Klaus Schwab Quotes

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has the potential to empower individuals and communities, as it creates new opportunities for economic, social, and personal development. But it also could lead to the marginalization of some groups, exacerbate inequality, create new security risks, and undermine human relationships.

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.

One thing I want to do is get Silicon Valley to think harder about those who have been left behind by the technology revolution. It has created huge winners for those who are able to understand it and are adept at it. But it has also displaced a tremendous number of jobs.

I see three forces militating in favor of growing inequality: increasing measurement of worker value added, automation through smart software, and globalization.

I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!

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.

This is an anxiety driven world - the whole world is driven by anxiety. It is anxiety about the aftermath of the global financial crisis; it's anxiety about inequality and about computers replacing jobs.

Stark inequality, poverty, and unemployment are driving increased social unrest and, consequently, social and economic risk. Environmental deterioration may well intensify social inequality.

I grew up in the Middle East, and I worry that AI increases the socioeconomic divide as opposed to closing the gap.

And a revolution of automation finds machines replacing men in the mines and mills of America, without replacing their incomes or their training or their needs to pay the family doctor, grocer and landlord.

The Negro is trying to enter a social community and a tradition of work-and-income which are in the process of vanishing even for the hitherto privileged white worker Jobs are disappearing under the impact of highly efficient, progressively less costly machines.

Technology produces a new division of haves and have nots.

We have come to the point where a new machine invented in England deprives millions of Chinese workers of their livelihood within a year's time.

The root of the worker’s resistance to technological change is the conflict between labor as a commodity and labor as a resource. Increased productivity imposes upon the worker a risk of obsolescence.

Displacement by technology has probably occurred since the invention of the shovel.

In Victorian England, laborers were pushed off the farms, replaced by steam power.

The great question, however, for the poor man is, or shortly will be, that of escape from competition with labor-saving machinery

For most of history, the prime source of human insecurity was nature. Capitalist societies have been oriented toward innovation and dynamism, to the creation of new knowledge, new products, and new modes of production and distribution. All this has shifted the locus of insecurity from nature to the economy.

Suppose, … that the making of the new machinery affords employment to a greater number of mechanics, can that be called compensation to the carpet makers, thrown on the streets?

You are exacerbating inequality rather than opening up opportunity.

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.

If our institutions can’t build consensus and respond to the demand of Americans for jobs today, how will we ever do it in a time when artificial intelligence and robotics kick in and five times that number of jobs disappear twice as fast?

Think back to the time when Agriculture was not labor efficient. We have lost all these jobs. But I don't think anyone is too sad about it.

I see tech as... a force that is changing pretty much all parts of our society. It's really sad for me that we don't have enough women that are part of that.