“If you take an 18-year-old from a school, give him pure economics, which is basically a lot of maths and mass models and nothing else, he will know no history, no psychology, no philosophy, no political science, no sociology, no anthropology. I think you're producing somebody who cannot deal with nearly all the problems that will be actually faced in doing economics well in the world.”

— Martin Wolf

“I think we have to have a rethink about how do we communicate the beauty of economics as envisaged by Adam Smith, but also with the nuance that Adam Smith himself understood about the invisible hand and its moral foundations and its limits. How do we do that without sacrificing the good of economics, that is an open question. Certainly a broader set of perspectives would be useful, but I'm not sure whether that would be by itself enough. I think we need to do much more soul searching.”

— Daron Acemoğlu

“In the normal economy [after vaccinating is completed], is there any shortage of work that needs to be done? I think about the energy-transition that we have to get through and we have to get through very quickly, and I think about the jobs that would come if we were intelligent about that. I think of the the poor job that we do in America of taking care of some of our more vulnerable populations and the work that could come out of that. 

So I am not worried about not having enough work to go around and therefore needing a universal basic income. I’m worried about creating the right conditions, so that people can get matched to the jobs and the work that needs to be done, and be part of that world of work which I believe is actually incredibly important for a person's dignity, sense of community and sense of belonging. ”

— Andrew McAfee

“I would agree that there's a lot of work that needs to be done, maybe for three billion people, but I don't know if there's gonna be enough for seven. (...) So I agree that there's a lot of work to be done, but I do think that there might be a differential, and in that differential is where frustration is going to grow. 

It's not people that didn't try, or didn't want to, or didn't work hard. Frustration comes from those that try, and they didn't get the opportunities. I’m afraid that, at least my intuition is that there's going to be an important difference there, a big enough gap to become a problem.”

— César A. Hidalgo

“There are very strong incentives in life to stick to small problems, fix a particular detailed policy issue or research something that will get you a paper published in one of the economics journals. There are lots of really clever people spending all their energy on small questions. 

We've got some really big questions facing us at the moment, and so my advice would be, obviously students are really interested in those big issues, and so have the courage to pursue those big issues. It needs the younger generation to be working on them. ”

— Diane Coyle

”You can't work in silos anymore in the world that we're in, not with this technology and you cannot come up with completely novel ideas focusing only on your narrow, specific question that you're looking at. 

It's really important to broaden your horizon and to engage with all of the knowledge that is out there.”

- Charlotte Stix

“In the World Economic Forum we need to have people from everywhere, and especially the Global South. And so you know, your question is what's going to be good and bad, I think the global south is an area that I worry about on an almost constant basis. How can we make sure that we lift everybody's boats using AI?”

— Kay Firth-Butterfield

”We are truly at a moment in history where we need values, we need a kind of universalised goals, or we are going to disintegrate into warring factions and nationalist movements that have no interest in internationalism.”

- Wendell Wallach

“So we're really going to see more advocacy, more activism, and I think what has been left out of the conversation, when it comes to AI, would be the voice of the people. And I think people are really waking up to the fact that something is happening.”

— Renée Cummings

“I see this myth increasing over time: the idea that an algorithm is more fair than people. It's just false.”

- Celeste Kidd

“In this new world of virtual care, some people say, oh, data is the new oil. I would actually tell you, data is the new water. And that is, it's ubiquitous. What's the oil, is the algorithms. It's turning the data into wisdom and action. But as you've heard from my other panellists, we're going to need labels on those algorithms. This is a bag of dried fruit. Note it has a nutrition label on it, tells me a little bit about its fitness. We're going to need nutrition labels on our algorithms, if we're going to eradicate racism and reduce disparities, disparities of care across the world.”

— John Halamka

”So, is AI in diagnostics? Not yet, not really. Is AI in treatment? Not yet, not really. I think that, is it in clinical decision support specifically with radiology? I think that's where we're playing right now. And then how do we take that and really elevate it to the next level, hold AI accountable to all of the traditional benchmarks that we hold healthcare accountable to.”

