Satyajit Das examines economic historian Carl Benedikt Frey’s new book How Progress Ends as well as his 2019 The Technology Trap. He argues that economic and technological progress is not inevitable and stagnation, instead, may be the norm. In a concession to topicality and the need of appropriate keywords for search engines, Why Progress Stops has some coverage in the latter half of the book on AI. There is a lengthy list of the sovereigns who retarded technological progress to maintain the stability of society and their regimes. Frey’s narrative is US-centric, although Why Progress Stops is less so than his earlier book.