In Davos this week, 3,000 world leaders and business bosses attended hundreds of talks, workshops, dinners, and other get-togethers. The takeaway: Artificial intelligence and climate change are going to ruin us, but blockchain and women are going to save us. While advances in AI are undoubtedly significant for humanity—Google CEO Sundar Pichai compared AI to the invention of fire—the potential for job losses and instability as industries adjust (or not), is tremendous. “At the end of the day,...

Davos, Switzerland “It’s a time of enormous ebullience,” said Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman on a panel in Davos today (Jan. 23), “part of which has been created by really good economic growth.” Schwarzman’s optimism was shared by other finance chiefs in the first hours of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting. “I think we are in an exceptionally favorable context,” said Credit Suisse CEO Tidjane Thiam, speaking during the panel on global markets. “There’s synchronous growth, with the US...

Robots are taking human jobs. But Bill Gates believes that governments should tax companies’ use of them, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment. It’s a striking position from the world’s richest man and a self-described techno-optimist who co-founded Microsoft, one of the leading players in artificial-intelligence technology. In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates said that a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly...