¶ Sources and Methodology
This wiki accepts exclusively publicly available and verifiable sources. The following hierarchy applies:
| Priority |
Source Type |
Examples |
| 1 |
Official statistics |
FSO, SNB, SECO, Federal Chancellery |
| 2 |
International organisations |
IMF, OECD, IEA, WHO, UN |
| 3 |
Scientific publications |
Peer-reviewed journals, conference papers |
| 4 |
University research |
ETH, EPFL, KOF, Avenir Suisse |
| 5 |
Legal texts |
Federal Constitution, revDPA, EU AI Act, GDPR |
| 6 |
Quality media |
NZZ, SRF, Le Temps, Financial Times |
| 7 |
Specialist books |
Peer-reviewed or from reputable publishers |
Not permissible: Wikipedia as a primary source, social media posts, blogs without a scientific basis, anonymous sources.
Source references are given as footnotes [N] in the text. At the end of each page, the complete bibliography follows with author, title, publisher/journal, year and, where applicable, URL.
The fiscal model calculation in this wiki is based on the following assumptions:
| Parameter |
Value |
Source |
| Employed persons in Switzerland (2024) |
5.5 million |
FSO |
| Gross median wage |
CHF 84,000/year |
FSO Wage Structure Survey |
| Wage-dependent levies (OASI+BVG+tax) |
approx. 48% |
FSIO, FTA |
| Total wage-dependent state funding |
CHF 220 bn/year |
Calculation |
| Automation rate by 2032 |
12% (net) |
McKinsey, KOF ETH, conservative |
| Automation rate by 2040 |
32% (net) |
McKinsey, own estimate |
| Automation rate by 2050 |
42% (net) |
McKinsey, own estimate |
| New jobs (AI sector, compensation) |
10% of losses |
Estimate |
| Inflation (long-term) |
1.5% p.a. |
SNB target corridor |
| Real wage growth |
0.5% p.a. |
Historical average |
| Population growth to 2050 |
9.0 to 10.35 million |
FSO Reference Scenario A-00-2025 |
| Share of working-age population (20--64) |
65% to 55% |
FSO |
- ETH Zurich, Department of Computer Science: Research milestones. inf.ethz.ch
- Wirth, Niklaus: Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. Prentice-Hall, 1976.
- Wirth, Niklaus: Project Oberon: The Design of an Operating System and Compiler. Addison-Wesley, 1992.
- ETH AI Center, Zurich-Oerlikon: opened October 2020. ai.ethz.ch
- IDSIA (Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale): founded 1988 in Lugano. idsia.ch
- Schmidhuber, Juergen / Hochreiter, Sepp: Long Short-Term Memory. Neural Computation 9(8), 1997.
¶ Pioneer Era and Foundations
- McCulloch, Warren / Pitts, Walter: A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity. Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 1943.
- Turing, Alan: Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, Vol. 59, 1950.
- McCarthy, John / Minsky, Marvin / Rochester, Nathaniel / Shannon, Claude: A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, 1955.
- Rosenblatt, Frank: The Perceptron. Psychological Review, 1958.
- Minsky, Marvin / Papert, Seymour: Perceptrons. MIT Press, 1969.
¶ AI Winters and Expert Systems
- Lighthill, James: Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey (Lighthill Report). Science Research Council UK, 1973.
- Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project (FGCS): 1982--1992. MITI.
- Haigh, Thomas: How the AI Boom Went Bust. Communications of the ACM, February 2024.
¶ Neural Networks and Deep Learning
- Rumelhart, David / Hinton, Geoffrey / Williams, Ronald: Learning Representations by Back-Propagating Errors. Nature 323, 1986.
- Krizhevsky, Alex / Sutskever, Ilya / Hinton, Geoffrey: ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (AlexNet). NeurIPS, 2012.
- Vaswani, Ashish et al.: Attention Is All You Need (Transformer architecture). NeurIPS, 2017.
- OpenAI: ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue. openai.com, November 2022.
- OpenAI: GPT-4 Technical Report. arxiv.org, March 2023.
- Google DeepMind: Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models. December 2023.
- Anthropic: Claude 3 Technical Report. anthropic.com, March 2024.
- Meta AI: Llama 2 and Llama 3.1. 2023/2024.
¶ Regulation and Policy
- EU AI Act (Regulation EU 2024/1689): In force since 1 August 2024. digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
- Digital Services Act (DSA), Regulation EU 2022/2065.
- EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Regulation EU 2016/679.
- Swiss Data Protection Act (revDPA): In force since 1 September 2023.
- Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation.
- Swiss popular initiative "For an unconditional basic income": rejected on 5 June 2016, 76.9% No.
- UBI pilot projects: Finland (KELA, 2017--2018), Stockton/USA (SEED, 2019--2021), Kenya (GiveDirectly, since 2016).
- AlgorithmWatch: A guide to the new EU AI regulation. algorithmwatch.org
¶ Economy and Labour Market
- McKinsey Global Institute: A Future That Works: Automation, Employment, and Productivity. 2017.
- Frey, Carl Benedikt / Osborne, Michael (Oxford Martin School): The Future of Employment. 2013.
- KOF ETH Zurich: Labour market effects of generative AI, 2023.
- Avenir Suisse: Analyses on the automation of the Swiss labour market.
- Stanford HAI: AI Index Report 2024. aiindex.stanford.edu
- FSO: Population scenarios 2023--2055, Reference Scenario A-00-2025.
- UN World Population Prospects 2024. population.un.org
- Gapminder.org: Demographic projections and birth rates worldwide.
- Switzerland: fertility rate 1.39 (2023). Federal Statistical Office.
- Bostrom, Nick: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press, 2014.
- Russell, Stuart: Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. Viking, 2019.
- Tegmark, Max: Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Knopf, 2017.
- Zuboff, Shoshana: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019.
- Kurzweil, Ray: The Singularity Is Near. Viking, 2005.
- Kurzweil, Ray: The Singularity Is Nearer. Viking, 2024.
- Harari, Yuval Noah: Homo Deus. Harvill Secker, 2016.
- Rosling, Hans: Factfulness. Flatiron Books, 2018.
- Friedman, Milton: Capitalism and Freedom. University of Chicago Press, 1962.
¶ Money, Currency and the Economy
- Mayer, Thomas (Flossbach von Storch): Analyses on inflation, fiat money and the long-term value of the euro.
- Swiss National Bank (SNB): Annual reports and monetary policy assessment. snb.ch
¶ Hardware and Computing Power
- Moore, Gordon E.: Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits. Electronics Magazine, April 1965.
- NVIDIA H100 / H200 / Blackwell: GPU architecture for AI training. nvidia.com
- Top500.org: List of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
- International Energy Agency (IEA): Energy and AI. iea.org, 2025.
- IEA: Global electricity consumption of data centres: 415 TWh (2024), forecast 945 TWh (2030).
- S&P Global: Global Data Center Power Demand to Double by 2030. April 2025.
¶ Autonomous Weapons and Security
- International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC): Autonomous Weapon Systems, 2014.
- UN Panel of Experts on Libya: Report on the deployment of the Kargu-2, 2021.
- Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), Group of Governmental Experts on LAWS. unog.ch
- IAEA: Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1957. iaea.org
¶ Robotics and Automation
- Boston Dynamics: Atlas, Spot, Stretch. bostondynamics.com
- Tesla Optimus: Humanoid robot, pilot programmes from 2024.
- Figure AI: Figure 01/02, BMW factory deployment, 2024.
Last updated: March 2026