“Bill Gates said in 2012 that this is the paradox of our time, noting that ‘innovation is emerging at an unprecedented pace … yet Americans are becoming increasingly pessimistic about the future.’ (from the introduction to this book) “Half of the Jobs Will Disappear”—Carl B. Frey, who sparked a worldwide debate in 2013 with his Oxford colleague Michael Osborn in their joint paper “The Future of Employment: How Much Work Will Be Affected by Computerization? A History of Technological Civilization. The history of mankind from the perspective of technology, according to Frey, is as follows. After a long period of “Great Stagnation,” which began in the Neolithic Age, the Industrial Revolution began in England with the invention of the steam engine, a turning point that ushered in other regions of the world, including Asia. This was the era of the “Great Divide. It was a period of hardship for workers as the labor participation rate declined, and the Luddite movement to destroy machines began. Then came the Second Industrial Revolution, centered in the United States with the invention of electricity, and the era of “Great Equality” with shrinking disparities that dramatically improved the lives of workers. This was the era of the honeymoon between technology and human beings. However, with the introduction of computers into factories and offices, we entered an era of “great reversal,” in which disparities widened. What will be the fate of the human race in the future, when AI automation is expected to replace human labor? The author, Frey, has consulted a vast amount of historical research on technology and humans, and warns that the “Luddite Movement” may be back.
Table of Contents introduction ■Part 1: Great Stagnation
- Chapter 1: History of Pre-Industrial Technology
- Chapter 2: Pre-Industrial Prosperity
- Chapter 3: Why did mechanization not proceed? ■ Part 2: The Great Divide
- Chapter 4: Emergence of the Factory
- Chapter 5: The Industrial Revolution and Discontents ■Part 3: Ohira, etc.
- Chapter 6: From Mass Production to the Middle Class of the Masses
- Chapter 7: Rekindling the Mechanization Problem
- Chapter 8: The Triumph of the Middle Class ■Part 4: The Great Inversion
- Chapter 9: The Decline of the Middle Class
- Chapter 10: Widening Disparities
- Chapter 11: Political Polarization ■Part 5: The Future
- Chapter 12 Artificial Intelligence
- Chapter 13: The Road to a Rich Life
A few days after writing this, I realized - Worldcoin and Curve - Might not be right.
This page is auto-translated from /nishio/テクノロジーの世界経済史 using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.