The World Economic Forum 2025 theme is “Collaboration for the Intelligent Age.” While the potential of artificial intelligence was acknowledged, world leaders cautioned about the risks of AI to humanity and called for international collaboration to create frameworks for using AI responsibly.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned about two escalating global threats: the unchecked expansion of AI and the climate crisis. AI that can argue and instruct is on the WEF’s list of top 10 technologies since 2018.
Guterres acknowledged the immense potential of AI but cautioned against the risks of leaving AI ungoverned. He emphasized the need for international collaboration (government and private sector). He alluded to the Global Digital Compact – a comprehensive framework for global governance of digital technology and artificial intelligence. The United Nations adopted the framework as a roadmap for harnessing digital technology responsibly.
“We must collaborate so that all countries and people benefit from AI’s promise and potential to support development and social and economic progress for all,” Guterres said.
Speaking on behalf of His Holiness Pope Francis, Cardinal Peter Kodwo Turkson of the Holy See, said that the theme of this year’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2025 – “Collaboration for the Intelligent Age” – offers an opportunity to reflect on AI as a powerful tool for both cooperation and unity.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2025 highlights AI risks such as manipulation of information through gen AI and state-sponsored campaigns disrupting democratic systems and undermining public trust in critical institutions. The report warned that efforts to combat this risk have a “formidable opponent” in gen AI-created false or misleading content that can be produced and distributed at scale.
Misinformation campaigns in the form of deepfakes, synthetic voice recordings or fabricated news stories are now a leading mechanism for foreign entities to influence “voter intentions, sow doubt among the general public about what is happening in conflict zones, or tarnish the image of products or services from another country.” Such campaigns are especially acute in India, Germany, Brazil and the United States.
AI Outpacing Human Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence that can argue and instruct has been on the WEF’s list of Top 10 Emerging Technologies since 2018.
In episode 8 of the WEF podcast on the “Top 10 Emerging Technologies,” Andrew Moore, Vice President of Engineering, Google Cloud AI, said professions that we thought required “our personal ingenuity” would turn out to be “things that can be automated.” While this could reduce jobs in specific sectors, people could also use AI to improve productivity and social interactions.
“There’s a lot that can be automated there, and those careers [such as legal and general health], might diminish. There are some other areas in which we’re going to be using AI to help the humans who will remain in charge, such as teaching small kids or nursing or things that involve care and really deep social interactions with other folks. So I do see quite terrifying changes in the makeup of the population, but the things for people to do armed with these intelligent assistants sitting on their shoulder are actually going to get more interesting or not less interesting as a result,” Moore said.
In 2018, there was a live demonstration of a debate between humans and an AI system called Debator, which IBM developed. The AI system out-debated the human on a topic it had never learned. The demonstration in San Francisco involved two debates against professional debaters who had been working on Project Debator for the previous six years. That incident raised much concern about AI becoming more intelligent than humans in the future.
In the “Top 10 Emerging Technologies” episode, Sophia Velastegui, Chief Technology Officer, AI of Dynamics at Microsoft, said, “The significance of an AI system that out-debated a person shows the potential to assist people in deeper conversation with deeper contextual awareness could be a system, along with responsible AI can remove bias and enrich our lives.
On a January 6 episode of the “Re:Thinking“ podcast hosted by Adam Grant, OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman spoke about the future of AI and humanity. “You and I are living through this once in human history transition where humans go from being the smartest thing on planet earth to not the smartest thing on planet earth,” Altman said.
Altman said that, in a couple of years, one could have “the most empathetic conversation” with AI, on almost any topic – and this is just “a couple of years” away.
“Whether you like it or not, artificial intelligence is beginning to reach a point where the world economy and the workforce will be completely changed,” Altman said.
He also said that human ability “will still be valued,” but it won’t be “raw, intellectual horsepower.”
“Eventually, I think the whole economy transforms,” Altman said. “We always find new jobs, even though every time we stare at a new technology, we assume they’re all going to go away.”
Can AGI Go Rogue?
In a meeting on Day 3, four AI experts opined that the day when the world experiences “very powerful AI,” known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is not far off.
AGI is a hypothetical AI system that can learn and understand any intellectual task a human can. AGI is a theoretical concept that aims to create software with human-like intelligence.
Dario Amodel, CEO and Co-founder, Anthropic said he has seen models that are starting to be as good as Ph.D students in areas like math, programming and biology. “So, I guess by 2026 or 2027, we will have AI systems that are broadly better than almost all humans at almost all things.”
Andrew Ng, Executive Chairman, Landing AI is excited about how intelligent AI agents can empower humans and supplement their intelligence, as hiring intelligent people “is one of the most expensive things in the world today.”
He said AI can make intelligence cheap, and it will empower “a lot of people.”
However, some experts fear there is a risk that AGI could go rogue.
“Right now, science doesn’t know how we can control machines that are even at our level of intelligence – and even worse, if they’re smarter than us. Nobody knows,” said Yoshua Bengio, Professor, University of Montreal.
AI developments are progressing too fast, and it will be one or two years before AGI becomes possible.
Yejin Choi, professor and senior fellow at Stanford University, alluded to governance controls, regulations and laws that check the risks of highly intelligent AI models, saying we may not have much time.
“I wish things progressed slowly, even though I’m very much in the middle of it and excited about it. But it’s only going to go faster. So we need to invest more into making human lives better using AI instead of just making AI better for itself, Choi said.
She said AI must address tough questions that humanity faces, such as how to deal with natural disasters like wildfires.
“Is there a way to somehow simulate it, somehow predict it? Can we actually put more effort into teaching human values and norms instead of just optimizing for benchmarks?” asked Choi.
