Job Redundancy Quotes

Hence it would be madness to block automation in fields such as transport and healthcare just in order to protect human jobs. After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans – not jobs. Redundant drivers and doctors will just have to find something else to do.

drivers and traffic police (since when rowdy humans are replaced by obedient algorithms, traffic police will be redundant). However, there might be some new openings for philosophers, because their skills—until now devoid of much market value—will suddenly be in very high demand. So if you want to study something that will guarantee a good job in the future, maybe philosophy is not such a bad gamble.

The service and office workers, checkout clerks, account managers, and salespeople whose jobs can be consolidated and rendered redundant by the digital revolution are the modern version of the horses driven off their Depression-era farms.

AI is nowhere near human-like existence. But 99 per cent of human qualities and abilities are simply redundant for the performance of most modern jobs. For AI to squeeze humans out of the job market it needs only outperform us in the specific abilities a particular profession demands.

AI is nowhere near human-like existence. But 99 per cent of human qualities and abilities are simply redundant for the performance of most modern jobs. For AI to squeeze humans out of the job market it needs only to outperform us in the specific abilities a particular profession demands. Even the managers in charge of all these activities can be replaced.

If we agree that the education, employment and retirement continuum is no longer a linear “cradle to grave” construct, then several tools for managing this reality are increasingly proving redundant. Job descriptions used for hiring are one such example. Hiring managers often write these as a reflection of their own experiences, ignoring the fact that we are entering an era where the emphasis should be less on ready competence and more on transferable skills.

The spectrum of hatred against “irregardless” might be unmatched. Everyone claims to hate the word “moist,” but the dislike is general and jokey: ew, gross, “moist,” bleh. People’s hatred of “irregardless” is specific and vehemently serious: it cannot mean “without regard to” but must mean “with regard to,” so it’s nonsensical and shouldn’t exist; it’s a double negative and therefore not allowable by anyone with sense and judgment; it’s a redundant blend of “irrespective” and “regardless,” and we don’t need it; it is illogical and therefore not a word; it is a hallmark of uneducated speech and shouldn’t be entered into the dictionary. All of these complaints point in one direction: “irregardless” is evidence that English is going to hell, and you, Merriam-Webster, are skipping down the easy path, merrily swinging the handbasket. The truth is I felt for the complainant. “Irregardless” was just wrong, I thought—I knew this deep down at a molecular level, and no dictionary entry was going to convince me otherwise. But sharing my personal linguistic beef with the world was not part of the job, so I buttoned my yap and answered the correspondence. Yes, it’s entered, I said, but please note that it’s marked “nonstandard” (which is a fancy way of saying it’s not accepted by most educated speakers of English) and we have a very long usage paragraph after the one-word definition that explains you should use “regardless” instead. We are duty-bound to record the language as it is used, I concluded, gritting my teeth and mentally sprinkling scare quotes throughout the entire sentence.

I’m sure there’ll be new new jobs for horses that we haven’t yet imagined. That’s what’s always happened before, like with the invention of the wheel and the plow.” Alas, those not-yet-imagined new jobs for horses never arrived. No-longer-needed horses were slaughtered and not replaced, causing the U.S. equine population to collapse from about 26 million in 1915 to about 3 million in 1960.55 As mechanical muscles made horses redundant, will mechanical minds do the same to humans?

In a 2016 book widely publicized in the US, Stern claimed that 58 per cent of all jobs would be automated eventually, driven by the ethos of shareholder value. He told the American media group Bloomberg, ‘It’s not like the fall of the auto and steel industries. That hit just a sector of the country. This will be widespread. People will realize that we don’t have a storm anymore; we have a tsunami.’16 Nevertheless, there are reasons to be sceptical about the prospect of a jobless or even workless future. It is the latest version of the ‘lump of labour fallacy’, the idea that there is only a certain amount of labour and work to be done, so that if more of it can be automated or done by intelligent robots, human workers will be rendered redundant. In any case, very few jobs can be automated in their entirety. The suggestion in a much-cited study17 that nearly half of all US jobs are vulnerable to automation has been challenged by, among others, the OECD, which puts the figure of jobs ‘at risk’ at 9 per cent for industrialized countries.18

He insisted on getting "back to the basics of great products, great marketing, and great distribution.”11 At a product strategy session early after his return to Apple, Jobs’s bewilderment and frustration at a plethora of redundant products reached a climax. He drew a two-by-two chart that divided the market into four segments—Consumer and Pro on one axis, Desktop and Portable on the other—and declared that Apple was to make one great product for each quadrant.

