2041. The Artificial Society

Two decades from now, who will actually be making the decisions that run your business, your government, and your economy?

Agentic artificial intelligence has already answered part of that question. Autonomous AI agents allocate capital, screen job candidates, set prices, and negotiate contracts, right now, at scale. What's changing is not the technology. It's who holds power once the technology is doing the deciding.

Most books on this shift come out of Washington or Beijing. This one doesn't. Europe regulates artificial intelligence more aggressively than any other region on earth, yet builds almost none of the infrastructure it regulates. That contradiction turns the continent into the sharpest available case study for a question every economy will eventually face: what happens when the entities making decisions answer to someone else's rules.

Economist and consultant Luis Sotillos Sanz has spent two decades inside companies navigating digital transformation. In 2041. The Artificial Society, he draws on that experience, the enforcement record of the EU AI Act, and empirical evidence on how agentic AI is deployed today to build a working framework for an economy already underway.

Inside, you'll find:

• How autonomous AI agents are emerging as a new category of economic actor, distinct from software, from employees, from firms
• Why the line between natural persons, legal persons, and agentic persons is blurring, and what that means for accountability
• How decision-making authority is being redistributed inside businesses and governments, often invisibly
• Four scenario-based, foresight-driven futures for Europe by 2041, from a continent that sets the platform others build on to one that merely executes decisions made elsewhere
• What "metacontrol", supervising systems rather than people, actually requires in practice

The four scenarios mapped here aren't predictions. They're a diagnostic tool. Which one is most likely is left for you to work out as you read, because the reasoning matters more than the answer.

This is not a book about Europe for European readers. It's a book about what happens to any economy that regulates a powerful technology without controlling the infrastructure behind it, a dilemma the United States and China have mostly avoided by building that infrastructure themselves. Europe is simply the most advanced case of the alternative path. If you run a business, shape policy, or want to understand where decision-making authority is headed once agentic AI is fully embedded, in Brussels, in Washington, or in Shenzhen, you'll recognize your own stakes in these pages.

A practical framework for navigating an economy where the old rules no longer fully apply.