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The Technology Trap
- Author
- Carl Benedikt Frey
- Narrator
- Richard Lyddon
- Publisher
- Princeton University Press
- Publish Date
- 18 June 2019
- Run Time
- 15 hours 31 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
This audiobook narrated by Richard Lyddon reveals how the history of technological revolutions can help us better understand economic and political polarization in the age of automation
From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence,
The Technology Trap takes a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society's members. As Carl Benedikt Frey shows, the Industrial Revolution created unprecedented wealth and prosperity over the long run, but the immediate consequences of mechanization were devastating for large swaths of the population. Middle-income jobs withered, wages stagnated, the labor share of income fell, profits surged, and economic inequality skyrocketed. These trends, Frey documents, broadly mirror those in our current age of automation, which began with the Computer Revolution.
Just as the Industrial Revolution eventually brought about extraordinary benefits for society, artificial intelligence systems have the potential to do the same. But Frey argues that this depends on how the short term is managed. In the nineteenth century, workers violently expressed their concerns over machines taking their jobs. The Luddite uprisings joined a long wave of machinery riots that swept across Europe and China. Today's despairing middle class has not resorted to physical force, but their frustration has led to rising populism and the increasing fragmentation of society. As middle-class jobs continue to come under pressure, there's no assurance that positive attitudes to technology will persist.
The Industrial Revolution was a defining moment in history, but few grasped its enormous consequences at the time.
The Technology Trap demonstrates that in the midst of another technological revolution, the lessons of the past can help us to more effectively face the present.
Critics Review
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"One of Handelsblatt's Best Technology Books of 2019"
Handelsblatt
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"One of Época Negócios's Best Books of 2019"
Epoca Negocios
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"A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year"
Choice
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"A Project Syndicate Best Read in 2019"
Project Syndicate
See more reviews See fewer reviews
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"A fascinating history of technical change."---Chris Dillow, Stumbling and Mumbling
Stumbling and Mumbling
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"Anybody interested in the economic impact of digital and AI, in particular on jobs, will want to read Carl Frey's new book."---Diane Coyle, Enlightened Economist
Enlightened Economist
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"In his bracing new book The Technology Trap, Carl Frey extrapolates from the history of the industrial revolution to offer a vision of the future in which Amazon Go, AI assistants and autonomous vehicles are 'worker replacement' technologies."---Greg Williams, Wired
Wired
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"If you're an optimist about the robotic future, you likely hear talk that we're all going to lose our jobs or suffer a big pay cut, and tell friends to relax — the new technology revolution is going to turn out like all the others since the dawn of the Industrial Age. But if history is your best hope, you should probably think again: [The Technology Trap has] a strong case."---Steve Levine, Axios
Axios
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"One of Frey's most salient points is that our attitudes and actions toward technology can play a pivotal role in how it impacts us. A lot of stock has been put into Frey and Osborne's prediction of 47 percent automation. But if Frey's book gets even half the attention the paper got, it should serve to quell some of our fears around a bleak machine-dominated future."---Vanessa Bates Ramirez, Singularity Hub
Singularity Hub
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"A Financial Times Best Book of the Year"
Financial Times
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"Winner of the Richard A. Lester Prize for the Outstanding Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics, Industrial Relations Section of Princeton University"
Industrial Relations Section of Princeton University
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"The Technology Trap may well ensnare doom-seekers' attention with its ominous-sounding title. But it should ultimately hearten anyone who reads it."
The Economist
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"Anybody interested in the economic impact of digital and AI, in particular on jobs, will want to read [The Technology Trap]."---Diane Coyle, Enlightened Economist
Enlightened Economist
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"[Frey] takes a provocative, original long view on current concerns, examining the fallout from past technological advances . . . to mass production and artificial intelligence."---Andrew Hill, Financial Times, Summer Books of 2019
Financial Times
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"I have been lost in [The Technology Trap] for the last 10 days."---John Harris, The Guardian
The Guardian
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"Frey's analysis is worth taking seriously because the Oxford economic historian and economist has researched his subject deeply and has co-authored one of the most widely cited studies on automation . . . . Frey's story is well argued and — at times — deeply alarming about the stability of western democracies given he predicts the further concentration of wealth in a few hands and in even fewer locations"---John Thornhill, Financial Times
Financial Times
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"An excellent analysis of past industrial revolutions, the technologies that emerged within them, and the way societies adapted to those changes."---Adi Gaskell, Forbes
Forbes
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"As [Frey] points out in his new book The Technology Trap, for all that the robots may make the world more local, they may have other painful side-effects, putting millions of people out of work and sparking an almighty backlash."---Ed Conway, The Times
The Times
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"The Technology Trap is the perfect book for higher ed people to read . . . . deeply researched and [convincingly] argued."---Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Education
Inside Higher Education
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"[The Technology Trap] is a reminder that the future of work depends on policy choices. It is well worth reading."---Ravi Venkatesan, Book Review Literacy Trust
Book Review Literary Trust
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"A . . . danger is that Luddite efforts to avoid the short-term costs associated with a new technology will end up denying access to its long-term benefits—something Carl Benedikt Frey, an Oxford academic, calls a 'technology trap'."
