Barack Obama
Former President of United States of America
The next wave of economic dislocations won’t come from overseas. It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good middle-class jobs obsolete.
Bill Gates
Philanthropist. Founder and former CEO of Microsoft.
You cross the threshold of job-replacement of certain activities all sort of at once. So, you know, warehouse work, driving, room cleanup, there’s quite a few things that are meaningful job categories that, certainly in the next 20 years [will go away].
Andrew McAfee
Curious about the impact of technology. Co-author of "The Second Machine Age" and "Machine | P
As digital devices like computers and robots get more capable thanks to Moore’s Law (the proposition that the number of transistors on a semiconductor can be inexpensively doubled about every two years), they can do more of the work that people used to do. Digital labor, in short, substitutes for human labor.
It is widely feared that half the jobs in the economy might be eliminated by innovations such as self-driving vehicles, automatic checkout machines and expert systems that trade securities more effectively than humans can.
If all you think about are the jobs today and you project forward, there might be a day where robots take over every single job we have today. Is that the future that will come? No, because we have innovative people – well, I like to think we have innovative people in society – and we invent new things all the time, that require new jobs to manage them, to invent them, to conceive them, to enginee...See More
Jeff Immelt
Former Chairman of @GeneralElectric, the world’s digital industrial company. Father. Golfer. D
There's 330,000 people that work for GE and none of them had a productive day yesterday, none of them had a completely productive day. So my own belief is that when it comes to digital tools and things like that, that first part of the revolution, is going to be to make your existing workforce productive.
It doesn’t really make sense to ask whether automation will affect jobs. Yes, 100 percent of jobs will be affected. Jobs change all of the time. The content of jobs will change. But it’s not as if there’s a fixed amount of work to do. The net number of jobs is rising.
Job tasks are changing. In many cases that automation is complementary to the tasks that people do. For example, doctors’ work i...See More