New Perspectives for People and the Environment

The self-driving company is often reduced to an efficiency program: fewer routines, faster decisions, lower costs. In my book "The Self-Driving Company" (Springer, 2023; German original Springer Gabler, 2021), I deliberately framed the vision more broadly: it comprises the four dimensions of autonomy, sustainability, resilience, and humanity. This article looks at the four dimensions as a whole and then goes deeper into the two that reach beyond the company into society and the environment. It shows why transparency makes both of them possible and indispensable at the same time, which supposed threats dissolve, and which new working worlds emerge as a result.

Four dimensions, one system

The vision of the company in 2035 rests on four dimensions that depend on each other. Autonomy is the starting point: once around 80 percent of a company's functions and decisions are automated and controlled by sufficiently intelligent algorithms, I speak of a self-driving company. Resilience is the answer to a world that has become less predictable since the end of the Cold War; the pandemic and the energy crisis of recent years have confirmed this. Sustainability and humanity, finally, are the dimensions that determine whether technological progress is also progress for people and the environment.

Autonomy relieves us because the business steers itself; resilience allows us to cope with the growing unpredictability of the world. Sustainability and humanity, by contrast, are not properties that can be built in like a feature. They arise from the complete transparency I described in Transparency for Value Creation, Fairness, and Quality of Life: a company whose decisions can be inspected in detail can act sustainably and humanely because it knows all the consequences. But it also has to, because it can no longer hide anything. This double effect makes these two dimensions the politically and socially decisive ones.

Sustainability: mastering complexity instead of deciding short-term

Sustainability has been a much-discussed topic at least since the Club of Rome's report on the limits to growth in 1972. What is new is how little negligence is still tolerated today, and not only by the younger generations who will make up a substantial share of economic actors by 2035. The pressure has also become legally concrete: the European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD, Directive (EU) 2022/2464) applies to the first large companies from fiscal year 2024 and obliges them to report on sustainability with similar rigor as on their financial figures. And in March 2023, the European Union decided that newly registered passenger cars must no longer emit any CO2 from 2035 onward (Regulation (EU) 2023/851). What was still a scenario for the future in 2021 is now a statutory timetable.

My thesis is that an autonomous company in 2035 must be sustainable without exception and do business accordingly. This is easier to achieve with a self-driving company than with a business in which people make all the decisions. People decide short-term and within the boundaries of their own system, that is, the department or the quarterly target. In the firm belief that they are acting rationally, they blank out the long-term consequences, because nobody can hold all the interdependencies of a complex decision in their head at the same time. The self-driving company, on the other hand, resembles an organism that is fully networked internally and externally and continuously calculates all scenarios on the basis of all data: energy consumption by the hour, material flows, transport routes, product lifetimes, and the recovery of residual materials. What a planning department calculates once a year, the system takes into account with every single decision.

Two caveats belong here. First, software only optimizes what it is given as a goal. Sustainability does not arise by itself, but because ecological goals are specified with the same weight as margin and delivery date; the direction comes from people. Second, sustainability only has an effect if it can be verified. In the self-driving company, a sustainability report is not a document that is produced and polished once a year, but a query on the same data with which the company is run. Greenwashing loses its effect because the data behind the report can be inspected. Whoever cannot hide anything cannot deceive either.

Humanity: people set the direction

The company of 2035 acts largely autonomously and nevertheless puts people at the center in every respect. The fear that computers could come to rule over people is unfounded today and tomorrow; I explained why in AI and Science Fiction: Why There Will Be No Skynet. Software has no motives of its own. It knows neither ambition nor envy, it does not strive for power, and it has no will. In 2035 it will still do exactly what we have programmed it to do: complete tasks, solve problems, handle routines. The difference from today: it keeps learning continuously and at high speed. But people set the direction: What should the results look like? Which positive effects must be guaranteed? What must be avoided at all costs?

Unlike people, software does not try to circumvent these boundaries: it conceals nothing, does not outmaneuver another department, does not line its own pockets, humiliates and harasses nobody, but does exactly what we have specified, around the clock. For society to accept these systems, two requirements must be met that I described in the book as the most important ones for intelligent algorithms: traceability and predictability of decisions. The political agreement on the AI Act reached by the European Parliament and the Council in December 2023 points in the same direction: transparency obligations and human oversight for high-risk systems, including those that make decisions about people. For the self-driving company these are not hurdles but conditions it fulfills by design.

