Aware many of you have no idea who i am so thank you for showing up out of the spirit of pure curiosity. I think it speaks very well of you and i know theres really big names at the festival and i feel honored to be among them so thanks for coming. Who am i to mark a few things around i write a column called the undercover economist for the Financial Times. At the pink newspaper thats really good. I recommend it. Thanks baxter. And the second thing is i present bbc radio so im present a show for the Bbc World Service called 50things that made the modern economy. Ive presented a show for bbc radio for aboutnumbers and how we think about numbers and how numbers lead us astray. And sometimes help us understand the world. And i also have a podcast with a gentleman called michael lewis, a gentleman called Malcolm Gladwell called Cautionary Tales which is all aboutthings going wrong , sometimes in amusing ways and what we can learn from them. So in between all that, i tried to write a few booksand im going to talk about what i learned writing one of them. The second thing i wanted to say is thank you to the Rancho Mirage writers festival. To jamie and the rest of the festival and thank you to jamie please, thank you. So jamie, email me 18 months ago and suggested that i fly across the world from Oxford England to cometo Rancho Mirage. Near palm springs, id heard of palm springs. Is it like palm springs or different . Its been a huge journey and i realized its only possible to fly in someone like me from a long way away with the support of devoted readers. The angels and all thepeople who supported this festival so thank you to all of you, i feel fortunate to be here. So i said i wasnt a fan of long preambles so obviously im a total hypocrite. Let me talk about this book of mine. The 50 inventions that shaped the modern economy. I dontknow whether you can see theslide or not. I can see a slide. Okay. Feel free by the way to put the camera back on me. Its just a patch shot, you dont need to look at that, put the camera back on me but i want to talk about the book as such, i want to talk about what i learned when i was working on. This is a project originally for the bbc where i take 50 different inventions that i found interesting. Not the most important inventions. Not the mostobvious inventions of the inventions that i felt had something to teach us. That there were stories behind these inventions and people ask me how did you choose them . I chose them because i thought they were interesting, thats the only criteria so what did i learn when i was doing this . I think it feels like an important question because at this moment, we are asking the questions about what technology does and how it shapes our society. And where coming up with a wide range of answers and for all of our understandable focus on politics and political debate, very often it is technology really shapes how we live, how our economy grows, how our Society Works read these answers to these questions matter. And when you talk to economists, theyre really into camps. Theres one group that says you know, this is a progress of computers, youre going to progress Artificial Intelligence. Its really possible that after about two centuries, of people falsely worrying that the robots are going to take the jobs. Its actually possible and what do at this time. And you people who live really hard, really to look at history making a compelling case that this could happen. At the same time, there are equally expert people, equally persuasive, equally compelling 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 the robots are going to take the job, will they please hurry up and do it. Because we need a few more robots around here. Go the im puzzled between these two views and ive been studying this debate for years and i still dont know the answers but this is the question that really illuminates a lot of debate. So trying to understand how Technology Works and how it shapes our lives i think is its not just a matter of curiosity although of course. City is the most important thing. The answers to these questions even if we dont know what the answers are, the answers to thequestions really matter. I said i would tell you what i learned working on this book. I learned that we make 2 big mistakes when were thinking about how Technology Works. The impact that technology has and i want to talk about the mistakes, the mistakes are always fun so let me show you an image from one of my favorite movies. This is an image from blade runner and some of you may have seen the film. When it came out in the 80s i was too young. Its a pretty traffic hardhitting punchy film. 