A wonderful, perfect world: cars drive their passengers autonomously to their destination, modern diagnostic tools create customised medicines, high-tech factories independently produce ever more optimised products, and bureaucracy is taken care of by computers. Workplaces are clean, artificial intelligence has closed the skills gap, and the enormous productivity allows for the financing of high social standards. And with an AI tax, it would even be possible to reduce the tax burden on labour.

A gloomy, broken world: the advent of AI has robbed millions of people of their jobs, labelling them the „proletariat“. The masses now have to reorientate themselves in low-paid manual occupations where dexterity is still essential. Unless, of course, they have undergone further training early enough to get the few particularly well-paid jobs for controlling AI processes. Productivity has literally exploded, causing returns on capital to skyrocket. The rich have become even richer, the poor even poorer. Unrest is imminent.

Two futures that are unlikely to materialise. But one thing is clear: AI will increase productivity and optimise processes, change job profiles, develop new products, accelerate science and support creative activities. It will also harbour dangers: Surveillance, social manipulation, exploiting and infiltrating people digitally. And jobs will be lost: in offices, factories and the creative world.

In order to steer this development in a humane direction, it must be controlled. However, it is doubtful whether German society is aware of the drama. In surveys conducted by Bitkom or the management consultancy EY, for example, people expect professional consequences, but – unlike in other countries – do not generally consider them to be as relevant to their own jobs. Many simply reject AI outright.

Companies in Germany's neighbouring countries are taking a faster and more consistent approach to AI integration than in Germany. Above all, they pay attention to employee involvement, as an EY survey shows. Many German firms shy away from investment, communication with employees, disruption to established processes and, ultimately, risk.

The money spent on AI research, development and implementation in Europe is also rather undersized. While around 68 billion dollars were invested in the USA in 2023, the figure here (including the UK) was only 11 billion dollars. And the political sphere? The EU Commission wants to spend 1 billion euros a year – but this is apparently happening in an „uncoordinated“ way, with little effect, as the European Court of Auditors criticises. In any case, not enough to even begin to prepare for the coming tectonic changes.

And dangerous, because then the dystopia becomes reality all by itself: Jobs will be lost here and created elsewhere. Europe and Germany have already been left behind by other technological trends. No new technology clusters were formed from which new global corporations would have grown. Have we not learnt from this?

Once again, the main aim of the legislation (AI Act) seems to be to prevent something bad from happening, rather than to promote and foster new developments. If Europe really wanted to make itself fit for AI, the continent would have to standardise data protection as quickly as possible and create a digital single market for data and networks. This would then also be attractive for investors – even under EU, for example in terms of data and copyright protection. That would certainly be better than the current situation, as digital companies currently care little about copyright, and are carrying out an unrivalled data grab when training their AI machines. Do we really want to be judged, exploited and moulded by Asian and American AI superintelligence, according to their standards, in the future? Where is the signal of change?