Start talking about technology. The first thing is im well aware that many of you have no idea who i am and so thank you for showing up out of the spirit appear to gossip. I think it speaks very well of you that i know theres some really, really big names at the festival and i feel very honored to be among them so thanks for coming. So who am i . A few things. I write a column called the undercover economist for the financial times. Thats the pink newspaper thats really good. I recommend it. Thank you, sir. The second thing is i present bbc radio. I present a show for the Bbc World Service called 50 things that made the modern economy. All about numbers and i would think about numbers and how numbers sometimes lead us astray and sometimes help us understand the world. I also have a podcast with a gentleman called Michael Lewis and them gentleman called Malcolm Gladwell called Cautionary Tales which is all about things going wrong come sometimes in tragic ways and sometimes in amusing ways and what we can learn from them. In between all that i try to write a few books and im going to talk about what i learned writing what of them. Thats one thing. The second thing i wanted to say is thank you to the Rancho Mirage writers festival, to jamie and the rest of the festival guys. A round of applause for jamie, please, thank you. [applause] so jamie, jane emailed me a few months ago and suggested that i fly across the world from Oxford England to come to Rancho Mirage. Its near palm springs. It sat like palm beach are as different . This huge journey for me and i realize thats only to fly in some like me from a very long way away with the support of really devoted readers and angels and all the people who supported this festival, so thank you very much for all of you. I feel very fortunate to be here. [applause] i said it wasnt a fan of long preambles so clearly im a total hypocrite. Let me talk about this book of mine, fifty inventions that shaped the modern economy. I dont know whether you can see the slide or not. I can see a slide. Okay here feel free by the way to put the camera back on me. Its just a patch shot. You dont need to look at that. Im going to talk about the book as such. Im going to talk about what i learned when i was working on it. This was a project originally for the bbc were i picked the two different inventions that i found interesting. Not the most important inventions, that the most obvious inventions but inventions that i felt have something to teach us, stories behind these inventions. People ask me how did you choose . I chose them because i thought there were interesting, thats the only criteria. What did i learn while i was doing this . It feels like an important question because at this moment we are asking Big Questions about what technology does and how it shapes our society. We are come up with a very wide range of answers. For all understandable focus on politics and political debate come very often it is technology that really shapes how we live, how our economy grows, how our society works. The answers to these questions matter. When you talk to economists, they are really into mac camps. One group says a bit of the progress of computer can look at the progress of Artificial Intelligence. Its really possible that after about two centuries of people falsely worry that the robots are going to take our jobs, its possible they might do it this time. People to thought really hard, we looked at the date and history had a very compelling case that this has happened. At the same time are equally expert people, equally compelling who will look at the data and say, the Unemployment Rate is at record lows. Productivity growth is extremely disappointed. We seem to be in the middle of a technological slowdown. If the robots are going to take the jobs will be please hurry up and do it . We need a few more robots around here. The puzzle between these of use, ive been studying this debate for years and i still dont know the answer. This is the question that really of them and its a lot trying to understand how Technology Works and how it shapes our lives. I think its not just a matter of curiosity although of course curiosity is the most important thing. The answers to these questions even if we dont know all the answers, the answers to the questions really matter. I said i would tell you what i i learned working on this book. I learned that we make two big mistakes when we are thinking about how Technology Works, the impact that technology has. I want to talk about the mistakes because the stakes are always fun. Let me just show you an image from one of my favorite movies. This is an image from blade runner, and some of you may have seen this film. When it came out in the early 1980s i was too young. Its a pretty graphic hardhitting punchy feel. It still stands up, still a good film but if you look at the image i showed you of what appears to be a beautiful woman smoking a cigarette, which by the way, hopefully you old enough to know better. Do not do this. It looks cool in the movies, very bad idea. This is not a beautiful woman smoking a cigarette. This is a machine, a robot. The robots name is rachel. Rachel is a replicant and replicant is a kind of organic robot that is indistinguishable from a human with a mind that is indistinguishable from a human. Rachel believes herself to be human, sporting a look. She thinks shes human but shes not. It takes a specialist played by harrison ford, our hero, takes a specialist with special equipment to tell the difference between this artificial creature, this piece of technology and a human being. And it is so sublime, so seductive is rachel that the man whose job it is to retire rogue replicants, when he meets rachel he falls in love with her. Or at least he has a certain urge torture. That entirely clear but hes got strong feelings and you see here this is deckard calling rachel up. What do you do when you want to date a robot . The answer is you do what you do when you want to did do anybod. You phone them up. This being the future, this being a future of Incredible Technology where we have Artificial Intelligence, when we have these synthetic humans indistinguishable from the real thing, the card phones her up on a paper deckard on the wall of a bar. Something wrong, ever have a look at the image again for a moment. Its like because its so was made in 1980s, and it is set in los angeles, you can see its got phoebe on it. Because its a videophone, not a purely beautiful but this is a phone attached to the wall of a bar and, of course, she says no, and hangs up. You can see the font of the future. This film is set in 2017. 