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 your old enough to know better. Do not do thisit looks cool in the movies, its a very bad idea. This is not a beautiful Woman Holding a cigarette. This is a machine. The robot. The robots name is rachel. Rachel is a replicant and a replicant is a kind of organic robot but its indistinguishable from a human with a mind that is indistinguishable from a human. Rachel believes herself to be human, spoiler alert. She thinks shes human, shes not. It takes a specialist played by harrison ford, our hero rick deckard. It takes a specialist with special equipment to tell the difference between this artificial creature, this piece of technology and a human being. And indeed so sublime, so seductive is rachel that deckard, 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 certain merges towards her, if not in part entirely clear but got strong feelings and you see here this is deckard calling rachel up. What do you do when you want to date a robot mark the answer is you do what youdo when you want to date anybody, you phone number. This the future, this being a future of Incredible Technology where we have Artificial Intelligence, where we havethese synthetic humans indistinguishable from the real thing , deckard phones are out on a pay phone on the wall of a bar. Theres something wrong with that so if we have a look at the image again for a moment its like because this film was made in the 1980s, and its set in los angeles you can see its got graffiti on. Because its a video phone, not a purely audio phone but this is a bone attached to the wall of a bar. And ofcourse she says no and hangs up. You can see the fonts of the future. This film isthat in 2017. Or 2019. So theres this weird divergence here. This unbelievably sophisticated technology, rachel, the organic robot and the absolute lack of progress of anything else. They do have flying cars but apart from that everything is the same. Theres this amazing lack of imagination about what else might change and i dont want to criticize blade runner because blade runner is a great movie and just in terms of storytelling you cant change everything because then the audience will have no frame of reference. They wont understand whats going on but i think its revealing you can conceive of a society where you have human level Artificial Intelligence. Where you have perfect, flawless genetic engineering and yet if you want to make a phone call you put coins into a box on the wall bar. And whats going on here . Is the basic mistake here . The mistake is partly that were trying to see into the future and its hard to see into the future, its complicated but thats not just the fundamental mistake. The fundamental mistake is very common. Its an obsession with the most complex technology we can envisage. If a technology would not have made our parents gas and say this is magic, this is sorcery, how does it work . If the technology doesnt do that we dont think its technology. Thats a big mistake and if we view all technology as incredibly sophisticated and complex, where going to profoundly misconceived the way that technological change works. An example. You want an example. Let me give you anexample. This is of course the gutenberg bible. And when i worked on the book , i went around and i talked to economists, to historians, technologists, scientists and i said what should i put in the book . Everybody said the Gutenberg Printing press. You must have the Gutenberg Printing press in the book i didnt put the Gutenberg Printing press in the book. Why not . Lets have a look at the Printing Press again or the bible again. This is this remarkable object. If you look at these dense black columns of text written in latin, the illustrations arehanddrawn but are seasonal organic illustrations. But the latin text, this is made by a machine. This is a remarkable technology. But when i look at it, what do i see . I see paper. No one ever gets excited about paper but the thing is, you cant have this without paper. Seriously you can, you can have parchment, parchment is made of animal skin, sheepskin cow skin you can make and you can print on department and in fact bird did print some of his bibles on department. 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. Im a proud geek. I did the math. You want to do a print run of bibles, maybe 2000 bibles, you need a quarter of 1 million she. To make it 2000 bibles. It doesnt work, it doesnt work. So you could say lets just print 50, with printed 2000 but if youre going to print 50 , what is the point of having a Printing Press . Its easier to just hand write the thing. So the economics of printing demand paper. Now, the history of paper i find fascinating. Its my favorite invention in the book. It was invented in china, a lot of things invented in china thousand years ago and initially it was used for wrapping stuff up but eventually its cheaper than self and its light of than wood and you can write on. And arrived in the islamic world around 1300 years ago. The Islamic Culture had a really driving litmus culture with no printing. It was all andwritten. But massively literacy and then the Technology Sat on the fringes of europe and it was partly a weather thing. How do we make paper that doesnt go moldy in the european weather. But that was a solvable problem. The real problem is europeans just werent very interested because most of us couldnt read or write. And the main demand for writing surface is to make bibles out of. And i dont want to go into much detail with the manufacturing process of paper. It does involve urine and stinky rags and is quite a dirty process. The third industrial process in europe making paper so if youre proposing youre going to make a bible out of stinky cheap paper, thats almost offensive. Thats like saying i thought of a cheaper way to make a crown for the king. We could make out of lead and pewterinstead of making an article. That would be cheaper but whats the point of cutting corners to make a crown for the king fmr same thing with the bible. Its a holy object, there are very few of themeveryone is handwritten. Who want to keep bible. Its pointless. And paper only came into your there was a commercial culture arriving around it. The italian merchants started to use