The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation.

• Author: Huria, Sonali

Carl Benedikt Frey. The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019. ix + 471 pages. Hardcover, $29.95.

The Technology Trap by the economic historian, Carl Benedikt Frey, is a fascinating account of the history of automation and the attitudes and responses that technological change has engendered. The present volume is an extension of his widely cited study on automation--a 2013 paper co-authored with the technologist, Michael Osborne--that explored the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on American jobs.

In an encapsulation that spans pre-industrial technological creation, the Middle Ages, Renaissance, the age of geographical discoveries, the industrial and computer revolutions, down to the present age of artificial intelligence (AI), Frey examines social and political receptiveness to technological change, determined in large part by how these developments have impacted individual incomes and economic growth.

Through riveting examples across these time frames, Frey argues that whenever technological progress has been "labor-enabling" rather than "labor-replacing," technology has been adopted with little resistance; not so when technological change has meant major workforce disruptions. The resistance to technological change however, has not been limited to workers alone; rulers and political authorities, particularly in the pre-industrial period, often scuttled worker-replacing technologies for fear of social unrest and rebellion (p.55, 57).

The book is divided into five parts, which offers a historical periodization of technological progress and its role in shaping trajectories of economic growth and individual incomes. Part 1 of the book, titled The Great Stagnation, explores the preindustrial world which was marked by some of the most significant technological innovations, including writing, the discovery and use of metals, and civil and hydraulic engineering and architecture, and yet, was an age of economic stagnation, when labor-saving technologies did not necessarily lead to the kind of prosperity that emerged in the eighteenth century. The second part, The Great Divergence, examines when the West grew much wealthier than the rest of the world following the industrial revolution. It contrasts the pre-industrial world with the Industrial Revolution, when not only were technologies largely labor-replacing, but had the firm backing of political...