGOs and government leaders we're not gonna make that kind of progress. And as an example, let's just come back to your point. Balkanization of data. And you look at this Balkanization of data, well said, you know what? That comes from fear, that comes from ignorance. And then what does that lead to? Nationalism, you know? And then yes, that slows down technology advancement. And why is that happening? Because these world leaders come in and they'll say oh we're shocked, we're shocked that this is happening. Well, but for 20 years we've been articulating what is gonna happen with data. Why have they not been paying attention? Why didn't I not act earlier? And I'll tell you why, because the urgent, okay, is basically consuming the importance. And we know other technologies that are really gonna be transformational or coming. And yes, we have like a minister of finance in this country and we have a minister of foreign affairs of that country. I think maybe every country needs a minister of the future also. Someone who can just kind of pay attention to what's gonna come. Let those people deal with the crisis of the day, okay? Because we can't afford anymore for all of these guys to kind of throw up their hands and say oh, we had no idea this was happening when you could go back and look at the transcripts of the World Economic Forum for the last 20 years. It's all been right there. It's been clearly communicated. So what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? That is the question. What action are we gonna take? And that is my leadership point, which is let's transform leadership. And that's I think the message of this event. I think that's why we're here. But Eric is dialogue enough. I mean, with the greatest respect to Klaus and to this wonderful organization. And we come here every year and have these conversations. Policies don't really get made here. A lot of people spend a lot of time talking. So dialogue's not enough, is it? We need to- No, of course it's not enough, but it's a start. And the first step to solving any problem is recognizing it and understanding the issues that are there. But there are a number of very specific policies that could be put in place. And I would start with education. That's a great place to start. When you see growing inequality, it's often a sign that we aren't doing education right. The first Nobel Prize winner economics had this great insight that inequality is often the result of a race between technology and education. And right now we aren't doing education right. I'm not gonna say we're saying we're not just doing it enough of it, but it has to be fundamentally reinvented. And that's something that governments have an obvious role in. And that means stressing the kinds of things that humans are good at and machines aren't good at. And there are plenty of things. I mean humans and machines have very different capabilities. Humans are great at creativity and complex problem solving, inventing new businesses, science, literature, arts. They're also great at interpersonal relations, nurturing, caring, teamwork, sales, negotiation, coaching. You wouldn't want to have a halftime speech given by a robot football coach. That wouldn't be particularly inspiring. And a leader of a company also has to be inspiring. And these are things, skills that I actually think can be taught and they can be learned, but that's not the way we do our schools today, not the way we do our education today, or very few of them. Too many of them sit the kids in rows of desks and have them sit quietly and memorize facts and learn to follow instructions. But let's face it, memorizing facts, following instructions, that's exactly what computers do well. It's foolish for us to turn our kids into machines that spit out memorized facts and follow instructions. We need to have them stress these new skills that are gonna be needed in the 21st century. So that's one of the categories we can improve. We can do a lot of other things in terms of boosting entrepreneurship, investment in basic infrastructure, R&D. We're gonna have to rethink the tax code to focus more on taxing the things we don't want. Like pollution, carbon, congestion, and not taxing the things that can create shared prosperity, like labor and jobs, and yet right now we have it exactly backwards. But if we have a dialogue, I think that these types of solutions have become more broadly evident and then people can go back and put them in place. Let me just say one last thing on that, that ultimately it's not gonna happen just from the leaders understanding these issues. At the end of the day in democracies, for better or worse, the leaders follow the people and that means that there has to be a broad understanding of the kinds of changes that are needed. I mean, I've talked to some of the world leaders and some of them have a perfect understanding of exactly the issues we're talking about here. But they say, the people in my congressional district, they're not on board with this yet, so I can't go forward. And that's the way democracy is supposed to work. It's slow, it's clumsy. Winston Churchill said it was the worst system of government except for all the others. And that's what we have to deal with. So we're gonna have to have this dialogue go much broader than just the people who are here at Davos. And I think, I'm glad this is on television because I think it's gonna reach a much broader audience. But you know, I'm a teacher by trade, so I wouldn't argue with education, education, education, I mean, that's a given. But you know, I'm dealing today with the desperate situation of my colleagues in Tunisia. Civil society, unions, business, I just won the Nobel Prize for the dialogue that brought one of the best constitutions and stability to move from dictatorship to democracy. But guess what? The same thing that sparked the Arab Spring in Tunisia is right now on our doorstep again. They're very educated young people. One of the co-chairs, Amira, one of my colleagues here as co-chairs is in fact a Tunisian young woman, she's brilliant. But on the streets right now, young people don't have jobs. They are highly educated. They don't have jobs, so there's civil unrest again and there was a curfew imposed over the last 24 hours. That is again