The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation Audiobook (Free)

How the history of technological revolutions might help us better understand economic and political polarization in the age of automation

In 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 associates. As Carl Benedikt Frey displays, the Industrial Revolution created unprecedented prosperity and wealth about The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation over the long term, but the immediate implications of mechanization were devastating for huge swaths of the populace. Middle-income careers withered, wages stagnated, the labor share of income fell, income surged, and economic inequality skyrocketed. These tendencies, Frey records, broadly mirror those inside our current age group of automation, which began with the Pc Revolution.

Just as the Industrial Revolution eventually brought about extraordinary benefits for society, artificial intelligence systems have the to do the same. But Frey argues that this depends on how the short term can be managed. In the nineteenth hundred years, workers violently indicated their worries over machines acquiring their jobs. The Luddite uprisings joined a long influx of machinery riots that swept across Europe and China. Today’s despairing middle class hasn’t resorted to physical pressure, but their frustration has resulted in rising populism and the increasing fragmentation of culture. As middle-class jobs continue to arrive under pressure, there is no assurance that positive behaviour to technology will persist.

The Industrial Revolution was a defining moment ever sold, but few grasped its enormous consequences at that time. The Technology Snare demonstrates that amid another technological trend, the lessons of the past might help us to better face today’s.