【英语生活】机器人会夺走我们的工作吗？ Intelligent robots raise anxieties over future jobs

In a shiny demonstration room in a Tokyo office, a small robot called Sota swings its arms enthusiastically like a small child as it talks to the humans clustered around it. NTT Data, the Japanese IT services company, is planning to dispatch these little table-top robots into care homes for the elderly, where they will be able to talk to the residents as well as control their lights, check their blood pressure and remind them when to take their pills.

With its big round eyes and childish voice, Sota (pictured right) is far from threatening. Yet many people are increasingly fearful of the trend that Sota represents: a fresh wave of technological progress that some believe will render many human workers redundant.

The idea that vast numbers of jobs will soon be automated has even permeated the walls of the world’s central banks. Late last year, both Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, and Ignazio Visco, governor of the Bank of Italy, gave speeches exploring the economic consequences of the “second machine age”, as MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have called it.

The trigger for these fears is the development of machines and computers that can be substituted for human brains as well as brawn — threatening the jobs of truck drivers, analysts and financial journalists.

“The smarter machines become, the greater the likelihood that the space remaining for uniquely human skills could shrink further,” Mr Haldane told an audience of British trade unionists in November.

He estimated that about 15m jobs in Britain, almost half the total, were at risk of automation. Similarly, Mr Visco told his audience that up to 50 per cent of jobs in the major European countries were estimated to be at risk.

Not everyone is panicking, however. For one thing, we have been here before, as David Autor, an economics professor at MIT, points out.

In a recent paper, he noted that fears of automation and joblessness were running so high in the 1960s that president Lyndon B Johnson created a special “Blue-Ribbon National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress” to examine the consequences for jobs and living standards. The national commission eventually concluded that mass unemployment was not a risk: “The basic fact is that technology eliminates jobs, not work,” it said.

The commission was proved right. During the wave of automation in the 1960s, and those that preceded (and succeeded) it, the overall level of employment held up because new jobs replaced old ones. There have been winners and losers as middle-skilled jobs — such as routine secretarial and manufacturing tasks — have declined, but the total proportion of people in work has not budged much.

In the UK, for example, technology has improved productivity by about a third each generation, yet the employment rate is roughly the same now as it was in the early 19th century.

“We could be talking about spinning jennies or we could be talking about cyborgs — from an economic perspective it’s kind of the same,” said Toby Nangle, asset manager at Columbia Threadneedle Investments.

“I think the onus on people saying ‘this time is different’ is to make the case why it is different.”

Those who say this time will be different, such as Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots, believe this wave of technological change will be so profound it will reach into every part of the labour market and skew the gains to only the very richest.

So far, there is not enough evidence to know whether Mr Nangle or Mr Ford will be proved right. Indeed, there is no sign at all yet that technology is supercharging productivity by supplanting workers with machines.

If anything, the global economy has the opposite problem. Growth in labour productivity — the amount of output generated per worker — has been slowing in the developed world and big emerging economies such as China and Brazil. The slowdown is partly the consequence of the financial crisis, but in some places it began sooner: labour productivity growth in the US started to decline in 2005 as the initial effects of the IT revolution began to fade.

Japan is a more extreme example: in spite of its reputation as the home of robotics, Japanese productivity is below the OECD average and far lower than countries such as the US and Germany.

Of course, it may be that the technological breakthroughs have yet to reach the workplace en masse. Driverless cars are not yet replacing jobs, for example, but it is easy to believe they eventually could.

In some ways, the Sota robots are pioneers: how quickly they are adopted by Japanese care homes might give us a sense of when — and whether — to worry about the “second machine age”.

