The World Economic Forum is setting up a tech-focused hub in San Francisco

Recognizing the central role that technology now plays in the global economy, the World Economic Forum is establishing a new center in San Francisco to connect tech companies and policymakers in the heart of the world's technology industry. Building off the Forum's thesis of a "Fourth Industrial Revolution," the new facility will focus on bringing government officials and tech companies together to create frameworks for more productive legislative policies that can be implemented worldwide. "Depending on the collective choices we make -– as consumers, as communities, as business, government, and civil society leaders -– these technological breakthroughs could give us the power to move into a world that is even more prosperous, while being more sustainable and more inclusive," reads an early version of remarks prepared by World Economic Forum founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab. "Alternatively, we could end up in a world where our economic, political and social systems are more rigid, more unequal and more conflicted." Despite their deep roots in government-funded research, the relationship between policymakers and the tech companies that have sprung from the civic-minded seeds they nurtured with financing has always been a thorny or even openly antagonistic one (cf.