it for contrast and to atone for letters and for accounts so you get the first water driven paper mills in italy. You can still buy Beautiful People paper in cipriani with the mountains coming down and driving these cameras that are pulsing these contracts and their making, it was something beautiful for a second wasnt it . And their making paper and paper spread to europe as an everyday commercial thing. And it arrived in what is now germany in the late 1300s and within half acentury , the gutenberg invents the Printing Press read absolutely no point in massproducing writing until you can massproduce a writing surface. So this is the first principle you might say of understanding technological change. Its the paper principle so once something has become cheapenough. Once something has become cheap enough, to make 20 paper out of. Then its cheap enough to change the world. We paper is everywhere. Its not just in the book read we went on it. We decorate our walls withit. Receipts, towel in, you go to the restaurants here. , dry your hands on paper. Its completely ubiquitousand it is ubiquitous because it is cheap. Not because itis complicated. Its 2000 years old. It is ubiquitous because it is cheap and still important and my argument is that one of the things that we missed about technological change as we miss the cheap stuff. Cheap simple stuffchanges the world. Sure im excited about Computers Read im a nerd. And pewters are interesting. Show me the cheap stuff and ill show you the stuff that is going to make a contribution while being wildly overlooked. Let me give you a couple other examples. The first time you see this picture youre thinking those are not very nice gentleman. This is not apicture of what you think it is. This is not the clan, this, these guys are cuttingbarbie wire. Theyve mastered their faces with a do not wish to be seen cutting barbed wire. Barbed wire. Thats an intriguing invention. Where did that come from . In the 1860s, i dont want to come here and lecture you on American History and i apologize for doing so but Abraham Lincoln signed of course thehomesteading. Hes trying to shift the center of gravity away from the south and towards the midwest. Its move the center of population, shift it away until you just show up in the midwest, put some fence around some land. Theres some people who were there first, dont worry about them. Put a fence around the land and farmout land for 5 years and then its yours, the homesteading act. Home settlers show up in the midwest and theres a problem. Not enough would. You need the wood for firewood, need the wood for buildings. You cant be building fences out of wood, its far too expensive so you could just put up ordinary wire but the longhorn cattle will barge right through that. Destroy your crops so heres an interesting lesson. We talk about Property Rights in economics and Property Rights are super important but theres Property Rights you have legally and theres Property Rights that you have practically because you have the ability to enforce those Property Rights so longhorn cattle, Pay Attention to president lincoln, theyre going to come and destroy your crops so this is an example of aninvention that everybody knew was necessary. They just didnt know how to do it. Some inventions like the laser famously people created an i wonder what we can do with this. Barbed wire we knew we needed barbed wire and two thirds of all applications were coming out of the midwest because of all the globally were coming out of the midwest. For a few years and then a gentleman called jf listen to called illinois, he gets a patent for what is recognizably remarkable. Barbed wire and you can still recognize it today. Its a string of wire, they have a shop that wrapped around it and another string of wire and you twist one and and a twist around each other and that stops the barbs moving backwards and forwards and its that simple and 10 years after he got that patent the us made 240 thousand miles of barbed wire. Enough to go around the earth 10 times. Because it was, this was solving a problem. Its just fencing. Its just fencing. We had fencing beforehand. We had the great wall of china, we knew how to build a wall for a very long time ago but this is a way to do it cheaply and again, the cheapness of it that changed the world. Heres another example. This graph is from the Financial Times best newspaper in the world. This is solar power and i apologize because this graph is now 4 years old so you live in the desert, you have solar power. We still struggle to imagine that solar power and work comes from nowhere. Overpower came from nowhere really. We expect now that nevada, casinos are willing to pay millions of dollars purely to not have to purchase power on the agreements they signed with local utilities. Not just that solar power is cheap, its that i will pay millions of dollars not to have to buy the fossil fuel power as i can plug in to the electric grid. What drivenness . You mustthink there must be some cool technological breakthrough. No, its just learning by doing. Bigger factories, more practice, more specialized tools. More attention to how we this stuff effectively. Moreattention to how we install it, snap together panels. It used to take two or four people a couple of days to install it on your, now its two or three people and it takes a couple hours to read this is thetechnology that gave us ikea furniture. Applied to solar panels and a very old idea