The Economist
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"Excellent."---Masood Ahmed, CGD Policy Blog
CGD Policy Blog
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"Magisterial."---Chris Gibbons, Acumen
Acumen
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"Frey's observations and detailed historical analysis are useful for even those of us who cling to a more optimistic view of the long run."---Micheal Munger, Law & Liberty
Law & Liberty
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"[A] historical odyssey."---Jane Humphries and Benjamin Schneider, Project Syndicate
Project Syndicate
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"Frey provides a longue durée examination of the economic, social, and political interplay that drives technological change. Careful, erudite, elegantly written, and full of insight, the book sets the current overwrought debate about automation and AI on a firm contextualized footing."---Jayati Ghosh, Project Syndicate
Project Syndicate
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"Frey's book is a history with a policy purpose . . . the book reveals an enormous scope of reading."---Kenneth Lipartito, American Historical Review
American Historical Review
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"Co-Winner of the Silver Medal in Business Technology, Axiom Business Book Awards"
Axiom Business Book Awards
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"One of the Financial Times' Summer Books of 2019: Business"
Financial Times
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"One of the Financial Times' Best Books of 2019: Technology"
Financial Times
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"12 must-read books for 2019 as recommended by Tech Crunch's Extra Crunch readers"
Tech Crunch
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"One of Five Books' Best Economics Books of 2019"
Five Books
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"University of Chicago 2019 Recommended Reading"
University of Chicago
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"Carl Benedikt Frey has written an important and timely book . . . . A great deal of effort, thought, and scholarship went into its writing, and it shows. There is much food for thought here and I can envision this assigned in upper division economics classes as well as some graduate courses."---Alexander Field, EH.net
EH.net
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"Frey offers a refreshingly human-centered analysis of technological progress."---Oscar Schwartz, Stanford Social Innovation Review
Stanford Social Innovation Review
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"It's clear The Technology Trap has plenty to teach us, and should automatically be on the reading list of any serious policy maker or politician."---Ben Ramanauskas, Cap X
Cap X
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"Frey explores automation and its consequences, taking the reader on a long sweep of UK and US industrial history that demonstrates the distinction between labour-enabling and labour-replacing technologies. . . As arguably the most comprehensive account of automation to date, this book deserves to be read widely"---Liam Kennedy, London School of Economics Review of Books
London School of Economics Review of Books
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"[The Technology Trap] offers a fascinating history of technology's effects on employment from the Industrial Revolution to today and attempts to tackle how we might avoid a repeat of past social ills, as the Computer Revolution sweeps away a majority of human jobs."---Robert Elliott Smith, Medium
Medium
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"Narrator Richard Lyddon performs an almost impossible feat—making a very theoretical audiobook sound absorbable in a truly entertaining way . . . . Cheers to both Frey and Lyddon, a pairing that listeners may wish to hear again."
AudioFile Magazine
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"An extremely useful history of the effect of technology on jobs and income inequality."---John Judis, The National Interest
The National Interest
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"[E]rudite and thoughtful, and the questions [The Technology Trap] raises are important and pertinent."---Joel Mokyr, Journal of Economic History
Journal of Economic History
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"[Frey] investigates the short, medium, and long-term consequences of the Industrial Revolution on workers, finding that in fact the changes had extraordinarily negative consequences in the short term. His lessons from this pivotal moment in history can help technology leaders avoid the biggest risks today in how we design human/AI systems in the coming age of automation."
TechCrunch
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"I highly recommend [The Technology Trap]."---Randal C. Picker
Randal C. Picker
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"There is little reason to doubt the contemporary relevance of Frey's analysis into the consequences of automation on the labour market, and the broader socio‐political implications of those technological changes which are highly anticipated to reshape our working lives and economic existence as we know it. The voluminous public commentary about technology, and public protests against the ramifications of technology change (such as taxi drivers decrying peer‐to‐peer ride‐sharing services which rely on smartphone apps), serve as sufficient warrant to pay attention to Frey's contribution."---Mikayla Novak, Economic Record
Economic Record
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"Excellently written, full of examples and studies I hadn't previously encountered, and I learned a lot."---Tim Harford
Tim Harford
User Reviews
No reviews yet.
Details
- Author
- Carl Benedikt Frey
- Narrator
- Richard Lyddon
- Duration
- 15 hours 31 minutes
- Release Date
- 18 June 2019
- ISBN
- 9780691193571
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Princeton University Press
- Genre
- Labour / income economics, Digital and information technologies: social and ethical aspects
Synopsis
This audiobook narrated by Richard Lyddon reveals how the history of technological revolutions can help us better understand economic and political polarization in the age of automation From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, The Technology Trap takes a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society's members. As Carl Benedikt Frey shows, the Industrial Revolution created unprecedented wealth and prosperity over the long run, but the immediate consequences of mechanization were devastating for large swaths of the population. Middle-income jobs withered, wages stagnated, the labor share of income fell, profits surged, and economic inequality skyrocketed. These trends, Frey documents, broadly mirror those in our current age of automation, which began with the Computer Revolution. Just as the Industrial Revolution eventually brought about extraordinary benefits for society, artificial intelligence systems have the potential to do the same. But Frey argues that this depends on how the short term is managed. In the nineteenth century, workers violently expressed their concerns over machines taking their jobs. The Luddite uprisings joined a long wave of machinery riots that swept across Europe and China. Today's despairing middle class has not resorted to physical force, but their frustration has led to rising populism and the increasing fragmentation of society. As middle-class jobs continue to come under pressure, there's no assurance that positive attitudes to technology will persist. The Industrial Revolution was a defining moment in history, but few grasped its enormous consequences at the time. The Technology Trap demonstrates that in the midst of another technological revolution, the lessons of the past can help us to more effectively face the present.
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