Thank you for coming. That is the pink newspaper thats really good. I present bc radio. Ive done a show for the World Service ive made fifty inventions that shaped the modern economy. And how numbers lead us astray and sometimes help us to understand the world. I also have a podcast with a gentleman called michael lewis. Called Cautionary Tales its all about things going wrong sometimes and tragic ways and sometimes in amusing ways. In between all of that i try to write a few bucks. The second thing i want to say is thank you to the Rancho Mirage festival to jamie and the rest of the festival. A round of applause for jamie please. Jamie emailed me probably 18 months ago and suggested i fly across the world from Oxford England to come to Rancho Mirage. Its a huge journey for me. Thank you very much to all of you. I feel fortunate to be here. [applause]. I said i wasnt a fan of long preambles. Clearly im a total hypocrite. Let me talk about this book of mine. I dont if you can see the slide. But i can see a slide. Feel free by the way to put the camera back on me. In order to talk about the book as such i will talk about what i learned when i was working on it. They take 50 different inventions that i found interesting. Not the most obvious inventions. But the inventions that i felt have something to teach us. There were stories behind these inventions. I chose them because i thought they were interesting. 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. And were coming up with a very wide range of answers for all of our understandable focus on politics and political debate very often its technology that really shapes how we live how our economy goes and how our society works. The answer to these questions matter and when you talk to economists they are really into camps. One group that says you know look at the progress of computers. Its really possible that after about two centuries of people falsely worrying that robots would take their jobs. And people who had thought really hard. They make a very compelling case that this could happen. At the same time there are equally expert people who will look at the data and say the Unemployment Rate is at record lows. Productivity growth is extremely disappointing. We seem to be in the middle of a technological slowdown. If they can to take the jobs will they please hurry up and do it. The puzzle between these two views. I had been studying this for years and i still dont know the answer. But this is a question that illuminates a lot of debate. Trying to understand how Technology Works and how it shapes our lives is not just a matter of curiosity. Curiosity is the most important thing. Even if we dont know what the answers are. The answers to the questions it really matter. I said i would tell you what i learned working on this book i learned that we make we make two big mistakes when were thinking about how Technology Works. The impact that technology has. Let me just show you an image from one of my favorite movies this is a image from blade runner some of you may have seen the film when it came out. It still stands up. Its out. Its still a good film. But if you look at the image that i showed you of what appears to be a beautiful woman smoking a cigarette which by the way hopefully you are old enough to know better. This is not a beautiful woman smoking a cigarette this is a machine its a robot rachel is a replicant in a kind of organic robot that is indistinguishable from a human with a mind that is interesting and rachel believes herself to be human. She think shes human thinks shes human but she is not. It takes a specialist played by Harrison Ford was special equipment to tell the difference between this artificial creature in a human being. So seductive is rachel. The man whose job it is to retire robe [leftsquarebracket clients he falls in love with her or at least he has certain urges towards her. Its not entirely clear but he has strong feelings. They are calling rachel out. When you do when you want to date a robot when you want to date a robot you phone them. On this be in the future of Incredible Technology where we have Artificial Intelligence and synthetic humans. They found her up on a pay phone on the wall of a bar. We have a look at the image again for a moment. Because the film was made in the 1980s and set in los angeles you can see and it has graffiti on it. This is a phone attached to the wall of a bar and of course she says no and hangs out you can see the phone to the future. There is a weird divergence here. Unbelievably Sophisticated Technology and the lack of progress and in anything else. Apart from that everythings the same. There is this amazing lack of what else might change. Just in terms of story tell you cant change everything because then they dont understand whats going on. I do think its revealing that you can conceive of a society where you have Artificial Intelligence and perfect flawless genetic engineering if you want to make a phone call you put coins into a box on a phone thats on the wall. We are trying to see into the future and its hard to see into the future. Its complicated 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 gasp and say this is magic this is sorcery how does it work. We dont think its technology. Thats a big mistake. If we view all technology is incredibly sophisticated. We are cannot miss conceive the way that technology and change it work. Let me give you an example. This is of course the gutenberg bible. When i worked on the book i went around and i talked to economist to historians the scientist and what should i put you in the book. Everybody said that Gutenberg Printing press in the book. I didnt put the Gutenberg Printing press in the book. Lets had a look at this again. This was the remarkable object. You look at the dense black columns. The illustrations are handdrawn. The latin text. This is made by machine. This is remarkable technology. When i look at it what do i see. I see paper no one ever gets excited about the paper. You cant have this