David Autor Quotes

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

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.'

A new era of production has begun. It's principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural. The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the self-regulating machine. This results in a system of almost unlimited capacity which requires progressively less human labor. Cybernation is already reorganizing the economic and social system to meet its own needs .... As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated [to their work] governmental measures—unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments.

In the long term, artificial intelligence and automation are going to be taking over so much of what gives humans a feeling of purpose.

The last 200 years, we've had an incredible amount of automation. We have tractors that do the work that horses and people used to do on farms. We don't dig ditches by hand anymore. We don't pound tools out of wrought iron. We don't do bookkeeping with books! But this has not, in net, reduced the amount of employment.

I think automation will eliminate certain types of jobs - lower income, lower-skilled jobs in manufacturing. But nobody knows whether it's going to change the job basket of the 21st century, or be net positive, or net negative.

In many cases, jobs that used to be done by people are going to be able to be done through automation. I don't have an answer to that. That's one of the more perplexing problems of society.

Pretty soon we'll have robots in our society, you're going to have a lot of automated processes that used to be done by people - this is happening. Society and technology is changing so fast, and the impact of the change on society and technology is global, not local.

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?'

Are those 'terrible' machines really putting those people out of work? Or are they getting rid of a really dull job that we shouldn't be torturing people with?

I think a lot of people will be liberated from a lot of oppressive manufacturing jobs, or a lot of service jobs, because they'll be done by computers. There'll be the world's best education available online and free.

Accountants, machinists, medical technicians, even software writers that write the software for 'machines' are being displaced without upscaled replacement jobs. Retrain, rehire into higher paying and value-added jobs? That may be the political myth of the modern era. There aren't enough of those 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.

We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.

It [the government] has failed to make the proper adjustments so that the invention of NEW MACHINERY instead of throwing workers out of employment, will only shorten the hours of work for all labor.

If you step back and look at technology from every era, it has displaced jobs but also created a lot of jobs.

Technology's always taken jobs out of the system, and what you hope is that technology's going to put those jobs back in, too. That's what we call productivity.

The promise of artificial intelligence and computer science generally vastly outweighs the impact it could have on some jobs in the same way that, while the invention of the airplane negatively affected the railroad industry, it opened a much wider door to human progress.

Job displacement is so huge, I'm tempted to not talk about anything other than that.

Technology is advancing at breakneck speed, upending old ways of doing business and resetting the social contract between employers and employees.

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.

Employees have been worrying about the rising tide of automation for 200 years now, and for 200 years employers have been assuring them that new jobs will naturally materialize to take their place.

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

Automation will significantly change many people's lives in ways that may be painful and enduring.