learning by doing which originally identified in the aerospace industry. Agentleman called tp right in the 1930s. The second plane is 20 percent cheaper than the first claim. The next two planes are 20 percent cheaper and a second plane. The next four planes, 20 percent cheaper than the third and fourth planes, every time you double the output, the price falls by about 20 percent and some oxford academics down the road from me had started the learning by doing effect and they found absolutely ubiquitous any product you care to name the percentage there is everything from batteries to beer exhibits learning by doing the thing about solar power is when i looked at the 2016, 99 percent of all the solar power cells ever made had been made between 2010 and 2016. There was no Solar Industry before 2010 and theres this sudden ramping up and it continued. We learn to do it cheaply because practice makes perfect and the same thing by the way is to the batteries. So this is a completely Transformative Technology and again, theres nothing especially complicated. Its a very predicable thing. Just build more, they get cheaper. People build more, its cheaper again. And my favorite example is this is one for the real cannot nerves read my favorite example is the shipping containers read so shipping containers is has done more to lower trade costs, more to fuel globalization and the wto, the character in trade, nafta, any trade agreements. Im an economist and we like trade agreements. We like dealing with foreigners and getting them to sell stuff and buy stuff that we economist are in favor of that but i think we exaggerate the importance of the trade deal. Often this history changes in technology. The cell phone, theinternet. The barcode. Theyre going to be, dont get me started on the barcode. Come find me later and ill tell you about thebarcode. Shipping containers, when you think about it, this technology was really introduced in the late 1950s by an entrepreneur called malcolm mclean. This is 1850s technology, not 1950s. This is bars. Corrugated. The software. How complicated is that . But responding a lot of time taking stuff and putting it on a truck and the truck drives to the port and we take it off the truck and loaded on the ship and the ship goes to another port. We put it on another ship, on a train area to take off the train and putit on a truck. Why dont we just put it on the box and move the box . Its radical, its amazing but of course mclean wasnt the first person to think of this. The idea of owning the stock in a box and moving the box, this goes back to the early 20thcentury but when mclean realized is you need to the whole system going. You need the trains to adapt and you need to talk to adapt, you need the ships to that and the ports to annette. You need the rules with, you need a just asked to adapt, you need the unions to and he managed to get all those things working. Often by breaking the rules and we forget now that American Logistics are so regulated back then. It just wasnt legal to start up a trucking line and serve a particular route area you had to prove that there was a need for the root and you wouldnt want to spoil the business for the people who already start the route. On a railroad and a Trucking Company. Youcouldnt own a railroad and a shipping line. Because you know, maybe its best to but thats an important consideration for mclean its like i have to change the shipping line and the Trucking Company so he produced all these clever legal maneuvers to make this happen and he also borrowed a lot of money. He took a lot of risk and he eventually much later went bankrupt. But he gave us this system is change which is what was necessary to make a shipping container work. So shipping container another example of the paper principle. It changes the world not because its complicated but because its cheap. But that lead me into the second thing i said the beginning of my remarks. We make mistakes. When we think about technology. The third mistake is focusing on whatever super complicated, whatever you do, whatever is sophisticated and which can be important. We dont Pay Attention to the stuff thats simple and cheap is just as important. The second mistake we make is we think about the invention and we dont think about the system. So shipping container only works if its part of systemic change area so give you another example of that. I wanted to show you this is not going to make alot of sense to some of you. Tomorrows world is a classic Bbc Tv Program i used to watch when i was achild. It went on for decades and it was a show about how technology, what was coming down the track in terms of technology and i want to show you could we maybe get the slideon the screen for a second . This is a short film 90 seconds, about whats the office of the future is going to be like. From the perspective of 1967. [music] what nice people. And my office, the perfect office. Note phone, no filing cabinets. Client area cool. Very efficient. I may never get out of his chair. That would be nice. No distractions. Just me andthe work. Alone and efficient. Nobody. [inaudible]. This is what the office of the future look like 53 years ago. I was going to say that they got every single thing wrong, everything but i think theres one thing they got right is the moment you sit down at your desk and youre faced with actual work the first thing youre going to do is distract yourself by pressing a button. I got that one right apart