Conclusion
“En Marche!” Politics and Society on the Move
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.
—GROUCHO MARX
I will stick my neck out and make a forecast: everything in the automobile industry will change in the coming 10 to 15 years. The industry itself and everything related to it will have to undergo a fundamental change. The question is not so much if but how quickly this will occur. Politics and our society are facing a huge challenge.
A few months ago, I was traveling in Silicon Valley with several EU parliamentarians. They wanted to understand what it is that makes Silicon Valley so special in technology and entrepreneurship. During our conversations, one of the conservative parliament members huffed about people expecting benefits without wanting to do anything for them. “If you don’t want to work, well, you won’t get any money! So you won’t have anything to eat!,” he stated. In his anger, the man overlooked the most important lesson from his visit: the world has changed. There is a looming tsunami of machines and AI systems that will replace human work and power. The figures and facts about the automobile industry presented in this book alone show just how far the development has already progressed. Soon 540,000 truck drivers, 250,000 taxi drivers, and more than 300,000 workers in the German automobile industry itself are likely to lose their jobs. In the United States, we have 3.3 million truck drivers on the line and more than half a million taxi drivers. And this is just the beginning! New technologies probably will not be able to make up for this loss of jobs because we are facing a revolution in the working world that is unprecedented in human history. It will hit both low-skilled workers and highly skilled professional groups as well. Nobody can say that these people do not want to work. There just won’t be any more work for them. So what will we do with them?
Some of the problems we have to deal with today can already be regarded as harbingers of this digital revolution. We have to lead completely different discussions based on the twenty-first century, detached from the ideological debates of the nineteenth century. It does not help to throw around terms such as class warfare, machine tax, capitalism, and socialism in a knee-jerk reaction. The twenty-first century requires solutions from the twenty-first century.
Silicon Valley giveth, and Silicon Valley taketh away. If we are not careful, if we fail to confront these issues, we will exacerbate our situation still further. In 2016, Switzerland took a vote on the issue of an unconditional basic income, which may be a possible solution to those fundamental changes. However, at that time, it was still rejected by a large majority. We should be debating this issue in other countries, too, seriously, honestly, and ready to let past ideologies be bygones, trying to find answers for the people of the future. The future is very close indeed.
Overcoming Cognitive Distortions
Our prejudices and human rationality or irrationality are not always the best guidance when trying to understand big upheavals and reacting appropriately. So-called cognitive distortions have very tangible effects:1
• Fear of loss. Potential overestimation of losses and underestimation of potential benefits
• Endowment effect. A higher estimation of the assets we already have
• Status quo distortion. Preferring the status quo to any change (These three types of cognitive distortion ensure that people still prefer their own private cars that they steer personally to any of the future shared and/or autonomous vehicles.)
• Faulty risk assessment. Dramatic overestimation of unknown risks in comparison with existing risks even if the numbers contradict this assessment (This is the underlying reason why consumers think autonomous and shared cars are more dangerous than they actually are or will turn out to be.)
• Optimistic distortion. Overestimation of one’s own abilities and underestimation of risks (Car owners believe that they themselves drive more safely and have better control than machines, overlooking the safety advantages that autonomous vehicles offer.)
• Availability heuristics. Application of rules of thumb when assessing facts without being able to draw on one’s own experience or exact information (Human beings tend to focus on rare negative events such as accidents, the trolley problem, or cyberattacks that may come with the future of mobility.)
Put Unconditional Basic Income and Robot Taxes on the Agenda
According to the official definition, “unconditional basic income (UBI) is a social-political financial transfer concept according to which every citizen—independently of their economic situation—shall receive a legally fixed financial contribution that is the same for everyone and paid by the state, without having to provide any return service for it.”2 Assuming that every single one of us receives $500 or even $2,000 every month as a guaranteed income without having to work, how would we then spend our time? This is difficult to say. We must not forget that there have always been groups in our populations that were not necessarily included in the (paid) work cycle: children and senior citizens (depending on the country), rich heirs, religious groups, and aristocracy were and are among those groups. Some of them studied or honed their sports and arts talents; others took care of the home and children or turned to charitable causes.3 And then there are those who just enjoy life.
We would be able to afford such benefit payments even today, although this is often vehemently denied. Actually, benefit payments already constitute the highest amounts in most countries’ budgets. In the United States, 20 percent of all household income is benefit payments.4 Tax rebates and subsidies for companies are nothing but benefit payments. The money the governments gave to failing banks during the financial crisis is benefit payments.
