The six most interesting things I learned this week in Davos

I’m just returning now from a week in Davos. There are all kinds of nested eggs inside of this conference: quiet meetings behind closed doors that are blocked by other closed doors you can only open if you have special decal on your badges. Deals quietly struck at a bar while Lenny Kravitz plays on a stage one room over. No one can ever figure out exactly what’s going on, particularly not me. But a few moments stuck out.

1)   At its best, Davos is a place where scientists, academics, politicians, and business leaders actually make progress on issues where progress can be made. Last year, I felt like I got to play a small part in furthering a much-needed conversation on ethics in artificial intelligence. This year, the most valuable moment I took part in was probably a panel I moderated on deep-sea mining. This is one of the great coming environmental questions of our time. Should we tear up the deep seas in order to extract precious minerals that could help us move away from a carbon-based economy? There are few laws and little trust, and the conversation I moderated—which included miners, scientists, and activists—got heated. It also led to what I thought was the most powerful moment of my time in Davos, a speech by the great oceanographer, Sylvia Earle. She’s now 84 and she stood up, a little frail, and came up from the audience to the stage. She spoke about the magic of the deep sea and of how little we know. And then she noted that minerals we seek to mine aren’t just rocks. They’re the accretion of living things, built up over millions of years. Who are we to yank them from the ground, through a process we don’t understand, in the service of growth we may not need? I left the room persuaded that, at the very least, we need a long moratorium on this technology and a sprint toward trying to figure out if there are ways to build the batteries of the future without cobalt, polymetallic nodules and the other treasures of the deep ocean floor.

2)   Speaking of Earle, there was magic both in the power of the youth and the wisdom of the elder. Klaus Schwab, who runs the show, is 84, but eminently spry and idealistically extolling the virtues of a new kind of capitalism. I watched George Soros, age 89, nearly break down and cry as he announced a one-billion dollar investment in a network of universities that, he hopes, will help sustain open societies so under threat from authoritarianism. But at the same time, the star of the conference was 17-year-old Greta Thunberg, challenging the CEOs, many of whom zipped in on their private planes, to do massively more to save our planet from catastrophe.

3)   Trump was here, of course, and he gave a narcissistic and inappropriately nationalistic speech, arguing that the United States has experienced what he called unimaginable growth and progress under him. "The United States is in the midst of an economic boom—the likes of which the world has never seen before,“ he proclaimed. I was watching from the overflow room, where Trump’s bombast was met with laughter. The U.S. economy is doing well, it's true. But it’s hard to convince a bunch of people who know the numbers that the US economy is the greatest economy ever. (The economy is growing roughly the same as it did under Barack Obama, and significantly more slowly than it did under Bill Clinton.) That said, Trump is not the only person, or even the only Trump, who represented the administration here. I heard that the same tech CEOs who were nonplussed in a private meeting with the President were much more impressed with his daughter Ivanka. The one government official I spent time with, FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra, was eminently impressive and on point.

4) The one moment that Trump garnered actual cheers was when he announced that the United States would join the global coalition trying to plant a trillion trees. This is an admirable challenge! It won't solve the climate crisis, but, along with other actions, it could do a lot to help. The effect though is all in the details. If the U.S. plants one hundred billion trees, for example, but we plant monocultures on areas we've just clearcut, we've done nothing good. If we plant diverse tree ecosystems, in areas where they can do the maximum benefit—for biodiversity, for water filtration, for human habitat—then something wonderful will have emerged from the president's self-congratulatory oratorio.

5)   One of my favorite things to do in Davos is to meet with the tech leaders from abroad who I don’t get to see so much in New York in San Francisco. I started my week with a fabulous meeting with Ming Maa, the president of Grab. (I described his strategy for beating Uber in Southeast Asia in this Most Interesting Thing in Tech: basically, understand the local market and work with the drivers as they are, not as you wish them to be). And then I met with Mohit Joshi, the president of Infosys. (I described his system for internal retraining, which allows for extensive automation while still increasing headcount in this Most Interesting Thing in Tech.) I also immensely enjoyed the chance to talk about—and even argue about—the way the West and China think about A.I. with Bowen Zhou of JD.com and Xue Lan of Tsinghua University. The rules of A.I., Bowen argued, are something that we will figure out as we go, just as we figured out the rules for driving in the decades after cars hit the road. I countered that we only mandated seat belts after hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost. But I also agreed with his general perspective: AI is an ocean and we are looking out at it from a shore. And it was great to actually get to talk directly with pioneers of the technology from both the West and the East.

6)   I also had the pleasure of engaging deeply with the International Media Council, a growing part of the World Economic Forum, which serves as a meeting place for editors in chief from around the world. It was a chance, in other words, to talk with people who have the same job as me, but in Indonesia, Japan, Nigeria, China. And the challenges we face everywhere are both similar—winning trust, making money, finding the truth—and quite different. I can write whatever I want about Facebook without having to worry that the comms teams will put a pipe bomb under my car. And indeed one of the best things to come out of this group is the One Free Press Coalition, a group of publishers, including Wired, who try to bring attention to imprisoned journalists around the world.

I said at the beginning that my main hope was to try to get a sense of how real the backlash to capitalism felt here. Did this seem like a new era? And the answer, as I head back, is: I’m not sure. Yes, there was more talk than usual about the climate crisis, about putting a price on carbon, and about redefining capitalism as something for stakeholders not shareholders. But, to be honest, the conversation didn't seem to have fundamentally transformed from years before.

Maybe it'll all change next year. If you're coming, drop me a line or say hello at the Congress Center. Or come for a run in the mountains—which was the one thing I made sure to do every day. If you're going to be in beautiful Davos, talking about saving the environment, you might as well get out in it a bit too.