Automated Labor Quotes

The invisibility of work and workers in the digital age is as consequential as the rise of the assembly line and, later, the service economy.

Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race. Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women. Preserve only the factories, railroads, machines, mines, and raw materials. Destroy everything else. Then return to work. Work must not cease.

So, where are the robots? We've been told for 40 years already that they're coming soon. Very soon they'll be doing everything for us. They'll be cooking, cleaning, buying things, shopping, building. But they aren't here. Meanwhile, we have illegal immigrants doing all the work, but we don't have any robots.

In a few years the androids will be working for us. Let’s hope that we never have to work for them

Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)

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

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

I think of AI itself as a monster of capitalism.

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.

Any job that can be done by an illiterate can be done by a machine.

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

I think that technology is the best thing that ever happened to mankind. It's an absurd notion that somehow, 'My God, what are we going to do when driverless cars come along?' It's going to save lives on the road. And maybe, one day, we'll all be working four days a week and not five or six days a week.

In speaking of the work of machines and of natural forces we must, of course, in this comparison eliminate anything in which activity of intelligence comes into play. The latter is also capable of the hard and intense work of thinking, which tries a man just as muscular exertion does.