Examining the impact of innovation on the economy is no simple task. After all, technology eliminates people’s jobs in the short term, but it also creates new, better jobs in the long term. Technology also boosts economic productivity, but many fear that such gains will not be fairly distributed in a coming age, as many pessimists envision a future economy composed of venture capitalists and their butlers.

Will the rise of robots and artificial intelligence deliver
a prosperous economy? And what policies should we adopt to ensure that all
Americans are included in this prosperity? On this episode, Carl Benedikt Frey
discusses the impacts of technological progress on the economy, past and
present.

Dr. Frey is the Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at Oxford University, where he teaches economics and economic history. In 2013, he co-authored a widely-shared paper with Michael Osborne titled “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?” in which he estimated that 47 percent of jobs were susceptible to automation. This year, he returned to the subject with his new book, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor and Power in the Age of Automation.