{"id":14961,"date":"2026-02-15T05:28:38","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T04:28:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/?p=14961"},"modified":"2026-02-15T05:28:38","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T04:28:38","slug":"january-book-reviews-3-matt-ridleys-how-innovation-works-serendipity-energy-and-the-saving-of-time-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/2026\/02\/january-book-reviews-3-matt-ridleys-how-innovation-works-serendipity-energy-and-the-saving-of-time-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"January book reviews (3): Matt Ridley’s How Innovation Works: Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time (2020)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I decided to review all books I read, which also serves as a motivator for making notes when reading (actually, I only highlight text and memory is usually enough reconstruct why it was marked).\u00a0 Having covered the two long, political books, let’s cover Matt Ridley’s How Innovation Works: Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time<\/em> (2020)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s a history of technology book, with some comments on the related political and legal climate. In particular, Ridley is very critical of intellectual ‘property’, that is, various property limitations due to monopolies granted by the government (cf. Against Intellectual Monopoly<\/em><\/a>). Granted, the aim of them is to increase innovation but frequently they do exactly the opposite. The commonly cited example is the development of steam engines which was continuously slowed down by a variety of patents:<\/p>\n

\n

In 1763 a skilled and practical Scottish instrument maker, by the name of James Watt, was asked to mend a model Newcomen engine belonging to the University of Glasgow. The thing barely worked. In trying to understand what was wrong, Watt realized something about Newcomen engines in general that should have been spotted much earlier: three-quarters of the energy of the steam was being wasted in reheating the cylinder during each cycle, after it had been\u00a0<\/span>cooled with injected water to condense the steam. Watt had the simple idea of using a separate condenser, so that the cylinder could be kept hot, while the steam was drawn off for condensing in a cooler container. At a stroke he had improved the efficiency of the steam engine, though as usual it took months of work to get the metalworking right to make his ideas into practical devices.<\/p>\n

After demonstrating the principle in a small test engine, Watt went into partnership with first John Roebuck to acquire a patent, then the entrepreneur Matthew Boulton to build full-scale versions. They unveiled the machine on 8 March 1776, a day before the publication of\u00a0The Wealth of Nations<\/i>, written by another Scot, Adam Smith. Boulton wanted Watt to develop a method of converting the up-and-down motion of the piston into a circular motion capable of turning a shaft for use in mills and factories. The crank and flywheel had been patented by James Pickard, which stymied Watt for a while and forced him to develop an alternative system, known as the sun-and-planets gear. Pickard in turn had got the idea of the crank from a disloyal and drunken employee of Boulton\u2019s own Soho factory, leaving the origin of this simple device mired in confusion.<\/p>\n

Despite this example of patents getting in the way of improvement, as Savery\u2019s had for Newcomen, Watt himself was an enthusiastic defender of his own patents, and Boulton was adept at using his political contacts to acquire long-lasting and broad patents on Watt\u2019s various inventions. Just how much Watt\u2019s litigiousness delayed the expansion of steam as a source of power in factories is a hotly contested issue, but the ending of the main patent in 1800 certainly coincided with a rapid expansion of experiments\u00a0<\/span>and applications of steam. Indeed, one source of steady and incremental improvement in the efficiency and penetration of steam engines came as a result of the publication of a journal,\u00a0Lean\u2019s Engine Reporter<\/i>, founded by a Cornish mining engineer named John Lean, which acted like an open-software movement, disseminating suggestions for improvement among many different engineers. My point is simple: Watt, brilliant inventor though he undoubtedly was, gets too much credit, and the collaborative efforts of many different people too little.<\/p>\n

Five years after Watt died in 1819, there was a subscription to build a monument to him, unusual in those days when monuments were mostly to those who won wars. The editors of a journal called\u00a0The Chemist<\/i>\u00a0had this to say, rather perceptively: \u2018He is distinguished from other public benefactors, by never having made, or pretended to make it his object to benefit the public\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. This unpretending man in reality conferred more benefit on the world than all those who for centuries have made it their especial business to look after the public welfare.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Also for airplanes:<\/p>\n

A long slog was still needed to turn the invention of powered flight into an innovation of use to society. Some of the Wrights\u2019 ideas were dropped: a forward elevator proved too unstable, and warping the whole wing to steer worked less well than having hinged flaps or ailerons. But their general discovery that to control an aircraft in a turn it was necessary to use the wings to achieve the roll and the rudder to control the yaw was crucial. The Wrights themselves soon became rich through prizes and contracts, yet were also embroiled in exhausting legal battles as they sought to defend their patents. Wilbur died of typhoid in 1912, at the age of forty-five. Katharine died in 1929, Orville in 1948.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And telegraphs:<\/p>\n

