During 2024 and 2025, I made a series of trips to mainland China and Hong Kong, meeting business leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, students and academics.
Between speeches, salons and other events, I gave approximately 60 press interviews. I also held monthly online dialogues with leading thinkers, streamed on social media by my publisher, CITIC Press. In 2025, I received the annual Artificial General Intelligence Research Award in Beijing.
At a conference in Shanghai, I was introduced to a chief editor who suggested that I write a book about the world we might inhabit in 2050. There was an interesting twist: for my Chinese interviews, I had received the questions in advance, as is the custom in China. We therefore had around 60 lists containing approximately 200 different questions, a remarkably useful record of what people actually wanted to know about the future. AI helped us rank them. Having helped set the agenda, it could hardly complain about the scrutiny that followed.
The editor had one condition: the book should be accessible and, preferably, entertaining. The aim was to explore enormous changes through the questions they raise for our own lives.
The book begins with AI itself: how the technology is developing, what it could become capable of, and which breakthroughs might come next. This draws partly on the continuously updated map of future innovations and their dependencies developed by our company, Supertrends.
From there, it explores the economic consequences of AI and the other radical technologies approaching us. How will wealth be created and distributed? Where will money flow? What happens to growth, productivity and the value of human work when intelligence becomes increasingly abundant?
Next comes everyday life. How might our lifestyles in 2050 differ from those we know today? What will we do with our time, what will we value, and how will we find purpose in a world where machines can do more of the things that currently keep us busy?
The book then turns to work and leadership. How do you lead an organization when its machines are smarter and more numerous than its people? Which jobs will disappear, which will emerge, and how will labour markets function through the transition?
Finally, it asks a question close to my own professional life: how do you invest in this strange new world? Where might lasting value accumulate, and how can we prepare for a future whose opportunities may be as unfamiliar as its risks?
Covers and other Editions
2050: When Machines Do the Work and We Do the Living is published in Danish by Politikens Forlag, and in Chinese by CITIC Press.