However, many people define themselves based on their jobs. Losing their job throws them into an ethical crisis of purpose, leaving them with the feeling that they are now useless or do not belong anywhere anymore. Our societies today look down on people without work.5 Our entire life revolves around our occupation, the way we organize our daily tasks, the traffic system, mealtimes, holidays, even the times we use most of our electricity. Schools train us so that we can find a job. But what happens if jobs are no longer the solution but the problem?
Eighty-five percent of all jobs lost in the course of the last two decades were not moved to low-wage countries but were in fact made obsolete by technological progress.6 Those jobs are not ever coming back. The combination of automation and AI will lead to the loss or complete redefinition of 47 percent of all jobs in the United States, 35 percent of all jobs in Great Britain, and a staggering 77 percent of all jobs in China.7 The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development indicates that 57 percent of all jobs will be affected.
Bill Gates, philanthropist and founder of Microsoft, therefore suggests introducing a tax on robots and automation.8 A human being doing a job pays income tax. A robot does not. This increases productivity and decreases the tax burden for companies. If you look at it closely, this shows that our tax systems are organized in a way to penalize human work and encourage people to replace humans by robots, a policy that inevitably leads entire countries on a downward spiral. Robots take jobs and decrease the tax income that would help us to retrain future unemployed workers, pay unemployment benefits, or simply pay an unconditional basic income to everyone. Taxes on robots would not, by contrast, really create a conflict of company interests. You do not have to keep provisions for expenses such as health insurance or retirement benefits for robots. They would still be cheaper than humans.
Whether the unconditional basic income or robot taxes or other measures are the solution, I have no better idea than you do. We should, however, be allowed to have an open discussion about this—overcoming traditional behavior and thinking patterns—without having to defend ourselves or be ridiculed. An unconditional basic income is just one of many tools we will have to examine for suitability. And we should do it soon.
Qualifying for the Future
Our future starts with our children. At present, we still educate children with the goal that they can hold a job later on and earn a living for themselves. In fact, many students at school and at university today still have a vision of working for Bosch, General Motors, Mercedes, General Electric, or IBM or of becoming a civil servant. There will be fewer jobs in those industries, however, and those that are available will require more rapidly changing profiles than ever before. In order to prepare our children for this, we have to provide them with an education that really enables them to create their future.
Gigi Read, an ex-colleague and a “mom on a mission” (as she frequently refers to herself), runs workshops for 8- to 14-year-olds to teach them the qualifications necessary for the twenty-first century. Our syllabus today teaches reading, mathematics, science, cultural and social values, and knowledge. According to the World Economic Forum, the curricula are lacking such competencies as critical thinking and problem-solving strategies, creativity, competencies in communication and cooperation, and the development of characteristics such as curiosity, initiative, persistence, adaptability, leadership skills, and social as well as cultural awareness. Read, for example, offers design thinking for children as a framework to identify and solve problems through stories. To accomplish this, the children combine digital tools with modeling clay and craft utensils. Prototypes are developed and modeled, transferred to a computer with a 3D scanner, and printed on a 3D printer. The children learn a programming language, Scratch, to program robots and immediately put the acquired knowledge into practical results. AI is also an issue. How do you create it, and how do you help it with machine learning?
If we indeed experience a wave of job losses, how will we then teach similar workshop strategies to those affected by unemployment? How can we help people start a wave of entrepreneurship and lifelong learning?
Show a Willingness to Change
I can talk until I am blue in the face and provide a million facts and data to prove that the second automotive revolution is already under way—all of which is to no avail if there is no willingness to embrace change. The example I included earlier, that of the Hungarian startup founder who only understood the value of design thinking when he had to close down his own startup and was on the lookout for new ideas, is a case in point.
Small exercises help you to prepare for mindset changes and to make crucial decisions. I have a few more suggestions for you: gain experience! Rent a Tesla or a BMW i3 and drive around in it for an hour, a day, or better still, a whole week. Consciously go to a place where self-driving cars and buses are being tested and observe them. Or get into a driverless subway or tram. This would be a good start for beginners.
Always remember how quickly changes can happen, even in the automobile industry. In 1900, Fifth Avenue in New York City was lined with horse-drawn carriages, but by 1913, the street was full of cars. Think of friends or people you know who have been involved in serious traffic accidents. Think about going to work. Would you still like to be “steamed” for your daily commute, or would you rather take an electric suburban train? So why do so many of you still insist on cars propelled by “dinosaur juice”?