Even savvy financial advisors won’t look at the world of business deal making in quite the same way after reading Jacques Peretti’s eye-opening “The Deals That Made the World.’’
Peretti, an investigative reporter for the BBC and a documentarian, presents 10 modern-day business agreements that have altered our lives, from the way we eat and why we diet, to how Asia—especially China—toppled the West from its long reign as the world’s financial innovator and leader.
The final deal that Peretti chronicles sprang from the rise and superiority of machines, i.e., computerized robots. In 2017, a Japanese insurance company bought IBM’s artificial intelligence software to make health insurance decisions on millions of policies, and to speed up claims and reduce the workforce. The robots rendered 127 human employees redundant, making them the first people to lose their jobs to AI.
The MIT and Oxford academics and scientists whom Peretti quotes on the subject of AI predict that half of all jobs could become automated by 2030. If correct, the repercussions for financial management and the stability of nations are striking.
Robots would not contribute to IRAs or pensions or invest, which would dramatically shrink the pool of clients seeking advice and management, and greatly reduce the amount of capital that finances everything from infrastructure to research and development.
Government and big business are paying attention to this revolution, Peretti says.
“If machines make everyone redundant, how will people earn a living, and what will they do all day? In recent years, many tech industry leaders have weighed in with potential solutions,’’ Peretti writes.
Elon Musk of Tesla and PayPal, suggests a ‘universal living wage,’ an amount we are all paid to exist.’’
Bill Gates of Microsoft advocates for taxing robots on their labor. Companies would be charged on the savings from using robots rather than humans, and that money would pay for the universal living wage, roads, hospitals, armies and social safety nets.
Slightly less threatening but still monumental in its potential for causing upheaval, is globalization. Peretti pivots globalization on “How Asia Rewrote the Rules,’’ starting with the deal struck in 2017 when Chinese President Xi Jinping signed the One Belt One Road (OBOR) agreement with 68 countries, including the United States. It calls for a $1 trillion investment by China in infrastructure projects including building road systems, ports, railways and power stations around the world.