TED学院 | 未来的工作是什么样？

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中英文演讲稿

The writer George Eliot cautioned us that, among all forms of mistake, prophesy is the most gratuitous. The person that we would all acknowledge as her 20th-century counterpart, Yogi Berra, agreed. He said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

作家乔治·艾略特提醒我们，在所有形式的错误中， 预言是最没有理由的。我们都熟知的 20世纪的尤吉·贝拉，也同意这点。他说，“很难做出预测， 尤其是关于未来"。

I'm going to ignore their cautions and make one very specific forecast. In the world that we are creating very quickly, we're going to see more and more things that look like science fiction, and fewer and fewer things that look like jobs. Our cars are very quickly going to start driving themselves, which means we're going to need fewer truck drivers. 

不过我要无视这些提醒，并作出一个非常具体的预测。 当今世界我们正在飞速创造， 我们会看到越来越多的新事物，看起来像是科幻小说， 以及越来越少看起来像工作的事物。 我们的车很快要开始自动驾驶， 这意味着我们用不着那么多的卡车司机了。

We're going to hook Siri up to Watson and use that to automate a lot of the work that's currently done by customer service reps and troubleshooters and diagnosers, and we're already taking R2D2, painting him orange, and putting him to work carrying shelves around warehouses, which means we need a lot fewer people to be walking up and down those aisles.

我们要把Siri和沃森（人工智能程序）结合 用它来自动完成大量的工作 而这些工作目前通过客服人员 维修人员和分析师来完成， 我们就已经造出了R2D2， 把它涂成橙色，让它去工作 将货架运往各地仓库， 这意味着我们需越来越少的人 在那些通道上走来走去。

Now, for about 200 years, people have been saying exactly what I'm telling you -- the age of technological unemployment is at hand — starting with the Luddites smashing looms in Britain just about two centuries ago, and they have been wrong. Our economies in the developed world have coasted along on something pretty close to full employment.

迄今为止的 200多年， 人们一直在热议我现在所说的内容，关于“技术性失业”的时代已经来临 — — 始于卢德派（反科技人士）在英国捣毁织布机，这发生在大约两个世纪前， 但他们的预言错了。 我们一路至今的经济发展几乎是接近充分就业。

Which brings up a critical question: Why is this time different, if it really is? The reason it's different is that, just in the past few years, our machines have started demonstrating skills they have never, ever had before: understanding, speaking, hearing, seeing, answering, writing, and they're still acquiring new skills. 

这就引申出一个关键的问题： 如果技术性失业是真的，那预言为何没有成真？ 导致现实与预言不符的原因是，我们的机器 在最近几年才开始展示出前所未有的技能。这些技能包括： 理解、说话、 听、 看、 应答、 写作，并且他们还在掌握新的技能。 

For example, mobile humanoid robots are still incredibly primitive, but the research arm of the Defense Department just launched a competition to have them do things like this, and if the track record is any guide, this competition is going to be successful. 

例如，移动的仿人机器人仍然很原始，但国防部的研究机构刚刚启动了一项竞赛，要这些机器人做上面的工作， 如果跟踪记录是可以借鉴的， 这次竞赛将会非常成功。 

So when I look around, I think the day is not too far off at all when we're going to have androids doing a lot of the work that we are doing right now. And we're creating a world where there is going to be more and more technology and fewer and fewer jobs. It's a world that Erik Brynjolfsson and I are calling "the new machine age."

所以当我环顾四周，我觉得那天是不远了。当我们通过机器人 做了很多我们现在在做的工作。 我们正在创造一个的技术越来越丰富 就业机会却越来越少的新世界 我和埃里克 · 布赖恩试图将其命名为 "新机器时代"。

The thing to keep in mind is that this is absolutely great news. This is the best economic news on the planet these days. Not that there's a lot of competition, right? This is the best economic news we have these days for two main reasons. The first is, technological progress is what allows us to continue this amazing recent run that we're on where output goes up over time, while at the same time, prices go down, and volume and quality just continue to explode. 

