SPEAKER_02: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
SPEAKER_03: 50 things that made the modern economy with Tim Harford.
SPEAKER_00: It was 1978. A Harvard Business School student, Dan Bricklin, was sitting in a classroom watching his accounting lecturer filling in rows and columns on the blackboard. The lecturer made an alteration, then had to work down and across the grid, erasing and rewriting other numbers to make everything add up. That looked like boring, repetitive hard work to Dan Bricklin. And laziness can be the mother of invention. The lecturer wasn't the only one writing down numbers in rows and columns, then taking ages to rub them out and recalculate. Accounting clerks all over the world did that every day in the pages of their ledgers. A two page spread across the open fold of the ledger was called a spreadsheet. The output of several paper spreadsheets would then be the input for some larger master spreadsheet. Making an alteration might require hours of work with a pencil, eraser and desk calculator. Like many business school students, Bricklin had had a real job before going to Harvard. He'd worked as a programmer at Wang and DEC, two big players in 1970s computing. And he thought why on earth would anyone do this on a blackboard or on a paper ledger when you could do it on a computer? So he wrote a programme for the new Apple II personal ledger, an electronic spreadsheet. A friend of his, Bob Frankston, helped him sharpen up the software and on the 17th of October 1979 their brainchild VisiCalc went on sale. Almost overnight it was a sensation. VisiCalc was the first programme with a modern spreadsheet interface. And it's widely thought to be the first killer app, a software programme so essential that you'd buy a computer just to be able to use it. Steve Jobs of Apple later said that it had been VisiCalc that propelled the Apple II to the success it achieved. Five years after VisiCalc's launch, the journalist Stephen Levy, an unofficial historian of modern computing, was able to write that there are corporate executives, wholesalers, retailers and small business owners who talk about their business lives in two time periods, before and after the electronic spreadsheet. VisiCalc, once dominant, was eventually unseated by Lotus 1, 2, 3, it in turn by Microsoft Excel. But the real lesson of the spreadsheet is not about how monopolies rise and fall, but about technological unemployment. The cliché these days is that the robots are coming for our jobs. But the story is never as simple as that. And the best illustration I can think of is the digital spreadsheet. What does a robot accountant look like after all? It certainly isn't Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator equipped with a pocket calculator instead of a shotgun. No, if the concept of a robot accountant means anything, surely it means VisiCalc or Excel. These programmes put hundreds of thousands of accounting clerks out of work. Accounting clerks were the men and women who spent their days tapping away at pocket calculators while erasing and recalculating numbers on paper ledger sheets. Of course VisiCalc was revolutionary in that world. Of course it was more efficient than a human. According to the Planet Money podcast, in the US alone, 400,000 fewer accounting clerks are employed today than in 1980, the first full year that VisiCalc went on sale. But Planet Money also found that there were 600,000 more jobs for regular accountants. After all, crunching the numbers had become cheaper, more versatile and more powerful, so demand went up. The point is not really whether 600,000 is more than 400,000. The point is that automation reshapes the workplace in much subtler ways than, a robot took my job. In the age of the spreadsheet, the repetitive, routine parts of accountancy disappeared. What remained, and indeed flourished, required more judgement, more human skills. There are countless jobs in high finance that, for the purposes of trading or insuring or whatever, depend on exploring different numerical scenarios, tweaking the numbers and watching the columns recalculate themselves. These jobs barely existed before the electronic spreadsheet. In season one of 50 things, we encountered the Jennifer unit, an earpiece that directs warehouse pickers to collect products by breaking down instructions into the most mindless, idiot-proof steps. The Jennifer unit strips a menial task of its last, faintly interesting element. The spreadsheet operates in reverse. It strips an intellectually demanding job of the most boring bits. Viewed together, these two inventions show that technology doesn't usually take jobs wholesale. It chisels away the easily automated chunks, leaving humans to adapt to the rest. That can make the human job more interesting or more soul destroying. It all depends. In accountancy, it made the human jobs more creative. Who doesn't want a creative accountant? Far from being traumatised by automation, accountants may now take the spreadsheet for granted. It seems extraordinary, but the histories of accountancy that I've read don't bother to mention VisiCalc or Excel. Perhaps it seems beneath their dignity. What the spreadsheet did to accounting and finance is a harbinger of what's coming to other white-collar jobs. Journalists no longer churn out routine stories about corporate earnings reports. Algorithms do that more quickly and cheaply. Teachers give help to pupils after an online tutorial has quizzed the child and figured out where she's getting stuck. A doctor can sometimes be replaced by a combination of a nurse and a diagnostic app. Law firms use document assembly systems that question clients, then draft legal contracts. Whether members of these professions will look back as kindly as accountants on their encounter with Arnie the Terminator remains to be seen. But they should learn one final cautionary tale the spreadsheet has to offer. Sometimes we think we've delegated some routine job to an infallible computer, whereas we've simply acquired a lever with which to magnify human error to a dramatic scale. Consider the time two noted economists were mightily embarrassed when a graduate student spotted a spreadsheet error in an influential economics paper. Oh, and there's the time the investment bank JP Morgan lost six billion dollars, in part because a key parameter was being divided not by an average of two numbers, but by their sum. If we ask computers to do the wrong thing, they'll do it with the same breathtaking speed and efficiency that inspired Dan Bricklin to create VisiCalc. That is a lesson we seem doomed to keep learning far beyond the borders of accountancy.
SPEAKER_03: Steven Levy's classic article, A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge, was the first draft of the history of the digital spreadsheet. For a full list of our sources, please see BBCWorldService.com slash 50 Things. Eagle, get the air zone for landing. Over.
SPEAKER_01: I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
SPEAKER_04: A story of breathtaking ambition. I thought that he was a little premature
SPEAKER_03: on making an announcement just in ten years since we hadn't even gone into orbit.
SPEAKER_04: A story of incredible innovation. I'm in charge of this stuff called software, but nobody knew what software was. A story of amazing human endeavor.
SPEAKER_01: It was the lack of fear. It wasn't the lack of knowing it was risky, but just weren't
SPEAKER_04: afraid of it. A story of triumph over adversity. As they pitch over and see the moon for the first time, Neil said, we can't land here.
SPEAKER_04: A story where we all know the ending. That's one small step for man. But not necessarily the beginning. Three, two, one, zero. I'm Kevin Fong, and 50 years on, I'll be telling the story of the Apollo moon landings in a brand new podcast from the BBC World Service. We're about to do something that nobody has ever done. With the help of the people who made it happen. We were able to do this impossible thing. That's 13 Minutes to the Moon. We did it. We did it. The first episode is available now. Just search for 13 Minutes to the Moon wherever you found this podcast.
