Quotessence
Home / Topics / Automation Quotes

Automation Quotes

Browse 78 quotes about Automation.

Related topics

Automation Quotes

“Anything that can be automated, cognified, decentralized, digitized, disintermediated, or virtualized will be. These shifts will radically transform every aspect of the economy, including industries, sectors, professions, jobs… even the meaning of work itself.”

“Techistentialism studies the nature of human beings, existence, and decision-making in our technological world. Today, we face both technological and existential conditions that can no longer be separated. We define this phenomenon as Techistentialism.”

“In The Inhuman... Lyotard, like Weber, reminds us of the distinction between technological development and 'human' progress. He argues, in particular, that the development of technology, or 'techno-science', is driven by the quest for maximum efficiency and performance, and as such leads to the emergence of new 'inhuman' (technological) forms of control rather than to the emancipation of 'humanity'. Lyotard reasserts the instrumental nature of the modern system, arguing that 'All technology ... is an artefact allowing its users to stock more information, to improve their competence and optimize their performances'. In this view, techno-science may be seen to stand against all instances of the unknown, including the aporia of the future anterior, and thus to have little respect for forms which are different or other to itself. This is compounded by the fact that technological development is intimately connected to the drive for profit. Lyotard proposes that this directs the production of knowledge and conditions the nature of knowledge itself, for information, itself a commodity, is increasingly produced in differentiated, digestible forms ('bits') for ease of mass exchange, transmission and consumption, and with the aim of enabling the optimal performance of the global system.”

“The Luddites knew exactly who owned the machinery they destroyed. They saw that automation is not a faceless phenomenon that we must submit to. And they were right: Automation is, quite often and quite simply, a matter of the executive classes locating new ways to enrich themselves.”

“The occupants of the other three looked like the people they had seen rioting in the streets of Paris that morning. They were citizens of the other France, the France one didn’t read about in guidebooks. They were the put-upon and the left-behind, the ones without glittering degrees from elite institutions of learning. Globalization and automation had eroded their value in the workforce. The service economy was their only option. Their counterparts in Britain and America had already had their say at the ballot box. France, reckoned Gabriel, would be next.”

“If automating everything makes people lazier and lazier, and laziness leads to stupidity, which it does for most people, judging by the current content circulating the social networks everywhere, except North Korea, where they don’t have any internet to speak of - at some point the Japanese robots, for which a market niche is currently being developed, with no concerns on how they should be designed to act in society or outside it - will have no choice, but to take everything over, to preserve us from ourselves…”

“Every day is a new opportunity for start-ups and established businesses to automate products and solutions or identify and solve problems for internal and external stakeholders. We must always continue to innovate and improve efficiency.”

“Many presume that integrating more advanced automation will directly translate into productivity gains. But research reveals that lower-performing algorithms often elicit greater human effort and diligence. When automation makes obvious mistakes, people stay attentive to compensate. Yet flawless performance prompts blind reliance, causing costly disengagement. Workers overly dependent on accurate automation sleepwalk through responsibilities rather than apply their own judgment.”

“Automation promises to execute certain tasks with superhuman speed and precision. But its brittle limitations reveal themselves when the unexpected arises. Studies consistently show that, as overseers, humans make for fickle partners to algorithms. Charged with monitoring for rare failures, boredom and passivity render human supervision unreliable.”

“Our inventions have long been ahead of us in terms of efficiency and sanity, productivity and predictability. Oh, how we’ve wished we could be manmade, too. What has been keeping us back, keeping us messy? The animal impediment, within and without. Eliminating these impediments, we will surely be catching up with our machines, resembling them more and more impeccably.”

“Thus, for example, the idea of progress has disappeared, yet progress continues. The idea of wealth that production once connoted has disappeared, yet production itself continues more vigorously than ever. Indeed, it picks up speed precisely in proportion to its increasing indifference to its original aims. Of the political sphere one can say that the idea of politics has disappeared but that the game of politics continues in secret indifference to its own stakes. Of television, that it operates in total indifference to its own images (it would not be affected, in other words, even were mankind to disappear). Could it be that all systems, all individuals, harbour a secret urge to be rid of their ideas, of their own essences, so as to be able to proliferate everywhere, to transport themselves simultaneously to every point of the compass? In any event, the consequences of a dissociation of this kind can only be fatal. A thing which has lost its idea is like the man who has lost his shadow, and it must either fall under the sway of madness or perish.”