Samuel Morse did more to shrink the world than anybody before or after him. Thanks to his innovations, messages that once took months could now take seconds to reach their destination. Unlike Jackson, Morse did a series of experiments to try to turn the original idea into a device. A suggestion of using relays from Leonard Gale of New York University proved critical, and by 1838 Morse was able to send the message \u2018A patient waiter is no loser\u2019 over a two-mile wire, using a code. In a typical example of simultaneous discovery, he was narrowly beaten to the same goal by two British inventors, Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke, but Morse\u2019s version, using a single wire, was better. Moreover, Morse went on to invent a binary digital alphabet to use on the telegraph \u2013 Morse code. Like so many inventors he then spent years defending his priority, fighting no fewer than fifteen court actions over his patents: \u2018I have been so constantly under the necessity of watching the movements of the most unprincipled set of pirates I have ever known, that all my time has been occupied in defense, in putting evidence into something like legal shape that I am the inventor of the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph!\u2019 he cried in 1848. He achieved final vindication in the Supreme Court only in 1854.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Surprisingly, he has an entire section on general criticism of all the modern intellectual monopolies. Very refreshing for a history book written by a conservative politician<\/a>.<\/p>\n

An amusing story from the UK concerning the construction of sewers:<\/p>\n

During London\u2019s cholera epidemic of 1854, chloride of lime was used so liberally in Soho that, as one magazine reported, \u2018The puddles are white and milky with it, the stones are smeared with it; great splashes of it lie about in the gutters, and the air is redolent with its strong and not very agreeable odour.\u2019<\/p>\n

At the time of that London epidemic, Dr John Snow was trying, largely in vain, to persuade the authorities that cholera was caused by dirty water, not smelly air \u2013 the \u2018miasma\u2019 theory then in vogue. He had shown that those getting their water supplies from the Thames estuary were far more likely to catch cholera than those getting their supply from rural streams, and he famously removed the handle from a water pump in Broad Street in Soho around which a cluster of cholera cases had developed.<\/p>\n

But he was widely ignored, and chlorine was being spread in the streets for the wrong reason: to combat the supposedly dangerous smell, not to kill water-borne germs. In the \u2018great stink\u2019 of 1858, when parliamentarians were so disgusted by the smell from the River Thames that they at last authorized the construction of modern sewers to carry the sewage out to sea, chloride of lime was applied to window blinds in Parliament to mask the smell.<\/p>\n

So the source of the invention of chlorination, like that of vaccination, is enigmatic and confused. Only in retrospect can it be seen as a disruptive and successful innovation that saved millions of lives. It evolved rather slowly, probably from serendipitous beginnings in largely mistaken ideas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Us moderns find it extraordinarily hard to believe how disgusting cities used to be. It is not a coincidence that old shoes tend to have relatively high heels, male shoes included. This is because people used to literally walk around in shit in the streets (from horses mainly, as there were no cars or bikes yet). Only apparently these foul smells reaching parliament could finally convince Parliament to fund the creation of sewers. Granted, primitive sewers have been around for thousands of years in a variety of civilizations<\/a>, but not in the modern style for modern urban density.<\/p>\n

On medicine and antibiotics:<\/p>\n

\n

Fifty years after Pasteur\u2019s summer holiday led to a fortuitous insight into the mode of action of vaccination, summer holidays would produce another piece of serendipity in the conquest of disease. Alexander Fleming left his laboratory in London to spend August 1928 in Suffolk. The weather that summer in London was changeable: cool in much of June, then suddenly rather hot in July, the temperature reaching a stifling 30\u00baC on the 15th, before cooling dramatically in early August, then heating up again after 10 August. This is of relevance because it affected the growth of the\u00a0Staphylococcus aureus<\/i>\u00a0bacteria that Fleming was growing in petri dishes as he prepared a chapter for a book on bacteria. Though he was an expert on the species, he wanted to check some of his facts. The cold spell of early August was just right for the growth of a mould, of the fungus\u00a0Penicillium<\/i>, a spore of which had somehow floated into the laboratory on the wind and landed on one of the petri dishes. The hot spell that followed allowed the bacterial culture to expand, leaving only a gap around the\u00a0Penicillium<\/i>, where the mould had killed the staphylococci. It created a striking pattern, as if the two species were allergic to each other. Had the weather been different this pattern might not have been possible, because penicillin is not effective against mature bacteria of this species.<\/p>\n

