It's good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work.
Peter ThielRead
The optimism that many felt in the 1960s over labour-saving technology is giving way to a fearful question: 'Will your labour be good for anything in the future? Or will you be replaced by a machine?'
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses a shift from optimism about technology to fear about job security due to automation.
Peter Thiel highlights a transformation in societal perception regarding labor-saving technologies. Initially seen as beneficial and optimistic, these advancements are now accompanied by anxiety over their impact on employment. The questions posed reflect a growing concern that machines may ultimately replace human workers, leading to uncertainty about the future value of human labor.
Themes
TechnologyAutomationLaborOptimismFear
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about job automation, this quote can highlight concerns about the future of work.
More from Peter Thiel
All quotes →The first question we would ask if aliens landed on this planet is not, 'What does this mean for the economy or jobs?' It would be, 'Are they friendly or unfriendly?'
Peter ThielRead
People working on bigger ideas on a more protracted timeline will be more on the stealth side. They aren’t releasing new PR announcements every day. The bigger the secret and the likelier it is that you alone have it, the more time you have to execute. There may be far more people going after hard secrets than we think.
Peter ThielRead
What is it about our society where anyone who does not have Asperger's gets talked out of their heterodox ideas?
Peter ThielRead
Every time you write an email, it is in the public domain. There are all these ways where security is not as good as people believe.
Peter ThielRead
Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.
Peter ThielRead
Similar quotes
We're not in hardware for hardware's sake. We're in hardware to be able to express all our platform and productivity software in a way that's unique.
Satya NadellaRead
The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.
Zbigniew BrzezinskiRead
What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.
Nicholas G. CarrRead
About three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
Bill GatesRead
Everyone with a cell phone thinks they're a photographer. Everyone with a laptop thinks they're a journalist. But they have no training, and they have no idea of what we keep to in terms of standards, as in what's far out and what's reality. And they have no dedication to truth.
Helen ThomasRead
Software companies should take more responsibility for security holes, especially in browsers and e-mail clients. There are some straightforward things the industry should be doing right now to fix things, and I don't know why they haven't been done yet.
Tim Berners-LeeRead