The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation

"Carl’s work is about what the impact of this new wave of technology and automation is going to be on everybody’s jobs and standards of living. He does that by taking a historical perspective and looking at the Industrial Revolution. The fact is that for quite a long period there wasn’t any increase in average standards of living and indeed, as we know from literature, there was a period of great misery for lots of people as they moved from the countryside to work in the mills and so on. The question he’s asking is, ‘Is it going to be the same this time? Is history going to repeat itself?’ and ‘Are there things we can try and think about in terms of policy that will stop history repeating itself?’ It has to be said that this is all quite uncertain, because although people fear what automation is going to do—that wave of robots coming and taking jobs—it hasn’t happened yet. That’s probably not the strongest part of the book, but that’s because there’s no simple solution, no silver bullet that can take on that challenge. We know from the waves of automation of the 1980s and 1990s that what we did then wasn’t particularly effective. A lot of the problems of the Rust Belt in the US and in the north of England, for example, are a result of the fact that we didn’t handle those job losses particularly well. Unemployment and poverty were embedded in those kinds of places and now we’re seeing the political backlash. “We’ve got to the point where there’s very widespread questioning of the ways we’ve been doing things and how things have turned out” The book underlines the urgency of dealing with this, but also shows that it’s really quite difficult to think about. How do you rearrange the whole of a society to stop the disruption that comes with technological innovation? I wouldn’t go that far back, because the institutions and the government frameworks are too different, but you would hope that we can improve over time, that we can learn in some ways. We saw that that’s possible, actually, during the financial crisis. Central banks clearly had learned the lessons of the Great Depression . Today, I think we can learn the lessons, not perhaps from the Industrial Revolution, but from the 1980s and 1990s. We need to think about things that have been allowed to atrophy, like job guarantees and a proper welfare state. I don’t think it will get that bad. We start as a much richer society and with much more effective social and government institutions, so I certainly don’t think it will be directly comparable. Also, when you’re comparing any particular outcomes, you have to remember the counterfactual. Life as a poor person in the English countryside in 1800 was no picnic either. I think it is, because that’s the politics of backlash that we see now. To the extent you think technology helps to explain inequality in the modern world—and I think it does—then, of course, it can be stopped. The moves towards protectionism you can see are part of that, because one of the things technology has done is create global supply chains and all the logistics that go along with that, including trade barriers coming down. If they go back up, that will reorganize production again."