Carl Benedikt Frey

[1] After studying economics, history and management at Lund University, Frey completed his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in 2011.

[5] And 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.

For example, Yuval Noah Harari, Kai-Fu Lee, Richard David Precht and Martin Ford have argued that societies need to prepare for a jobless future, citing Frey and Osborne.

[15] In a recent retrospective on the ensuing debate, The Economist referred to him as "an accidental doom-monger" and pointed out that Frey is in fact much more optimistic than he had been made out to be.

[16] In 2023, he published a co-authored essay in The Economist arguing that the latest wave of Generative AI benefits lower-skilled workers.

They also argue that while AI systems are adept at remixing and reassembling existing works, their capacity for creativity has limits.

Frey goes on to argue that the reason why the Industrial Revolution first happened in Britain was that governments there were the first to side with inventors and industrialists, and vigorously repressed any worker resistance to mechanisation.

In continental Europe (and in China), in contrast, worker resistance was successful, which Frey suggests helps explain why economic growth there was slow to take off.

An opinion poll by the Pew Research Centre survey in 2017 found that 85 per cent of US respondents favoured policies to restrict the rise of the robots.

Many works of this nature, which attempt to cover centuries, indeed millennia of economic history, as well as look into the future, end up being superficial and often error-ridden.