E. F. Schumacher Quotes

There was a Gallup poll that said something like 70 percent of people in the United States do not enjoy their job - they work to put food on the table and get insurance to survive. So, what happens when technology can do all that work for us and allow us to actually do what we enjoy with our time?

In history, in most cultures, and at most points in time, if you want to find the most advanced technologies, you can look principally in two places. One is weapons and the other is musical instruments. My hypothesis is that instruments are usually ahead of weapons. In fact, I think you can find many examples of instruments being predecessors of weapons and very few in the reverse.

I know many Europeans and I think many of them don't even believe me when I say that people in US don't have vacations. Obviously a lot of people do but there are many, tens of millions of people that don't and there's certainly no guarantee of a vacation. So paid time off is very valuable where people know they could get four or five weeks vacation, which is absolutely standard in Europe. Denmark has 6 weeks. So I think that's something that's very valuable, giving people time off.

I love to not work. I love to go to the movies, I like to travel... I think I work maybe half the year. Sometimes, people think I've done three films in a year, but it's because I did a participation [cameo?] in a film. But I work for half a year, no more.

I think that's actually what's missing from government, for the most part. We've got a lot of policy people, but we have no technologists, even though technology is such a big part of our lives. It's just amazing, because even these big Silicon Valley companies, the masters of the universe or whatever, haven't engaged with Washington until recently. They're still playing catch-up.

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.

We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.

In the year 2000 you're going to have a problem...Leisure time will be a problem in the year 2000. I just want you to realize, I just want to make sure that you know of it now.

I don't resent working long hours. I shouldn't- I'm the one who set up my life this way. I love to work. It's the thing that I get the most satisfaction out of-nd probably what I do best. Not that I don't enjoy days off. I love vacations and loafing around. But I think much of the world has the wrong idea of working. It's one of the good things in life. The feeling of accomplishment is more real and satisfying than finishing a good meal- or looking at one's accumulated wealth.

I think that laziness in many ways is the human condition, and that's what has led us to this place where, as we've developed technology.

We spend more time working for our labor-saving machines than they do working for us.

I think that most technology is positive in the short term, and negative in the long term. I wonder, if somebody looked back at the 20th and 21st centuries a thousand years from now, what their perception of the car would be. Or of television. I wonder if over time, they'll be seen as this thing that drove the culture, but ultimately had more downside than upside.

Nothing increases the number of jobs so rapidly as labor-saving machinery, because it releases wants theretofore unknown, by permitting leisure.

I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.

I think I'll be working a lot less as I get older

I'm not some anti-technology person. I think it's often how people would assume that if they don't know me.

There's this Indian fellow who worked out a cycle like the idea of stone-age, bronze-age, only he did it on an Indian one. The cycle goes from nothing until now and 20th century and then on and right around the cycle until the people are really grooving and then just sinks back into ignorance until it gets back into the beginning again. So the 20th century is a fraction of that cycle, and how many of those cycles has it done yet? It's done as many as you think and all these times it's been through exactly the same things, and it'll be this again.

The first reaction to trauma is denial, then comes anger and finally, acceptance. I think the US is still between denial and anger, and I hope we will reach acceptance because almost perversely, right now, only the US has the technology that is needed for global economic change.

I think technology is such that we can reach new heights but we need some of the basics of the pre-technological age. It's counter-productive to be able to type a hundred words a minute but not know what the words mean.

Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.

Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society.

I think in general technology always sort of makes some jobs less relevant, or perhaps, even obsolete, but I will say that the idea that sort of workers will find nothing else to do seems like it's way too pessimistic on the capabilities of everyone as human beings, right?

We are in the twentieth or the twenty-first century, but all the thinking, if you speak to one of those people keen on technology - you see that all their thinking is two centuries old. In cinema, you can show this.

Technology changing the world so quickly. I think it's even more difficult for older people to keep up in the world. And that's a challenge.

By the time of the Singularity, there won't be a distinction between humans and technology. This is not because humans will have become what we think of as machines today, but rather machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond. Technology will be the metaphorical opposable thumb that enables our next step in evolution.