How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations

"Yes, he is a Swedish academic who’s written a lot not only about the history but also the future of technology, in particular AI. What Frey does in the book is challenge the idea that progress is inevitable. He looks back to civilizations over the last millennium and examines why they have stalled when it comes to progress. For example, he writes about China losing its way after the Song Dynasty. Having been a great, inventive nation, it becomes bogged down in bureaucracy. On a giant macroeconomic and historical scale, it’s about finding the balance between the necessary structure and bureaucracy that you need in order to build and the decentralized, innovative spirit that you need to keep going. As he points out, when that gets out of kilter, you get stuck. This has huge lessons that he draws for both the US and China. Again, this is something that’s taken up by one of the other books, Breakneck , we’ll talk about shortly. There’s a failure to adapt to technology, which inevitably dooms a civilization if it can’t find a way through it. So it’s a heavyweight book that gives you a grand historical perspective on the key question of how to guarantee growth and continued technological advance. It’s inevitably pretty sweeping. Ancient China did it wrong, so we can do it differently’ is probably not the conclusion that you draw. But I’m a great believer in the dangers of repeating the mistakes of the past (to misquote George Santayana). As a cautionary tale, the book is pretty good in saying, ‘This needs to be thought through.’"