How progress ends: technology, innovation, and the fate of nations
Hosted by the Department of Geography and Environment
In-person and online public event (LSE campus, venue tbc to ticketholders)
Tuesday 21 Oct 2025 6.30pm - 8pm
How will progress end? In this event, Carl Benedikt Frey – one of the leading scholars of technology and the economy – will discuss his new book, How Progress Ends.
To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers a remarkable and fascinating journey across the globe, spanning the past 1,000 years, to explain why some societies flourish and others fail in the wake of rapid technological change.
Meet our speakers and chair
Carl Benedikt Frey (@carlbfrey) is the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School, both at the University of Oxford. He is also a fellow at Mansfield College, the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford, and Lund University’s Department of Economic History. His books include The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation.
Michael Storper is Professor of Economic Geography at LSE and also holds affiliations at Sciences Po (Paris) and UCLA’s Department of Urban Planning. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, winner of the Sir Peter Hall Prize, and won the Royal Geographical Society’s Founders Medal in 2016.
Neil Lee (@ndrlee) is Professor of Economic Geography at LSE. He is affiliated with the International Inequalities Institute, Centre for Economic Performance, and Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion. He is a fellow of CIFAR’s Innovation, Equity and the Future of Prosperity Programme and an Associate Member of Nuffield College, Oxford.
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