Carl Benedikt Frey is an economist at the University of Oxford, where he holds the Oxford Martin Citi Fellowship and directs the Future of Work programme at the Oxford Martin School. He is best known to a general audience for co-authoring, with Michael A. Osborne, the 2013 study “The Future of Employment,” whose estimate that about 47 percent of US jobs were at high risk of computerisation became one of the defining statistics of the automation debate.
Frey’s broader work places the current wave of automation in long historical perspective. His 2019 book “The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation” compares the British Industrial Revolution with the computer revolution and argues that technological change can raise overall prosperity while producing concentrated gains and painful worker displacement, sometimes provoking political backlash. The book won Princeton University’s Richard A. Lester Prize for the outstanding book in industrial relations and labor economics and was named a Financial Times Best Book of 2019.
A recurring theme in Frey’s research is that the social and political consequences of automation depend heavily on whether technology replaces workers or enables them, and on how the resulting gains are shared. That makes him a central figure for understanding not just whether AI can do a job, but what happens to the people and communities when it does.