Episode 456: Carl Benedikt Frey
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Economic Growth in the Age of Automation
The fear of AI taking our jobs has been buzzing for years, but it’s not a new conversation. Technology has been shaking up industries and displacing workers since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
In this episode, Greg sits down with Carl Benedikt Frey, the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI & Work at the Oxford Internet Institute, to dive deep into these shifts. As the Director of the Future of Work Programme and author of The Technology Trap, Frey sheds light on the historical and current impacts of automation, the Industrial Revolution, and the role of political power in technological progress.
Together, they explore who wins and loses in the AI era and what history can teach us about the future.
*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*
Episode Quotes:
Will AI drive long-term productivity or just short-term automation?
46:21: If all that AI is about is automation, then the future of productivity simply depends on the potential scope of automation, so to speak, and that will then eventually peter off. Whereas if it's about creating new tasks, new products, and new innovations, then it can be more sustained, right? And I think that's a key reason that the second industrial revolution lasted for a very long period of time: it created a host of entirely new types of economic activities. And so I think a key question going forward is: can we design our institutions to help make sure that AI is more being used to create new activities? I think it's likely to have a much more sustained impact on productivity growth going forward.
Starting from the past to predict the future
03:07: If you want to say that the future is likely to be very different from the past, then at the very least, I think we should be able to state why. So I think history should always be our starting point.
On the race between technology and education
39:18: The race between technology and education is a world in which everybody is better off, right? That has not been the case. So we need to somehow modify that model of the world, and what we've seen since the 1980s, in particular across advanced economies, but also in some emerging economies, is labor market polarization and the decline of middle-income jobs, right? And so the race between technology and education and the view of technological change does not explain that part of the story, right? That's sort of the task-based view, and things like replacing versus enabling technologies do have some explanatory power.
Should we be thinking of this new revolution as being more like the first than the second?
44:22: I think it is more like the first industrial revolution. And I still think that I can't think of a single AI application that is not about automation or doing something that people are already doing a bit more productively, whether it's writing, coding, or image generation.