Herbert Hoover Quotes

Much of what we consider the American way of life is rooted in the period of remarkably broad, shared economic growth, from around 1900 to about 1978.

The robots are coming, whether we like it or not, and will change our economy in dramatic ways.

Europe and North America, we are told, are less dependent on energy-intensive heavy industry than in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems we squeeze more GDP out of a barrel of oil than in those benighted days.

If you and your skills are a complement to the computer, your wage and labor market prospects are likely to be cheery. If your skills do not complement the computer, you may want to address that mismatch. Ever more people are starting to fall on one side of the divide or the other. That's why 'average is over.'

Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.

In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization.

Good intentions can often lead to unintended consequences. It is hard to imagine a law intended for the workforce known to Henry Ford can serve the needs of a workplace shaped by the innovations of Bill Gates.

A new era of production has begun. It's principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural. The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the self-regulating machine. This results in a system of almost unlimited capacity which requires progressively less human labor. Cybernation is already reorganizing the economic and social system to meet its own needs .... As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated [to their work] governmental measures—unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments.

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.

The main occupation of society has changed from fighting to business, from military to industrial life.

The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of the horse in agricultural production.

Displacement by technology has probably occurred since the invention of the shovel.

… post-industrial society

The U.S. is becoming an industrial heartland again.

If manufacturing jobs do come back to the U.S., they will be done by robots in hi-tech parts of the country rather than the Rust Belt states.

Over a long period of time, technological change is something that has been important in reducing manufacturing employment - absolutely and as a share of jobs in the economy.

Globally, manufacturing jobs are on the decline, simply because productivity growth has outpaced growth in demand.

When I was a teenager, the most valuable American companies were in finance and manufacturing.

Every industrial revolution brings along a learning revolution.

We adapt to technological progress by raising our minimum standards of living and working to stay above this rising threshold.

An AI utopia is a place where people have income guaranteed because their machines are working for them. Instead, they focus on activities that they want to do, that are personally meaningful like art or, where human creativity still shines, in science.

Ever since the first power looms put weavers out of work in the late 18th century, technology has increased productivity but threatened jobs for humans.

A half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass employment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being's worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world where much of life is lived on the Collaborative Commons.

Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household.

Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.