Spreadsheet

What does a robot accountant look like? Not C-3PO, or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, I’d suggest. It looks more like a grid on a computer screen: the digital spreadsheet, a technology which took the world of accountancy by storm in the early 1980s and made countless accounting tasks effortless. We should all spend more time pondering the spreadsheet because, as Tim Harford explains, in that four-decade-old technology lies a glimpse of what automation is really likely to do to all of our jobs.

Producer: Ben Crighton
Editor: Richard Vadon