Erik Brynjolfsson Quotes

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.

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

Technology is always creating jobs. It's always destroying jobs.

The bottom line is that while automation is eliminating many jobs in the economy that were once done by people, there is no sign that the introduction of technologies in recent years is creating an equal number of well-paying jobs to compensate for those losses.

Disruptive innovations create jobs, efficiency innovations destroy them.

The introduction of machinery is turning into idleness thousands, faster than new industries are founded

Every great invention takes a livelihood away from 50,000 men--& within ten years creates a livelihood for half a million.

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.

Amazon didn't create any jobs. Amazon probably destroyed a million jobs in our economy.

There are three types of innovations that affect jobs and capital: empowering innovations, sustaining innovations and efficiency innovations.

Technology has always been destroying jobs, and it has always been creating jobs.

The Negro is trying to enter a social community and a tradition of work-and-income which are in the process of vanishing even for the hitherto privileged white worker Jobs are disappearing under the impact of highly efficient, progressively less costly machines.

The history of economic growth is the history of people making more with less and shifting into new jobs that were unheard of in the previous generation.

This is … a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever

If our institutions can’t build consensus and respond to the demand of Americans for jobs today, how will we ever do it in a time when artificial intelligence and robotics kick in and five times that number of jobs disappear twice as fast?

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.

I think what we have to do is figure out how to make sure we get the benefits of improved technology and yet cope with the dislocation that it will inevitably produce in certain industries.

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

Look at trade and automation: two competing but slightly overlapping forces in the shrinking of the duration of jobs right now. We have to be able to talk honestly about how disrupted this world is going to be, and it is crazy to mislead people and say we're going to bring back all of the big factory jobs by creating a protectionist regime.

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.

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.

We need to wake up to the fact that it is not immigrants who are causing economic dislocations. It is technology and an evolving economy that is pushing more and more Americans to the sidelines.

There is a fear of innovation because people are afraid of job loss.

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.

Spain has been massively diverting capital from the private sector into politically favored environmental projects for the better part of a decade...every green job created, eliminated 2.2 real jobs and cost around $800,000 each!