Leaders from across the tech sector, academia, and beyond gathered to explore how to implement responsible AI and ensure safeguarding while fostering innovation, at a roundtable convened by TIME in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan 21.

In a wide-ranging conversation, participants in the roundtable, hosted by TIME CEO Jess Sibley, discussed topics including the impact of AI on children’s development and safety, how to regulate the technology, and how to better train models to ensure they don’t harm humans.

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Discussing the safety of children, Jonathan Haidt, professor of ethical leadership at NYU Stern and author of The Anxious Generation, said that parents shouldn’t focus on restricting their child’s exposure entirely but on the habits they form. He suggested that children don’t need smartphones until “at least high school” and that they don’t need to be exposed to the technology to be able to learn how to use it at the age of 15. “Let their brain develop, let them get executive function, then you can expose them.” 

Yoshua Bengio, professor at the Université de Montreal and founder of LawZero, said that scientific understanding of the problems posed by AI is necessary to solve them. He outlined two mitigations: first, designing AI that has built-in safeguarding to avoid harming a child’s development. This could be brought about by demand, noted Bengio, who is known as one of the “godfathers of AI.” Second, he said, governments should play a role; they could potentially implement mechanisms such as using liability insurers to indirectly regulate AI developers by making insurance mandatory for developers and deployers of AI. 

While the U.S. AI race with China is often cited as a reason to support limiting regulation and guardrails on American AI companies, Bengio argued: “Actually, the Chinese also don’t want their children to be in trouble. They don’t want to create a global monster AI, they don’t want people to use their AI to create more bio-weapons or cyberattacks on their soil. So both the U.S. and China have an interest in coordinating on these things once they can see past the competition.” Bengio said international cooperation like this has happened before, such as when the U.S. and the USSR coordinated on nuclear weapons during the Cold War. 

The roundtable participants also discussed the similarities between AI and social media companies, noting that AI is increasingly in competition for users’ attention. “All the progress in history has been about appealing to the better angels of our nature,” said Bill Ready, CEO of Pinterest, which sponsored the event. “Now we have, one of the largest business models in the world has at its center engagement, pitting people against one another, sowing division.” 

Ready added: “We’re actually preying on the darkest aspects of the human psyche, and it doesn’t have to be that way. So we’re trying to prove it’s possible to do something different.” He said that, under his leadership, Pinterest has stopped optimizing to maximize view time and started optimizing to maximize outcomes, including those off the platform. “In the short term, that was negative, but if you look long term, people would come back more frequently,” he said.

Bengio emphasized the importance of finding a way to design AI that will “provide safety guarantees as the systems become bigger and we have more data.” Setting sufficient conditions for training AI systems to ensure they operate with honesty could also be a solution, Bengio posited. 

Yejin Choi, professor of computer science and senior fellow at the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) at Stanford University, added that AI models today are trained “to misbehave, and by design, it’s going to be misaligned.” She asked: “What if there could be an alternative form of intelligence that really learns … morals, human values from the get-go, as opposed to just training LLMs [large language models] on the entirety of the internet, which actually includes the worst part of humanity, and then we then try to patch things up by doing ‘alignment’?” 

Responding to the question of whether AI can make us better humans, Kay Firth-Butterfield, CEO of the Good Tech Advisory, pointed to ways we can make AI a better tool for humans, including by talking to the people who are actually using it, whether that’s workers or parents. “What we need to do is to really think about: how do we create an AI literacy campaign amongst everybody and not have to fall back on organizations?” she said. “We need that conversation, and then we can make sure AI gets certified.”

Other attendees at the TIME100 Roundtable included Matt Madrigal, CTO at Pinterest; Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare; Jeff Schumacher, Neurosymbolic AI Leader at EY-Parthenon; Navrina Singh, CEO of Credo AI, and Alexa Vignone, president of technology, media, telco and consumer & business services at Salesforce, ​​where TIME co-chair and owner Marc Benioff is CEO.

TIME100 Roundtable: Ensuring AI For Good — Responsible Innovation at Scale was presented by Pinterest.

Business leaders considered the future of AI at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, during the TIME100 Impact Dinner Tuesday night.

The panel, ”From Vision to Velocity — Deploying Innovation at Scale,” delved into the ways AI has been integrated into industries from health care to energy, and some of the biggest challenges it may present down the road.

Noubar Afeyan, the co-founder and chairman of Moderna and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, said that Moderna has been using machine learning techniques to make medical advancements for quite some time, citing the development of COVID mRNA vaccines.