“As we face inseparable technological and existential conditions, we enter an era of Techistentialism. AI will increasingly provide insights that enable more-informed predictive decision-making, humans should remain wary of an inadvertent reliance on prescriptive algorithms dictating specific decisions. Complex and uncertain environments inherently involve unknown unknowns; these are situations where we need to be agile despite the lack of immediate answers.”

“Maybe the existential risk is not machines taking over the world, but rather the opposite, where humans start responding like idle machines - unable to connect the emerging dots of our UN-VICE world.”

“Like most visionary utopias, though. IDN (Integrated Data Network) was never to be. Perhaps it was simply too ambitious a project: infrastructures seldom respond to a single vision or a master plan, as Paul Edwards (2010) writes, and conjuring up a platform that would serve the entire marketplace was an almost Quixotic task. Infrastructures emerge not through planning and calculated foresight, but through the meandering paths of history, in the mangle of making, tinkering, and wrestling with the obduracy of organizations, practices, and their installed base. The system eventually introduced for Big Bang reflected this fragility and contingency of infrastructures: it was the creative result of reshaping legacy devices into a system that did the job for the time being. A band-aid. A product of creative, recombinant bricolage.”

“Your conscience, dammit - doesn't it ever bother you?" "Why should it? I've never done anything dishonest." "Let me put it another way: do you agree things are a mess?" "Between us?" "Everywhere! The world!" She could be appallingly nearsighted. Whenever possible, she liked to reduce any generalization to terms of herself and persons she knew intimately. "Homestead, for instance." "What else could we possibly give the people that they haven't got?" "There! You made my point for me. You said, what else could we give them, as though everything in the world were ours to give or withhold." "Somebody's got to take responsibility, and that's just the way it is when somebody does." "That's just it: things haven't always been that way. It's new, and it's people like us who've brought it about. Hell, everybody used to have some personal skill or willingness to work or something he could trade for what he wanted. Now that the machines have taken over, it's quite somebody who has anything to offer. All most people can do is hope to be given something." "If someone has brains," said Anita firmly, "he can still get to the top. That's the American way, Paul, and it hasn't changed." She looked at him appraisingly. "Brains and nerve, Paul." "And blinders." The punch was gone from his voice, and he felt drugged, a drowsiness from a little too much to drink, from scrambling over a series of emotional peaks and pits, from utter frustration.”

“We can rebuild our architecture and infrastructure – the kind, unlike under capitalism, that can largely withstand extreme weather – (largely) out of hemp; we can build a high-speed fully automated system of production from durable, lightweight bioplastic and graphene, out of hemp and other plants, powered by biofuel and hemp batteries, while – because of hemp’s ability to revive soil and absorb CO2 – healing the soil and stabilising the climate in the process. This reconstruction of society, which would raise living standards exponentially for everyone, is not an ideal or a fantasy, it is a necessity both historically and ecologically. But it can only be realised through socialism.”

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

“I claim that this bookless library is a dream, a hallucination of on-line addicts; network neophytes, and library-automation insiders...Instead, I suspect computers will deviously chew away at libraries from the inside. They'll eat up book budgets and require librarians that are more comfortable with computers than with children and scholars. Libraries will become adept at supplying the public with fast, low-quality information. The result won't be a library without books--it'll be a library without value.”

“As a technologist, I see the trends, and I see that automation inevitably is going to mean fewer and fewer jobs. And if we do not find a way to provide a basic income for people who have no work, or no meaningful work, we’re going to have social unrest that could get people killed. When we have increasing production - year after year after year - some of that needs to be reinvested in society.”

“U.S. labor leaders will realize that automation can multiply man's wealth far more rapidly than it is multiplying at present and that automation will leave all men free to search and research... Realizing the direct competition with foreign industry on a straight labor basis will mean swiftly decreasing wages per hour and longer hours and decreasing buying power of the public.”

“From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a "disutility"; to work is to make a sacrifice of one's leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice.”

“Marketing automation is the technology that propels your business into a new era of relationship based marketing with quantifiable results. When powerful technology meets effective implementation and internal process management, your company will soon find itself on a journey that leads to new heights of business success.”

“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker's body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers' intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”

“We must establish all over the country schools of our own to train our own children to become scientists, to become mathematicians. We must realize the need for adult education and for job retraining programs that will emphasize a changing society in which automation plays the key role. We intend to use the tools of education to help raise our people to an unprecedented level of excellence and self respect through their own efforts.”