leading to the kind of breakdown in our society none of us wants. So what's the answer? And here's a challenge. I did the numbers about three years ago. There are hundreds of French companies in Tunisia. There are hundreds of German companies in Tunisia and many, many more. Take one young person each on your books. Pay for them if you like. They're tiny salaries out of your CEO's salaries. You know, if Jamie Dimon can give himself a 35% pay rise when you've seen the economic volatility this week and we've had the Oxfam report of the 1%, let's do something to take away the tension that isn't just about education, not that I disagree at all, except that I think you should respect teachers just a little more or none of you would be here. But apart from that, let's do something me too. So that makes two of us. Let's do something for young people and start today in Tunisia. You can make a difference. Just to come back a moment here to the point that you were making. Eric, are we just in a unique moment? And this leads off from what Maurice was saying about the economic environment at the moment. So increasingly when I talk to companies, they are pursuing growth in OPEX, but they are not pursuing growth in CAPEX. They are not spending large to invest in their businesses, which means they're not taking on people. But they are bringing in technology like Mark's company makes and they are using that to reduce costs rather than pursue growth. Is this just a phase we are in coming out of the financial crisis or is this going to be with us for some time to come? Well, there are a lot of factors at work and certainly part of it is the lingering effects of the long slump after the financial crisis. But I think there's something more fundamental going on and that's this remarkable set of new technologies that are coming on board that can do things that could never have been done before. In the first industrial revolution, we automated our muscles and augmented our physical work. Now machines are increasingly able to do cognitive tasks and that's opening up a much broader set of things that machines can do that only humans used to be able to do. And the instinctive and sort of easy thing to do is to look at an existing task and say, huh, how can I use a machine to automate that particular task? It doesn't take a ton of creativity, it takes a little bit and engineers can be focused on that task and automate it. And we've been doing that quite effectively in automating lots of tasks. But the more valuable strategy in the long run is to be a little more creative and say, how can we use a machine to take this human and make them even more valuable than they were before? Doing something new, something that wasn't done before, create a new product, a new service, a new business process, a whole new business model. That's something that's rare. It takes the kind of entrepreneurship, the kind of creativities that entrepreneurs have. I personally believe that it's entirely possible but when you have these kinds of technological revolutions, I think the first instinct is too often to just stick with your existing tasks, your existing processes and just automate them. And I'd call that lazy. It can be profitable, you can make some money on it, but in the long run, the bigger wins come from expanding the pie. And that's a strategy that isn't just good for the bottom line, it's good for society because it creates shared prosperity and what I was saying benefits for the many, not just the few. Maurice, very briefly. Yeah, on this aspect, there is two very important elements. The first one is that we are living since 2008 in a world of uncertainties and people, CEOs and management and board are a little bit reluctant to invest and that is one of the reasons. The second reason is that there is a short-termism approach from all the investors and Larry Fink has written a letter which is quite clear about this and when you compare the average tenor of a CEO, the fact that the return on investment is much longer than the average tenor, what they want to do is to make sure that they are not held responsible for the decision which has been made before or after. So what they are doing is to improve the system and to improve the way it is operating rather than to invest and the way to find growth is to acquire companies rather than to invest in new product, new machine and new industries. So this is a situation which I believe is linked to the current situation. I don't believe that it will be a long-lasting situation and I think that thing will change as soon as they will feel that there is more certainty on the forecast of the economy. Let me just push back at you for a moment here because I've heard this argument before. You are the CEO and chairman. Mark is the CEO and chairman. You run your businesses. They buy a stake in your business if they think it's gonna do well, but you run your business. So if you decide that you're going to run it in the interests of short-term share price performance, that is your decision. That is not their decision. So let's be clear where the responsibility lies. I want to address that because that is what we are talking about. That you just got to the heart of the matter. Which is that- It's only taken 45 minutes. Well, this is the heart of the matter which is that CEOs need to wake up. They need to wake up, take on the new responsibility and you cannot focus on your shareholders. You have to focus on your stakeholders. You can see what she is talking about, what he is talking about, what he is talking about. But you're talking about stakeholder management. That is, there are many stakeholders that CEOs are responsible for. And if you take this highly focused strategy, just as your two-year tenure as CEO to maximize shareholder value, you're not only gonna probably destroy your company, but you could destroy the world. So we do have to shift the CEO consciousness and get CEOs to engage in a multi-stakeholder approach. This is really critical. I loved your comment about education which I think everybody resonated. I strongly believe that the two most important forces of the future will be education and forgiveness. Because education gives it the knowledge of what's possible. Forgiveness lets us let go of our grudges