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“In tech, we always watched with envy the ability to move quickly, because pharmaceuticals have never been programmable,” Afeyan said. “For the first time in 2020 the world saw programmable medicine. But we haven’t stopped at that.”

He also asserted that AI will become crucial in understanding the nature in and around us—but cautioned that people may not be ready for what that insight “will do to our humanity and to our self image.”

“​​I would contend that what we’re about to find out, based on the application of artificial intelligence to nature, is that nature is a whole bunch of forms of intelligence, and we never realized it. Every tree, every virus, every immune cell, these are forms of intelligence,” he said, adding, “I think the safety, maybe security challenge to humans—or, let me put it this way, insecurity challenge to humans—is going to be that we’re going to have to adjust our image of ourselves and realize that with machine intelligence and with nature’s intelligence, we can improve how we can manage nature, how we can extract value from food … new medicines, how to prevent disease.”

Executives of two of India’s leading renewable energy companies, ReNew Energy co-founder Vaishali Nigham Sinha and Greenko Group President Mahesh Kolli, spoke about the changing energy industry amid AI’s growing demand for power.

Kolli discussed the developing role of what he called “electro-states,” countries that have shifted to electrical energy and clean sources, like solar or wind, and away from traditional methods such as oil. 

“What we’re seeing in India is that kind of electro-state revolution,” he said about the country’s use of clean energy going from “a power source for electricity to households” to “now becoming a source to make materials, molecules, and AI,” a shift he said is driving India’s competitive position within a global market and that of other advanced electro-states like China.

Speaking about the potential implications of AI’s rise on the effort to combat climate change, Sinha urged collaboration between countries.

“When we talk about the climate agenda, we’re talking about the world at large. And for that, countries will have to work together because climate really doesn’t know boundaries,” she said, adding that public and private partnerships are “required” to make strides across sectors, “especially in clean energy.”

Siemens Chief Technology and Strategy Officer Peter Koerte ended the panel discussion by offering a warning about the threat AI could pose to the job market. He referenced the ways technology has already taken human jobs throughout history, and noted that this is not the first time rapidly advancing tech has stoked fear in countries’ workforces. 

“AI is doing to the brain workers, meaning the white collar workers, what robots did to the blue collar workers,” he said. 

TIME100 Impact Dinner: From Vision to Velocity — Deploying Innovation at Scale was presented by Andhra Pradesh.

Leaders from Dow Chemical Company, EY, and NTT Data Inc. shared their perspectives on the impact of scaling up new technologies like AI during a TIME100 Talks panel discussion in Davos on Jan. 20. 

The panel took place on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, which kicked off on Jan. 19 in Davos, drawing around 3,000 high-level participants from business, government, and beyond, in addition to many more observers, journalists, activists, and others.

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During the panel, titled “Innovation in a Multipolar Era,” the participants discussed the benefits of integrating AI, and its potential in areas such as health care and education, as well as some of the challenges of integrating the technology at scale within businesses. 

“We…see enormous benefits, whether it’s discovery of new materials, new drugs, or tech-driven productivity,” said Abhijit Dubey, CEO and chief artificial intelligence officer at NTT Data. “But at the same time we really have to watch out for what we’re doing.” 

He added that, unlike all other innovations before it, AI is the “first technology that will actually be non-human driven.” Not only can this lead to unexpected outcomes, but the technology requires vast amounts of energy and water, in addition to mining of rare earth minerals that are in some cases leading to tensions over resources. 

Another concern is the “paradox of massive abundance at the same time [as] a massive market labor dislocation,” said Dubey, noting it is “something that we really have to watch out for.”

“The pain is not the destination, it is in the transition,” added Debra Bauler, chief information and digital officer at Dow, who explained how the company is approaching its workforce during the AI transition. “We think about the way we work with our team members. We also want to move them from doers of tasks to directors of systems,” she said. “There will be job impacts, but we also think where we’re going, the destination is worth this transition period.”

In any tech transition, when it comes to jobs, “you lose one, you generate one-to-two,” noted Dubey. Protecting those who are negatively impacted can’t be entirely left up to the private sector, he argued. In addition to publicly backed mechanisms like universal basic income, he noted that a solution to generate funding that has been discussed would be imposing a tax on AI agents, the same way people are taxed. “There have to be structural mechanisms that need to be thought through right now, because we can’t do this reactively on the spot,” he said, adding, “There’s no government in the world that’s set up to do this.”

