AI Book Review: How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations скачать в хорошем качестве

AI Book Review: How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations

Article link: https://open.substack.com/pub/johanos... How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations argues that technological and economic progress is neither automatic nor guaranteed. Carl Benedikt Frey takes readers through a thousand years of history to show how periods of flourishing innovation have often been followed by stagnation or decline when institutions failed to adapt or when powerful incumbents blocked disruptive change. He is particularly concerned that today’s leading economies, notably the United States and China, may be drifting towards forms of bureaucratic and corporate sclerosis that could blunt the transformative potential of AI and green technologies. In this review, I highlight both the strengths and the tensions in Frey’s argument. His long historical sweep is a valuable antidote to today’s AI hype, reminding us that technology interacts with politics, power and social norms. At the same time, I note that questions of inequality, corporate capture and ecological limits deserve more attention than the book sometimes gives them. For policymakers, business leaders and citizens in South Africa and across Africa, the core lesson is nonetheless compelling: progress will not arrive automatically on the back of AI; it will depend on the institutions and choices we build around it.