Every great invention takes a livelihood away from 50,000 men--& within ten years creates a livelihood for half a million.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
In 2017, there was a sudden recognition of several adverse societal consequences of information technology, from job losses due to automation to manipulation of public opinion, with significant political consequences.
It's easy to kind of say it's the elite that's putting you down. Well, it wasn't really the elite, technology will do that.
Our machines increasingly do our work for us. Why doesn't this make our labor redundant and our skills obsolete? Why are there still so many jobs?
We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job.
Automation is going to cause unemployment, and we need to prepare for it.
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.
How are we going to make our livings in a society becoming increasingly jobless because of hi-tech and outsourcing? Where will we get the imagination to recognize that for most of human history the concept of Jobs didn't even exist? Work, as distinguished from Labor, was done to produce needed goods and services, develop skills and artistry, and nurture cooperation.
Some years ago a top Ford official was showing the late Walter Reuther through the very automates plant in Cleveland, Ohio and he said to him jokingly, "Walter, you'll have a hard time collecting union dues from these machines." and Walter said, "you are going to have more trouble trying to sell automobiles to them." Both of them let it stop there. There was a logical answer to that ... the owners of the machines could buy automobiles and if you increase the number of owners you increase the number of consumers.
Our whole economy and society is already being changed by the fact that we have increasing unemployment, mass unemployment and that's what we're facing in the future because of increasing automation.
Efficiency innovations are a natural part of the economic cycle, but these are the innovations that streamline process and actually reduce the number of available jobs.
If you step back and look at technology from every era, it has displaced jobs but also created a lot of jobs.
It is easy to underestimate in advance the impact of globalization and automation - I have done it myself.
I think in general technology always sort of makes some jobs less relevant, or perhaps, even obsolete, but I will say that the idea that sort of workers will find nothing else to do seems like it's way too pessimistic on the capabilities of everyone as human beings, right?
The most important part about tomorrow is not the technology or the automation, but that man is going to come into entirely new relationships with his fellow men. He will retain much more in his everyday life of what we term the naïveté and idealism of the child. I think the way to see what tomorrow is going to look like is just to look at our children.
Deskilling devices - they make us dumber. We're immersed in a system that now requires the use of a cell phone just to get around, just to function, and so the logic of that cell phone has been imposed on us.
We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.
Machines deprive us of two things which are certainly important ingredients of human happiness, namely, spontaneity and variety.
The impact of technology on labor has become clearer and clearer by the day.
I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.
The technologists and entrepreneurs I know are generally good people. If they were given a choice, 'Do your job and eliminate normal jobs' or 'Do your job and create abundant opportunities,' they would choose the latter. Most of them would happily even take a small hit to do so. But this isn't a choice they're given.
