Top 50 Martin Ford Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The Ford Motor Company CEO taunts Reuther by asking, “Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?” Reuther comes right back at Ford, asking, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?” While.”

— Martin Ford

2. “I find it somewhat ironic that many conservatives in the United States are adamant about securing the border against immigrants who will likely take jobs that few Americans want, while at the same time expressing little concern that the virtual border is left completely open to higher-skill workers who take jobs that Americans definitely do want.”

— Martin Ford

3. “If computers can create musical compositions or design electronic components, then it seems likely that they will soon be able to formulate a new legal strategy or perhaps come up with a new way to approach a management problem.”

— Martin Ford

4. “For example, the lithographic process used to lay out integrated circuits was initially based on optical imaging techniques. When the size of individual device elements shrank to the point where the wavelength of visible light was too long to allow for further progress, the semiconductor industry moved on to X-ray lithography.”

— Martin Ford

5. “The real question, I think, is not whether the field as a whole is in any real danger of another AI winter but, rather, whether progress remains limited to narrow AI or ultimately expands to Artificial General Intelligence as well.”

— Martin Ford

6. “In 2012, Google, for example, generated a profit of nearly $14 billion while employing fewer than 38,000 people.9 Contrast that with the automotive industry. At peak employment in 1979, General Motors alone had nearly 840,000 workers but earned only about $11 billion – 20 percent less than what Google raked in. And, yes, that’s after adjusting for inflation.”

— Martin Ford

7. “Many California farmers have transitioned from delicate crops like tomatoes to more robust nuts because they can be harvested mechanically. Overall agricultural employment in California fell by about 11 percent in the first decade of the twenty-first century, even as the total production of crops like almonds, which are compatible with automated farming techniques, has exploded.”

— Martin Ford

8. “Indeed, a 2013 study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne at the University of Oxford concluded that occupations amounting to nearly half of US total employment may be vulnerable to automation within roughly the next two decades.59.”

— Martin Ford

9. “Nearly 90 percent of fast food workers are twenty or older, and the average age is thirty-five.17 Many of these older workers have to support families – a nearly impossible task at a median wage of just $8.69 per hour.”

— Martin Ford

10. “In Japan, a new machine is able to select ripe strawberries based on subtle color variations and then pick a strawberry every eight seconds – working continuously and doing most of the work at night.”

— Martin Ford

11. “One of the obvious implications of a potential intelligence explosion is that there would be an overwhelming first-mover advantage. In other words, whoever gets there first will be effectively uncatchable.”

— Martin Ford

12. “Imagine the uproar when Uber’s cars start arriving without drivers.”

— Martin Ford

13. “In other words, one of the most fundamental ideas woven into the American ethos – the belief that anyone can get ahead through hard work and perseverance – really has little basis in statistical reality.”

— Martin Ford

14. “The evaporation of thousands of skilled information technology jobs is likely a precursor for a much more wide-ranging impact on knowledge-based employment.”

— Martin Ford

15. “In this, there is a strong cautionary note as we look to the future: as IT continues its relentless progress, we can be certain that financial innovators, in the absence of regulations that constrain them, will find ways to leverage all those new capabilities – and, if history is any guide, it won’t necessarily be in ways that benefit society as a whole.”

— Martin Ford

16. “Vision Robotics, a company based in San Diego, California, is developing an octopus-like orange harvesting machine. The robot will use three-dimensional machine vision to make a computer model of an entire orange tree and then store the location of each fruit. That information will then be passed on to the machine’s eight robotic arms, which will rapidly harvest the oranges.”

— Martin Ford

17. “Growth in median incomes during this period tracked nearly perfectly with per capita GDP. Three decades later, median household income had increased to about $61,000, an increase of just 22 percent. That growth, however, was driven largely by the entry of women into the workforce. If incomes had moved in lockstep with economic growth – as was the case prior to 1973 – the median household would today be earning well in excess of $90,000, over 50 percent more than the $61,000 they do earn.”

— Martin Ford

18. “Knowing the ideological predisposition of a particular economist is often a better predictor of what that individual is likely to say than anything contained in the data under examination.”

— Martin Ford

19. “Different people have different levels of understanding of the many things around them, and science is about trying to deepen our understanding of those many things.”

— Martin Ford

20. “In 2011, big companies generated an average of $420,000 in revenue for each employee, an increase of more than 11 percent over the 2007 figure of $378,000.”

— Martin Ford

21. “We eventually will have to move away from the idea that workers support retirees and pay for social programs, and instead adopt the premise that our overall economy supports these things. Economic growth, after all, has significantly outpaced the rate at which new jobs have been created and wages have been rising.”

— Martin Ford

22. “The nearly perfect historical correlation between increasing productivity and rising incomes broke down: wages for most Americans stagnated and, for many workers, even declined; income inequality soared to levels not seen since the eve of the 1929 stock market crash; and a new phrase – “jobless recovery” – found a prominent place in our vocabulary.”

— Martin Ford

23. “The unfortunate reality is that a great many people will do everything right – at least in terms of pursuing higher education and acquiring skills – and yet will still fail to find a solid foothold in the new economy.”

