Hey, Siri what is the fourth industrial revolution? The fusion of technologies – artificial intelligence, gene editing, advanced robotics that characterises this latest revolution is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds. It will disrupt nearly every industry in every country, creating new opportunities and challenges for people, places and businesses. The last year is testament to a tech transition that is happening at a pace and a quality never before experienced, changing our lives and shifting our notions of the workplace.
Two and a half centuries ago the ‘first’ Industrial Revolution was a defining moment, but who then understood its consequences? Carl Benedikt Frey’s much celebrated book The Technology Trap demonstrates that the lessons of the past can help us more effectively to face the present as we live through another tech revolution. Siri may be able to describe what it is, but Frey will help us to frame – and make sense of - this time we are living in, as we live it.
Carl Benedikt Frey
Is a Swedish-German economist, economic historian, speaker and author. He is Oxford Martin Citi Fellow and founder and director of the programme on the Future of Work at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford where he is based. Frey has served as an advisor and consultant to international organisations, think tanks, government and business, including the G20, the OECD, the European Commission, the United Nations, and several major companies. In 2020 he became a member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) – a multistakeholder initiative to guide the responsible development and use of AI, hosted by the OECD.
He is an op-ed Contributor to the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, and the Wall Street Journal, where he has written on the economics of artificial intelligence, the history of technology, and the future of work. His most recent book 'The Technology Trap, Capital, Labor and Power in the Age of Automation’ was a Financial Times Best Books of the Year in 2019.