Dec 09 2021 42 mins 2
In this episode we talk to economic historian Aaron Benanav, researcher at Humboldt University Berlin, where he studies the history of unemployment and global labour markets. We will discuss his latest book, Automation and the Future of Work, which is a consensus-shattering account of automation technologies and the falling demand for labour. Benanav argues that Silicon Valley titans, techno-futurists, and politicians from all sides of the political spectrum are wrong when claiming that we are on the cusp of an era of runaway technological change, heralding the end of work as we know it. We will examine why they are wrong, how this dominant belief system came about, and what the real-world, problematic implications of this rhetoric are. And if not technology is destroying our jobs, what is?