without paper. Parchment is made of animal skin. You can make parchment. And you can print onto parchment. They did print some of the bibles onto parchment shortly before he went bankrupt. Because the economics dont work on parchment. Im a geek. I did the math. If you want to do a print run of a bible you need a quarter of a million sheep. You could say lets just print 50. If you just get a print 50 what is the point of having a printing press. Its just easier to hand write the things. The economics of printing demands paper. The history of paper i find fascinating. It was invented in china about 2000 years ago. It was used for wrapping step up. It arrived in the islamic world around 1300 years ago. And Islamic Culture have a thriving culture with no printing. It was all cant written. And then the Technology Sat on the fringes of europe. It was partly a weather thing. How do we make paper that doesnt go moldy. That was a solvable problem. The europeans just werent that interested. Most of us could not read or write in the maned main demand with that manufacturing protest. Its part of a dirty process. If you are proposing that you can make a bible out of a stinky cheap paper thats almost offensive. I thought of a cheaper way to make a crown for a king. That would be cheaper. But whats the point of cutting corners to make it a crown for the king. Its a holy object there are very few once. Who wants a cheap bible. Its pointless. And paper only came into europe because there was a commercial culture arriving around it the italian merchants. You get the first water driven paper mills you can still bite beautiful paper with a fast rushing mountain. In driving these hammers and the cotton rags and they are making paper. That slowly spreads to europe. It arrives and what is now germany in the late 13 hundreds and within half of a century may invent the princely printing press. This is the first principle of understanding technological change and is the paper principle. Once something has become cheap enough and wants to become cheap enough to make toilet paper out of the nets cheap enough to change the world. Papers everywhere and its not its not just in the book. We decorate our walls with it. Receipts, you go to the restroom here. It is a big u. S. Because it is cheap. Not because it is complicated its 2000 years old. It is still important. My argument as that one of the things that we miss is we miss the cheap stuff. Cheap, simple step changes the world. Im excited about computers im a nerd. But give me the cheap stuff and i will show you the stuff thats really get a make a contribution while being widely overlooked. The first time you see this picture you think those are not very nice gentleman. This is not the clan. They are touching barb wire. Barb wire while that is an intriguing invention. Whered that come from. In the 1860s and i want to come here and lecture you on american history. Abraham lincoln science into force the homesteading act history to shift the center of gravity away from the south south and towards the midwest and the west. Move the center of the american economy. Shifted away. He said you just show up in the midwest puts a fence around the land there are some people that are there first dont worry about them. Farm that the land for five years and then its yours the homesteading act. Theres a little problem. Its not enough wood. You need the wood for fire wood for building. You cant be building fences out of what its far too expensive. You could just put up ordinary wire. But the longhorn kennel cannot well just destroy your crops. Property rates are super important. But theres property rates have legally and once that you have practically because you actually have the ability to enforce those rights. Longhorn kennel are not paying attention to president lincoln. This is an example of an invention barb dryer everybody knew was necessary they just did not know how to do it. Some inventions like the laser people created and they said i wonder what we can do with this. It must be something. Barb r we knew wire we knew we needed barb wire. In all the applications for fencing were coming out of the midwest of america. All patient applications globally were coming out of the midwest for a few years and then a gentleman called jay f glidden this is also where Cindy Crawford is from. He did not get what was the murder modern barb wire. He of the sharp bits wrapped around it. You twist one and and you twist around each other. It is that simple. And ten years after he got that the u. S. Made 240,000 miles of barb wire. Enough to go around ten times because this was solving a problem for people. Its just fencing. We have fencing beforehand. Now have the great wall of china. We knew how to build a wall a very long time ago but this is the way to do it cheaply and the cheapness of it that change the world. This is from the Financial Times the best paper in the world. This graph is now four years old. We live in the desert. We still struggle to imagine that solar power can work. Its come from nowhere really fast. Nevada conceals are willing to pay millions of dollars. Purely did not had to purchase power on the agreements they head with the local securities. I will pay millions of dollars not to have to buy the fossil fuel power. What has driven this. There must be some super cool technological breakthrough its just learning by doing. More specialized tools and more attention to how we pack this stuff intentionally. He used to take the crew of four people to he used to take the crew of four people to now has two or three people and it takes a couple of hours. This is the technology that gave us ikea furniture. Its a very old idea it was originally identified in the aerospace industry. The second one is 20 cheaper. Every time you double output the price falls by about 20 . Some oxford analytics. Any products you care to name. Everything from batteries to bear beer. When i looked at this in 2016 201699 percent of all solar power ever made have been made between 