from that, they got everything wrong and what why fundamentally did they get it wrong . Because what you saw was an office of the future that had no social change. Noorganizational change. It was exactly like the office of 1967 except the desk is made of plastic and theres a sort of computer thing on a desk that moves so this is the kind of technology, the technology is nonsense but that doesnt matter but the technology is placed into the context of a 1967 office with a typing pool of young unmarried women deferential to the cost whos in a suit and tie and hes got the Corner Office and theyre out there in the typing pool and theres no sense of any sort of social change at all in this vision of the future. Where just taking whatever fever dream of a Technology People had in the 1960s and said right, were going to put that in our current office. Thats never, never technological change works. Very often its how we think about it. We see our lives the way we behave, the way we interact with people, our political institutions, our organizations. The office, we see that and we imagine that what technology does is it just drops in and itreplaces one little bit. Of what we do and nothing else changes. So this is similar to the blade runner problem we have. You have artificial humans and yet people are still making calls on paper. So we always, all or almost always that to take advantage of the new technology. The adaptationprocess is not always pleasant. It always happens usually necessary and we prove to be very adaptable in contorting ourselves to make the Technology Work for us. But we are being contorted because you work for an organization, you have to do what the boss of the Organization Says so let me give you an example. This is a famous example in nerd labs you may not spend time in nerd last which i do so illbring you news of this example. So this is a photograph of a factory in 1880. And the thing to see about this is that all the work in this factory are drawing power from a drive shaft on the ceiling. I told you this is nerd labs. Their drawing power from the drive shaft on the ceiling by any cells that come down and so everything they do is defined by their relationship with the driveshaft. The driveshaft is going along the ceiling and it goes down into the building and theres another building next door which is going to hold power, driving the driveshaft and that is how a factory works read it if you had asked experts in technology and manufacturing and design around about 1870, whats going to change inthis picture . What is going to change American Manufacturing . They would have said theres a Steam Powered drive belt, this is a Steam Powered factory. What is going to change is electricity. But what actually happened is that factory earners would remove the coalfired steam engine and they would replace it with a big old electric motor. Edison is selling electricity down the wires. You can buy electricity from mister edison. Westinghouse is designing super efficient turbines and efficient electric motors. You replace the old steam engine, put in an electric motor and nothing else changes and you know what happened to productivity . Nothing. People said why are we bothering with this stuff . I thought electricity was supposed to be awesome and there was a little less pulled up which is good if youre making fabric but basically it didnt make a huge difference. Then around about the end of the first world war, the change in the immigration ratio became harder to recruit workers so 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. And they started to realize you could ask staff to take more responsibility and actually these are electric motors. The thing about electric motors is you can have 100 small electric motors instead of one big one. Have 100 small steam engines instead of a big one is its very inefficient but you can add 100 smallelectric motors. They get power to the wires. Driveshaft, we can get rid of that driveshaft. Everyone can have theirown electric motor. Ion, that means you could build a factory with skylights or we could have cranes in the 10 roof to help people move stuff around or maybe both. Also, we have to organize a factoryaround the proximity to the driveshaft, we can spread out. You have two or three story factories with all the machines charting the future driveshaft and everything is being lubricated by these boilers. After you get to sleep and everything is crammed in around the driveshaft. But with the electric motors you can spread out and you can organize a factory around the low of products. Its the first process, this is the second process, doesnt matter whether it needs a lot ofpower or a little bit of power. Just arrange it in a logical way you can start having a production line. If you have the product moving between people. None of this is possible with a centralized power source on the driveshaft. So it turns out that electricity didrevolutionized American Manufacturing but it didntdo it in the 1880s. It did in the 1920s. And in order to unlock the technology, you needed to change how you paid them, how youtrained them , where they sat, the building they sat in. The technology that they were using the workflow process. Afteryouve done all that technology is improved. Soits organizational change. That unlocks the power of this Technology Read this is a very oldexample, this is 100 years old. What possibly teach us about today mark but more recently, an economist called