要牢记的是， 这是非常好的消息，这是地球上最好的经济新闻。你会认为机器人带来了竞争，不是吗？ 为何是最好的经济新闻？有两个主要原因。第一是，技术进步使得我们继续维持令人惊叹的产出。随着时间推移继续前进， 与此同时，物价却开始下降， 数量和质量都持续上升。

Now, some people look at this and talk about shallow materialism, but that's absolutely the wrong way to look at it. This is abundance, which is exactly what we want our economic system to provide. The second reason that the new machine age is such great news is that, once the androids start doing jobs, we don't have to do them anymore, and we get freed up from drudgery and toil.

现在，有些人看到这个会联想到浅层的唯物主义， 但这绝对是错误的理解方式。这种物质丰富正是我们对现有经济体系的期待。第二个主要原因， 一旦机器人 开始承担工作，我们就不需要再插手， 我们可以从辛苦的劳动中解放出来。

Now, when I talk about this with my friends in Cambridge and Silicon Valley, they say, "Fantastic. No more drudgery, no more toil. This gives us the chance to imagine an entirely different kind of society, a society where the creators and the discoverers and the performers and the innovators come together with their patrons and their financiers to talk about issues, entertain, enlighten, provoke each other."

现在，当我与剑桥和硅谷的朋友提起此事，他们认为， "太棒了。从此再没有辛苦，再没有劳累。这给了我们去想象 一种全然不同的社会的机会，那里，创造者和发现者、表演者和创新者与他们的赞助人和金融家们在一起，谈论的热门话题，娱乐和启蒙， 彼此启迪"。 

It's a society really, that looks a lot like the TED Conference. And there's actually a huge amount of truth here. We are seeing an amazing flourishing taking place. In a world where it is just about as easy to generate an object as it is to print a document, we have amazing new possibilities. 

这样的社会，看起来很像 TED 大会。实际上大量的真相就在这里，我们看到了令人惊异的蓬勃发展。在这个我们可以像打印文档一样生成物体的世界， 我们有令人惊异的无限可能。

The people who used to be craftsmen and hobbyists are now makers, and they're responsible for massive amounts of innovation. 

那些曾经的手艺人和业余爱好者，现在是决策者，负责大量的创新工作。 

And artists who were formerly constrained can now do things that were never, ever possible for them before. So this is a time of great flourishing, and the more I look around, the more convinced I become that this quote, from the physicist Freeman Dyson, is not hyperbole at all. This is just a plain statement of the facts. We are in the middle of an astonishing period.

那些以前受到各种限制的艺术家，可以尝试前所未有有的创作，远胜先人。所以这是一个伟大的时期， 我们环顾四周，越发相信物理学家弗里曼 · 戴森的箴言，一点都不夸张。它只是对事实的平实陈述而已，我们正处在一个非常时期。

["Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences." — Freeman Dyson]

["技术是上帝的恩赐，是仅次于“生命”的恩典。它是文明、 艺术和科学的母亲"— — 弗里曼 · 戴森]

Which brings up another great question: What could possibly go wrong in this new machine age? Right? Great, hang up, flourish, go home. We're going to face two really thorny sets of challenges as we head deeper into the future that we're creating.

这就引出另一个大问题： 在这新的机器时代，哪些东西会走上岔路？ 对吧？太好了，蓬勃发展，回家去。我们要面对两大棘手的挑战，当进一步靠近我们正在创造的未来。

The first are economic, and they're really nicely summarized in an apocryphal story about a back-and-forth between Henry Ford II and Walter Reuther, who was the head of the auto workers union. They were touring one of the new modern factories, and Ford playfully turns to Reuther and says, "Hey Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?" And Reuther shoots back, "Hey Henry, how are you going to get them to buy cars?"

