Robert J. Shiller Quotes

Most of the jobs that are going from the United States are not going to other countries; they are going to machines.

How will we deal with a world where leisure is abundant and there aren't enough good-paying jobs to go around? To meet this political and economic meta-challenge, the hot new idea is the universal basic income — using some of the wealth generated by all this new technology to guarantee everyone a baseline income, whether they are working or not.

The bottom line is that while automation is eliminating many jobs in the economy that were once done by people, there is no sign that the introduction of technologies in recent years is creating an equal number of well-paying jobs to compensate for those losses.

If you look at it from just a pure economic basis, technology is replacing all of the jobs robots can do, and machinery is replacing the jobs that humans once held. If we don't train our children to imagine, to create, they're going to be unemployable.

If you want to bring down the prices of healthcare and education, the answer will be more innovation, more technology, which will then have the effect of freaking everybody out and saying, 'Oh, my God, you're going to kill all the jobs.'

The introduction of machinery is turning into idleness thousands, faster than new industries are founded

Only in a minority of cases will workmen be able to recognize the technological change responsible for their dismissal. For this it would be necessary that machines be introduced in an existent plant under the eyes of the workmen and that dismissal be effected immediately after.

The result [of more rapidly adopting technology] is likely to be more unemployment in the short term and perhaps greater inequality—a recipe for social instability. Economists are right to remind us that workers who are displaced by machine intelligence need not be condemned to long-term idleness. Given the infinite variety of human desires, there is always more work to be done. But society will need to facilitate social structures that help employees face a lifetime of job changes.

The hollowing out of the middle class. That's not just about capitalism or the structure of taxation. That is also about the fundamental truth that machines can do a lot of things better than humans used to do. A lot of those people are being pushed down to do less value-adding jobs, so they get paid less money.

Advances in automation, artificial intelligence and robotics, while increasing productivity, will also cause major upheavals to the workforce.

Fear is the wrong response to technological unemployment. Focusing on economic flexibility and adaptability - with special attention to eliminating the barriers we've accidentally created to the mobility of the working classes - is the right response to technological disruption.

I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?

My biggest worry is that no one seems to notice that we are not going to stop the technical progress that is going to continue to displace people through automation.

I don't think that globalisation is anywhere near the threat that robots are.

Sooner or later, the U.S. will face mounting job losses due to advances in automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

What we can say with confidence is that the technological revolution is worsening inequality, due mostly to mechanisms that limit free markets. It is also bringing about disruptive change that is intensifying insecurity and may indeed lead to large-scale labor displacement.

With any previous transition we made with technology, it hasn't been the case that we need less people.

Ever since the first power looms put weavers out of work in the late 18th century, technology has increased productivity but threatened jobs for humans.

I don't think that all the coal miners - or even more realistically, say, the truck drivers whose jobs may be put out by self-driving cars and trucks - they're all going to go and become web designers and programmers.

We are in an electronic technology age now and it's about time we put away the old stuff.

Technology magnifies differences, and it's been replacing or obviating jobs for a long time. But what happens as that case accelerates? I'm not one of these doomsayers who says, 'There will be no jobs.'

The optimism that many felt in the 1960s over labour-saving technology is giving way to a fearful question: 'Will your labour be good for anything in the future? Or will you be replaced by a machine?'

As the TiVos and the Replays are coming into our world - and they're coming - it's better to - be inside the tent and figure out what they're doing and to work hand in hand with them as opposed to saying, 'You know what, the automobile is not going to work. I'm going to stick to my horse and carriage,' you know.

As hardware doubles its density every 18-24 months, courtesy of Moore's Law, and as software eats the world, technology will replace a broad swathe of jobs outright - from burger-flippers to diagnosticians - and atomize many others from full-time positions into gigs performed by many fungible workers. Tech, in short, will eat jobs.

The global equalization of wages and the exponential growth in technology has created a job-killing machine that's only going to get worse.