eric johnson was famous for writing books about Artificial Intelligence these days but about 20 years ago , eric jolson and his colleague lauren hicks david American Business in the 1990s. And while they were interested in was the process of technological change. If an American Business got a load of computers and, this is a graph i apologize for. Let me explain what this graph is area so if youthis way , that is more computers. If you move back, thats a reorganization, more decentralization. You move up, its more money and i have your attention. So this is what they found. What is this graph showing . Itsshowing if you get the computers and and you dont reorganize , you dont make any money. If you reorganize and you dont get the computers and you dont make any money. If you dont reorganizeand you dont get thecomputers and , thats not the worst thing you could do. But the real money comes from reorganizing and getting computers. Inorder to make the Technology Work , you have to reorganize and im very mindful of the fact that with the manufacturing, with electrification, it took 40 years. I dont know when we should be measuring from , the invention of the computer in the 1940s or the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. Invented by an englishman called tim, just saying. Or should it be the smart phone, 2007. Or what is it that were looking at western mark point is whatever technology youre looking at it can take a long time to figure out howto use it. Arguably theimpact of the web , impact of the smartphone, 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 area what we do know is that when they do it, it will be because we change that we that. Machines are adaptable, we are. We are always the ones who find ourselves bending to fit. You may not like it, you may like it but thats the way it always seems to work. At the beginning of my remarks, i talked about this big debate about what are the robots going to take the job. And i said i dont know the answer. I havent figured it out in the last 30 minutes, i can assure you read but i think that thoselessons that ive learned the lessons i hope ive been able to share with you , do sharpen the questions a bit. So when we think about the machines taking jobs, we can think about this sort of super scary vision of terminator or how hal 9000, just this disconcerting image of hal 9000, these intelligences that are going to take over our lives and take everything and destroy us or at the very least force us into the lives ofcomplete luxury and indolence where they do all the work and i dont know. That seems to me to be making these 2 basic mistakes. Were focusing too much on the sophisticated stuff and not thinking about how we are going to change to adapt to them area 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 and sees youre working at an Accounting Firm and you get there and theres arnold in a Leather Jacket with an easy on the desk and you back slowly away and you come back and getyour things later or you thinking maybe c3 po mightmake a good accountant. I know hes a protocol droid. But the image of a robot accountant but i can tell you thats notwhat and a robot accountant looks like. You go to your windows computer and you fire up Microsoft Office and theres this green for microsoft excel and you click on the button and outcomes a spreadsheet and thats a robot accountant and it was invented in 1979, the First Digital spreadsheet by a guy who wondered why he hadto spend all his time adding up rows and columns on big pieces of paper. These pieces of paper were called spreadsheets, big pieces ofpaper. Why is it every time something changes i have to recalculate everything this is crazy oh i can get a computer to do this. He programmed microsoft xl and microsoft excel, its not very sexy. Its not very complicated. It is a robot accountant but it lowers the task of arithmetic. And it lowers the task of arithmetic that acouple particular kind of accountant did. The accounting clock or which you call them clerk so ill translate. The accounting clerk. There were 400,000 accounting clerks in the us at the time and basically all of them were out of work in about five years but we now have more accountants than ever before because those people in different jobs. Obviously you dont add up rows and columns, whats the point of that the accountancy profession extended the job of being an accountant became much moreinteresting. Theres a situation where it wasnt obligated. It wasnt sexy. Its just microsoft excel completely reshape an industry area it didnt destroy any jobs. We have more jobs accountancy and we did before but it changed the way we did those jobs. Change the kind of thing accountants did, they started doing financial forecasting, scenarios, they started doing advisory work and it made being an accountant a lot more interesting read because the machine was doing the most boring part of accounting. But let me give you another example. A really exactly the same dynamic. Only with a slightly ending. So ill show you a photograph of jennifer, this is not jennifer. Jennifer is what shes wearing. Effort is the headset. So this woman is workingin a warehouse, before any large company, loads of warehouses around the world. And a few years ago, your job in a warehouse would be you have a list, people have ordered stuff online. You have to find outwhere all the stuff is , put it in the cart. To be packed. And then the genesee unit was invented and the unit