Show Notes
Government Accountability Institute leaders Peter Schweizer, Eric Eggers, and Seamus Bruner sat down recently for a chat about what the world’s billionaire class has in store for the rest of us in the wake of the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“So I want to get your sense, Seamus, of how much has really changed at Davos? You do have a couple of outspoken critics there. They speak candidly to them face to face, which I think is kind of new for Davos,” Schweizer asks Bruner. “Has much changed?”
“Davos wants you to think so,” Bruner jokes. “They made the theme this year, ‘Rebuilding Trust.’ So, obviously, they do have some self-awareness… They want to rebuild trust with all of us who are critics of their plans for our future. Has much changed? If you look at the agenda, the schedule of events for this year’s Davos — not much has changed. It’s full speed ahead on the climate crisis, on the war on farmers, on artificial intelligence.”
The GAI crew briefly touched on China and the topic of climate change — and Schweizer says the Davos elites are losing some of their confidence.
“Davos is starting to lack maybe a little bit of confidence because so many of the things they believed 10 years ago have turned out not to be true,” Schweizer says. “One of them was that the climate was going to be in a terrible shape. It’s really not. It’s where it was 10 years ago. More to the point, they all held up the Chinese as having figured out how to create a planned economy. Where you get growth, you get the dynamism of capitalism. If you look at the state of the Chinese economy right now, it’s not good.”
Artificial intelligence was also a big topic at Davos this year.
“This is obviously a controversial subject,” Schweizer says. “It’s scary to a lot of people. You have people like Elon Musk who have raised questions about killer robots. But the vision that they [the WEF] have for artificial intelligence is pretty glowing… It seems to be wildly optimistic in the sense that it’s going to benefit them but it’s not going to necessarily benefit the rest of us. It’s another one of these gaps between the elites at Davos and the reality for the rest of us,” Schweizer says.
“Yeah, artificial intelligence was really the unofficial theme,” Bruner agreed. “Every day they had several panels on artificial intelligence. They’re all very optimistic about it, mostly because it’s big tech companies who will be benefiting the most here. It remains to be seen whether it will be like the [personal] computer. A lot of people feared computers would put secretaries out of business. but it turns out the computers created more jobs than ever.”
“So far, people seem willing to take the tech that they think makes their life easier. And these guys laugh all the way to the bank,” Eggers adds.
Don’t miss the entire discussion on this week’s episode of The Drill Down.
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Imagine a world in which you own nothing and rent everything. Most of the protein in your diet comes from bugs, while lab-grown meats are a rare, expensive delicacy. You are not allowed to have more than one child, and your financial and medical data are instantly transferred to a centralized government database via a subdermal microchip.
Controligarchs warns that this will be our existence if the supranational elites of the World Economic Forum get their way. Bruner, the Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute led by famed investigator Peter Schweizer, presents a mountain of original research and reveals shocking new evidence that shows their sinister agenda will soon become reality.