Kevin Kelly Quotes
The problem with trying to measure productivity is that it measures only how well people can do the wrong jobs. Any job that can be measured for productivity probably should be eliminated from the list of jobs that people do.
If an job’s productivity can be measured accurately, it is not long before the job can be analyzed enough to have robots or computers do it.
Kevin Kelly, Founding Editor of Wired Magazine, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World, 1999
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The implication is that we will be able to have cheaper products and cheaper services plus there will be less need for human efforts and few jobs needed and available.
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.
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.
This was a virtually unheard of idea at the time.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
In the Great Recession, the industrial production had improved much by 2012—the 4th year of the Obama administration. However, technology and automation were displacing workers. At the time, the U. S. was producing the same amount as before the Great Recession only it was being done with 5 million fewer workers.
Kevin Kelly (born 1952) is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture.
