What happens when 400 autonomous cars can do the work of 10,000 human drivers?

And more ideas from our latest Risk Club series dinner in Berlin

Two weeks after our Munich dinner during the Security Conference, the BlueYard team gathered again in Berlin with a group of founders, investors, and operators to talk about the state of our global civilization and how to go risk on during one of the most volatile times in recent history. Here are a few key themes from our closed-door conversation, hosted in partnership with Max Claussen at System.One VC:

AI is displacing jobs faster than any previous wave of automation

Today, a fleet of 400 Waymo autonomous vehicles can serve the same market as roughly 10,000 human rideshare drivers. These cars run 24 hours a day with no breaks to speak of. In China “dark factories” like Xiaomi run around the clock, producing a smartphone every three seconds with the lights off because robots don’t need to see.

Every previous wave of automation — mechanization, electrification, computing — took decades to fully deploy. These decades provided a necessary buffer for humanity, giving workers time to retrain, institutions time to adapt, and policy time to catch up. That’s not happening here.

The scramble to adapt is underway

The gig economy is growing as a buffer between employment and unemployment, and human-in-the-loop work for AI training is emerging as an entirely new labor category. But the gig economy is itself automatable (as the Waymo numbers make plain) and AI training work may shrink as the models improve. So even these adjustments are temporary. Some at the table raised whether displaced white-collar workers could retrain into trades and how long that window stays open before physical AI closes it too.

The economies absorbing these shocks are already vulnerable

In the US, strip out AI and data center investment and GDP growth is barely visible. Stock market performance is concentrated in a handful of companies. And rule of law is eroding, with institutional trust on a precipitous decline. Meanwhile, in Europe, regulatory complexity continues to hamper innovation and markets remain fragmented compared to the US.

Globally, 18-to-25-year-olds are voting for extremes on both the left and the right, signaling a generation that sees the current system as unable to deliver on promises past.

Policy proposals from the table

At each of our dinners, we like to ask people to imagine policy proposals for this new world. In Berlin, we talked about mandatory equity-backed pension plans, starting from birth, at €50 to €100 per month — the logic being that if AI shifts GDP growth from labor to capital, citizens need to own capital from day one.

Others suggested structural reforms to governance itself: smaller parliaments, defined term limits, fewer career politicians. Still others called out the need to streamline permitting for solar, batteries, and physical infrastructure (if resilience is the goal then bottlenecks in deployment become strategic liabilities).

Where we see opportunity

From the conversations at this dinner and across our broader work, we see the most compelling opportunities in four areas: European defense and resilience infrastructure, where a €650B rearmament wave is creating a new generation of companies. The European startup ecosystem, which continues to outpace the continent’s corporates in responding to these shifts. Ukrainian reconstruction (which several at the table compared to Poland’s post-1989 transformation). And European energy sovereignty, where accelerating solar and battery deployment is both a security imperative and a commercial opportunity.

We’re looking for the next generation of founders making civilizational bets. If that’s you — or if you’re an investor, policymaker, or operator thinking about these questions — we’d love to talk.

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