首先是经济方面， 这通过一个杜撰的故事已经有很好的总结。故事关于亨利 · 福特二世（汽车生产商） 和沃尔特·鲁瑟，汽车工人工会的领袖。他们一起参观最现代化的汽车工厂， 然后福特开玩笑地对鲁瑟说： "嘿，沃尔特，你怎么让这些机器人来支付工会会费?" 鲁瑟回答，"嘿，亨利 你怎么能让他们买你的车?"

Reuther's problem in that anecdote is that it is tough to offer your labor to an economy that's full of machines, and we see this very clearly in the statistics. If you look over the past couple decades at the returns to capital -- in other words, corporate profits -- we see them going up, and we see that they're now at an all-time high. 

在这个故事中，鲁瑟面临的问题实质上是面对一个充满机器的经济体，很难去提供人的劳动。我们可以在统计数据中，非常清楚地看到。在过去的几十年资本收益— —换言之，企业利润— —我们看到它们在增长，而且目前正是历史最高水平。 

If we look at the returns to labor, in other words total wages paid out in the economy, we see them at an all-time low and heading very quickly in the opposite direction.

如果我们对比一下劳动力，换句话说，在经济体中，总工资的发放，我们看到这一数据是空前的低，两者非常迅速地朝着相反方向偏离。

So this is clearly bad news for Reuther. It looks like it might be great news for Ford, but it's actually not. If you want to sell huge volumes of somewhat expensive goods to people, you really want a large, stable, prosperous middle class. 

所以这就是鲁瑟的坏消息（工人少，会费少）。但看起来它可能是福特的好消息，然而实际上不是。如果你想要卖出数量巨大的昂贵商品，你需要一个大型的、稳定的、繁荣的中产阶级。

We have had one of those in America for just about the entire postwar period. But the middle class is clearly under huge threat right now. We all know a lot of the statistics, but just to repeat one of them, median income in America has actually gone down over the past 15 years, and we're in danger of getting trapped in some vicious cycle where inequality and polarization continue to go up over time.

经历了整个战后时期，美国已经形成了这样一个中产阶级，但中产阶层显然正处在巨大的威胁中。我们都知道很多统计数据， 只提其中一个，在美国，中产阶级收入的减少已经持续了15年， 我们处在陷入持续恶化的不平等与两极分化的恶性循环的危险之中。

The societal challenges that come along with that kind of inequality deserve some attention. There are a set of societal challenges that I'm actually not that worried about, and they're captured by images like this. This is not the kind of societal problem that I am concerned about.

这些伴随不平等现象带来的社会挑战值得关注。相比这些严峻的社会挑战，我倒不会担心这种被机器人逆袭的危险。这不是我所担心的那种社会问题。

There is no shortage of dystopian visions about what happens when our machines become self-aware, and they decide to rise up and coordinate attacks against us. I'm going to start worrying about those the day my computer becomes aware of my printer.

这个世界从不缺，当我们的机器拥有自我意识， 并决定崛起和发动对我们的攻击的反乌托邦式幻想，但我要开始担心的是 某一天我的电脑知道了打印机的存在。

So this is not the set of challenges we really need to worry about. To tell you the kinds of societal challenges that are going to come up in the new machine age, I want to tell a story about two stereotypical American workers. And to make them really stereotypical, let's make them both white guys. 

所以机器人的进攻并不是我们真正需要担心的。为了让大家对新机器时代的社会挑战有更好的理解，我想讲一个故事，关于两个典型的美国工人。为了使它们真正典型， 我们假设他们是两个白人。

And the first one is a college-educated professional, creative type, manager, engineer, doctor, lawyer, that kind of worker. We're going to call him "Ted." He's at the top of the American middle class. His counterpart is not college-educated and works as a laborer, works as a clerk, does low-level white collar or blue collar work in the economy. We're going to call that guy "Bill."