- Jennifer Joe

“When we talk about data and when we talk about the use of AI, there is still when you look into who actually puts these the the algorithms together, who puts the products together, there's some inherent bias, not intentional bias, not just in data itself, but even with the software engineers themselves, and the data scientists that are putting this together. (...) 

Be aware not just of the biased data, but your own bias and think very carefully because this is no joke, right. When you train a model and if you train the model wrong, you can have the best intentions, but you will actually be hurting patients”

— Luba Greenwood

“As much as people hate government, like oh the regulations, it slows us down, there's cost, there's a lot of benefit sometimes to having that external authority. Certainly when I was a Chief Medical Officer, sometimes within the kind of the gladiator-games that happen in the C-Suite, sometimes if I said it it didn't necessarily have the same impact as saying: “Well, we might get audited, I used to be in Medicaid I know how this goes, we don't want to get audited, do we?” So sometimes you kind of need that person on the outside wielding the big stick.”

- Umbereen Nehal

“Artificial intelligence is a general purpose technology, and it's evolving into that. It will become something like electricity. (...) It's going to touch every aspect of our economy, every aspect of our society, every aspect of our lives. (...) I think it's going to be just enormously transformative, and we all need to sort of be focused on that, going forward.”

— Martin Ford

”With order-picking and autonomous driving, I think we at least have some conceptual understanding of what the path of getting there is. When it comes to general artificial intelligence, nobody has a clue about what the path to getting there is. I mean, some people think that just throwing data and computing power on it is going to get us there, and I very much doubt that that is true. But it's almost a religious question to ask somebody, because there is a very little conceptual understanding of what is actually required to get there.”

- Carl Benedikt Frey

“A lot of times, while we are equipped to think about optimization and algorithms, the core of these problems that we are thinking about are people. For someone it could be a matter of life and death. (...) Proceed both compassionary and carefully.”

— Jessie Finocchiaro

”Volunteer, and learn how to code! So volunteer why? It will humanise the thing that you’re studying and you’ll get attached to something, and you will be humbled at just how complex and how with all your training you cannot make, you’re trying to make a difference with this one thing and it’s so difficult. Code, so you start thinking about implementation, you start thinking about algorithms and design, which is something that we don’t think enough about.”

- Sera Linardi

“I believe that seeking collaborations with researchers and other students outside one’s field, and across a wide range of disciplines in revisiting classical, new problems through this multidisciplinary lens, can lead to the most exciting discoveries.”

— Faidra Monachou

“Think about always that the methods and designs we are putting in-place are never in a void. Although they're seemingly neutral, they all have impact in the kind of assumptions we make, and have a social context that, basically shapes the kind of applications and outcomes that we will see out of such a design.”

- Ana-Andreea Stoica

“Make sure that you also think about, especially in dealing with questions of size and impact, who are the minority groups, the marginalised members of these communities who are effected, who are actually most impacted by these challenges? Hopefully they are the most elevated by your solutions as well.”

- Lily Xu

“I’ve really benefited from reading economic history, and just reading about these past industrial revolutions. And I would recommend Nathan Rosenberg's work on history of technology, and basically just read everything that he's written, and that'll get you started.”

— Jeffrey Ding

”When you bring emerging technologies and bring them in conversation with another field it becomes both wide open and I think very impactful in the future. It’s a good opportunity for maybe relatively younger people to get involved and make an impact.”

- Matt Sheehan

“If we're asking questions like, who is ahead, important to follow that up immediately with, why do we care? Or you know, what are, what are we actually trying to achieve here? (...) For the four of us who spend a lot of time in China, U.S., AI spaces, we often just get the question, who's winning or who's gonna win. And that's sort of very unsatisfying, and I would claim not very useful question.”