Since the operational and tactical decisions are made by the system, people have their minds free to think about humanitarian concerns and to improve them. The company of 2035 must not only be humane but humanitarian: every form of exploitation of people is already strongly criticized today and will be even less acceptable in the future. Again, the reason lies in transparency. In the self-driving company it will no longer be possible to conceal unfavorable practices, neither internally nor along the supply chain. Markets will be open exclusively to those companies that strictly adhere to humanitarian principles.

Life will become more livable for people in a society with humanitarian-oriented self-driving companies, and our work will become more humane.

From "The Self-Driving Company" (Springer, 2023)

Supposed threats and how they dissolve

Beyond the fear of a rule of the machines, the changes trigger further, subjectively perceived threats. On closer analysis, they turn out to be solvable, and each opens up a new perspective. Three examples.

The creative, humane, and ecological factory

Many activities are upgraded in content because the monotonous routines are taken over by software. Already today, workpieces can be procured by robots and placed on the machine, while algorithms take over quality and performance control. Many people will stay in the factory, but they will concentrate on the creative and empathetic activities: new product ideas, improvement proposals, deepening customer relationships, think tanks for the recovery of residual materials, or planning the new plant including a company kindergarten together with the representatives of the municipality. The factory becomes a place where people design and software runs operations.

Working worlds instead of jobs

In the book, I estimated that 20 to 30 percent of today's "jobs" will disappear. Previous technological evolutions show, however, that new fields of activity emerge to the same extent or more; sweaty field labor turned into factory work, and factory work into office work in air-conditioned rooms. The productivity gain also comes at the right time: due to demographic change, significantly fewer workers will be available to us in 2035. The increased productivity gives employees a choice that did not exist before: higher salaries, or more free time at a high salary. Because the routines disappear, five to six hours of work per day are enough, by my estimate in the book, to achieve the full workload of a former full-time employee, and at a higher level of content. The office loses its function as a place of attendance and becomes a meeting point for self-organizing teams; what counts is not location and presence, but results.

A new heyday for genuine craftsmanship

Self-driving companies produce goods automatically and more cost-efficiently than ever. These products become cheaper and are available to a very broad section of society. At the same time, personal services remain in demand, in healthcare, in care, and in increasingly differentiated psychological services. And high-quality handmade products may be in greater demand than ever; for a handmade bread roll, customers will still be willing to pay significantly more in 2035. In People in the Self-Driving Company, I summarized this in six theses, from "people want to buy products from people" to "people will always have work." The precondition, however, lies not in technology but in the political framework: as long as human labor is taxed as heavily as it is today, the machine retains the advantage.

What this means for politics and companies

In the coming years, the idea of the self-driving company will develop from an economic concept into a topic that permeates politics, society, and legislation. Society as a whole will benefit from highly efficient, tax-paying companies and can thereby more than compensate for the transitional effects on those disadvantaged by this transformation. From today's perspective, I see five fields of action:

• Sustainability goals as system goals. Ecological goals belong in the specification of the decision logic, not in the annual report. What is not formulated as a goal will not be optimized.
• Transparency toward the state and society. Taxes and levies paid in real time, verifiable reports, and traceable decisions replace control with certainty.
• Education. Software programming and how algorithms work belong in every curriculum, because only an enlightened and knowledgeable society can deal with this technology confidently.
• Liability. Who is responsible for an algorithm's decision, for example in the event of an unplanned system failure? This question must be rethought in law; insurers will cover the rare cases of damage.
• Taxation of human labor. If people are to be able to afford services from people, labor must no longer be the most expensive factor of production.

For companies, this path does not begin with a law but at home: with a specification that contains ecological and humanitarian goals alongside economic ones, with decisions that are logged and explainable, and with the willingness to disclose their own data to partners and the state before the legislator demands it.

The next step

How the four dimensions interact and how the vision of the company in 2035 is structured as a whole is described in my book, which has been available in English from Springer under the title "The Self-Driving Company" since November 2023: About the book. If you would like to know where your company stands in terms of autonomy, resilience, sustainability, and humanity, and which goals can be included first in the decision logic of your software, we would be happy to talk with you: Book an expert meeting.