Power levels were dropped so low that even voice communications were difficult. Removing carbon dioxide from the air was another serious problem. Lithium hydroxide normally did the job but there wasn’t enough of it. The only additional supply they had was in the Command Module, and its canisters were cube-shaped whereas the Lunar Module’s sockets were cylindrical. It looked like the men would suffocate before they made it back. In one of the most inspired brainstorming sessions of all time, engineers on the ground got out all the kit that the crew would have available. They then improvised a ‘mailbox’ that would join the two incompatible connections and draw the air through. The air was becoming more poisonous with every breath as the astronauts followed the meticulous radio instructions to build the Heath Robinson repair. Amazingly, it worked. They would have enough clean air. But they weren’t out of the woods yet. They needed to re-enter the atmosphere in the Command Module, but it had been totally shut down to preserve its power. Would it start up again? Its systems hadn’t been designed to do this. Again, engineers and crew on the ground had to think on their feet if their friends were to live. They invented an entirely new protocol that would power the ship back up with the limited power supply and time available without blowing the system. They also feared that condensation in the unpowered and freezing cold Command Module might damage electrical systems when it was reactivated. It booted up first time. Back to Earth with a splash With Apollo 13 nearing Earth, the crew jettisoned the Service Module and photographed the damage for later analysis. Then they jettisoned the redundant Lunar Module, leaving them sitting tight in the Command Module Odyssey as they plunged into the atmosphere.

Quiz show contestant’ may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Jennings, who came in second, added a personal note on his answer to the tournament’s final question: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.” He later elaborated, “Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the twentieth century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of ‘thinking’ machines. ‘Quiz show contestant’ may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.

In somebody’s mind, some upper-level suit that was looking at the bottom line and all those red numbers, it made more sense to unload five employees who collectively made a hundred thousand a year and ruin five lives, than it did to get rid of one job-redundant, mid-level manager earning the same amount.

The likely consequences of this coming age of uncertainty—when a growing number of people will have good reason to fear job loss and long-term redundancy—will be a return to dependency upon the state.

For an example of empathy in action, consider what happened when two giant brokerage companies merged, creating redundant jobs in all their divisions. One division manager called his people together and gave a gloomy speech that emphasized the number of people who would soon be fired. The manager of another division gave his people a different kind of speech. He was up-front about his own worry and confusion, and he promised to keep people informed and to treat everyone fairly.

Get geeky about it – ensure you are the one that people go to when they have a question about your industry. Keep yourself the most knowledgeable person you know on it. This will help you not only succeed today but will future-proof you against redundancies as you will be well-known within your industry and will enable you to get another job quickly.

She saw all this in bits and pieces, as she arrived at a planet to pick up passengers or departed it after dropping them off; she saw them as a god might, ageless and detached from the flow of time. She hadn’t realized when she took this job how it would make her into something other, something distinct from humanity yet still technically human, but it had. The Maintenance Deck of the ship had become a series of time capsules, with each new crew member bringing relics of their particular age. The Redundancy was a museum.

I was the first to arrive, and Bill was in the process of cleaning his barbecue. He looked about forty, and he told me that he and Violet had been on the island for three years, ever since he’d been made redundant from his job in Sydney. Apart from helping Tom out when he needed it, he and Violet managed a group of four holiday cabins for an absentee owner, and also ran a low-key café in the holiday season. They loved it and intended to stay until the kids had to go to secondary school

The other major oil industry suppliers were similarly weary, trying to shore up earnings by slashing jobs, trimming project costs, and squeezing their own customers and suppliers wherever they could. (The wildcatters had it worse: many of the mom-and-pop operators of the American oil patch started to file for bankruptcy.) One year later, GE would merge its oil and gas unit into the oil-field giant Baker Hughes, keeping for itself a more than 50 percent stake in the company and spinning out a new public company to be run by Simonelli, under GE’s control. The transaction eased GE’s exposure to the ongoing oil rout and gave the new company, dubbed “Baker Hughes, a GE company,” vast new areas of redundant employees and operations to eliminate. With Baker Hughes, GE changed its tone a bit. The deal was transformational, but in which intended direction wasn’t made clear. GE execs like Bornstein would proclaim that the deal gave them “optionality,” but the reality was that investors were left in the dark on the strategy: Was GE doubling down on oil? Or was it preparing to exit the industry? The idea of holding such a long-term option was nice, but the game pieces in the positioning were people, and those who didn’t leave their job had no idea where the future of the company might be. The new arrangement didn’t spare Lufkin. The historic foundry was closed. The city’s annual financial report now just shows a blank line when listing the company’s employment tally, evidence of the more than four thousand jobs that evaporated after GE came to town. Between two Mondays—the day GE announced it was coming to Lufkin and the day the company said it would move on, leaving a shuttered foundry at the center of town—just 868 days had passed.

If the organization grows in size, higher-ups’ importance will almost invariably be measured by the total number of employees working under them, which, in turn, creates an even more powerful incentive for those on top of the organizational ladder to either hire employees and only then decide what they are going to do with them or—even more often, perhaps—to resist any efforts to eliminate jobs that are found to be redundant.

Bureaucrats complicate. It gives them more work to do. It gives them job security. It means promotions as ever more bureaucrats are added to the Ministry of Redundancy.

You do an amazing job at work, doing work that is your job. Thank you for being a part of Team Redundancy!


But thanks to his sense of smell, he did have a good job. He was employed by the National Intelligence Center to smell murderers and terrorists in letters and other documents. The information revolution was just beginning, and he was very worried: his sense of smell didn't work with screens.