Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy

by Tim Harford

So perhaps, for a glimpse of the future, we should look not to Rosie the Robot but to another device now being used in warehouses—the Jennifer unit. It’s a headset that tells human workers what to do, down to the smallest detail; if you have to pick nineteen identical items from a shelf, it will tell you to pick five, then five, then five, then four . . . which leads to fewer errors than if you were told “Pick nineteen.”19 If robots beat humans at thinking, but humans beat robots at picking things off shelves, why not control a human body with a robot brain? It may not be a fulfilling career choice, but you can’t deny the logic.

By 1900, one of Thomas Edison’s carbon filament bulbs would provide you with ten days of bright, continuous illumination, a hundred times as bright as a candle, for the money you’d earn with our sixty-hour week of hard labor. By 1920, that same week of labor would pay for more than five months of continuous light from tungsten filament bulbs; by 1990, it was ten years. A couple of years after that, thanks to compact fluorescent bulbs, it was more than five times longer. The labor that had once produced the equivalent of fifty-four minutes of quality light now produced fifty-two years. And modern LED lights continue to get cheaper and cheaper. 6 Switch off a lightbulb for an hour and you’re saving illumination that would have cost our ancestors all week to create.

https://www.ft.com/content/da557b66-b09c-11e5-993b-c425a3d2b65a.