David Autor Quotes

Technology and robotics are advancing and will reduce the need for workers in the future.

Most Americans agree that technology is going to eliminate many more jobs than it is going to create.

The message behind 'Time Is Up' is that robots are starting to take over the world, and we should be aware of it because they're already walking among us.

In many cases, jobs that used to be done by people are going to be able to be done through automation. I don't have an answer to that. That's one of the more perplexing problems of society.

The question is, you know, will someone accidentally build a robot that takes over from us? And that's sort of like this lone guy in the backyard, you know - 'I accidentally built a 747.' I don't think that's going to happen.

We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.

Personally, I'm not afraid of a robot uprising. The benefits far outweigh the threats.

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?

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.

Automation is going to cause unemployment, and we need to prepare for it.

Artificial intelligence is destroying the traditional world of work.

I don't think that globalisation is anywhere near the threat that robots are.

Automation is driving the decline of banal and repetitive tasks.

Twice a week, a truck comes near my house, and two guys get out and pick up the garbage. This will disappear. There will still be a truck coming, but it will be driven autonomously, and the garbage will be picked up autonomously, and those jobs will be gone.

Immigrants are not the main threat to the industrialized world's workforce: robots are - or, rather, artificially intelligent robots are.

If our era is the next Industrial Revolution, as many claim, AI is surely one of its driving forces.

I don't think that all the coal miners - or even more realistically, say, the truck drivers whose jobs may be put out by self-driving cars and trucks - they're all going to go and become web designers and programmers.

Make no mistake about why these babies are here - they are here to replace us.

Pretty soon we'll have robots in our society, you're going to have a lot of automated processes that used to be done by people - this is happening. Society and technology is changing so fast, and the impact of the change on society and technology is global, not local.

Technology magnifies differences, and it's been replacing or obviating jobs for a long time. But what happens as that case accelerates? I'm not one of these doomsayers who says, 'There will be no jobs.'

I particularly felt that my job in management was safe from the incursion of machines with friendly faces painted on the front of their heads, or whatever you call the metal constructions atop their shoulders, if those are indeed shoulders.

I'm not afraid of computers taking over the world.

The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories. People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

Let's not kid ourselves here, robots already run most of our world. We'll be their butlers soon enough.

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.