Book & Reviews

"The Technology Trap is a subtle, wide-reaching exploration of the relationship between technology and labor over centuries of history. Frey shows how the impacts of automation upon the British and American workforce have been shaped by changing power structures. In its attention to the detailed determinants of change, his book is a hugely welcome antidote to today’s surfeit of sweeping predictions about the future of work."

Baron Robert Skidelsky, Warwick University, author of Keynes: The Return of the Master

"Will machines equipped with artificial intelligence render the human race redundant? Is work as we know it about to be terminated? When we try to think about plausible futures, history is a better guide than science fiction. In this important new work of applied history, Oxford economic historian Carl Benedikt Frey draws on the experience of the first and second industrial revolutions, as well as the first computer revolution, to offer answers to some of the burning questions of our time. His key point -- that technological disruption of the labor market is usually painful in the short run, whatever the long-run benefits of innovation -- is of vital importance to voters and policy-makers alike."

Niall Ferguson, Hoover Institution, Stanford, author of The Ascent of Money

“How will artificial intelligence affect the future of work? In The Technology Trap, Frey answers this question through a comprehensive, insightful analysis of the relationship between technological advances and work, from preindustrial society through the Computer Revolution. He predicts that intelligent machines will reduce the demand for human labor while yielding significant productivity gains. Societies will differ in how they choose to distribute these gains."

Laura Tyson, University of California, Berkeley, Chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton Administration

"In this book, Carl Frey brings a new perspective, that of historical experience, to tackle some of the most important issues of our time. Offering the clearest account that I have read in quite a while regarding current problems around employment, technology, economic performance, and globalization, Frey provides the technological background to Thomas Piketty’s analysis of inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century."

Jane Humphries, All Souls College, University of Oxford, author of Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution

"Carl Frey’s highly original, admirably engaging, and deeply researched book should be read by anyone interested in how technological change will disrupt not only our jobs, but also our politics and society. By comparing the current age of disruptive technological change with the Industrial Revolution, The Technology Trap provides unique and timely insights which we ignore at our peril."

Ian Goldin, Oxford Martin School & Balliol College, Oxford University, author of The Age of Discovery

"The Technology Trap is the perfect book for higher ed people to read [...] deeply researched and convincingly argued"

Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

"Carl Frey and Michael Osborne ignited everything from robot hysteria to outraged denunciation, the latest in a cycle of visceral emotion that has accompanied every wave of new technology since before the Industrial Revolution. Frey's new book: "The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation" pivots off of the now-famous 2013 paper to answer whether the hysteria he and Osborne kindled is justified. …. 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 pessimists have a strong case."

Steve LeVine, Axios Future

"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

"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

"Frey ist ein hervorragender Analytiker der Probleme der anstehenden Veränderungen."

"Frey offers a refreshingly human-centered analysis of technological progress."

Stephan Scheuer, Handelsblatt