Henry Ford Quotes

The Machine is the new Messiah. Machinery is accomplishing in the world what man has failed to do by preaching, propaganda, or the written word.

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.

The industrial revolution allowed us, for the first time, to start replacing human labour with machines.

People talk about "job creation," as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.

How unhappy are you that your dishwasher has replaced washing dishes by hand, your washing machine has displaced washing clothes by hand or your vacuum cleaner has replaced hand cleaning? My guess is this ‘job displacement’ has been very welcome, as will the ‘job displacement’ that will occur over the next 10 years. This is a good thing. Everyone wants more jobs and less work.

I have been photographing the portrait of an end of an era, as machines and computers replace human workers. What we have in these pictures is an archeology.

There are many machines throughout history that were built to do something better than a human can.

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

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.

If people really liked to work, we'd still be plowing the land with sticks and transporting goods on our backs.

Instruments, machines, looms will increasingly supplement the strength and skill of men; will augment at the same time the perfection and the precision of manufactures by lessening both the time and the labor needed to produce them

Only in a minority of cases will workmen be able to recognize the technological change responsible for their dismissal. For this it would be necessary that machines be introduced in an existent plant under the eyes of the workmen and that dismissal be effected immediately after.

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

The thing which has made Labor great & powerful is labor-saving machinery--& nothing else in the world could have done it. It has been labor's savior, benefactor; but Labor doesn't know it, & would ignorantly crucify it. But that is human & natural.

… industry is at present producing as much as it did in 1929. [before the Great Depression] Ordinarily this would mean work for everybody, but since the depression, ten million dollars have been spent in modernizing these particular plants with the result that they are now using ten thousand fewer men than in 1929. Two million dollars more is to be spent shortly on further modernization, and much of the heavy work done in the past by men and skilled men, many of them, will be done by machinery. College and high school boys, who stand on a balcony somewhere and press buttons are preferred for this work today, and four men will do the work of one hundred men before long!

If agrarian society must fall to the machine, at the very least, Iranians should own the machine.

The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders.

As for ourselves, we love our machines.

Technology is the future, I have seen the third industrial revolution, and we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution.

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 mechanical loom and the calculator have shown us that technology is both disruptive and filled with opportunities. But it would be hard to find a decent argument that we would have been better off without these inventions.

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

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.

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

Man makes machines to man the machines that make the machines.