Vernor Vinge Quotes

Any discrimination, like sharp turns in a road, becomes critical because of the tremendous speed at which we are traveling into the high-tech world of a service economy.

I see three forces militating in favor of growing inequality: increasing measurement of worker value added, automation through smart software, and globalization.

We can no longer prosper by increasing human productivity. The more we try to do, the more poverty we will create.

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.

That the way to achieve higher standards of living for all is through science and technology, taking advantage of better tools, methods and organization.

… post-industrial society

The story of the next century is the transition from an industrial, resourced-based economy to a knowledge economy.

The world view of economic development has completely changed: it is no longer believed to be driven by human labour, as Karl Marx said, or by capital, as Alfred Marshall stated, but is knowledge-driven.

The structural changes of globalization and automation that has created concentrated wealth among some people who have had the right skills and the right opportunities has also created extraordinary disruption and havoc among the American middle-class.

I am hoping, though, that many of them have kids, who, when they have a moment to take a break from their iPods, Internet, or Google, will explain to their parents running the country just how the world is being flattened.

Transformation in the nature of work tend to brings wrenching social changes in their wake.

We have come to the point where a new machine invented in England deprives millions of Chinese workers of their livelihood within a year's time.

The root of the worker’s resistance to technological change is the conflict between labor as a commodity and labor as a resource. Increased productivity imposes upon the worker a risk of obsolescence.

One of the objections most frequently urged against machinery is, that it has a tendency to supersede much of the handlabour which was previously employed; and in fact unless a machine diminished the labour necessary to make an article, it could never come into use.

Human labor is becoming the cheapest of commodities.

The loss of manufacturing jobs is a sign of economic health.

Cities have made the transition from industrial to service economies.

The economic development of industrial society tends inevitably to the ruin of small industries.

Even before the [2008] recession, corporations were able to enhance profitability by taking advantage of using technology to perform or supplement the work of human beings. This was, on the whole, a manageable situation. Workers who were replaced by the technology were adapting by learning how to work with the technology; jobs in technology opened up to balance the jobs lost. The current situation is far different. During the recession, companies learned how to maintain production and profits with fewer employees. They assigned existing workers to take on tasks performed by those who were laid off, they converted full-time jobs to part-time jobs (which carried little or no expense to the company for employee benefits), and they outsourced.

For most of history, the prime source of human insecurity was nature. Capitalist societies have been oriented toward innovation and dynamism, to the creation of new knowledge, new products, and new modes of production and distribution. All this has shifted the locus of insecurity from nature to the economy.

There is a trend worth worrying about, which is the disappearance of manufacturing jobs from the workforce. Shortly after World War II, about one-quarter of employed Americans held manufacturing jobs. Now less than one-tenth do. From the perspective of individual businesses, this change is natural and desirable—rising productivity by definition means fewer people making more things. But it is troublesome for society as a whole, since factory jobs have historically buoyed the middle class and given rise to future industries and jobs, virtuous-cycle style.

We live in a dynamic time, where the rate of change and the rate of innovation are very high. It’s not equal in all segments or sectors of the economy, but we are seeing a lot of innovation in certain sectors, and I expect that to continue.

Most of the jobs that are going from the United States are not going to other countries; they are going to machines.

Technology is going to revolutionize almost every sector, leading to the demise of many traditional professions. Economic and political power will be determined less by a country's size than by its technological superiority.

Technology has been advancing so fast that the number of jobs globally in manufacturing is declining. There is no way that Trump can bring significant numbers of manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.