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| Klaus Schwab |
The Great Reset is the name of the 50th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), held in June 2020. It brought together high-profile business and political leaders, convened by Charles, Prince of Wales and the WEF, with the theme of rebuilding society and the economy in a sustainable way following the COVID-19 pandemicWEF chief executive officer Klaus Schwab described three core components of the Great Reset: the first involves creating conditions for a "stakeholder economy"; the second component includes building in a more "resilient, equitable, and sustainable" way—based on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics which would incorporate more green public infrastructure projects; the third component is to "harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution" for public good. In her keynote speech opening the dialogues, International Monetary Fund director Kristalina Georgieva listed three key aspects of the sustainable response: green growth, smarter growth, and fairer growth. At the launch event for the Great Reset, Prince Charles listed key areas for action, similar to those listed in his Sustainable Markets Initiative, introduced in January 2020. These included the re-invigoration of science, technology and innovation, a move towards net zero transitions globally, the introduction of carbon pricing, re-inventing longstanding incentive structures, rebalancing investments to include more green investments, and encouraging green public infrastructure projects.
In June 2020, the theme of the January 2021 51st World Economic Forum Annual Meeting was announced as "The Great Reset", connecting both in-person and online global leaders in Davos, Switzerland with a multi-stakeholder network in 400 cities around the world. The Great Reset will also be the main theme of the WEF's summit in Lucerne in May 2021.
According to The New York Times, the BBC, The Guardian, Le Devoir and Radio Canada, "baseless" conspiracy theories spread by American far-right groups linked to QAnon surged at the onset of the Great Reset forum and increased in fervor as leaders such as U.S. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau incorporated ideas based on a "reset" in their speeches.
Fourth Industrial Revolution
Klaus Schwab used the phrase "Fourth Industrial Revolution" in a 2015 article published by Foreign Affairs, and in 2016, the theme of the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, was "Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution". In his 2015 article, Schwab said that the first industrial revolution was powered by "water and steam" to "mechanize production". Through electrical power, the second industrial mass production was introduced. Electronics and information technologies automated the production process in the third industrial revolution. In the fourth industrial revolution the lines between "physical, digital and biological spheres" have become blurred and this current revolution, which began with the digital revolution in the mid-1990s, is "characterized by a fusion of technologies." This fusion of technologies included "fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing."
Just before the 2016 annual WEF meeting of the Global Future Councils, Ida Auken—a Danish MP, who was also a young global leader and a member of the Council on Cities and Urbanization, uploaded a blog post that was later published by Forbes imagining how technology could improve our lives by 2030 if the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDG) were realized through this fusion of technologies. Auken imagined how digitized communication, then transportation, accommodation and food, would result in greater access and decreased cost. Since everything was free, including clean energy, there was no need to own products or real estate. In her imagined scenario, many of the crises of the early 21st century — "lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment" — were resolved through new technologies. The article has been criticized as portraying a utopia at the price of a loss of privacy. In response, Auken said that it was intended to "start a discussion about some of the pros and cons of the current technological development."
While the "interest in Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies" had "spiked" during the COVID-19 pandemic, fewer than 9% of companies were using machine learning, robotics, touch screens and other advanced technologies. An October 21, 2020 WEF virtual panel discussed how organizations could harness fourth revolution technologies. On January 28, 2021, Davos Agenda virtual panel discussed how artificial intelligence (AI) will "fundamentally change the world". 63% of CEOs believe that "AI will have a larger impact than the Internet."
During 2020, the Great Reset Dialogues resulted in multi-year projects, such as the digital transformation programme where cross-industry stakeholders investigate how the 2020 "dislocative shock" had increased and "accelerated digital transformations". Their report said that, while "digital ecosystems will represent more than $60 trillion in revenue by 2025", "only 9% of executives [in July 2020] say their leaders have the right digital skills".
The WEF's Great Reset agenda was "another example of wealthy, powerful elites salving their consciences with faux efforts to help the masses, and in the process make themselves even wealthier and more powerful. Wikipedia
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