— Helen Toner

“I’d put in a pitch for learning as many languages as you can stomach, while you're in these cradles of education of universities. It's just one of the biggest advantages that you can get. And of course learning Chinese, if you don't already have that, that is a good idea. In the U.S. at least, there's very little understanding of how technology operates in various parts of Africa, there's very little understanding of what's going on in India. Just basically look around the world, and if there's a language that you can add, or especially that's part of a language group that you don't already have bouncing around in your brain, and if you have some time in your course schedule, cram it in there.”

- Graham Webster

“Economics, I find, at least in development economics, is much more political-based. Certain researchers are closely aligned with certain political projects and certain places. And it's important for us to trace and examine those, as ways to understand how certain economic ideas become dominant, and how then they influence (...) our social and built environment.”

— Jigar Bhatt

”The disruptive technologies are here, and they arrived, and they are going to be here, and we have to learn how to live with them and have to introduce them into our lives. But in the case of Latin America, for instance, that we have a strong inequality, and heterogeneity, we need policies that induce our development process that stimulate the new technology, but avoid these negative effects of this technology.”

- Gabriela Dutrénit

“You should never rest. You don't know what you don't know, and you'll never know what you don't know. (...) When you have a spirit that doesn't rest, then you will always find something that might be different. The world is in continuous change … sometimes you can’t see but it is changing. And change does not belong to a particular point of view. The nature and pace of change and therefore how innovation works depend on the glasses, i.e., from where you are looking, and your motivation. Such a point of view also helps to design policies based on cumulative causation along with continuous learning.”

— Beatriz Fialho

“I have provided a definition of innovation which takes knowledge as being at the center, and emphasizes the processes in which innovation actually takes place. And so I define innovation as a process of generating knowledge, processing it, distributing it, and emphasizing that the forms of knowledge in the innovation system must extend to non-technological knowledge as well as technological knowledge. Why this is important, as a competing, challenging, disruptive definition is that it describes innovation as it is performed by the global majority.”

- Gillian Marcelle

“[Related to STI policy and Africa,] one thing I will say is really the importance of learning. We've seen many cases where lessons that should have been learned and implemented have not been taking place. Issues around policy learning are very, very important. (...) Just to say one word, policy learning would be a fantastic area to focus on, relating to climate change, relating to every other point we've discussed.”

— Chux Daniels

”In economics in particular, there's a tendency towards abstraction. Really abstracting away from all sorts of things we've revealed as important here; history, institutions, context. Remember that underneath all of this the actual living people and lived experiences. And I think that links to the policymaker as well, as the policymakers also often forget about people, except as people who experience the outcomes of policy.”

- Susan Newman

“Think about innovation as a collective process, as a possible democratic process. Think about innovation with environmental issues in mind. Think about solving local problems for local use. We have a very global challenge, but local solutions are super important. Think about innovation in a pragmatic way. This is my main message.”

— Nathalie Lazaric

“[Related to one thing I could say to students] Try to think out of the mindsets that frequently emerge from mainstream centers. Find the different voices, the different approaches to problems that need a very different approach to be overcome.”

- Verónica Robert

“Try not to become a slave of disciplinary protocols. Many economists have a strong socio-disciplinary sense of belonging, that leads us to have standardised protocols of research. My recommendation would be, try to get into cross-boundaries. (...) Try to be interdisciplinary, starting from one well-known discipline, but try to enlarge to something that allows you to follow your curiosity and your research-instincts.”

- Maria Savona

“We all have a limited number of years on this planet and we spend a lot of those years working. Time-use researchers, sociologists who study how we spend our lives, tell us that we spend over the course of our lives as much time on unpaid work, on domestic chores, on caring for other people, as we do in the paid labour market. So far, this future of work discussion has focused solely on the paid labour market. Next, let’s think about this other half of work, that work that happens in the domestic sphere, and that is just as vital for the reproduction of society.”

- Vili Lehdonvirta