Fleming, a diminutive and taciturn Scot, returned from holiday on 3 September and \u2013 as was his habit \u2013 began inspecting the cultures he had left behind in the petri dishes cluttered into an enamel tray, before discarding them. A former colleague, Merlin Pryce, put his head around the door and Fleming engaged him in conversation as he worked. \u2018That\u2019s funny,\u2019 he said when he picked up the plate with the pattern of exclusion between the fungus and the bacterium. Was the fungus producing a substance that killed bacteria? Fleming was immediately intrigued and saved both the plate and a sample of the fungus.<\/p>\n

Yet it was to be more than twelve years before anybody turned this discovery into a practical cure for diseases. Part of the problem was the success of vaccination. Fleming\u2019s career had been largely under the influence of a great pioneer of bacteriology, Sir Almroth Wright, who was convinced that diseases would never be cured by medications, however effective, but by assisting the body to defend itself. Vaccination should be used to treat, as well as prevent disease.<\/p>\n

Wright, the son of an Irish father and a Swedish mother, was a towering figure, outspoken, eloquent and irascible. Among colleagues he was known as \u2018the Praed Street Philosopher\u2019, \u2018the Paddington Plato\u2019 or more mischievously Sir Almost Right or Sir Always Wrong. \u2018Stimulate the phagocytes!\u2019 was Wright\u2019s battle cry, immortalized in Bernard Shaw\u2019s play\u00a0The Doctor\u2019s Dilemma<\/i>, in which Sir Colenso Ridgeon is a thinly disguised depiction of Wright. St Mary\u2019s Hospital, where Wright and Fleming worked, became the high temple of vaccine therapy. Wright\u2019s championing of typhoid vaccination for the Allied troops in the First World War probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives.<\/p>\n

Influenced by Wright, Fleming\u2019s scepticism that a chemical could ever be found to cure infections was reinforced by his experiences researching the causes of infection in wounds during the First World War. He and Wright were stationed in a casino in Boulogne, which they turned into a bacteriological laboratory, the better to understand how to save lives. Here Fleming showed, using test tubes deformed to resemble jagged wounds, that antiseptics like carbolic acid were counterproductive, because they killed the body\u2019s own white blood cells without reaching the gangrene-causing bacteria deep in the crevices of the wounds. Instead, Fleming and Wright argued, wounds should be cleaned with saline solution. It was an important discovery, and one that doctors treating the wounded almost completely ignored, because it felt all wrong not to dress wounds with antiseptics.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These kind of delays are the norm in history. It is not immediately obvious what to do with some new finding, and often various preconceived notions kept back progress. In this case, probably only a few people knew about this discovery, so if these people were unwilling or incapable of seeing the applications, then innovation would simply wait until someone else comes along. By the way, antiseptics are still commonly used and recommended by typical household advice (e.g. Chlorhexidine), but medical evidence is rather against it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On steam engine ship propulsion:<\/p>\n

\n

By one of those remarkable coincidences, just six weeks later, also in London, a Swedish engineer by the name of\u00a0John Ericsson, who did not know Smith, also took out a patent for a similar device. Smith was already building a full-scale boat, of 10 tonnes, with a 6-horsepower engine, with the help of an engineer named Thomas Pilgrim. The boat was launched into the Paddington canal in November 1836 and immediately suffered a lucky accident. The screw that Smith had built was like a wooden corkscrew wrapped around a wooden shaft, with two complete turns of the screw along its length. A collision knocked one turn of the screw off, after which the boat went much faster, an unexpected discovery related to turbulence and drag. The next year Smith redesigned the propeller in metal with a single turn of screw and the boat went out to sea and round the Kent coast and back, proving its worth in rough weather. Ericsson\u2019s version had two drums, rather than a narrow shaft, with screws revolving in opposite directions, an adaptation that was largely unnecessary until the development of the torpedo.<\/p>\n

