Closing post
Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.
Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”
She suggested that in advanced economies, one in 10 jobs had already been “enhanced” by AI, tending to boost these workers’ pay, with knock-on benefits for the local economy.
By contrast, Georgieva warned that AI would wipe out many roles traditionally taken up by younger workers. “Tasks that are eliminated are usually what entry-level jobs do at present, so young people searching for jobs find it harder to get to a good placement.”
Meanwhile people whose jobs were not directly changed by artificial intelligence risked being squeezed, she said, with their pay potentially falling without a productivity boost from AI.
“So the middle class, inevitably, is going to be affected,” Georgieva predicted.
More here
And that’s all from us for this year at Davos, as we rattle down the mountain towards home.
Thanks for reading on a quite dramatic week, where there was more tension, disagreement, and geopolitical angst than before.
I can't remember who said it, but Davos is a talking shop for rich, powerful people, which means it can be boring when rich, powerful people largely agree with one another, and it's magnetic when they're actually at one another's throats.
— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) January 22, 2026
Goodbye. GW
Hassabis: More breakthroughs needed to reach AGI
AI was certainy a hot topic, again, at Davos this week – even though Kristina Georgieva is regretful there wasn’t more discussion on issues such as guardrails.
Earlier this week, at a Google event, Demis Hassabis of Deepmind said he supports the idea that one or two more big breakthroughs may be needed before we get to artificial general intelligence (AGI), such as ‘continual learning’, and better memory.
Dismissing the suggestion that the industry had ‘whooshed by’ AGI and was now working on super-intelligence, Hassabis argued that AGI was five to 10 years away.
His definition of AGI is a system that can exhibit all the cognitive capabilities humans can, including the highest levels of human creativity achieved by scientists and artists.
That means not simply solving physics or chemistry problems, or the cracking protein-folding which won Hassabis the Nobel prize, but actually coming up with a new theory of physics.
“Something like Einstein did with general relativity. Can a system come up with that?
Because, of course, we can do that. The smartest humans with our human brain architectures have been able to do that in history and the same on the art side. Not just create a pastiche of what’s known, but actually be Picasso or Mozart and create a completely new genre of art that we’ve never seen before.
Today’s systems are nowhere near that, Hassabis insists.
There’s also physical intelligence; an AGI robot would have to play sports or control itself to “amazing levels” to reach the level achieved by the human brain architecture.
He added that super intelligence is another concept worth talking about, but that is about going beyond what human intelligence can do.
We can’t think in 14 dimensions, or plug in weather satellites into our brains. Not yet, anyway.
Those are truly beyond human, or superhuman, and that’s a whole other debate to have, once we get to AGI.
