In 2013, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne published a paper claiming that 47 percent of jobs in the United States were in danger of being replaced by artificial intelligence (AI). The paper made quite a splash at the time. Apparently even Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisors took it quite seriously (322).
A decade later, Frey's fears haven't quite come to pass. (A Bureau of Labor Statistics report from July 2022 in fact finds little evidence that AI has made any appreciable difference in the rate or character of job loss in the United States.) Still, out of that 2013 paper came Frey's most recent book, a survey of the history of mechanization in Europe (mainly England) and the United States. In it, he claims that we currently stand on the threshold of a “technology trap.” Until the ascent of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century, Frey argues, European...
