Jeremy Rifkin Quotes

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

Advances in automation, artificial intelligence and robotics, while increasing productivity, will also cause major upheavals to the workforce.

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.'

A new era of production has begun. It's principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural. The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the self-regulating machine. This results in a system of almost unlimited capacity which requires progressively less human labor. Cybernation is already reorganizing the economic and social system to meet its own needs .... As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated [to their work] governmental measures—unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments.

Massive increases in productivity due to the happy marriage if information technology and advanced manufacturing techniques are having a chilling, unprecedented effect on job creations.

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.

We're living through the second Industrial Revolution.

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.

It's estimated that by 2030 there will be virtually no unskilled jobs in the British economy.

I think a lot of people will be liberated from a lot of oppressive manufacturing jobs, or a lot of service jobs, because they'll be done by computers. There'll be the world's best education available online and free.

The global equalization of wages and the exponential growth in technology has created a job-killing machine that's only going to get worse.

Companies are doing a good job at producing stuff. They are just doing it without people.

The hollowing out of the middle class. That's not just about capitalism or the structure of taxation. That is also about the fundamental truth that machines can do a lot of things better than humans used to do. A lot of those people are being pushed down to do less value-adding jobs, so they get paid less money.

There is no question we are in an era of people asking, 'Is the Robocalypse upon us?

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

The 21st-century mix of jobs is probably going to be different than the 20th-century mix.

The progressive integration of new technologies in our economy amounts to a paradigm shift with a profound impact on the context and content of work.

In the long term, artificial intelligence and automation are going to be taking over so much of what gives humans a feeling of purpose.

Technological change is both familiar and easy to observe.

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

The optimism that many felt in the 1960s over labour-saving technology is giving way to a fearful question: 'Will your labour be good for anything in the future? Or will you be replaced by a machine?'

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.

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

History is full of examples of poorer nations that become wealthy by exploiting their comparative advantage in cheap labor to become globally competitive in a range of manufacturing industries.... If robots are expected to take over many of the menial jobs currently performed by people, the concern should not be for the working class in wealthy countries but for the billions living in the developing world who will now have lost the only established ladder out of poverty.