第一个是接受大学教育，专业的、 创造性的类型， 管理者，工程师、医生、律师、代表这类人群。 我们称他为"Ted"。 他处在美国中产阶级的顶层。 预制对应的是未经大学教育的 普通工人和职员， 低级白领或蓝领工作者。 我们称他为"Bill"。

And if you go back about 50 years, Bill and Ted were leading remarkably similar lives. For example, in 1960 they were both very likely to have full-time jobs, working at least 40 hours a week. But as the social researcher Charles Murray has documented, as we started to automate the economy, and 1960 is just about when computers started to be used by businesses, as we started to progressively inject technology and automation and digital stuff into the economy, the fortunes of Bill and Ted diverged a lot. 

如果在 50 年前， Bill和Ted这两种人的生活差别不大。例如，在 1960 年他们两人都很有可能有全职工作，一周工作40 个小时。但根据社会研究员查尔斯 · 默里的记载， 当我们开始经济自动化，1960 年正是计算机开始进入商用，我们开始逐步将技术自动化和数字化注入经济 Bill和Ted的命运，偏离了很多。

Over this time frame, Ted has continued to hold a full-time job. Bill hasn't. In many cases, Bill has left the economy entirely, and Ted very rarely has. Over time, Ted's marriage has stayed quite happy. Bill's hasn't. And Ted's kids have grown up in a two-parent home, while Bill's absolutely have not over time. Other ways that Bill is dropping out of society? He's decreased his voting in presidential elections, and he's started to go to prison a lot more often. 

在这时间轴上，Ted继续 保持一份全职工作，Bill却没有。在许多情况下，Bill已完全无法维持生计，而Ted却几乎不会出现这种情况。随着时间的推移，Ted的婚姻一直很快乐。Bill却并非如此。Ted的孩子们在双亲家庭中长大， 然而Bill的孩子却没有这么幸运。 Bill会在其他方面与社会脱节吗？ 越来越少的Bill参与总统选举的投票，越来越多的Bill开始光顾监狱。

So I cannot tell a happy story about these social trends, and they don't show any signs of reversing themselves. They're also true no matter which ethnic group or demographic group we look at, and they're actually getting so severe that they're in danger of overwhelming even the amazing progress we made with the Civil Rights Movement.

我没法给大家展示一个乐观的社会趋势，而他们(Bills)也没有任何改变自己的迹象。这是一个普遍的事实，无论是在哪一个民族、哪一个社会群体， 都已经变得如此严重。这才是我所说的压倒性的社会挑战即便我们在公民权利运动中已经有所进展。

And what my friends in Silicon Valley and Cambridge are overlooking is that they're Ted. They're living these amazingly busy, productive lives, and they've got all the benefits to show from that, while Bill is leading a very different life. They're actually both proof of how right Voltaire was when he talked about the benefits of work, and the fact that it saves us from not one but three great evils.

而我在硅谷的朋友 在剑桥的朋友，他们就是Ted。 他们过着忙碌、 富有成效的生活， 并从中受益， 然而Bill却过着完全不同的生活。 他们实际上都验证了伏尔泰的箴言 伏尔泰论述工作的益处， 归功于，它将人类从三大罪恶中拯救。

["Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice and need." — Voltaire]

["工作把人从三大罪恶——无聊，堕落，贫乏——中拯救出来"— — 伏尔泰]

So with these challenges, what do we do about them?

那么，面对这些挑战，我们需要如何去做？

The economic playbook is surprisingly clear, surprisingly straightforward, in the short term especially. The robots are not going to take all of our jobs in the next year or two, so the classic Econ 101 playbook is going to work just fine: Encourage entrepreneurship, double down on infrastructure, and make sure we're turning out people from our educational system with the appropriate skills.

经济的剧本是出奇地明确， 直截了当，尤其是在短期内。机器人还不至于在一两年内揽下我们所有的工作，所以经典的经济学剧本也可以发挥效用： 鼓励创业精神，翻倍的基础设施建设，并确保我们正在提升我们自身，通过教育制度培养相应的技能。

But over the longer term, if we are moving into an economy that's heavy on technology and light on labor, and we are, then we have to consider some more radical interventions, for example, something like a guaranteed minimum income. Now, that's probably making some folk in this room uncomfortable, because that idea is associated with the extreme left wing and with fairly radical schemes for redistributing wealth. 

