Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity‪.‬

Fall 1981. At ETH Zurich, a young student enrolls in the very first standalone computer science program in Switzerland. What seemed like an academic niche at the time became the most powerful technology of our era. Forty-five years later, Beat W. Meier tells the story firsthand — and reveals what comes next.

This is not another dry tech history. It is the gripping narrative of a man who lived through the AI hype of the 1980s, survived the great frost of the 1990s, and now describes the moment in April 2026 when everything tipped. Meier explains transformers, deep learning, and ChatGPT so clearly you won't need a computer science degree — yet with enough precision that experts will nod in agreement.

Part 1 — The Promise: From the Dartmouth dreams through Lisp and Prolog to Japan's Fifth Generation Project that shook the world.

Part 2 — The Great Frost: Why a billion-dollar industry froze, the hardware lied, and expert systems quietly died — while neural networks survived underground.

Part 3 — The Long Years of Patience: Moore's Law, the data flood of the internet, Deep Blue vs. Kasparov — and why nobody understood what it all meant.

Part 4 — The Explosion: Deep learning changes everything. ChatGPT democratizes intelligence. And in January 2026, the Singularity arrives. What is money still worth when machines produce everything?

Part 5 — Two Futures: The Land of Plenty or Digital Stalinism? Nine scenarios for 2050, nine demands for policymakers, a visionary thought experiment about the Swiss economy — and a fictional day inside the AI-powered media company Ringier in 2035.

What makes this book unique: Meier writes from a rare dual perspective — as a Swiss entrepreneur who knows the security industry from the inside, and as a developer who builds AI-powered systems for medical research today. He combines technical depth with political clarity and poses the question that Switzerland, as a small, prosperous nation without a national growth promise, must urgently ask itself: How much freedom remains when the machines can do everything?

Who this book is for: Anyone who wants to understand what is happening right now — and who is willing to think along rather than be swept up by the hype. Entrepreneurs, policymakers, teachers, students, parents. Anyone who senses that this technology will change their life but doesn't yet know how.