Norbert Wiener Quotes

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 world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders.

The automatic machine, whatever we thinkof any feelings it may or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of the slave.

The bottom line is there are lots of problems that were not created by government. The biggest one is loss of middle class incomes, loss of good-paying jobs which was created by technology and globalization. Above all, when you can move a job to China or India, it reduces wages.

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.

One of the objections most frequently urged against machinery is, that it has a tendency to supersede much of the handlabour which was previously employed; and in fact unless a machine diminished the labour necessary to make an article, it could never come into use.

The machines, which mark the triumph of science, become, by reason of the antithetic conditions of the social plexus, instruments which impoverish millions and millions of artisans and free peasants.

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.

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

Massive increases in productivity due to the happy marriage if information technology and advanced manufacturing techniques are having a chilling, unprecedented effect on job creations.

Most of the jobs that are going from the United States are not going to other countries; they are going to machines.

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.

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

Our machines increasingly do our work for us. Why doesn't this make our labor redundant and our skills obsolete? Why are there still so many jobs?

There might be new technology, but technological progress itself was nothing new - and over the years it had not destroyed jobs, but created them.

People talk about "job creation," as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.

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

There are many machines throughout history that were built to do something better than a human can.

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

I've got less respect for our politicians, for instance, who are not worried or apparently don't even consider the fact that Apple and a lot of the other good technology companies are going to create an automatic car. Think of the jobs that's going to cause to be gone.

We have to face the fact that countries are going to lose jobs to robotics. The only question that needs to be answered is which country will create and own the best robotic technology and have the infrastructure necessary to enable it.

Technological unemployment is scary for those affected - but has always gone hand in hand with economic progress.

Tech is important, but if you look at even the successful tech start-ups, you see they employ only dozens of people at most. Tech is never going to have the impact on the job market that manufacturing has.

Swarms are one very simple way of keeping ourselves ahead of the machines.

What people are now realizing is that this formula that technology destroys jobs and creates jobs, even if it's basically true, it's too simplistic.