Race Against The Machine Quotes

“There has never been a worse time to be competing with machines, but there has never been a better time to be a talented entrepreneur.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men. —Havelock Ellis, 1922”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“As David Leonhardt notes, when Bill Clinton assembled the top minds of the nation to discuss the economy in 1992, no one mentioned the Internet.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“When significant numbers of people see their standards of living fall despite an ever-growing economic pie, it threatens the social contract of the economy and even the social fabric of society.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“Instead, the stagnation of median incomes primarily reflects a fundamental change in how the economy apportions income and wealth. The median worker is losing the race against the machine.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“Digitization, in other words, is not a single project providing one-time benefits. Instead, it's an ongoing process of creative destruction; innovators use both new and established technologies to make deep changes at the level of the task, the job, the process, even the organization itself. And these changes build and feed on each other so that the possibilities offered really are constantly expanding.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“ Decouple benefits from jobs to increase flexibility and dynamism. Tying health care and other mandated benefits to jobs makes it harder for people to move to new jobs or to quit and start new businesses. For instance, many a potential entrepreneur has been blocked by the need to maintain health insurance.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“While the foundation of our economic system presumes a strong link between value creation and job creation, the Great Recession reveals the weakening or breakage of that link. This is not merely an artifact of the business cycle but rather a symptom of a deeper structural change in the nature of production.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“Moore’s Law is not a one-time blip but an accelerating exponential trend.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“Digital technologies change rapidly, but organizations and skills aren’t keeping pace.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“The Great Stagnation: We are failing to understand why we are failing. All of these problems have a single, little noticed root cause: We have been living off low-hanging fruit for at least three hundred years. … Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think. That’s it. That is what has gone wrong.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“the message the labor market is clearly sending is that it’s much easier to create value with highly educated workers.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“Because the process of innovation often relies heavily on the combining and recombining of previous innovations, the broader and deeper the pool of accessible ideas and individuals, the more opportunities there are for innovation.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“But the broader lesson of the first Industrial Revolution is more like the Indy 500 than John Henry: economic progress comes from constant innovation in which people race with machines. Human and machine collaborate together in a race to produce more, to capture markets, and to beat other teams of humans and machines.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“Ford CEO Henry Ford II and United Automobile Workers president Walter Reuther are jointly touring a modern auto plant. Ford jokingly jabs at Reuther: “Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay UAW dues?” Not missing a beat, Reuther responds: “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“In fact, the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay has increased from 70 in 1990 to 300 in 2005, and much of this growth is linked to the greater use of IT,”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“The most productive firms reinvented and reorganized decision rights, incentives systems, information flows, hiring systems, and other aspects of organizational capital to get the most from the technology. This, in turn, required radically different and, generally, higher skill levels in the workforce.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine