Supertrends

9.THE NEW LIFESTYLES – EXPERIENCES AND SELF-REALISATION

Lars Seier Christensen, co-founder of the very successful Saxo Bank and later serial entrepreneur, debater, and venture investor, is one of my good Swiss-based acquaintances and, when it comes to politics and social development, he and I agree on most things. There is, however, a single issue on which once, during a discussion, we took different sides. That is the question of whether or not artificial intelligence and robots will create mass unemployment. Lars Seier feared yes, while I tended more to no, even though neither of us felt 100% sure. My lower degree of concern is basically justified by Say's Law, which states that supply creates demand: if companies in a free market economy produce more, wages and other payments for productive inputs will create sufficient demand for structural unemployment not to occur.

This law has resisted one technological wave after another, ever since the economist, Jean-Baptiste Say, formulated it a few hundred years ago. Neither the Industrial Revolution, the green revolution, computers, the Internet, nor any of the other technological breakthroughs created systemic unemployment. In the early nineteenth century, for example, about 90% of the American population were farmers. Now the figure is less than 2%. Nonetheless, as I write, the United States is close to full employment and experiencing huge demand for the goods their business community is producing. However, Lars Seier argues ...