Robert Heilbroner Quotes
In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man.
See Eigen {633625} for a more explicit personal statement of the choice for the individual.
Robert Heilbroner, 1919-2005, Economist & Historian, The Future As History, 1960
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
He made this quotation in a discussion about nuclear weapons, but the principle is valid for many areas from the Internet to pharmaceuticals. In the nuclear weapons case there have been a number of accidents – including fatal ones – over the years and on several occasions a nuclear weapon came close to detonating near populated areas. In one case, radiation damage from a crash of a nuclear weapons equipped bomber have made an area in Spain unusable for years into the future.
Musk was one of the very few technilogical leaders who had great fear about the potential danger of artifical intelligence and thought that it should be regulated.
Technology has always displaced and replaced workers, but most industrial technological breakthroughs, in the long run, have created new jobs and better paid ones. What worried Gompers did not appear to materialize in his lifetime, but actually became and issue on the later years of the 20th century and the early 21st century where the computer the robot, and the sophisticated software began to replace workers at a faster rate than new opportunities were created. Gompers was one of the harbingers of things to come.
His 50 year prediction was a little too optimistic although a large percentage of the routine, and some non-routine, jobs had become automated especially in the automobile and other manufacturing arenas, and many other fields. But there were still some other jobs that were still being done without machines in 2014. Asimov was essentially right but a little early in his timing.
Computers, robots have replaced many more American workers than those who lost their jobs by having them replaced by foreign labor. Ironically, even in counties like China, South Korea, and a number of others, have "liost" millions of jobs to automation thenselves.
- Born: March 24, 1919
- Died: January 4, 2005
- Nationality: American
- Profession:
Robert L. Heilbroner was an American economist and historian of economic thought. The author of some 20 books, Heilbroner was best known for The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953), a survey of the lives and contributions of famous economists, notably Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.
