Narrator: In 1907, the lamplighters of New York City went on strike, plunging the gaslit streets of Manhattan into darkness. For generations, they had been a neighborhood institution, the men who brought light and safety to the city each evening. But their profession was dying. The relentless march of electric streetlights, which could be illuminated from a central substation, was rendering their skills obsolete. The strike was a desperate, final stand against a technology that was making them redundant. This conflict, between the promise of progress and the people it threatens to leave behind, is not a relic of the past. It is the central tension of our time.

In his book, The Technology Trap, economist Carl Benedikt Frey argues that this tension has defined human history for centuries. He reveals that our modern anxieties about automation and artificial intelligence are echoes of a long and often violent struggle over the relationship between capital, labor, and power. The book provides a sweeping historical analysis to understand why technological progress can sometimes lead to widespread prosperity and, at other times, to disruption, inequality, and social unrest.

Narrator: For most of human history, economic growth was virtually nonexistent. This period, which Frey calls the "Great Stagnation," was not due to a lack of invention. Pre-industrial societies were technologically creative, developing innovations like the windmill, the printing press, and the mechanical clock. The real reason progress failed to translate into prosperity was active resistance to technologies that threatened jobs and the established social order.

This resistance often came from the top. In 1589, an English clergyman named William Lee invented a revolutionary stocking-frame knitting machine that could produce textiles far faster than a human hand-knitter. He sought a patent from Queen Elizabeth I, hoping for fame and fortune. The Queen, however, was not impressed. Fearing that the machine would throw her subjects out of work and lead to social unrest, she refused the patent, telling Lee, "Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment." This fear of disruption, shared by rulers and craft guilds across Europe, created a powerful bottleneck. Guilds, which controlled trades, regularly banned labor-saving machines to protect the livelihoods of their members. As a result, technologies that could have sparked an industrial revolution centuries earlier were actively suppressed, trapping societies in a low-growth equilibrium.

Narrator: The Industrial Revolution finally ignited in eighteenth-century Britain because of a fundamental shift in political power. Unlike in continental Europe, where monarchs and guilds could easily block threatening innovations, power in Britain had shifted toward a new class of merchants and manufacturers who stood to profit from mechanization. The government, now more influenced by these commercial interests, began to consistently side with innovators, not with the workers who resisted them.

This new reality was brutally demonstrated during the Luddite rebellions of the early 1800s. Skilled textile workers, seeing their wages plummet and their jobs disappear due to new mechanized looms, organized to fight back. They weren't mindlessly anti-technology; they were rationally responding to the destruction of their livelihoods. In coordinated nighttime raids, they smashed the machines they saw as their enemy. But the state’s response was swift and merciless. The British government deployed an army larger than the one fighting Napoleon in Europe to crush the rebellion, making machine-breaking a capital offense. The Luddites were defeated, and the message was clear: the path was now clear for mechanization, regardless of the short-term social costs. This period, what Frey calls the "Great Divergence," saw rocketing profits and productivity, but for the average worker, it was an era of stagnant wages, horrific working conditions, and social misery known as "Engels' Pause."

Narrator: While the First Industrial Revolution was largely about replacing skilled artisans with machines operated by unskilled labor, the Second Industrial Revolution in twentieth-century America was different. This period saw the rise of "enabling technologies" that augmented human labor rather than simply replacing it. The new factories, powered by electricity and organized around the assembly line, created a massive demand for a new class of semiskilled workers who could operate and maintain the complex machinery.

Henry Ford’s automobile plants are a prime example. While the assembly line automated many tasks, it also created millions of new, stable, and well-paying jobs. Ford famously introduced the five-dollar-a-day wage, not out of pure generosity, but because he needed to retain workers with the skills to operate his revolutionary production system. This era, which Frey terms the "Great Leveling," saw technology and labor working in tandem. As productivity soared, so did wages. A high school education became a ticket to a stable, middle-class life. Supported by the growing power of labor unions and the expansion of the social safety net, the benefits of technological progress were shared more broadly than ever before, leading to an unprecedented era of mass prosperity.

Narrator: Beginning in the 1980s, the tide turned again. The computer revolution ushered in a new wave of automation that began to reverse the gains of the previous century. Unlike the enabling technologies of the factory age, digital technologies excelled at automating routine tasks—the very foundation of the stable, middle-income jobs in factories and offices that had sustained the middle class. This marked the beginning of the "Great Reversal."

The effects are starkly visible in the decline of American manufacturing towns. Consider Port Clinton, Ohio, which in the 1950s was a thriving blue-collar community where a factory job provided a solid middle-class existence. As automation and globalization began to eliminate those jobs, the town’s economic foundation crumbled. Today, its downtown is filled with empty storefronts, and the children of the once-prosperous factory workers face a future of low-wage service jobs with little opportunity for upward mobility. This story has been repeated across the industrial heartland. The labor market has polarized, with growth in high-skill, high-wage "symbolic analyst" jobs and low-skill, low-wage service jobs, while the middle has been hollowed out. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, a generation of workers faces the prospect of being poorer than their parents.

Narrator: As artificial intelligence and robotics advance, they threaten to automate a vast new range of tasks, from driving trucks to managing logistics and even performing some medical diagnostics. The 3.5 million truck drivers in the United States, for example, face a future where their jobs could be rendered obsolete by autonomous vehicles. The central question of the book is whether we will fall into a new "technology trap," where the social and political backlash against automation stalls progress for everyone.

Frey argues that the outcome is not predetermined; it depends entirely on the policy choices we make. To avoid the trap, we must manage the short-term consequences of displacement. This requires a multi-faceted approach. First, investment in education, especially early childhood programs, is critical to prepare future generations for a world that demands creativity, critical thinking, and social intelligence—skills that machines still lack. Second, for those displaced, we need stronger safety nets, such as wage insurance that tops up the income of a worker who has to take a lower-paying job. Finally, policies that increase worker mobility, like relocation vouchers and the reduction of restrictive occupational licensing, can help people move to where the new jobs are. Without a concerted effort to help people adjust, the widespread anxiety about automation could easily curdle into political resistance, threatening the very progress that promises long-term prosperity.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from The Technology Trap is that the consequences of technological change are not inevitable. History shows that technology’s impact on society is a choice. The Luddites were not wrong about the short-term pain of mechanization; they were simply powerless to stop it. The twentieth century showed that when technology creates new opportunities and the gains are shared, progress is embraced.

Today, as we face a new machine age driven by AI, we are at a similar crossroads. The challenge is not to stop automation, but to steer it. We must learn the primary lesson of the past: for technological progress to be sustainable, its benefits must be widely shared. The question we face is not whether we can create intelligent machines, but whether we can be intelligent enough to build a society where both humans and technology can flourish together.