The Business and Political Elite at Davos

Their opinions about high tech changes, and what they mean:

Internet will 'disappear', Google boss tells Davos

Google boss Eric Schmidt predicted on Thursday that the Internet will soon be so pervasive in every facet of our lives that it will effectively "disappear" into the background. Speaking to the business and political elite at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Schmidt said: "There will be so many sensors, so many devices, that you won't even sense it, it will be all around you."

"It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room and... you are interacting with all the things going on in that room." "A highly personalized, highly interactive and very interesting world emerges." On the sort of high-level panel only found among the ski slopes of Davos, a panel bringing together the heads of Google, Facebook and Microsoft and Vodafone sought to allay fears that the rapid pace of technological advance was killing jobs.

"Everyone's worried about jobs," admitted Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook. With so many changes in the technology world, "the transformation is happening faster than ever before," she acknowledged. "But tech creates jobs not only in the tech space but outside," she insisted. Schmidt quoted statistics he said showed that every tech job created between five and seven jobs in a different area of the economy. "If there were a single digital market in Europe, 400 million new and important new jobs would be created in Europe," which is suffering from stubbornly high levels of unemployment. The debate about whether technology is destroying jobs "has been around for hundreds of years," said the Google boss. What is different is the speed of change.

"It's the same that happened to the people who lost their farming jobs when the tractor came... but ultimately a globalised solution means more equality for everyone." With one of the main topics at this year's World Economic Forum being how to share out the fruits of global growth, the tech barons stressed that the greater connectivity offered by their companies ultimately helps reduce inequalities. "Are the spoils of tech being evenly spread? That is an issue that we have to tackle head on," said Satya Nadella, chief executive of Microsoft. [...]

They are entitled to their opinions as anyone else. But I don't necessarily believe them. The problem with "Elites" is, they don't live in the same world as the rest of us. They can think whatever they like, but it doesn't necessarily make it so. And some of their ideas are downright creepy. Is their vision the Brave New World we are headed for? Because if that is what they are aiming for, I would guess that there will be unintended and unforeseen consequences that they have not anticipated.


More fun from the Davos Elites:

You’ve entered The Hypocrisy Zone: Billionaire Democrat wants YOU to downsize your lifestyle
     

Bill Gates: "I got mine, so now capitalism sucks"

Ok, that's not EXACTLY what he said, but considering how he made his fortune, some may say the sentiment's the same. It sounds rather hypocritical to hear him grouse about capitalism now. From Lawrence Kudlow:

Capitalism Doesn't Work, Mr. Gates?

Bill Gates, bloviating at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is issuing a clarion call for a "kinder capitalism" to aid the world's poor. Gates says he has grown impatient with the shortcomings of capitalism. He thinks it's failing much of the world. This, of course, from a guy who's worth around $35 billion (give or take a billion).

Don't you just love it?

A guy without a college degree who invented a new technology process in his garage that literally changed the entire world, a guy who took advantage of all the great opportunities that a free and capitalist society has to offer and got filthy rich in the process, is now trashing capitalism and telling us it doesn't work. What chutzpah.

For all his do-good preaching, Gates is ignoring the global spread of free-market capitalism that has successfully lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into the middle class over the last decade. Think China. Think India. Think Eastern Europe. (Maybe even think France under Nicolas Sarkozy.) Gates wants business leaders to dedicate more time to fighting poverty. But the reality is that economic freedom is the best path to prosperity. Period.

[...]

Gates says he has witnessed steep income and cultural inequities in his travels around the world, in particular to Africa. But for this he should blame the absence of capitalist principles, not capitalism itself. Even the most compassionate corporate executives are not going to bring prosperity to impoverished countries with statist economies. Until Africa's nations undertake the market-oriented reforms that have boosted China and the other Asian Tigers -- like South Korea and Taiwan -- they will continue to rank at the bottom of the world prosperity scale.

The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal 2008 Index of Economic Freedom reveals how free-market economics is spreading like wildfire, while state-run socialism is on the decline. And it's no wonder why. The free-market countries are prospering mightily, while the least-free economies are mired in poverty. We're talking North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe and Iran. Also noteworthy is Venezuela. As the neo-socialist Hugo Chavez attempts to adopt Fidel Castro's failed economic model, he's sinking his nation toward Cuba-type poverty.

Economist Mark Perry, on his Carpe Diem blog site, reports that both the U.S. share of world GDP and its global stock market capitalization are shrinking. But this isn't a bad thing at all. It doesn't mean that America is heading downward. On the contrary, it means that newly freed economies are heading up.

The reality here is that the rising tide of global capitalism is lifting all boats that employ it. Capitalism works. It's a good thing. It's the key to unlocking a nation's prosperity. In fact, free-market capitalism is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised by man. [...]

George Soros, also at the Davos forum, is predicting that the era of capitalism is coming to an end. I have no doubt that he would like that. I'm sure it's a major reason why he funds so many left wing groups and practically owns the Democrat party. I'm sick of these exceedingly wealthy people who decide that once they've got theirs, capitalism has to be limited, so they can use their wealth to Lord it over the rest of us.

The entire article is worth reading, as it talks about what capitalism has done in China and India and many other places... and why it ought to be encouraged, not diminished.