Mark Twain Quotes

The social and economic impact of innovative American researchers, companies, and workers over the course of U.S. history have been enormous.

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.

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

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

… increased industrial efficiency makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with less labor

If we can make computers more intelligent - and I want to be careful of AI hype - and understand the world and the environment better, it can make life so much better for many of us. Just as the Industrial Revolution freed up a lot of humanity from physical drudgery I think AI has the potential to free up humanity from a lot of the mental drudgery.

Industrialization based on machinery, already referred to as a characteristic of our age, is but one aspect of the revolution that is being wrought by technology.

In the future, I'm sure there will be a lot more robots in every aspect of life. If you told people in 1985 that in 25 years they would have computers in their kitchen, it would have made no sense to them.

Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.

As we get better at things, we need less people to produce the things we really need, but what do we do with the rest of the people? They have to be doing something, too, to buy from those few which are doing the really basic stuff, and so that's why we need to be continually producing new stuff.

If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

Electricity is an example of a general purpose technology, like the steam engine before it. General purpose technologies drive most economic growth, because they unleash cascades of complementary innovations, like lightbulbs and, yes, factory redesign.

What the country needs are a few labor-making inventions.

We can go into no mechanic shop, into no manufactory of any description, upon no farm or plantation, or travel a mile on our railroads or in our steamboats, without seeing evidence of our originality and witnessing the fruits of our ingenuity and enterprise.

We must have modern conditions to meet modern machinery. As labor-saving devices are installed and used for production we must necessarily shorten the number of hours per day, and we are now at the state where we will necessarily have to come to a five day week because, gentlemen, you cannot have prosperity unless you have employment.

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.

The better his [a laborer’s] machinery, and the more readily it can be obtained, the larger will be his production....

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.

Through machinery, man can exert tremendous powers almost as fantastic as if he were the hero of a fairy tale. Through machinery, man can travel with an ever increasing velocity; he can fly through the air and go beneath the surface of the ocean.

As our farms and factories grew more efficient, they accounted for a shrinking share of our economy. And the more productive agriculture and manufacturing became, the fewer people they employed.

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.

Mastership hath many shifts whereby it striveth to keep itself alive in the world. And now hear a marvel: whereas thou sayest these two times that out of one man ye may get but one man's work, in days to come one man shall do the work of a hundred men - yea, of a thousand or more: and this is the shift of mastership that shall make many masters and many rich men.

Science has gone a long way toward helping man to free himself from the burden of hard labor; yet, science itself is not a liberator. It creates means, not goals. It is up to men to utilize those means to achieve reasonable goals.

Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.

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