knows where all the stuff its really knows what you have to pick. Knows how you have to pick. So if for example you ordered 13 copies of 50 inventions that shaped the modern economy from a warehouse which i would not advise, i advise you to buy them here at Rancho Mirage but say you ordered 13 copies of 50 inventions that shaped the modern economy read the unit would instruct the picture to go to the shelf and would say not take 13 copies, take five copies. Take five more copies. Take another five. Take three more copies. Take another three. Because the unit doesnt trust humans to count. But you know what humans can do, and eyes. Peripheral vision, really good at spotting things really very subtle hands, robots find it hard to pick stuff up. Is it a glass, is it a book . They crushed things, they drop things, humans are much better at this but this is a case just like the spreadsheet except the spreadsheet took away the most boring part of accounting where as the genesee unit is taking away the most interesting part of a job thats not very interesting. Remembering where the stuff is getting around the warehouse in an efficient way. We dont need yourbrain , thank you very much, we have a genesee unit for that, we just need your hands and your eyes when i think about technology, i think about the spreadsheet. I think about the genesee unit. Think about paper and barbed wire and the shipping container and solar panels. I think about all the cheap stuff and i think about the way that we adapt ourselves, sometimes in inspiring ways. Sometimes we contortourselves in order to fit around technology. And im not so worried about the robots taking our jobs. Im not so worried about the terminator. Not so worried about rachel, the super intelligent organic robot. Im a little bit worried about jennifer. Electronic books out there, thank you so much. Thanks a lot. Tonight at 9 pm eastern on after words, journalist Eileen Zimmerman looks at whitecollar drug addiction in her book smacked. For me someone struggling with an addiction was struggling with bleak conditions in their life area and maybe they were homeless and struggling with a Mental Illness untreated. They were someone but i would see on the side of the road living under a bridge and panhandling on the subway and i was wrong although addiction and fired in those communities there were plenty of people at the top of the ladder bubbling as well. Watch after words with Eileen Zimmerman tonight at 9 pm eastern on cspan2. On our Author Interview program after words the American Enterprise institute glorietta moscow interviewed speaker of the house of representatives Newt Gingrich on the tracks the us faces from china. Your own experience in congress and in american politics, what do you think are some of the changes that we need to make domestically to make sure that we do have the resources to compete with china . Thats part of what i wrote that chapter, isnt china so was a lot of what has to bedone is not china. When you have six schools in baltimore in which last year not a single student in six schools, not a single student could pass the state math and writing exam, you have a crisis that would be there whether the chinese existed or not. So we need very dramatic deep reforms in our own system. We need to reform the pentagon. This is a tired bureaucratic structure. I tried to remind people it was being rebuilt in 1943 so that 23,000 people using carbon paper and manual typewriters could manage a worldwide war. Now we have ipads, smart phones, etc. You still have 23,000 people. Its maniacal and of course it slowseverything down and makes everything too expensive. Weve got huge zones of reform that we need. The chinese currently are mopping up all sorts of International Organizations by basically bribing countries and theyre going to end up either being the leader or having picked the leader for an amazing range of International Organizations. We are not even prepared to start thinking about a campaign on the scale and complexity we are going to need in places like the food and Agricultural Organization or the world health organization, just go down the list and its astonishing how methodically successful theyve been so i think were going to have to if we are serious and we are determined to overmatched the chinese are going to have to get our act together you are going to have to go through some very painful and very profound reforms and part of the reason that i wrote trunk versus china was to set the stage for people to have this conversation and to recognize that everything the president s doing i think is the right general direction is about 10 percent of what we need to do it where all ultimately goingto be capable of competing with china. Watch the rest of this Program Visit our website, booktv. Org and search for Newt Gingrich for the title of his book trunk versus china using the box at the top of the page area. Synthroid around long discusses her journey from prison advocacy working to reformed your butt out sentencing guidelines and then former george w. Bush white house president ial speechwriter Jonathan Horn is a history of George Washingtons final years and later New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer chronicles the first year of the largest class of women ever elected to congress. Conversation with cyntoia brownlong, and author and activist for criminal justice reform. I want to thank Molly Goldberg you just heard from for her suggests