2019, sorry. Theres this weird the virgins here, this unbelievably sophisticated technology, rachel, the organic robot. Absolute lack of progress in anything else. They do have flying cars but apart from that, everything is the same. This amazing lack of imagination about what else might change. I dont want to criticize blade runner, the makers of blade runner because its a great movie and the storytelling, you cant change everything because then the audience have no frame of reference and understand whats going on. I think its revealing that you can conceive of a society where yet human level Artificial Intelligence where you have perfect genetic engineering and yet if you want to make a phone call you put coins into a box on the wall of a bar. So whats going on . What is the basic mistake . Sure, the mistake is its hard to see into the future. Its complicated. But thats not just the fundamental mistake. I think the fundamental mistake is very common. Its an obsession with the most complex technology we can envision. If the technology would not have made our parents gasped and say this is magic, its a sorcery, how does it work . If technology doesnt do that we dont think its technology. Thats a big mistake. If we view all technology is incredibly sophisticated, incredibly complex, we are going to profoundly misconceived the way technological change works. An example, you want an example. Let me give you an example. This is of course the gutenberg bible. When i worked on the book i went around and talked to economists, two historians, technologists, people, scientists and he said what should i put in the book. Everybody said, the Gutenberg Printing press. Few months but the Gutenberg Printing press in the book. I didnt put the Gutenberg Printing press in the book. So why not . Lets have a look at the Printing Press again, the bible again. This is this remarkable object. You look at these dense black columns of text written in latin. The illustrations are hand drawn but are chiseled organic illustrations by monks. But the latin text, this is made by machine. This is a remarkable technology. When i look at it what do i see . I see paper. No one ever gets excited about the paper. But the thing is you cant have this without paper. Strictly speaking you can. You can have parchment. Parchment is made of sheepskin or cow skin. You can make parchment and print onto parchment and effect gutenberg did print some of his bibles onto parchment. Shortly before he went bankrupt and lost control of the Printing Press. Because the economics dont work on parchment. I did the math because im a geek, a proud geek. I did the math. If you want to do a print on a bible, not a huge print run baby 2000 bibles, you need a a quarter of a million sheep to make your 2000 bibles. It doesnt work, it doesnt work. Work. So you can say lets just print 50. If youre just going to print 50, what is the point of having a Printing Press . Its easier to just hand write the things. So the economics of printing demands paper. Now, the history of paper i find fascinating because my absolute favorite invention in the book, it was invented in china. A lot of things unfinished in china, about 2000 years ago. It was initially used wrapping things up but the novellas its kind of cool because its cheaper than silk and lighter than wood and you can write on it. It arrived in the islamic world around 1300 years ago. The Islamic Culture had a really thriving literal culture with no printing. It was all handwritten. Mass literacy. The Technology Sat on the fringes of europe and it was partly a weather thing. How to make paper that doesnt go moldy in european weather . That was a solvable problem. Real problem is europeans just were not very interested. Most of us couldnt read or write. The main demand for righting wrg service is to make bibles out of it. I wont go into too much detail of the manufacturing process of paper. It does involve urine and some stinky rags into its quite a dirty process. If youre proposing youre going to make a bible at the stinky stinky cheap paper, thats almost offensive. Thats like saying i thought of the cheaper way to make a crown for the king. We could make it out of lead computer instead of making get t out of gold. That would be cheaper but whats the point of cutting corners to making a crown for the king . The same thing with the bible. Its a hot object. There are very few of them. Every single one is handwritten. Who wants a cheap bible . Pointless. Paper only came into your because there was a commercial culture arriving around it. Italian merchants started to use for contracts and for letters and for accounts. You get the first water driven paper mills in italy. It was beautiful, beautiful paper with fast rushing mountain streams come down and driving these hammers that a pulping these cotton rags, and the urine and theyre making ever stunning beautiful for second, and theyre making paper. Paper solely spreads to europe as an everyday commercial thing. It arrives in what is now germany in the late 1300s, and within half a century