2010 and 2016. There was no Solar Industry before 2010. We are just learning how practice makes perfect. The same thing is true of batteries. There is nothing especially complicated. My favorite example this is one for the real economics nerds my favorite example is the shipping container. It has done more to lower trade cost. Then the wto. Nafta any trade agreement and an economist we like trade agreements we economists are in favor of that i think we exaggerate the importance of the trade deal. The cell phone the internet the barcode. Dont get me started on the barcode. And the shipping container. When you think about it this technology was really introduced in the late 1950s. It is a steel box. Its corrugated to make it stronger how complicated is that. What were spending a lot of time putting it on a truck. Then we load love it on the ship. Why dont we just put it all in the box and move the box . Of course mclean was not the first person to think of this. The idea of putting the stuff in a box and moving the box. Because back to the earliest 20h century. You need to get the whole system going. You need trains to adapt. You need the rules to adapt. You need the unions to adapt. He managed to get all of those things working often by breaking the rules. And we forget now that American Logistics was so regulated back then. Its just not legal to start up a trucking line. And serve out particular route. You would approve that there was a need. You cannot own a railroad and a trucking company. That is an important consideration. Ive to change the shipping line and they company. He took a lot of risk. He went bankrupt but he gave us this systematic change which was what was necessary to make this shipping container work. The changes the world at knots because knots because its complicated but because its cheap. I said at the beginning of my remarks. We make mistakes when we think about technology. Were focusing on whatever which can be important but we dont Pay Attention to the stuff that is simple and cheap which is just as important. The second mistake that we make is we think about the invention and we dont think about the system. It only works if it is part of systemic change. Let me give you another example of that. I wanted to show you in a make sense in a moment. But tomorrows world this is a classic bbc program it was on for decades it was a show about what was coming down the track in terms of technology can we get the slide on the screen for a section. Will show you a short film 90 seconds about what the office of the future is good to be like. From the perspective of 1967. [music] what nice people. My office the perfect office. I need to never get out of this chair. No distractions just me and the work alone and efficient much better for human being. Tireless and efficient anything i want. So this was what the office of the future looked like 53 years ago. I was in a say they got every single thing wrong but i think there was one thing they got right which was you will distract yourself by pressing a button. Why did they get it wrong. What you saw was the office of the future. They have no social change. No organizational change. It was exactly like the office of 1967 except the desk is made of plastic its placed into the context of the 1967 office. Of young unmarried women. Whatever fever dreams of technology the people have. Where to put to put that in the current office. Its never how technological change works. Very often its how we think about it. We see our lives the way we behave in the way we interact with people political institutions. What technology does is it just drops in and replaces one little bit. And nothing else changes. This is similar to the blade runner problem that we have. We always adapt to take advantage of the new technology. An adaptation process is not always pleasant. Its usually necessary and we prove to be proved to be very adaptable in contorting ourselves to make the Technology Work for us. We give let me give you an example of this. This is a famous example in nerd land. I will bring you news of this example so this is a photograph of a factory in about 1880. In the thing to see about this is that all the workers are drawing power from a drive shaft on the ceiling. Everything they do is defined by their relationship with the drive shaft. It goes out of the building and then theres another building next year which has a coal powered steam engine. Its driving the drive shaft. If you would ask experts in technology and manufacturing and design around about 1870 whats can change in this picture will change American Manufacturing they wouldve set electricity. The Steam Powered factory. While change is electricity. But what actually happened what the factory owners would remove the steam engine and then replace it with a big old electric motor. Westinghouse is designing superefficient turbines. You put in that big electric motor and nothing else changes and you know what happened to productivity nothing. Why are we bothering with this stuff. I thought it was supposed to be awesome. A little bit less coal dust if youre making fabrics. Basically it didnt make a huge difference. The change in the immigration ratio and it became harder to include workers. We need to we to rethink how rethink how we do this. We will have to hire fewer staff trained them all. And actually these electric motors the thing about it is you can have a hundred small electric motors instead of one big one you cant have a hundred small engines because of a big one. Its very inefficient. They get power through the wires we can get rid of that drive shaft everyone can have their own electric motor at the desk. That means you could build a factory with skylights or you could have cranes in the roof to help people move things around. Also. We dont have to organize the factory around the driveshaft. All of these machines churning at turning at all the same time. Everything is being lubricated by this. And everything is preempted around the drive shaft. With the electri