在东京一处写字楼的一间明亮的展示厅里，一个名叫“索塔”(Sota)的小机器人一边跟聚拢在它周围的人交谈，一边像小孩子一样热情挥动着手臂。日本IT服务提供商NTT Data正打算把这些小小的桌面机器人派遣到老年人护理中心，它们可以跟护理对象交谈，并帮他们控制灯光、检查血压，以及提醒他们何时吃药。

索塔有着大大的圆眼睛和孩子般的嗓音（见右图），它还远远不能构成威胁。不过，许多人日益担忧索塔所代表的一种趋势：又一波被认为将使许多人类工人变得多余的技术进步浪潮。



大量工作不久后将实现自动化的观点，甚至已经渗透了世界上的一些中央银行。去年下半年，英国央行(BoE)首席经济学家安迪?霍尔丹(Andy Haldane)和意大利央行(Bank of Italy)行长伊尼亚齐奥?维斯科(Ignazio Visco)都发表演讲，探讨了麻省理工学院(MIT)的埃里克?布林约尔松(Erik Brynjolfsson)和安德鲁?麦卡菲(Andrew McAfee)所称的“第二个机器时代”的经济后果。

引发这些担忧的是能够取代人类大脑和肌肉的机器和电脑的发展——这对卡车司机、分析师和财经记者的工作构成了威胁。

“机器变得越智能，人类特有技能所剩下的空间可能会缩减得越厉害，”去年11月霍尔丹对英国一群工会人士表示。

他估计，英国大约有1500万个工作岗位——大约为总量的一半——可能受到自动化的威胁。类似的，维斯科也对观众表示，欧洲主要国家里多达50%的工作岗位估计面临风险。

然而，并非人人都感到恐慌。首先，正如麻省理工学院经济学教授戴维?奥托尔(David Autor)所指出的那样，我们以前遇到过这种情形。

他在不久前的一份论文中提到，1960年代，对自动化和失业的担忧达到很高程度，以致美国总统林登?约翰逊(Lyndon B Johnson)创立了一个特别的“蓝带技术、自动化和经济进步全国委员会”(National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress)，以研究就业和生活水平受到的影响。这个全国委员会最终得出结论称，并不存在大规模失业的风险。“基本事实是，技术消灭了工作岗位，但没有消灭工作，”该委员会表示。

该委员会的结论被证明是正确的。在1960年代的自动化浪潮，以及它之前和之后的浪潮中，总体就业水平得以保持，因为新岗位取代了旧岗位。中等技能岗位——比如日常的秘书岗位和制造业岗位——有所减少，因此有赢家也有输家，但整体就业率没有太大变化。

比如，在英国，技术在每代人期间将生产率提高了约三分之一，但目前的就业率跟19世纪初大体保持一致。

“我们可能在谈论珍妮纺纱机，也可能在谈论半机器人——从经济角度看，它们是一回事，”天利投资(Columbia Threadneedle)的资产经理托比?南格尔(Toby Nangle)表示。

“我认为，那些说‘这次不一样’的人，有义务说出不一样的理由是什么。”

那些说这次将不一样的人——比如《机器人的崛起》(Rise of the Robots)的作者马丁?福特(Martin Ford)——认为，这一轮科技变革将十分深远，将会影响到劳动力市场的方方面面，仅仅使那些最富有的人受益。

到目前为止，并没有足够证据证明，南格尔或福特到底谁的看法将是正确的。实际上，目前根本没有出现技术通过用机器取代工人而大力提高生产率的迹象。

如果说有什么不同的话，全球经济实际上面临着相反的问题。在发达世界、以及中国和巴西等大型新兴经济体，劳动生产率（指工人的人均产出）的提高一直在放缓。部分原因在于金融危机的拖累，但在有些地方，放缓开始得更早：随着IT革命最初的影响开始消退，美国劳动生产率增速在2005年就开始下降。

日本是一个更极端的例子：尽管有着机器人技术发源地的名声，但日本的生产率低于经合组合(OECD)国家平均水平，更是远低于美国和德国等国家。

当然，可能的情况是，技术突破尚未影响到所有工作场所。比如，无人驾驶汽车还没有取代人类工作岗位，但人们很容易相信，这最终会变为现实。

在某些方面，索塔机器人是先行者：日本护理中心接纳它们的速度有多快，或许会让我们知道在什么时候——以及是否——应该为“第二个机器时代”感到担忧。

译者/邢嵬