you have gutenberg invents the Printing Press. Actually no point in massproducing writing until you can massproduce a writing surface. This is a first principle you might save understanding technological change. Its the paper principle. So once something has become cheap enough, once something has become cheap enough to make toilet paper out of, then its cheap enough to change the world. Paper is everywhere. Its not just in the books. We print on it. We decorate our walls with it. Receipts, howling, you go to the restrooms here, wash her hands, daughter hands on paper, throw it away. To be completely ubiquitous and it is ubiquitous because it is cheap. Not because it is complicated. It is 2000 years old. It is ubiquitous because it is cheap and is still important. My argument is that one of the things you miss about technological change is when is the cheap stuff. Cheap simple stuff changes the world. Sure, im excited about computers. Im a nerd. Computers are interesting but give me the cheap stuff that i will show you the stuff that is really going to make a contribution while being widely overlooked. Let me give a couple of other examples. Here is the first time you see this picture you are thinking those are and not very nice gentleman. This is not a picture of what you think it is. This is not the klan. These guys are tagging barbed wire. They mask their faces because they do not wish to be seen cutting barbed wire. Barbed wire, thats an intriguing invention. So where did that come from . In the 1860s, i dont want to, and lecture you on american history. I do apologize in advance for but Abraham Lincoln signed into force the homesteading act. Hes trying to shift the center of gravity away from the south and towards the midwest and the west. He moves this at a population can boost the sin of the american economy, shifted away. You just show up in the midwest, but some fence around some land, yeah, theres some people who were there first, dont worry about them. Put some fence around the land and farm our land for five years, and then its yours, the homesteading act. Theres a problem. Theres not enough wood. You need the wood for firewood. You need the wood for building. You cant building fences out of wood. Its far too expensive to you could just put up ordinary wire but the longhorn cattle are just going to barge right to that, to store your crops. So youve got this an interesting lesson. We talk a lot about Property Rights and importance of Property Rights in economics and Property Rights are super important. But theres probably rights you have legally and discovery rights that you practically. Because you actually have the ability to enforce those Property Rights. So longhorn cattle are not paying attention to president lincoln, okay . Theyre going to come and destroy your crops. This is an example of invention of barbed wire, and invention everybody knew was necessary but it just did not to do. Some inventions like laser famously people create and say i wonder what we can do with this . But barbed wire we knew we needed barbed wire. And twothirds of all Patent Applications for fencing were coming out of the midwest of america globally for fencing were come out of the midwest for a few years as an agenda been called glidden from the cow illinois which is also where Cindy Crawford is from dekalb he couldnt get the patent for what is modern hardware. You still recognize it today. You have a string of wire, yet the sharp bits wrapped around it and have another string of wire and you twist one end, twist randy choate and that stops the barbs for moving backwards in force and its that simple. Tenures after he after he got that patent, the u. S. Made 240,000 miles of barbed wire, enough to go around the earth ten times. Because this was solving a problem for people to its just fencing. Its just fencing. We had fencing before it. We had the great wall of china. We knew how to build a wall, a very, very long time ago but this is a way to do it cheaply and get its the cheapness of it that changed the world. Heres another example. This threat is from the financial times, best newspaper in the world. This is the price of solar power. This graph is now four years old. So now you live in the desert. We still struggle to imagine the solar power can work but it comes from nowhere. Solar power has come from nowhere. Its come from nowhere really with aspect extent now that nevada casinos are willing to pay billions of dollars purely to not have to purchase power on the agreement they signed with local utilities. Its not just that solar power is cheap. Its that i will pay millions of dollars not to have to buy the fossil fuel power because i can just plug into the electric grid. Whats driven this . You might think there must be some supercool technological breakthrough. No, its just learning by doing. This graph that i i should your precious learning by doing. Bigger factories, more practice, more specialized tools and more attention to how to repack the stuff effectively get more attention to how to reinstall it, snap together panels. It used to take a crew of four people a couple of days to install folder on your roof. Now its two or three people and it takes a couple of hours. This is the technology that gave us ikea furniture, applied to solar panels. Actually its a very old idea learning by doing was originally identified in the aerospace industry. A gentleman in the 1930s. The second plane is 20 20 chr than the first plane. The next two planes are 20 cheaper than the second plane. The next four planes are 20 cheaper than the third and the fourth plane. Every time you double output, the price falls by about 20 . Some oxford academics down the road from you have studied the learning by doing effects and if at absently ubiquitous, any project you care to him, the percentage varies but everything from batteries