Short answers, pulled from the story.
Carl Benedikt Frey is a Swedish-German economist and economic historian who holds the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professorship of Artificial Intelligence and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute. He is also a Fellow of Mansfield College, University of Oxford.
The 2013 study, titled "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization," found that 47 percent of jobs in the United States faced a high risk of automation. According to Google Scholar it has been cited more than 20,000 times, and its methodology has been used by Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, the Bank of England, and the World Bank.
Carl Benedikt Frey wrote The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation, published in 2019, and How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations, published in 2025. Both were published by Princeton University Press.
Carl Benedikt Frey was born in Stockholm, Sweden, attended Katedralskolan, and studied economics, history, and management at Lund University. He then completed his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich before joining the Oxford Martin School, where he founded the programme on the Future of Work.
Carl Benedikt Frey and his co-authors found that incumbent taxi drivers saw their earnings fall by roughly 10 percent after Uber entered their city, though they did not lose their jobs outright. A companion study of Uber's own drivers in London found they reported higher life satisfaction than comparable workers despite low wages, alongside substantially higher anxiety.
How Progress Ends was a finalist for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award and the Lionel Gelber Prize, and it won the 2026 PROSE Award in Social Sciences: Economics. It was also selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2025 by Martin Wolf.