and problems from the past. And if we can create this kind of beginner's mind, this idea of what the future could be with all the incredible possibilities of the fourth industrial revolution, and we can all work together as leaders, then we can really do something amazing. We can really do something for those who are impoverished. We can create the zero carbon, zero poverty world that we've heard about. It's all right there, the potential, it's all right there. All we have to do is wake up. Let me just, Boris, I know you wanna come back in, but let me just ask you. The Edelman report coming into this, Davos told us that there is one group where there is trust in business and that's growing. And they are the digitally connected group. And then there is a whole big group below that who are increasingly distrustful of public institutions and businesses. Now, why is that happening and how do you change that? This is what you're saying. You've said it now five different times, five different ways. Inequality on this planet is our number one most serious issue, okay? What are we gonna do about it? We're gonna create a quality. Okay, what are the five things we're gonna do to create a quality? Let's do it. Let's come up with the five things to create a quality. We know we have inequality. All right, let's transform that to a quality. Everything from, take something like women. Let's make sure women have equal opportunity, equal advancement. Let's make sure that companies pay women the same that they pay men. Now that's a deal. They've invested billions of dollars. Find out the bottom line. Billions of dollars have been invested in HRMS systems. These are the human resource management systems that keep track. With one button, a CEO knows if they are paying women more or less than men, okay? But are they willing to press the button? That is leadership. Okay, are you paying women the same as men? I do. I do. And I want just to come back on the question that you put regarding CEOs and the way we are operating. I have, with my board, decided that I will take a long-term view on some changes and some transformation. My stock went down by 26% in the last 12 months. And we knew that we will be heard and we have accepted to be heard. And this is how you run long-term operation by accepting to take a hit for a short while, I hope a short while, maybe two years, because you need to transform your business. And I'm not the only one to do that. And you have many CEOs who are doing this and there is the vast majority which are under the pressure of short-termism. And what do you see? Activists, which are coming and which are disrupting the company and sometimes leading to the sale or the breakdown of the company in two or three pieces. So it's a very complicated issue. We cannot judge the things by only taking one aspect. The whole system has to be revisited, including the way investors are getting a return. And they have to accept to be part of a solidarity system by which we are creating value on the long-term. But we are creating value for all the stakeholders, not only maximizing as the Chicago School is saying, maximizing shareholder value. We have to take all the elements of the system and try to improve them all. But I agree with that. I say which shareholders? Because working people have $30 trillion invested in the global economy. That's our pensions. We have double that if you take our mutuals because we don't just bargain for better wages and conditions, we build mutuals, we build banks, we build health societies, we build and we bargain for pensions. And deferred wages, by the way, not simply CEO contributions. And we're going to have a proxy season this year. If we're serious about zero carbon and we don't say to every company, fossil fuel companies, yes, certainly oil and gas. I think we've lost an orderly exit from coal and we need to look after those communities and workers. But also every company, if you're going to make the transition, we don't want companies to go out of business. So we're saying, what's your plan for decarbonization and jobs? Decent jobs, by the way, well-paid jobs with rights. But what's your plan? If you have a plan, if there's engagement, if you're transparent about your progress and your targets and monitoring, then the long-term investment model that Maurice is talking about is the only model if we're serious about those global goals of zero carbon, zero poverty. So I agree, let's change the system. Those who want to play casino economy fine, isolate them. But let's actually look at what the system is doing by long-term sustainable shared prosperity because we're not sharing it right now. And I want to underscore something that just to be real clear of what Maurice and Sharon just said. This is not an either or. It's not like you have to turn away from the shareholders to help other stakeholders. The great news is that there are very good research by Zennep Tom and others that show that actually it can be more profitable if you go with the good jobs approach she calls it. She is an index, a good jobs index that shows that companies that invest in this broader approach, that invest in their workers and the other stakeholders part of the community, they actually in the long run do significantly better. And so if those shareholders saw you doing this and they sold their stock, well, shame on them, they're making a mistake, not just for the world and for society but for their own bottom lines because ultimately companies that do this are better. And I don't want to create this, have everyone get the misunderstanding that we have to, that it's an either or. If we do this right, we can invent systems that do create shared prosperity. And that's one of the reasons that we create something called the inclusive innovation competition to recognize companies that are doing that and spread the word that this is a profitable system. It's not that we have to turn away from one group. It's that we can invent systems that benefit all the groups simultaneously. If somebody could just tell me how much time we've got here before the room is needed again because we've run a little bit longer in the discussion because it's been such a great discussion but I do want to give the audience an opportunity to ask a