— Martin Ford

24. “That shift will ultimately challenge one of our most basic assumptions about technology: that machines are tools that increase the productivity of workers. Instead, machines themselves are turning into workers, and the line between the capability of labor and capital is blurring as never before. All.”

— Martin Ford

25. “In the nearly half-century since then, belief in the promise of education as the universal solution to unemployment and poverty has evolved hardly at all. The machines, however, have changed a great deal. Diminishing.”

— Martin Ford

26. “In 2010, the Northwestern University researchers who oversaw the team of computer science and journalism students who worked on StatsMonkey raised venture capital and founded a new company, Narrative Science, Inc., to commercialize the technology.”

— Martin Ford

27. “I do not see anything especially dystopian in offering some relatively unproductive people a minimum income as an incentive to leave the workforce. As long as the result is more opportunity and higher incomes for those who do want to work hard and advance their situation.”

— Martin Ford

28. “In the late nineteenth century, nearly half of all US workers were employed on farms; by 2000 that fraction had fallen below 2 percent.”

— Martin Ford

29. “Narrative Science has its sights set on far more than just the news industry. Quill is designed to be a general-purpose analytical and narrative-writing engine, capable of producing high-quality reports for both.”

— Martin Ford

30. “The Singularity itself will occur some time around 2045.”

— Martin Ford

31. “Future shoppers will rely more and more on their phones as a way to shop, pay, and get help and information about products while in traditional retail settings.”

— Martin Ford

32. “Can accelerating technology disrupt our entire system to the point where a fundamental restructuring may be required if prosperity is to continue?”

— Martin Ford

33. “The revolution now under way is happening not just because of the acceleration itself but because that acceleration has been going on for so long that the amount of progress we can now expect in any given year is potentially mind-boggling.”

— Martin Ford

34. “The main idea behind comparative advantage is that you should always be able to find a job, provided you specialize in the thing at which you are “least bad” relative to other people. By doing so, you offer others the chance to also specialize and thereby earn a higher income.”

— Martin Ford

35. “The relentless acceleration of computer hardware over decades suggests that we’ve somehow managed to remain on the steep part of the S-curve for far longer than has been possible in other spheres of technology. The reality, however, is that Moore’s Law has involved successfully climbing a staircase of cascading S-curves, each representing a specific semiconductor fabrication technology.”

— Martin Ford

36. “Between 2009 and 2012, US textile and apparel exports rose by 37 percent to a total of nearly $23 billion.7.”

— Martin Ford

37. “These “Singularians” have gone so far as to establish their own educational institution. Singularity University, located in Silicon Valley, offers unaccredited graduate-level programs focused on the study of exponential technology and counts Google, Genentech, Cisco, and Autodesk among its corporate sponsors.”

— Martin Ford

38. “Manufacturing jobs in the United States currently account for well under 10 percent of total employment.”

— Martin Ford

39. “Today’s computer technology exists in some measure because millions of middle-class taxpayers supported federal funding for basic research in the decades following World War II. We can be reasonably certain that those taxpayers offered their support in the expectation that the fruits of that research would create a more prosperous future for their children and grandchildren.”

— Martin Ford

40. “Loans are often rolled over continuously, so that the principal is never repaid. This makes capital investment extremely attractive even when labor costs are low and has been one of the primary reasons that investment now accounts for nearly half of China’s GDP.”

— Martin Ford

41. “In fact, advancing technology has already had a dramatic impact on Chinese factory jobs; between 1995 and 2002 China lost about 15 percent of its manufacturing workforce, or about 16 million jobs.9.”

— Martin Ford

42. “This S-shaped path in which accelerating – or exponential – advance ultimately matures into a plateau effectively illustrates the life story of virtually all specific technologies.”

— Martin Ford

43. “The turnaround is being driven by automation technology so efficient that it is competitive with even the lowest-wage offshore workers.”

— Martin Ford

44. “While lower-skill occupations will no doubt continue to be affected, a great many college-educated, white-collar workers are going to discover that their jobs, too, are squarely in the sights as software automation and predictive algorithms advance rapidly in capability.”

— Martin Ford

45. “I think it would be very premature to declare the MOOC phenomenon down for the count. We may, rather, simply be seeing the early-stage stumbles that are typical of new technologies.”

— Martin Ford

46. “Why aren’t average Americans more upset about the fact that they are paying the pharmaceutical freight for the rest of the world – including a number of countries that have significantly higher per capita incomes than the United States?”

— Martin Ford

47. “About 1.2 million jobs – more than three-quarters of domestic employment in the textile sector – vanished between 1990 and 2012.”

— Martin Ford

48. “WorkFusion, a start-up company based in the New York City area, offers an especially vivid example of the dramatic impact that white-collar automation is likely to have on organizations. The.”

— Martin Ford

49. “Within weeks of the product’s introduction, both university-based engineering teams and do-it-yourself innovators had hacked into the Kinect and posted YouTube videos of robots that were now able to see in three dimensions.4.”

— Martin Ford

50. “As an IBM document describing the Watson technology points out: “We have noses that run, and feet that smell. How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, but a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?”

— Martin Ford