Retailing has gone from an information-scarce to an information-rich environment.

Before information age, living standards basically were flat. Since then, they've been growing 2 percent a year were about 30 times richer. So technology, machines is really, you know, arguably the most important thing that's happened to humanity in terms of our living standards. You could look to the introduction of digital computers in the 1950s.

Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny.

Computers get better faster than anything else ever.

The kind of job where you come in and work 9 to 5, and where someone tells you what to do all day is becoming scarcer and scarcer.

Technology is always creating jobs. It's always destroying jobs.

It's most useful to think about not jobs but tasks. And within any given job, there are lots of different tasks. If you're a radiologist maybe reading the images machines can be able to do that better, maybe making the broader diagnosis and communicating it to the patients.

Now comes the second machine age. Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power - the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments-what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power.