“Learn from everyone. Follow no one. Watch for patterns. Work like hell.”

“By 2017, half of all employers will require workers to supply their own devices for work purposes. Also, Gartner says, enterprises that offer only corporately-owned smartphones or stipends to buy your own will soon become the exception to the rule. As enterprise BYOD programs proliferate, 38% of companies expect to stop providing devices to workers by 2016 and let them use their own, according to a global survey of CIOs by Gartner, Inc.’s Executive Programs.”

“You could truly leave work. Work was work, and life was life.”

“The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories,” said Andreessen. “People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.” It’s a glib remark—but increasingly true.”

“The turn of the new millennium is when the automation of middle-class information processing tasks really got under way, according to an analysis by the Associated Press based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Between 2000 and 2010, the jobs of 1.1 million secretaries were eliminated, replaced by internet services that made everything from maintaining a calendar to planning trips easier than ever. In the same period, the number of telephone operators dropped by 64%, travel agents by 46% and bookkeepers by 26%. And the US was not a special case. As the AP notes, “Two-thirds of the 7.6 million middle-class jobs that vanished in Europe were the victims of technology, estimates economist Maarten Goos at Belgium’s University of Leuven.” Economist Andrew McAfee, Brynjolfsson’s co-author, has called these displaced people “routine cognitive workers.” Technology, he says, is now smart enough to automate their often repetitive, programmatic tasks. ”We are in a desperate, serious competition with these machines,” concurs Larry Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University. “It seems like the machines are taking over all possible jobs.” Like farming and factory work before it, the labors of the mind are being colonized by devices and systems. In the early 1800′s, nine out of ten Americans worked in agriculture—now it’s around 2%. At its peak, about a third of the US population was employed in manufacturing—now it’s less than 10%. How many decades until the figures are similar for the information-processing tasks that typify rich countries’ post-industrial economies?”

“The most important resource we have is our people. We are wasting our citizens’ lives by not supporting their struggles to advance their education and train for a secure job. We have the tools. They’ve been around for decades. Online learning, credit by examination, evaluation of on-the-job training and academic credit for military service — all of these tools exist and have a proven track record of turning people’s lives around. Is it the snobbery of higher education — and some government leaders — that is grinding the movement to a halt? At a time when our institutions of higher education are being challenged economically and politically like no other time in history, we are faced with the need to better educate more than 60 percent of our current workforce, while simultaneously preparing the next. Instead of debating the strengths and weaknesses of face-to-face instruction over MOOCs (massive open online courses), or other forms of learning, we should embrace both. Remember, there are 93 million people in the workforce today without a degree of any kind.”

“

“People don’t see creative people as they are in reality,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent of everybody in a creative field is barely eking by. Also, when it comes right down to it, people like getting bargains. They’re not following the product chain back to the initial starting point.

“People are always going to want to get things inexpensively, so part of our job these days is to remind them there’s an actual human being on the other end of the equation, and that actual human being has rent to pay, and children they’d like to feed. The vast majority of writers are not like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling or Suzanne Collins. The average author makes a four-figure salary a year from their writing. If you don’t pay them, a lot of them will decide they can’t afford to write professionally anymore.”

“People are going to bring their own devices, their own data, their own software applications, even their own work groups,” drawing off friends and contractors at other companies, said Bill Burns, the director of information technology infrastructure at Netflix. “If you try and implant software that limits an employee’s capabilities, you’re adding a layer of complexity.”