Like most inventors, Smith struggled to be taken seriously. The Admiralty asked for a demonstration with a larger vessel, capable of at least 5 knots, before it would consider trying the technology. Smith formed a company, built a 237-ton ship called the\u00a0Archimedes<\/i>, fitted it with an 80-horsepower steam engine, and in October 1839 successfully took on the\u00a0Widgeon<\/i>\u00a0at Dover and the\u00a0Vulcan<\/i>\u00a0at Portsmouth, two of the Navy\u2019s fastest paddle steamers. Still the admirals demurred, while the\u00a0Archimedes<\/i>\u00a0shuttled around Europe showing off. Eventually in 1841 the Admiralty commissioned a screw ship,\u00a0Rattler<\/i>, launched in 1843 and in service the following year. In 1845\u00a0Rattler<\/i>\u00a0was pitted against a paddle steamer of similar weight and horsepower,\u00a0Alecto<\/i>, in a tug of war, the two ships being attached by a\u00a0line astern.\u00a0Alecto<\/i>\u00a0was humiliatingly dragged backwards at 2 knots.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in America, Ericsson had built a series of ships, including the\u00a0Princeton<\/i>\u00a0for the US Navy. France had launched the screw-driven\u00a0Napol\u00e9on<\/i>. The world\u2019s navies switched to screws almost overnight. Innovation continued, though, and the design of the screw evolved radically as the years went by, and as the understanding of turbulence and drag improved. The blade shape eventually became narrow near the shaft, wide further out, then tapering to a rounded end.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There is even a picture (lithograph) of this:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If you watch old movies with river boats (e.g. American civil war), you often see paddle steamers (big round wheel near water level) but later they disappear and underwater propellers are used instead.<\/p>\n

On internal combustion engines (ICE):<\/p>\n

\n

The story of the internal-combustion engine displays the usual features of an innovation: a long and deep prehistory characterized by failure; a shorter period marked by an improvement in affordability characterized by simultaneous patenting and rivalries; and a subsequent story of evolutionary improvement by trial and error. In 1807 a Franco-Swiss artillery officer not only patented but built a machine that could use explosions to generate movement. Isaac de Rivaz built a wheeled \u2018charette\u2019 on which was mounted a vertical cylinder in which hydrogen and oxygen were mixed and exploded by spark ignition: the weight of the descending cylinder drove the charette forward through a system of pulleys, before the explosions sent the piston back up again. It worked, just, as did a much bigger version built seven years later, but could not hope to compete with the steam locomotive.<\/p>\n

In 1860, the year after the first oil well was sunk in Pennsylvania, Jean Joseph \u00c9tienne Lenoir patented a design for an internal-combustion engine running on petroleum and by 1863 he had built one that trundled very slowly for nine kilometres in three hours outside Paris. Called the hippomobile, it was a cart mounted on a tricycle. Its extremely wasteful inefficiency derived mainly from the fact that there was no compression of the air in the cylinder.<\/p>\n

Two failures then. External combustion, to make steam, remained dominant for transport and would surely soon conquer the roads as well the rails. By the 1880s firms were springing up all over America and Europe to manufacture and sell steam cars, and as the new century dawned the main threat to the dominance of steam in the motor market would seem to be from new-fangled electric cars. The Stanley Steamer, marketed first in 1896 was the best-seller and set a world speed record of 127 mph ten years later. Yet within a few years, the underdog that was the internal-combustion engine had defied the experts and conquered all. Steam cars and electric cars were consigned to history.<\/p>\n

The central invention behind internal combustion was the Otto cycle of compression and ignition, a four-stroke dance: fuel and air enter the cylinder (1), the piston compresses the mixture (2); ignition drives the power stroke (3) and the gases are exhausted by the piston (4). Nikolaus Otto, a grocery salesman, came up with this design in 1876 after sixteen years of trying to improve on Lenoir\u2019s engine. He had enough success along the way to make and sell stationary engines and to expand his firm, which became Deutz \u2013 still a leading engine maker.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’ve had not heard of steam\u00a0cars<\/em><\/a> before reading this book, but they were apparently a thing:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

They look about the same as same age ICE cars though, but it’s hard to imagine a steam car going ~150 km\/h. It is also interesting that electric cars is an old<\/em> thing that has come back due to technological improvements. This seems generally rare. I don’t see new breeds of horses are going to make us switch back to horse transport, nor new quality CRT monitors. Once a newer technology takes over, it stays that way until something better is invented. Nuclear power is another such reversion in some countries, but only due to profound irrationality, e.g. German vs. Chinese electricity production<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The current German chancellor, Merz, says German’s exit was a mistake<\/a>, but they are probably incapable of building new ones given the absurd regulations.<\/p>\n

