Davos Utopia: The Overlooked Ethical and Environmental Costs
24/01/2026
Davos, Switzerland, January 2026. The chilly Alpine winds and the tense geopolitical atmosphere have not dampened the global elite's enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. In six-minute meetings on ski lifts and on streets crowded with tech brand pop-ups, a narrative of AI-driven infinite growth and job creation is repeatedly chanted. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang summed up this sentiment with three repeated words: Jobs, jobs, jobs. Yet, beneath this wave of optimism, heavier questions—about environmental consumption, ethical lapses, and social division—linger like undercurrents beneath the glacier, intentionally or unintentionally overlooked. Once again, the Davos Forum serves as a prism, refracting the profound gap between the idealized future envisioned by tech elites and the complex reality.
Optimism Narrative: Growth, Employment, and the Productivity Revolution
In the main venue of Davos and the surrounding brand houses, technology leaders meticulously constructed a logically self-consistent optimistic narrative. The cornerstone of this story is the productivity revolution and net job creation.
Jensen Huang's Infrastructure Epic may be the most representative. He describes the current AI wave as the largest infrastructure construction in human history and asserts that it will bring higher wages and more jobs to traditional industries such as plumbers, electricians, and steelworkers. His argument is based on a progressive logic: the energy industry creates jobs, the chip industry creates jobs, and the infrastructure layer creates jobs. This narrative cleverly reshapes AI from a technology that might replace labor into an engine driving employment across the entire industrial chain. On the No Priors podcast, he further distinguished between tasks and the purpose of work, arguing that AI automates repetitive tasks, not the core value of work and human judgment. He took radiologists as an example: AI-assisted image reading has not reduced the demand for radiologists; instead, due to increased processing capacity, the income of specialists in this field has surged by 48%, and the number of positions continues to grow.
Initial Realization of Commercial Value provides concrete evidence for this narrative. BNY Mellon's Chief Commercial Officer Cathinka Wahlstrom revealed that AI has reduced new client background research time from two days to ten minutes. Cisco President Jeetu Patel stated that cumbersome projects that previously required 19 person-years can now be completed within weeks. Blackstone Chief Operating Officer Rob Goldstein emphasized that the company views AI as a tool for business expansion rather than a means of layoffs, aiming to maintain a stable total headcount while managing nearly $700 billion in net new client assets. These cases collectively point to one conclusion: AI investment is transitioning from pilot purgatory to a stage of measurable returns.
However, beneath this uniform optimism, cracks have already begun to show. A survey by PwC reveals that only one in eight CEOs is confident that AI is reducing costs and generating revenue. Amazon plans a new round of layoffs, aiming to cut approximately 30,000 corporate positions on top of previous reductions. Luc Triangle, Secretary-General of the International Trade Union Confederation, pointedly notes that when workers lack a voice in AI deployment, no corporate assurances can alleviate their anxiety—workers perceive AI as a threat.
Veiled Shadows: Environmental Depletion, Ethical Risks, and Geopolitical Rifts
In stark contrast to the grand discussions on work creation in the main venue are the severe challenges that emerge in fringe conversations but fail to make it onto the mainstream agenda. The dialogues at Davos seem to unfold in two parallel worlds: one bathed in the glow of technological optimism, while the other is mired in political divisions, ethical dilemmas, and environmental costs.
The Massive Environmental Footprint is Systematically Underestimated. The largest infrastructure construction in history depicted by Jensen Huang is, in essence, an energy and resource-intensive physical process. Training large AI models requires massive computations, consuming electricity comparable to that of a small city and generating considerable heat, necessitating extensive cooling systems. Manufacturing advanced chips itself is a highly water-intensive and high-emission industrial process. However, in the Davos discussions on AI and growth, its carbon footprint, the growth of electronic waste, and the pressure on the global energy structure have scarcely been placed under the spotlight. While the global clean energy transition is accelerating driven by Chinese investments, whether the exponential expansion of AI infrastructure will devour these green achievements remains a critical, unresolved question.
Ethics and Social Risks Whisper at the Margins. Christy Hoffman, General Secretary of the UNI Global Union representing 20 million members, stated bluntly that AI is often packaged as a productivity tool, which typically means doing more with fewer workers. Some attendees even privately discussed extreme cases where chatbots could lead to users developing mental health issues or even suicide. These concerns touch the core of AI governance: algorithmic bias, privacy erosion, mental health impacts, and the structural disruption of the labor market. Although Bill Gates acknowledged the existence of these problems and believes they can all be solved, even proposing taxes on AI activities to aid workers, such discussions appear faint and fragmented within the business and growth-oriented tone of Davos. The widespread erosion of trust revealed by the Edelman Trust Barometer, particularly pointing to distrust in AI and government governance capabilities, has not translated into a core action agenda for the forum.
Geopolitical fragmentation is reshaping the technological ecosystem. Eswar Prasad, a professor at Cornell University and former IMF official, points out that globalization has evolved from a positive-sum game to a zero-sum game, leading to fragmentation in trade, technology, and capital flows. This fragmentation is particularly evident in the field of AI: countries are racing to build autonomous infrastructure, and protectionist policies are erecting barriers to technological collaboration. Digital sovereignty and control over cross-border technology deployment have become hot topics, but divergent rules and governance models may stifle innovation and hinder growth. Wolfgang Ischinger, Chairman of the Council of the Munich Security Conference Foundation, warns that the rules-based international order underpinning global trade and security is under sustained pressure. For export-oriented economies like Germany, uncertainties in trade rules, freedom of navigation, and political stability pose direct economic risks. The development of AI is no longer a purely technical or commercial issue but is deeply entangled in the risks of great power competition and technological decoupling.
