The Technology Trap - Carl Benedikt Frey

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ISBN: 978-0691172798
Verdict: 👍👍 👍

This is one of those books that you have to read in full to fully appreciate, with its well-researched examples to support the concept behind the book. 

The book highlights how current automation and Artificial intelligent(AI) systems trends can be used with an historical economic lens to project and address the economic, political and social affects that will arise and by using examples from the industrial revolution when technology displaced workers we can predict the effects of technologies like driverless cars.

I like the structured approach to present the argument and learnt along the way with references to various paradox (Moravec, Polanyi etc..) which I had not come across before and had to look up 

Here are some bits I highlighted in the book. however, there were quite a few so I couldn't  list them all ;

  • The pre-industrial era did not suffer a shortage of imagination, it suffered from a shortage of realization.” P73
  • Parliament passed an act in 1769 that made the destruction of machines a felony punishable by death – P127 .. now I didn’t know that !
  • Technical change became increasingly labor-augmenting instead of labor-replacing P133
  • The bargaining power of unions depends on the value of the skills and knowledge of the workers they represent P201
  • In the end, for most people, the main source of their income is not physical or financial capital , but human capital. The wealth of workers is in their skills. P213
  • A computer would have an easy time beating the world class chess champion Magnus Carlsen, but it would be unable to clean the chess pieces after the game and put them back in the right place. Any human cleaner still outperforms computer-controlled machines in perception, dexterity and mobility” P236 This summed up quite a bit for me !
  • However, for all the differences, these studies concur that unskilled jobs are most exposed to automation P322

I found this a nice read: it’s not a technology book per se, but a economic technology book with a focus on the emerging AI technologies

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