On fertilizers:<\/p>\n

\n

In 1843 a field called Broadbalk was set aside at Rothamsted in Hertfordshire to demonstrate the effect of fertilizer. One strip of the field has been planted every year since then with winter wheat and with no fertilizer of any kind. It became a tired and desolate sight, yielding less and less grain, till by 1925 it was able to produce less than half a tonne from every hectare, a small fraction of that which could be harvested from a part of the field that received farmyard manure or nitrate fertilizer. After 1925 fallow was introduced into the rotation, so that the land could recover some nitrogen from wild clover every other year. Yield rose on the untreated strip but only to modest levels. The lesson for humanity is obvious: without a continuous input of nitrogen, from crops grown elsewhere or at other times and perhaps fed to cattle or people first and turned into manure, farming cannot feed people sustainably.<\/p>\n

During the nineteenth century this did not matter all that much. The plough marched west into the prairies, east into the steppes and south into the pampas and the outback, breaking virgin soil that had been denuded of its wild grazing herds and its native people, and unleashing its fertile potential. More land fed more mouths. That the land soon became exhausted unless replenished by manure or\u00a0clover mattered, but there was always new land to break. Westward Ho!<\/p>\n

It did not help that there was a competing demand for nitrogen. Kings and conquerors also coveted ionized nitrogen (not that they knew it as such), with which to make gunpowder and wage war. In 1626, for instance, King Charles I of England ordered his subjects to \u2018carefully and constantly keep and preserve in some convenient vessels or receptacles fit for the purpose, all the urine of man during the whole year, and all the stale of beasts which they can save\u2019, and with this to make saltpetre, the basic ingredient of gunpowder.<\/strong> Farmers all over the world were forced to make saltpetre from manure and pay it as a tax, to support the monopoly on violence claimed by their rulers, thus depriving their fields of a source of fertilizer. One of the motives for the British conquest of Bengal was to gain access to the rich saltpetre deposits at the mouth of the Ganges.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Please collect and send all your urine! Imagine a modern state making such requirements. Modern garbage sorting is in the same direction of requiring citizens to sort and give up certain kinds of waste products, but at least not this gross.<\/p>\n

Innovation is kind of like natural selection:<\/p>\n

\n

Every technology is a combination of other technologies; every idea a combination of other ideas. As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee put it: \u2018Google self-driving cars, Waze, Web, Facebook, Instagram are simple combinations of existing technology.\u2019 But the point is true more generally. Brian Arthur was the first to insist on this point in his 2009 book\u00a0The Nature of Technology: What It is and How It Evolves<\/i>. He argued that \u2018novel technologies arise by combination of existing technologies and that (therefore) existing technologies beget further technologies.\u2019 I defy the reader to find a technological (as opposed to a natural) object in his or her pocket or bag that is not a combination of technologies and of ideas. Looking at my desk as I write I see a mug, a pencil, some paper, a telephone and so on. The mug is perhaps the simplest object but even it is glazed ceramic with a printed logo and combines the ideas of baking clay, glazing, printing, adding a handle and holding tea or coffee in a receptacle.<\/p>\n

Recombination is the principal source of variation upon which natural selection draws when innovating biologically. Sex is the means by which most recombination happens. A male presents half his genes to an embryo and so does a female. That is a form of recombination, but what happens next is even more momentous. That embryo, when it comes to make sperm and egg cells, swaps bits of\u00a0the father\u2019s genome with bits of the mother\u2019s in a process known as crossing over. It shuffles the genetic deck, creating new combinations to pass on to the next generation. Sex makes evolution cumulative and allows creatures to share good ideas.<\/p>\n

The parallel with human innovation could not be clearer. Innovation happens, as I put it a decade ago, when ideas have sex. It occurs where people meet and exchange goods, services and thoughts. This explains why innovation happens in places where trade and exchange are frequent and not in isolated or underpopulated places: California rather than North Korea, Renaissance Italy rather than Tierra del Fuego. It explains why China lost its innovative edge when it turned its back on trade under the Ming emperors. It explains the bursts of innovation that coincide with increases in trade, in Amsterdam in the 1600s or Phoenicia 3,000 years earlier.<\/p>\n

