In the market economy, you can never exclude bubbles, and there are potential bubbles in crypto, AI, but maybe the most serious one would be debt. We’re more indebted as countries than at any time since 1945. Many countries’ biggest expenditure on their budget is paying interest. So any instability with the financial system and debt would be quite a challenging bubble. But if economic growth continues, and if new technologies replace the growth-engine role of trade, if you can go back to growth closer to 4%, I think it will be easier to deal with or avoid potential debt bubbles. On AI and crypto, even after the dot-com bubble, companies [rose] from the ashes and they became even stronger. There might be, in the future, an adjustment on the AI piece, but that doesn’t change the perspective that we are in the middle of a paradigm shift, and those technologies are going to have much more impact than today in the coming decades, and hopefully they will lead to additional growth and prosperity and [prevent us] ending up like the 1970s, when there were almost zero growth for a decade.
What would you say to someone who says there’s a false expectation that there will be demand for these frontier technologies, and we will then therefore return to a zero-growth environment?
Of course, you can’t exclude that scenario, but I don’t find it the most realistic scenario. What we’re seeing in all the frontier technologies—quantum, AI, fusion, new energy sources, and also the way we do research and development is going to be revolutionized by AI. I think we will see breakthroughs in medicine, scientific biology, in many areas in the years to come that will create new opportunities, new jobs, prosperity, increased productivity.
It’s been reported that President Trump is attending this year. What do you hope he and his Administration take away from Davos?
Our theme is “A Spirit of Dialogue,” and we know that President Trump [and his] secretaries are very much into dealmaking, and to make deals, you have to have a dialogue. Hopefully there will be opportunities for agreements in the years to come that strengthen growth, prosperity, and peace. The Gaza agreement that was put in place by the U.S. is something positive, and we would like to see more of that kind of U.S. leadership going forward.
What’s your assessment of the role that Saudi Arabia and its leadership is playing on the global stage today?
The blueprint that they developed [Vision 2030] is a plan to improve the competitiveness of the kingdom’s economy, and they’ve made progress along many of these objectives. The role of women is very much changed. The service economy is growing, tourism is growing. What’s interesting is that the kingdom has pivoted from a focus on the geopolitics in the region to much more on how to improve the lives of the young population in Saudi Arabia, how to empower people, how to invest in the future, so they will be a prosperous country when the traditional revenues, sooner or later, go down.
Now under a new leadership structure, what needs to change about the World Economic Forum?
Don’t repair what is not broken. The World Economic Forum has been a trusted impartial platform for dialogue for more than 50 years. But the world has changed, from [one] based on strong multi-lateralism and globalization to [one] where we see countries focusing on their national interests. The World Economic Forum also has to be very realistic about what we can achieve. We are not an intergovernmental organization. Our platform brings all the key players in the world on it, being China, U.S., Europe, businesses, governments. Even under more challenging circumstances when it comes to pursuing dialogue, we can still create and enable discussions that can lead hopefully to constructive cooperation in the future, also addressing some of the key solutions that we that we need. That’s what we’re aiming for.