Raj Sharma, global managing partner for growth and innovation at EY, said that in order for AI to usher in an era of what he has called “super-fluid enterprises,” the key ingredients would be trust, tools, and talent. “You have to balance the equation between [the] three to make sure that AI is adopted.” 

TIME100 Talks: Innovation in a Multipolar Era was presented by Philip Morris International.

Four decades since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was first observed, members from across industries acknowledged that work remains to be done in civil rights, racial equity, and shared humanity at a TIME Impact Dinner on Monday night in Los Angeles.

TIME brought together industry leaders, advocates, and artists, as well as the architects of the national holiday, for the dinner, themed “Advancing the Dream — From Healing to Action.” 

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“Our hope is that tonight sparks ideas, deepens understanding, and strengthens connection,” said Loren Hammonds, the head of documentary at TIME Studios, in his opening remarks. “But most importantly, that it fuels the kind of collective action that Dr. King called us toward: action rooted in courage, compassion, and a belief in our shared humanity; and the power that comes from civic responsibility, community healing, and the vital role the arts play in moving these efforts forward.” 

Throughout the dinner, six special guests gave toasts about continuing commitments to champion justice and community and how storytelling can help support these efforts and honor the late Dr. King’s legacy.

La June Montgomery Tabron

La June Montgomery Tabron, president & CEO of the philanthropic organization W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which sponsored the TIME Impact Dinner, raised her glass “not just to the dreamers, but to the artists and storytellers who show us what’s possible and the leaders who make it real.” 

Tabron said that she was introduced to King through his famed 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech—not the version at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., but the one in Cobo Hall in Detroit, Mich. months earlier.

“In so many ways, my life has been a realization of Dr. King’s dream—and only over time have I come to understand how deeply his words have shaped my career and the responsibility I have felt to help extend that dream to others,” she said.

In Tabron’s toast, she recognized that 40 years since the first celebration of MLK Day, “everything we’ve fought for, all the progress we’ve made, hangs in the balance. But the inverse is also true. In this moment of struggle and uncertainty, everything is possible.”

Colman Domingo

Award-winning American actor, playwright, producer, and director Colman Domingo says that as a storyteller, he feels deeply connected to the dream Dr. King spoke of, “a dream shaped by language, by clarity, by conviction, and by the courage to name injustice plainly.” He added the holiday and the TIME Impact Dinner “is not only about challenging systems that fail us, but about telling fuller truths and strengthening the human connections that those systems too often erode.”

In his toast, Domingo acknowledged Aml Ameen, whom he acted alongside in the 2023 biopic Rustin about civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. In the film, Ameen portrayed King, while Domingo portrayed King’s close advisor Rustin. “As a storyteller, I stand shoulder to shoulder with this man,” Domingo said of Ameen, “and I want to stand shoulder to shoulder in this room with all of you tonight as we continue to march forth and do the work, the good work.”

Appearing to allude to the political climate in the U.S., Domingo encouraged everyone not to be downhearted. “These are dark times; well, we’ve always lived in dark times,” he said. “And what do we do? We get up again and again and again, and we do the work, and we love, and we dance, and we write, and we play, and we make this world bend a little further towards justice.”

aja monet

Los Angeles-based surrealist blues poet aja monet also paid tribute to King and his legacy through poetic remarks. She began with a reference to King’s famous sermon, “The Drum Major Instinct,” which King delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Feb. 4, 1968, just two months before his assassination, and she emphasized how that sermon speaks to the human desire to stand out.

monet, in her speech, lauded King at times—“Like many prophetic messages, Dr. King offers a view into now, the very age of the attention economy, a generation raised on the proclamation of me or I, without context of we or us”—as well as decried his demise. “There is no telling what Dr. King would say of this current moment, because this moment was stolen from him, an assassination turned into a holiday.”

In her performance, monet imagined an interaction between King and renowned American jazz drummer Max Roach, offering musicmaking as an analogy for changemaking. “The question we all must confront is, who are we on the bandstand, and what kind of musician do we choose to be?” she said, before adding: “Pick up your instrument. It’s not time for you to sit down. Play like you know how to listen.”

Dolores Huerta

Labor leader and civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, an inaugural TIME Latino Leader in 2023 whose work with migrant farmworkers birthed the United Farm Workers of America, said in her toast that crucial to King’s legacy was his work with working people and the poor. 

