Alexis Ohanian Quotes

I want to push technology boundaries to be more efficient.

I have all the tools and gadgets. I tell my son, who's a producer, 'You never work for the machine; the machine works for you.'

Technology has made it a lot easier to be productive. It's incredibly helpful to be able to get little bits of information quickly.

I would love to have access to a company like Caterpillar. I would make all their stuff remote controlled and work ten times as fast.

I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

For most purposes, a man with a machine is better than a man without a machine.

The human species is often amazingly inventive and industrious but at the same time profoundly lazy. It's very clear that we humans don't like to work. This aversion to work is so extreme - and our ingenuity so acute - that we're eager to devote countless hours designing and building devices that might shave a few minutes off our workday

Productivity depends on many factors, including our workforce's knowledge and skills and the quantity and quality of the capital, technology, and infrastructure that they have to work with.

I want to be a machine.

Every man must admit that by means of instruments and machines the labourer can execute tasks he could not possibly perform without them; that he can perform a greater quantity of work in a given time, and that he can perform the work with greater nicety and accuracy than he could possibly do had he no instruments and machines.

Read the story of the new invention for picking cotton. It may not be perfect yet, it may not work so well in hilly country as on the plains, but it is just a question of time before it is improved. More men and women out of work. Unless we have sense enough to sit down and discuss how to use this new invention and many others, so as to bring happiness, comfort and leisure to human beings and not unemployment, starvation and despair, then we deserve the hard times which surely will come our way.

… industry is at present producing as much as it did in 1929. [before the Great Depression] Ordinarily this would mean work for everybody, but since the depression, ten million dollars have been spent in modernizing these particular plants with the result that they are now using ten thousand fewer men than in 1929. Two million dollars more is to be spent shortly on further modernization, and much of the heavy work done in the past by men and skilled men, many of them, will be done by machinery. College and high school boys, who stand on a balcony somewhere and press buttons are preferred for this work today, and four men will do the work of one hundred men before long!

… increased industrial efficiency makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with less labor

How do we judge whether technology is making us more productive, or just lazy and impatient?

We only invest in businesses that reduce labor.

Every business has to figure out how to make itself more efficient. They've got to use technology. They've got to use the Internet, things like that. We can do the same thing with our state colleges.

Technology improves our lives in so many ways - from our toasters, ovens, and refrigerators at home to our computers, fax machines, and BlackBerrys at work. Technology makes once-burdensome tasks easy and fun.

There's a fine line between something saving you time and replacing a bit of you that could be useful. I've certainly become more and more aware of that.

I wanted to automate any part of my life that I could. And the over-the-top solutions are more fun than the useful ones.

I'm always trying to think of ways to make something more efficient. If I have to do something once, that's fine. If I have to do it twice, I'm kind of annoyed. And if I have to do it three times, I'm going to try to automate it.

Software is the language of automation.

I like modern efficiencies and functionality.

If technology can remove some of the labour-intensive tasks where the computer can do better than the human eye; that helps.

Pretty much all of my inventions come about the same way. I have an everyday problem or something that I'm too lazy to do, so I make a machine that does it for me.

At its best, technology can empower people in extraordinary ways.