question or make a comment. So just put your hand up if you'd like to participate. Yes, sir. Let's get the microphone to you. Ulrich Schaefer of Zootoget Zeitung, the biggest daily newspaper in Germany. I have a question to Mark Benioff. You mentioned that there are five things that we could do against inequality. And you mentioned number one and then the discussion moved on. So what are the next four points? Okay. Thank you. You know, I come from a place far away from here called San Francisco. And in San Francisco, we have a huge economic boom underway. It's also an incredible innovation boom. More companies and ideas have been created in the last five years than anyone possibly could have anticipated. But we have one zip code in San Francisco that we have unbelievable levels of inequality. We have unbelievable issues in regards to equity. We have health equity issues. In this one zip code in San Francisco, and San Francisco has only seven square miles. In this one zip code in San Francisco, preterm birth rates are six times higher than in all the other districts in San Francisco. And when you zero write down on that, you find out that 50% of those are coming from teenage girls, all right? And you get right down to levels of poverty and you get right down to levels of where there just is not adequate levels of education. This is in the most prosperous, most exciting city in the world. So I am the largest tech employer in San Francisco, salesforce.com. Should I be working on that? Damn right, I should be working on that. So I've got two new children's hospitals that I'm building, one in San Francisco, one in Oakland. I give all of my employees four hours a month, six days a year to do volunteerism. I tell them to get into the schools, get into the hospitals. I hold them accountable for that. I make sure that our technology is used for free in every non-profit and non-governmental organization. And I'm doing whatever I can to help create more equality that I know that is necessary. Why? It's totally selfish. What happens if that goes really wrong? It's not gonna be pleasant and it's gonna really impact our company in a very negative way. So it's in my selfish, selfish, selfish needs that San Francisco is a place of equality. And of course we are a place where we had gay rights, the summer of love, we understand equality in San Francisco, but not in every level, I can assure you, the data does not bear it out, okay? Because there are parts of San Francisco that are as poor and have as difficult health issues as any of the poorest or difficult health issues in the whole world. That's unacceptable. So that's my specific thing. I have to do something and we all have to do something. We all have to look at where we live, what we're responsible for, our geographies, our industries, our companies, and you have to take an action. And you have to set up a model inside your company. That's why we took part of our equity and profit and time and made sure that it's focused on helping other people. We call that our one, one, one model. We promote that through something called Pledge 1%. Now we have almost 500 companies who have also accepted that model. That's very exciting to me. Millions of dollars have been committed to philanthropic causes based on that. Mark, thank you. Let's just get one more question here and then we'll run. Thank you. My name is Bouter van Noort. I'm a journalist from the Netherlands. I have a question for Professor Brunjelsen. The span was about the future of growth. And with digitization, you already see the difficulty to measure the impact of certain developments. I mean, it's an example in your book, how do you measure the added value of Wikipedia and GDP numbers? Exactly. With new technologies, probably, there arise new problems to codify growth. Don't we need a completely new model, concept framework for growth, do you think? We do need a new model. Just as we're reinventing business, we need to reinvent the way we measure the economy. The GDP accounts that we all use now, Simon Kuznitz developed them in the late 1930s. It was a wonderful invention. It's been called the greatest economic invention of the century and I don't think that's an understatement. But he specifically said, he specifically said, please, please do not use this to measure the growth of your economy. And of course, we immediately started using it to measure the growth of your economy. And the reason he said that is that he was the developer of, and he understood that GDP is not a welfare measure. It is not a measure of how well we are all doing. It counts the things that we're buying and selling, cars or whatever. But it's quite possible for GDP to go in the exact opposite direction of welfare. You mentioned Wikipedia. Wikipedia replaces Britannica. There are fewer things bought and sold. Wikipedia is free after all. If you get a free GPS, how many of you have a free GPS on your phone? That creates enormous value for us, but it doesn't show up in the GDP statistics. Or on the other side, if we have worse pollution, more lung cancer, guess what? That generates lots of revenue for hospitals and you can put people in jail, you can buy burglar on systems. That may add to GDP, but it's not a sign of the economy getting stronger. So we need to reinvent that. And we're working with my team at MIT to come up with a new set of measures. We can draw on some of the big data that you mentioned earlier that we have a lot more information available. Roberto Rigabon has something he calls the Billion Prices Index where he's literally collecting a billion prices from around the world of every good and service. We are looking at measuring consumer surplus. I think we now have some of the raw data and information and the tools, and perhaps more importantly, the conceptual understanding to come up with a new set of metrics of the economy. Because ultimately, people manage what they measure and if we don't have the right metrics, we're gonna be making the wrong kinds of decisions. So it's time for us to come up with a new set of measures. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we draw this program to a close. Thank you so much for joining us for this CNBC special. It's been a real pleasure having you with us and we'll see you next time.