The fact that fishing tackle in the Pacific was more diverse on islands with more trading contacts, or that Tasmanians lost out on innovation when isolated by rising sea levels, shows the intimate, mandatory connection between trade and the development of novelty. This explains too why innovation started in the first place. The burst of technology that began in dense populations exploiting rich, marine ecosystems in southern Africa more than 100,000 years ago was caused by the fact that \u2013 for whatever reason \u2013 people had begun exchanging and specializing in a way that\u00a0Homo erectus<\/i>\u00a0and even Neanderthals never did. It is a really simple idea, and one that anthropologists have been slow to grasp.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Ideas (memes) ‘recombine’ (mix) in various ways and almost all technology is some mixture of prior ones (the first being simple improvements on natural objects, e.g. flint ‘knives’).<\/p>\n

On government innovation efforts:<\/p>\n

\n

The economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that \u2018any policy objective aimed deliberately at promoting long-run economic growth would be hard to document in Britain before and during the Industrial Revolution\u2019. It would be strange to argue that innovation could happen without state direction in the nineteenth century, but only with it in the twentieth.<\/p>\n

The same is true of America, which became the most advanced and innovative country in the world in the early decades of the twentieth century without significant public subsidy for research and development of any kind before 1940. The few exceptions tend to confirm the rule: for example, the government heavily subsidized Samuel Langley\u2019s spectacular failure to make a powered plane, while wholly neglecting the Wright brothers\u2019 spectacular success, even after they had proved their point.<\/p>\n

In a parallel case, some years later, in 1924 Britain\u2019s new Labour government decided it needed to design and build airships that could cross oceans, a feat that was at that time considered beyond the reach of conventional heavier-than-air planes carrying passengers. Experts urged the government to give the contracts to private firms, but, being socialist, they resisted and eventually decided to run a controlled experiment of two different approaches: a privately funded R100 built by Vickers, and a publicly funded R101 built by the government. Mission-oriented innovation indeed. The result was unambiguous. The R100 was lighter, faster and ready sooner. It flew to Canada and back in the summer of 1930 without mishap. The R101 was late, extravagant, over-engineered, underpowered, plagued by gas leaks and hastily redesigned at the last minute to give it more lift. On its maiden flight to India, in October 1930, carrying the air minister, it got as far as northern France and crashed, killing forty-eight of the fifty-four people on board, including the minister. A plaque records to this day where the forty-eight bodies lay in state in Westminster Hall. Neville Shute, later a novelist, who was an engineer in the R100 programme, was scathing in his book The Slide Rule<\/i> about the failures of the nationalized project: \u2018I was thirty-one years old at the time of the R101 disaster, and my first close contact with senior civil servants and politicians at work was in the field of airships, where I watched them produce disaster.\u2019<\/p>\n

In the second half of the twentieth century, the state did become a sponsor of innovation on a large scale, but that is hardly surprising given that it went from spending 10 per cent of national income to 40 per cent in almost all Western countries. As Mingardi put it: \u2018With such extraordinary growth, it is improbable that public spending wouldn\u2019t end up in the neighborhood of innovation-producing business at one point or another.\u2019 So it is not a matter of whether the state has caused some innovation. The question is whether it is better at doing so than other actors, and whether it does so in a directed fashion. I have shown in this book that many of the technologies that the nation state gave a push to during the Second World War \u2013 computing, antibiotics, radar, even nuclear fission \u2013 originated in peacetime and would probably have developed just as fast if war had not broken out, maybe faster, with the probable exception of fission.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There’s a photo:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

On technological unemployment:<\/p>\n

\n

The fear that innovation destroys jobs has a long history, dating back to General Ludd and Captain Swing in the early 1800s. In 1812 the Luddites went about smashing stocking frames in protest at the introduction of new machinery into the textile industry, taking their inspiration and their name from a probably apocryphal story of one Ned Ludd who had supposedly done the same back in 1779. In 1830, in a protest at conditions in the farming industry, rioting\u00a0labourers began burning hay ricks and smashing threshing machines, under a mythical leader named Captain Swing. This too was a protest at the effect of machines on livelihoods. The economist David Ricardo became \u2018convinced that the substitution of machinery for human labour is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers\u2019. Yet far from leading to widespread rural misery, the advent of machinery saw farm workers\u2019 wages generally increase and the surplus manpower rapidly taken up by jobs in the towns to supply goods to people with more disposable income.<\/p>\n