to beer exhibitors learning by doing. The thing about solar power is when i i looked at this in 201, 99 of all the solar power cells ever made have been made between 20102016. Yeah, there was no Solar Industry before 2010 effectively. This sudden ramping up and it is continued and continue. Were just learning to do it cheaply because practice makes perfect. The same thing by the weight is true of batteries. This is a completely Transformative Technology and again theres nothing especially complicated. Its a very predictable thing, just bill barr, they get cheaper, people want more, gets cheaper again, people want more, gets cheaper can. My favorite example is one of the real economic nerds. My favorite example is the shipping container. The shipping container has done more to lower trade costs, moe to fuel globalization, then the wto, the agreement of terrorist and trade, any trade agreement, im an economist, we like trade agreement we like dealing with foreigners and getting to sell stuff up by step. We favor of that. But i think we exaggerate the importance of the trade deal. Often this is driven by changes in technology. The cell phone, the internet, the barcode you dont get me started on the barcode. Common fun afterwards and up to you about the barcode, amazing. And the shipping container. The shipping container when you think about it, this technology was really introduced in the late 1950s by entrepreneur called malcolm maclean. This is taking 50s technology, not 1950s technology. Its a steel box. Its corrugated to make it stronger. How complicated is that . Were spending a lot of time taking stuff and putting it on a truck and the truck drive to the port and it would take it out of the truck and was noted on the ship and the ship goes to another port. We take it off the ship and put on a train. The train drives and we pick up the trip tree and put in the t. Why dont we just put all in a box and just move the box . Its radical. Its amazing. But, of course, he wasnt the first person to think of this. The idea of putting the stuff in the box and moving the box, this goes back to the early 20th century of what he realized is unique to get the whole system going. Indeed the trains to adapt. You need the trucks to adapt. You need the ships to adapt. You need the ports to adapt. You need the rules to adapt and need the logistic systems to adapter you need the unions to adapt. He managed to get all those things working, often by breaking the rules. We forget now that American Logistics were so regulated back then. It just wasnt legal to start up a trucking line insert a particular route. You had to prove that the was the need for the root and you wouldnt spoil a business to people who already serve the roots. You couldnt own a railroad and a trucking company. You couldnt own a railroad and the shipping line because maybe its anticompetitive. Thats an important consideration but for maclean, i had to change the shipping light and have to change the trucking company. He produced all these clever legal maneuvers to make this happen. He also bar a lot of money. He took a lot of risk. Eventually much later went bankrupt but he gave us this systematic change which is what was necessary to make the shipping container work. The shipping container, another example of the paper principal, it changes the world not because its complicated because its cheap. That leads me into the second thing i said at the beginning of my remarks. We make to mistakes when we think about technology. The first mistake is we are focusing on whatever supercop is good, whatever super new, whatever super sophisticated, which can be imported if we dont Pay Attention to the stuff that is simple and cheap which is just as important. The second mistake we make is we think about the invention but e dont think about the system. So the shipping container only works if its part of systemic change. Let me give you another example of that. I wanted to show you, this is going to be, this is not going to make a lot of sense to some of you. Tomorrows world, this is a classic Bbc Tv Program i used to watch when i was a child which is on for decades and it was a show about how technology what was coming down the track in terms of technology. I want to show you could we maybe get the slide on the screen for maybe a second . Im going to show you a short film about 90 seconds about whats the office of the future is going to be like from the perspective of 1967. What nice people. My office, the Perfect Office note in trays, note out, no phones, no filing cabinets. Quiet, cool, very efficient. I need never get out of this chair. That would be nice. No distractions. Just me and the work alone and efficient. Alone. I wonder if anybody wants me . Nobody will ask. I dont even have to go to it. Whats better than a human being, tireless and efficient . Anything i want, it brings. So this is what the office of the future looked like 53 years ago. I was going to say that they got every single thing wrong. Everything. But actually theres one thing they got right, which is the moment to sit down at your risk and you faced actual work the first thing you do is distract us up by pushing a button. They got that one right but apart from that they get everything wrong. Why fundamentally did they get it wrong . Because what you saw was an office of the future that had no social change. No organizational change. It was exactly like the office of 1967, except the desk is made of plastic and theres a sort of computer thing on the desk that moves. Theres this technology of the technology is nonsense but that doesnt matter. But the technology is placed into the context of the 1967 office with the typing pool of young, unmarried women too deferential to the boss who is in a suit and tie quizzical office. Theres no sense of any sort of social change at all in this vision of