Huerta also honored Rustin and actor-singer Harry Belafonte, who were pivotal figures in the American civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s, as well as King’s widow Coretta Scott King, who worked with Stevie Wonder to establish Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a national holiday.

“We’ve got to remember not only Dr. King, but we’ve got to remember everybody else that worked with him and that made the holiday possible, that made his legacy possible, the legacy that all of us have got to continue to commit, that we are not going to stop and we’re going to keep on working and we can realize his dream,” Huerta said, before ending her toast with chants to King and repeating the UFW slogan she famously coined: “¡Sí se puede!”

Ryan Alexander Holmes

In his toast, content creator and actor Ryan Alexander Holmes—born to a Chinese immigrant mother and an African American father—talked about the racial tensions he experienced growing up. Holmes pointed to how he saw, in 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement and the Stop Asian Hate movement being pitted against each other. “Because I am both Black and Asian, I am not armed with the illusion of choosing a side, because both are in my DNA,” he said. “In my blood is the unification of both—the very dream Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke into existence.”

He ended his toast with how his grandfather’s life ended in gun-related violence, similar to King’s, and how his late grandfather had passed down a dream of continuous improvement. “It is now my dream, and it is the dream of everyone in this room—to make the next generation better than the next—and it was also Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.”

Stevie Wonder

R&B legend Stevie Wonder opened his toast with a question: “What will it take for us to say enough is enough? Armed, masked men marching down the streets, snatching American citizens off the streets?” The question appeared to be in reference to ongoing immigration enforcement across multiple states, which has led to deaths and widespread protests against President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Wonder called on the dinner attendees to “remember your responsibility” in upholding justice, and he challenged them “to find our own personal resistance to the evil forces at work.”

Wonder capped off the evening with a rendition of “Visions,” a track from his critically acclaimed 1973 album, Innervisions, before he called on a choir to join him in the very song that helped lead to the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday they were gathered for: “Happy Birthday.”

TIME Impact Dinner: Advancing the Dream — From Healing to Action was presented by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Stevie Wonder, the R&B hitmaker behind “Superstition” and “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” among others, said that he was five years old when he first heard the voice of a then-emerging young civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

Decades later, Wonder’s production company Eyes ‘n’ Sound has been working with TIME Studios on a feature documentary that chronicles the musician’s crucial role in the fight to establish Martin Luther King Jr. Day as an American national holiday. 

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“I felt the need for us to celebrate a man who spent his life fighting, fighting for those rights, the rights for equality, the rights for civil rights, the rights for justice, the rights for the things that we say that this nation stands for,” Wonder said Monday at a TIME Impact Dinner commemorating the holiday. Wonder added that people must understand the level of “commitment and responsibility” needed to continue to champion those rights.

The film, which attendees on Monday got an exclusive sneak peek of the trailer for and which is set for release later this year, centers on Wonder’s iconic “Happy Birthday” song that was released on his 1980 album Hotter Than July.

The documentary feature is directed by Academy Award-nominated director Traci Curry, who co-directed Attica (2021) and the National Geographic documentary series Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (2025). Curry said Monday that the film is an “invitation for the audience to reconsider some very familiar aspects of our culture” as it dives deep into the creation and the history of the birthday song.

Wonder’s song galvanized a movement honoring King’s legacy and—with the help of King Jr.’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and the Congressional Black Caucus—a bill to create the holiday landed on the U.S. House floor in 1983, which former President Ronald Reagan signed into law that November.

Curry said that the documentary could also offer a blueprint for mass movements, recognizing the current political climate in the U.S. “We find ourselves in a political moment in this country where the rights that Dr. King and the members of the civil rights movement fought so hard for are in peril, as is our very democracy,” Curry says. “And I think we are in a moment where people are looking for a blueprint of what to do.”

When asked about what artists can do to lead change, Wonder referenced the lyrics to another of his songs, “Superstition,” in which he sings: “When you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer / Superstition ain’t the way.”

“Do your research,” he explained. “Discover the truth. Truth is the light, and we, as people of this nation and all over the world, must remember that we hold the power, and we must use that power, the gift that we have, the opportunity that we have. Use that power to educate, motivate, and inspire the young people of today.”

“I would hope that artists that get it will get it and do something about it,” he concluded. “I can’t tell you what to do, but you better do the right thing.”

TIME Impact Dinner: Advancing the Dream — From Healing to Action was presented by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.