The idea of technology causing unemployment did not go away. John Maynard Keynes worried in 1930 that \u2018the increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption\u2019. In 1960 a recession caused a rise in unemployment in America, and\u00a0Time<\/i>\u00a0magazine reported that \u2018many a labor expert tends to put much of the blame on automation\u2019 and it would get worse: \u2018what worries many job experts more is that automation may prevent the economy from creating enough new jobs.\u2019 By 1964 President Lyndon Johnson had created a National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress to investigate whether innovation would destroy work. By the time it reported in February 1966, American unemployment had fallen back to just 3.8 per cent. None the less, the commission recommended drastic action to share out the remaining work fairly, including a guaranteed minimum income and the government as employer of last resort, because of the \u2018potentially unlimited output by systems of machines which will require little co-operation from human beings\u2019.<\/p>\n

In short, the idea that innovation destroys jobs comes around in every generation. So far it has proved wrong. Over\u00a0the past two centuries productivity in agriculture dramatically increased, but farm workers moved to cities and got jobs in manufacturing. Then productivity in manufacturing rocketed upwards, freeing huge numbers of people to work in services, yet still there was no sign of mass unemployment. Candles were replaced by electric lights, but wick trimmers found other work. Millions of women joined the paid workforce, at least partly as a result of innovation in washing machines and vacuum cleaners, which freed them from much household drudgery, yet employment rates went up not down. In 2011 President Obama used the bank teller as an example of a job that has disappeared because of cash machines. He was wrong: there are more tellers employed today than before cash machines were introduced, and their jobs are more interesting than just counting out cash. On the day I write this, the percentage of working-age people in paid employment in Britain has just reached a record high of 76.1 per cent.<\/p>\n

Today, it is innovation in artificial intelligence that supposedly threatens to put many people out of work. This time is different, say many. This time, it is the cognitive skills of the machines, rather than their brute force, that rival those of people, leaving workers nowhere to go. By this you mean, I sometimes reply to academics or politicians who make this case, that it is intellectuals like you \u2013 and lawyers and doctors \u2013 who are now threatened, not just farm labourers, housewives or factory workers. There is a degree of special pleading going on here.<\/p>\n

One especially influential study, by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, published in 2013, came to the conclusion that 47 per cent of all jobs in America are at \u2018high risk\u2019 of automation within a \u2018decade or two\u2019. However, the\u00a0OECD re-examined the issue, used a more appropriate database and concluded that a much less frightening 9 per cent of jobs were at risk of disappearing because of automation, and even these would be accompanied by expanding employment in other occupations. But the scary scenarios are often popular with politicians and journalists. As the economist J. R. Shackleton observes: \u2018technophobic panic is already tempting policy-makers to consider untested policies that are often being pushed by political activists for reasons which have little to do with a threat to existing jobs.\u2019 A recent survey found that 82 per cent of Americans think that over the next thirty years robots and computers will \u2018probably or definitely do most of the work done by humans\u2019 but that only 37 per cent think they will do \u2018the type of work I do\u2019: a big contradiction there.<\/p>\n

The truth is, there is nothing unusually fast, or sweeping or threatening about innovation today, as it affects work. After all, as Adam Smith pointed out, the purpose of production is consumption; the purpose of work is to earn enough to get the things you want. Enhanced productivity means enhanced ability to acquire the goods and services you need, and therefore enhanced demand for the work of those that supply them. It is only the high productivity, and therefore high spending power, of the average modern worker that keeps restaurant chefs and pet vets and software experts and personal trainers and homeopaths in business.<\/p>\n

Innovation also creates wholly new kinds of jobs. Most of the jobs that people do today would sound utterly baffling to a Victorian. What is software, or a call centre, or a flight attendant? Innovation frees people to do the things they really value. Instead of digging and weeding your\u00a0vegetable patch to avoid starvation, you can choose to go out to work and buy veg from a shop. That is made possible by high productivity at your work. Walter Isaacson concludes that: \u2018Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for past ages.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The historical prior is that humans are adaptive and while new technologies remove some jobs (e.g. icemen removed by refrigerators<\/a>), other jobs are created instead (cooling technicians, or just elsewhere in unrelated sectors). AI is different though because it automates humans themselves. If and when we succeed in making humanoid robots with humanoid general intelligence, humans will be permanently unemployable except for niche jobs, in the same way as horses are. The old CGPGrey video is still the best thing to watch on this.<\/p>\n