the future. We had just taken whatever fever dream of a Technology People lead in the 1960s and said were going to put that in our current office. Thats never, its never how technological change works. But very often its how we think about it. Because we see our lives the way we behave, the way we interact with people, political hesitations, our organizations, the office, we see that and we imagine that what technology does is it just drops in and replaces one little bit of what we do and nothing else changes. This is similar to the blade runner problem we had where you have artificial humans and yet people are still making calls on payphones. We always, almost always adapt to take advantage of the new technology. The adaptation process is not always pleasant. It always happens, usually necessary and we have proved to be very adaptable in contorting ourselves to make the Technology Work for us or being contorted because you work for organization, you have to do what the boss of the organization says. That nikki and example. This is a example and nordland but you beautiful sophisticate people he may not have spent time in nordland which i do so i will bring you news of this example. This is a photograph of factory in 1880. The thing thing to see about this is all the workers in the factory are drawing power from a driveshaft from the ceiling. I told you this is nerd land. Drawing power via these belts to come down. Everything they do is defined by the relationship with the driveshaft at the driveshaft is going right along the ceiling and a ghost out of the building and then theres another building next door which has got a coal powered steam engine. Thats driving the driveshaft and that is how a factor works. You couldve asked experts in technology and Manufacturing Design around about 1870 whats going to change in this picture . What is going to change American Manufacturing . They wouldve said, electricity. A Steam Powered tribal, a Steam Powered factory what is going to change is electricity. But what actually happened was that factory owners would remove the cauliflower pyre, though coalfired steam engine and the replace it with a big old electric motor. Edison is selling electricity down the wires. You can buy electricity from mr. Edison. Westinghouse is designing super efficient turbines and super efficient electric motors. You replace the old steam engine to put in the big electric motor and nothing else changes. Do you know what happened to productivity . Nothing. Yeah, people are like why are we bothering with this stuff . I thought electricity was supposed to be awesome. It was a little bit less coal dust if youre making fabrics but basically did make a huge difference. Then around about the end of the first world war, the change in the emigration machine became harder to recruit workers into factory owners started going we need to rethink how we do this. Were going to have to hire fewer staff, pay them more, train them more. They start to realize you could ask staff to make more responsibility. And actually you know what . These electric motors, the thing about electric motor is you can have 100 100 small electric mos instead of one big one. You cant have 100 small steam engine instead of a big one because its very inefficient. You could have 100 100 small electric motors that get power through the wires. That means that driveshaft we can get rid of that driveshaft. With have their own electric part of the desk. Get rid of the driveshaft. Hang on. That means you could build factor with skylights or you could have cranes in the roof to help people move stuff around or maybe both. Also we had organized a factor around proximity to the driveshaft. We can spread out. Used to have two or three story factories with all these machines churning all of the same time and issues driveshaft and of things being lubricated by the drip oilers, you get your sleeve sleep caught in an nasty. Everything is cramped in around the driveshaft. But with the electric motors you can spread out and you can organize the factory around the flow of product. This is a first process, the second process, the third process. Doesnt matter if it needs a little power or a lot of power. You can start having a production line because you have the product moving between people. None of this is possible with a centralized power source on the drive shafts. It turned out electricity did revolutionize American Manufacturing but it didnt do it in 1880. It did in the 1920s. In order to unlock the technology you need to change who you hired, how you paid them, how you trained them, where they sat, the building they sat in, the technology they were using, and the workflow process. After you done all that, technology is brilliant. So organizational change that unlocks the power of this technology. This is a very old example, this is 100 years old. What could it possibly teach us about today . Much more recently an economist whose very famous for writing books about Artificial Intelligence, about 20 years ago he and his colleague studied American Business in the 1990s. What they were interested in was the process of technological change. If an American Business got a lot of computers in, this is a graph, i apologize for the complexity of the scrap. Let me explain what this graph is. If you move this way, that is more computers. If you move back, thats a reorganization. You move up, its more money, okay . Now i have your attention. This is what they found. What is officially . If you get the computer and and you dont reorganize, you dont make any money. If you we organize and you get the computers in, you dont make any money. If you dont reorganize and you dont get the computers in, thats not the worst thing you could do. But the real money comes from reorganizing and getting the computers in. In order to make the Technology Work you have