How Progress Ends (The Saturday Paper)

Unassuming as he is, in person and in prose, Carl Benedikt Frey will forever be associated with the great efflorescence of ‘crisis writing’ that emerged in the mid-2010s, in the long wake of the GFC. Though no proselytiser for radical change in the mould of Wolfgang Streeck or David Harvey, his 2013 paper ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?’, authored with his Oxford colleague Michael Osborne, became part of the mood music of ‘the long interregnum’ – the sense that capitalism was either breaking down completely or approaching an inflection point whose navigation would mean untold disruption. Its suggestion that 47% of jobs were at risk of automation over the next two decades popped up in all manner of interventions, from calls for a universal basic income to the ‘fully automated luxury communism’ of a new generation of radicals. Try as he might to qualify his findings, or the picture of them painted by both optimists and pessimists, Frey became the prophet of the ‘jobocalypse’. [More here]