11 - What Is the Societal Impact of Innovation?

Summary

Having looked at how firms develop innovations and bring them to market, and the role of entrepreneurs and states in shaping those processes, we turn now to the question of what innovations do to society. Innovations, after all, do not just concern the firms that create them. We begin at the most macro of macroscopic levels with Perez’s paper on technology bubbles, asking how societies are transformed through successive waves of technological revolution and what happens as those waves flood over society. Staying at the macroscopic perspective with Zuboff’s paper on Big Other, we look at how technological change transforms capitalist dynamics and ushers in both new logics of accumulation and new forms of exploitation. Then, we move to the question that the popular press tends to phrase as “Will robots take our jobs?” as we look at the history and future of workplace automation with Autor’s paper and Bessen’s analysis of the conditions that lead to widespread, as opposed to highly concentrated, societal gains from technology.