to reorganize. Im very mindful of the fact that with manufacturing, with electrification, it took 40 years. I dont know when we should be measuring from. She would be measuring from the invention of the computers in the 1940s or the World Wide Web in the early 1990s . And infinite by english men cald tim. Just saying. Or should it be the smart phone, 2007 or what is it we are looking at . The point is whatever technology you are looking at, it can take a long time to figure out how to use it. Arguably the impacts of the web, the impacts of the smart phone, the impact of the internet of things, rfid sensors, machine learning, were just beginning to get to grips with how these things might reshape our economy. What we do know is that when they do it will be because we changed. We adapt. Machines are not adaptable. We are. The ones who find ourselves bending to fit. They dont like it. They may like it but thats the way it always seems to work. At the beginning of my remarks, i talked about this big debate, what robots are going to take the jobs . Edison i dont know the answer and i havent figured out in the last 30 minutes. I can you. But i think that the lessons ive learned, the lessons i hope ive been able to share with you do sharpen the question a little bit. When we think about the machines taking the jobs, we tend to think about the set of super scary vision of the terminator or how 9000 come disconcerting image of the super Intelligence Computers a takeover life and to and destroy us with the very least forces us into lives of complete luxury and indulgence where they do all the work. I dont know, that seems to me to be making these two basic mistakes. Were focusing too much on incredibly sophisticated stuff and when i think about how we are going to change to adapt to them. So let me think about a really interesting technology. Its the robot accountant. Now, when i say robot accountant you are now thinking Arnold Schwarzenegger walks in, youre working in and an come from anu get there and theres arnold in a Leather Jacket with an uzi on the desk and you back slowly away. You come back to get your things later. Order thinking maybe c3po. Might make a good accountant. Thats the image of robot accountant but i can tell you thats not what a robot accountant looks like. Do you want to know what a robot accountant looks like . You go to your windows computer and your fire Microsoft Office and theres this green x for microsoft excel. Click on the button and up comes a spreadsheet. Thats a robot accountant. Its crazy, it was written, he programmed in excel. Microsoft excel, its not very sexy, is it . Its not very complicated. It lowers the task of arithmetic. It lowers the task of arithmetic, the particular accountant did, so i will translate, you call them quick. The clerks said there were 400,000 accounting clerks in the u. S. At the time and basically all of them were out of work in about five years. We now have more accountants than ever before because they did different jobs. Rows and columns, stuff point of that . But it still expanded but the job became much more interesting. A situation where it wasnt complicated, it wasnt sexy, it completely reshapes an industry, it didnt destroy any jobs. More jobs that accountants and we did before but changed the way we did those jobs. The change the kind of things like accountants did. They started doing scenarios and strategic advice work. It made it being interesting. The machine was during the most boring parts of accountancy. Let me give you an example of exactly the same dynamic, only with a slightly flipped and think. Say your photograph of jennifer, this is not jennifer. Jennifer is what she is wearing. Jennifer is the headset. This woman is working in a warehouse, for any Large Company around the world and a few years ago, your job in a warehouse, you have a list, people order to stop online, you have to find out where all the stuff is, put in the cart, then the unit was invented, knows where all the stuff is. It knows what you have to pick, how you have to pick it so if for example, you ordered 13 copies to shape and economy from a warehouse, which i would not advise, i would advise you to buy them here. Say 13 copies, it would instruct to go to the shelf and i would say, take 13 copies, take five copies. Take five more copies. Take three more copies, take another three. The unit doesnt trust the humans to count. Do you know what the humans can do . Eyes, supercool vision, really good at spotting things, subtle hands, they find that hard to pick stuff up, his glass, a book . The crush things and drop things, humans are much better. This is a case, just like a spreadsheet but spreadsheet took the most boring part of accountancy. This unit is taking away the most interesting part of the job thats not very interesting. Remembering for the stuff is in getting aware around the warehouse in an efficient way. Just need your hands and eyes. Thing about technology, i think about the spreadsheet, i think about the unit and paper and barbed wire and the shipping container and solar panels. I think about all the cheap stuff and the way that we adapt ourselves, sometimes in inspiring ways, sometimes we can toss ourselves in order to fit around that technology. Im not so worried about the robust taking on jobs, not so worried about the terminator, not so worried about rachel, the robot, im a little bit worried about jennifer. Thank you so much. Thank you. [applause] in out of our conversations. [inaudible conversations] we feature book tv programs, showcasing whats available every weekend on cspan2. The night books and reading, first pamela paul in the New York Times book review, she offers her thoughts on how to get children interested in reading books. Marianne wolf explores how our brains process reading print versus digital mediums. Bookseller and publishing