Shoshana Zuboff Quotes

The industrial revolution allowed us, for the first time, to start replacing human labour with machines.

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

I have been photographing the portrait of an end of an era, as machines and computers replace human workers. What we have in these pictures is an archeology.

Machines were devised not to do a man out of a job, but to take the heavy labor from man's back and place it on the broad back of the machine.

There is not a tool, an implement, or a machine that has not resulted in a decrease in the contribution of human labor. Labor is not made permanently idle [though]; when replaced in one special category... it turns its attack against other obstacles on the main road to progress.

The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

Any mechanical invention whatsoever has been more harmful to humanity than a century of war.

The introduction of so powerful an agent as steam will make a great change in the situation of man.

Modern ingenuity has made it possible for a child to run some of the machines and the child will get the job while the men must tramp.

Instruments, machines, looms will increasingly supplement the strength and skill of men; will augment at the same time the perfection and the precision of manufactures by lessening both the time and the labor needed to produce them

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.

In Victorian England, laborers were pushed off the farms, replaced by steam power.

The thing which has made Labor great & powerful is labor-saving machinery--& nothing else in the world could have done it. It has been labor's savior, benefactor; but Labor doesn't know it, & would ignorantly crucify it. But that is human & natural.

We do not ride upon the railroad. It rides upon us.

… 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!

The Machine is the new Messiah. Machinery is accomplishing in the world what man has failed to do by preaching, propaganda, or the written word.

I think AI is the new electricity. Whatever industry you work in, AI will probably transform it, just as 100 years ago the rise of electricity transformed industry after industry—everything from transportation and communications to manufacturing to health care.

Think back to the time when Agriculture was not labor efficient. We have lost all these jobs. But I don't think anyone is too sad about it.

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production.

To join in the industrial revolution, you needed to open a factory; in the Internet revolution, you need to open a laptop.

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

Tolstoy didn't know about steampunk or cyborgs, but he did know about the nightmarishness of steam power, unruly machines, and the creepy half-human status of the Russian peasant classes. In 'Anna Karenina,' nineteenth-century life itself is a relentless, relentlessly modern machine, flattening those who oppose it.

When water power then steam power were harnessed to spin and weave cloth, a cottage craft turned into an industry overnight.

Technology is the future, I have seen the third industrial revolution, and we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution.

For our part, Africa will make a significant contribution to the Fourth Industrial Revolution.