 First is to tell us a bit about your new work on Rise of the Robots and also do you view this as a description of what's happening already or a prediction for the future? And second, tell us how to fix graduate education in economics. The floor is yours. We'll also learn something about your priorities. Okay. So, robots. It may be the same answer for you. Very quick. Yeah, robots could teach our classes, too. Very quick on robots. Fascinating. I'm a, you know, I'm a technophile and a techno-believer and I do believe that we are in a very rapid ascent of information technology and I believe that it is displacing lots of jobs and that it is one of the reasons for the low wages, the stagnation of real earnings in the economy because the path of manufacturing employment which we talked about has shrunk considerably, chronically. More will come. It will also spread through the service economy as well. You don't need baristas in Starbucks. We will walk in soon to a Starbucks and our iris will be scanned and your default mode of mocha latte vente will come out automatically of a machine and you'll take it out the other door. They'll predict which days you're going to come, even, right? Pardon me? They'll predict which days you're going to come. Yeah, they'll have a very good idea. They'll welcome you by name, of course, as you arrive but we were expecting you are ten minutes late. Is everything okay, Mr. Saxon? And because Google will know where you are any moment anyway. So that's coming and it will transform fundamentally the labor market. Now, the interesting conceptual question is, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Now, as economists, we should say instinctively it's a great thing. Are you kidding? We can have the robots do all the work for us and I believe that's what we've hoped for ever since leaving Eden when we were condemned to work in the fields ten thousand years ago in the Neolithic Revolution. We've been trying to escape heavy labor and if the robots will do it, fantastic. But there is this actually deep conceptual question which is what is it? There is something right, actually, theoretically about the argument that the demand for labor falls, the wages decline and that can actually lead to a downward spiral in our economies. And so I have a paper from last year with Larry Kotlokov showing how that works. I have another paper coming out in a couple of weeks that I really like showing in an overlapping generations context how you can get weird outcomes. But what's always true is that with enough government intervention, redistribution of various kinds from old to young, for example, from capital owners to labor owners, of course you can make everybody better off because of pure technological change by definition if properly handled can make everybody better off. So this question of how we're going to handle this transition is a really interesting one. I believe it's happening. I believe it's a fascinating subject for analysis and research and I believe it's not been studied in very much depth yet. And that leads me to the second question because it is a good segue. What do we learn in economics? And I believe not the right things. And I'll take just this question. In my view, whether it's the geography questions or the manufacturing question that you asked about or the robotics or whatever it is, what's fascinating for us in our real lives and in our societal choices is the change that we're constantly living in during this past 230 years since Watt gave us the steam engine and we've been in 230 years of relentless change. Technological change, structural change, societal change, cultural change and yet our economics models are basically static, meant to be timeless and if we really want to understand the world we need to go deep into understanding what Baxter is doing or how Watson were Baxter the robot or Watson or what really is changing technologically. But concretely at the graduate level what would you do with them? So economics, we avoid that I think conceptually because if you study anything too specific it's out of date in 10 years. So we study general principles. I think that's epistemologically the weakness of our field because we want to be the four underlying natural forces of the social universe rather than studying specifics. So more like the anthropologists. No, more like the biologists. So if Watson and Crick had written their 1953 paper saying assume and base pairs and they can match by n times n minus 1 over 2 combinations it wouldn't be a very good model of DNA but they actually said there are four base pairs and there are two natural matchings and it happens to be a double helix and we're going to study the detail out of that for the next 40 years. Yeah, it's arbitrary, you know there could be other DNA but we're going to study this one. Now economists don't do that because we have a harder job actually in some sense which is that we're not studying a stable environment we're studying a changing environment so whatever we study in depth will be out of date we're looking at a moving target. To compensate for that by never getting into detail has been our approach but we're always behind the curve then we never have good answers when they're needed and that's what I would like us to study I would like economists to be working with engineers to be working with public health to be working with the medical professionals so that we're actually working on the real systems of our time and adding our pieces to that understanding and studying that so that we have an answer to robotics not a pure theoretical model which is nice and fun but something that can be helpful.