From Hype to Value: The Disconnect Between Elite Consensus and Reality
A subtle shift at the 2026 Davos Forum was the shift in focus from the hype around AI to questioning its practical value. However, this inquiry remains confined within the framework of commercial returns and has not expanded to broader social and environmental value assessments.
The Pressure of Value Realization permeates the conversation. Business leaders are no longer satisfied with proof of concept; instead, they are urgently seeking Return on Investment (ROI). IBM's Chief Commercial Officer, Rob Thomas, believes AI has reached a stage where it can generate ROI. However, how to scale and responsibly deploy innovative technologies has become a challenging agenda item for top executives. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warns that if companies using AI are limited to other AI companies, a bubble is bound to form. Jensen Huang refutes the bubble theory by citing soaring GPU rental prices, but this precisely exposes the risk of resources concentrating among a few giants. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warns that future AI may become so powerful that small businesses are hollowed out, with autonomous agents handling all consumer requests—this hints at a new form of monopoly and market concentration risk.
The Paradox of the Skills Crisis highlights the disconnect between ideals and reality. Despite predictions that AI will create 170 million new jobs by 2030 (while eliminating 92 million existing ones), companies still face hiring difficulties. Data from ManpowerGroup shows that over the past 12 months, 55% of employees have not received any workplace training. Employers have failed to establish a culture of continuous learning to seize the opportunities created by new technologies. This reveals a harsh reality: there is a significant time lag and preparedness gap between the job creation touted by the tech elite and the skill obsolescence faced by ordinary workers. Winston Weinberg, CEO of Harvey, stated that he spends 70% of his time on recruitment and lamented that the battle for top talent has reached astronomical levels, further exacerbating the inequality in talent distribution.
Trust Deficit becomes an invisible barrier to growth. The decline in the Edelman Trust Index indicates that trust in government, business, technology, and media is eroding across the board. In discussions, this manifests as distrust in AI and skepticism about the government's ability to lead us through periods of political and economic uncertainty. The lack of trust threatens growth, transformation, and innovation. Businesses need to regain credibility through transparency, accountability, and alignment with customer values. However, at Davos, discussions on how to concretely build this trust remain far from in-depth.
Multipolar World: Walking the Tightrope Between Security and Growth
The discussions in Davos ultimately revealed that the future of AI is not determined by a single technological logic but is nested within an increasingly multipolar and competitive geopolitical landscape. Governments are forced to walk a tightrope between security needs and economic growth.
The Tension Between Securitization and Economic Growth has become the new normal. Jane Harman, Chair of the U.S. National Defense Strategy Commission, pointed out that two environments coexist in Davos: one is the optimistic technological discussion centered on AI as a growth engine, and the other is the anxious political environment characterized by the erosion of trust among allies, the weakening of multilateralism, and the intensification of strategic competition. Professor Elizabeth Thurbon from the University of New South Wales noted that the transition to domestically produced renewable energy is seen as a national security multiplier, reducing dependence on fossil fuel imports. This logic is now spreading to the technology sector: AI capability is regarded as a core element of future economic competitiveness and national security, prompting countries to pursue technological sovereignty, which in turn exacerbates the fragmentation of the global technology ecosystem.
Structural Volatility Becomes the New Operating Environment. The warning from former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney still rings true: nostalgia is not a strategy. Technological breakthroughs, labor and skill shortages, and climate change have made disruption the norm, forcing continuous restructuring of global trade. Businesses and governments should no longer just plan for temporary disruptions; they need to view political and economic turbulence as the new normal of structural volatility. This means that the deployment of AI must, from the outset of its design, consider constraints such as geopolitical fragmentation, supply chain volatility, and regulatory discontinuity.
Lack of Globally Coordinated Governance is the greatest risk. Bill Gates calls for politicians to better understand technology, yet the voices of political leaders at Davos remain relatively weak. When the pace of technological advancement far outstrips the establishment of governance frameworks, issues such as ethics, environment, and social equity are easily sidelined. Redistribution proposals like taxing AI activities lack feasibility without transnational coordination. In a global atmosphere where zero-sum thinking is on the rise, reaching consensus on global AI governance rules, environmental standards, and ethical red lines has become exceptionally difficult.
The AI narrative for Davos 2026 is a meticulously tailored landscape. Tech leaders depict an idealized future where automation enhances tasks, boosts productivity, and ultimately creates more and better jobs. This narrative finds support in business cases and is amplified by an optimistic sentiment. However, this picture deliberately or inadvertently omits the environmental costs behind massive AI infrastructure, the ethical and social risks algorithms may bring, the erosion of technological sharing and collaboration due to geopolitical fractures, and the widespread labor market pains that could arise from lagging skill transitions.
On the forum, Elon Musk stated: For the sake of quality of life, being optimistically wrong is actually better than being pessimistically right. This philosophy may apply to personal mindset, but as a decision-making tone for global leadership, it could lead to systemic risks. When work, work, work becomes a mantra that masks deeper contradictions, the real danger lies not in pessimism towards AI, but in the blind optimism that turns a blind eye to the complex challenges that come with it.
The future of AI will not be determined atop the snowy peaks of Davos, but will be collectively shaped in conference rooms, factory floors, legislative bodies, and communities worldwide. The utopian visions of tech elites must engage in serious dialogue with Earth's physical limits, society's ethical boundaries, and the political realities of a multipolar world. Otherwise, what may await us is not an AI-empowered, inclusive future, but a new era marked by imbalanced growth and costs, coexisting opportunities and risks, and division outweighing shared progress. The echoes of Davos will eventually fade, yet these overlooked issues will continue to define the true trajectory of our coexistence with intelligent technology.
Reference materials
https://www.businessinsider.com/davos-tech-highlights-ai-deals-2026-1