但在长期看来，如果我们正在进入一个重技术轻体力的经济体，那么我们就必须要考虑一些更激进的干预措施，例如，最低收入保障。现在，这些可能会造成在坐各位的反感，因为这种想法曾与极端左翼连在一起，他们采用非常激进的手段，来重新分配财富。 

I did a little bit of research on this notion, and it might calm some folk down to know that the idea of a net guaranteed minimum income has been championed by those frothing-at-the-mouth socialists Friedrich Hayek, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman. 

我对此做了一些研究，它可能会让一些民间的反感趋于冷静。最低收入保障的概念曾经被社会主义者们所拥护，弗里德里克·哈耶克、 理查德 · 尼克松和米尔顿 · 弗里德曼。

And if you find yourself worried that something like a guaranteed income is going to stifle our drive to succeed and make us kind of complacent, you might be interested to know that social mobility, one of the things we really pride ourselves on in the United States, is now lower than it is in the northern European countries that have these very generous social safety nets. So the economic playbook is actually pretty straightforward.

如果你发现自己正在担心，诸如最低保障收入正在扼杀我们成功的动力，让我们洋洋自得，你可能会有兴趣知道，社会的流动性，这在美国，是让我们引以为傲的方面，现在却比不上北欧的国家，它们有着更为慷慨的社保网络。所以经济方面实际上相当简单。

The societal one is a lot more challenging. I don't know what the playbook is for getting Bill to engage and stay engaged throughout life.

社会方面却更具挑战。我不知道设计怎样的社会剧本才能让Bill重新参与和介入社会生活。

I do know that education is a huge part of it. I witnessed this firsthand. I was a Montessori kid for the first few years of my education, and what that education taught me is that the world is an interesting place and my job is to go explore it. The school stopped in third grade, so then I entered the public school system, and it felt like I had been sent to the Gulag. 

我只知道教育是不可或缺的一部分，对此我深有体会。我在蒙特梭利接受了几年的低龄教育，这种教育让我认为这个世界非常有趣，而我的工作就是要去探索它。学校在三年级时，就停办了，然后我进入公立学校系统，我感觉就像被派到劳改营。

With the benefit of hindsight, I now know the job was to prepare me for life as a clerk or a laborer, but at the time it felt like the job was to kind of bore me into some submission with what was going on around me. We have to do better than this. We cannot keep turning out Bills.

事后看来，现在我知道这种教育是让我成为一个职员或技工作准备，但与此同时我也觉得这种教育让我卷入到了无尽的厌烦之中。我们必须做得比这更好。 我们不能把下一代继续变成Bill。

So we see some green shoots that things are getting better. We see technology deeply impacting education and engaging people, from our youngest learners up to our oldest ones. 

我们已经看到有些好转的苗头。我们看到技术已经深深地影响了教育，吸引各个层次的求知者，从新生一代到我们这些老骨头。

We see very prominent business voices telling us we need to rethink some of the things that we've been holding dear for a while. And we see very serious and sustained and data-driven efforts to understand how to intervene in some of the most troubled communities that we have.

我们听到非常显著的来自商界的声音，告诉我们要反思那些我们一度坚持的事物。我们看到非常严肃和持久的数据驱动的努力，以了解如何去干预我们那些最不安的群体。

So the green shoots are out there. I don't want to pretend for a minute that what we have is going to be enough. We're facing very tough challenges. To give just one example, there are about five million Americans who have been unemployed for at least six months. We're not going to fix things for them by sending them back to Montessori. And my biggest worry is that we're creating a world where we're going to have glittering technologies embedded in kind of a shabby society and supported by an economy that generates inequality instead of opportunity.

所以希望就在那里。我连一分钟的假装都做不到。我们现在所拥有的真的是不够，我们现在面临着非常严峻的挑战。仅举一个例子，有大约500 万美国人已经失业至少六个月了。我们没法通过将他们送回蒙特梭利的幼儿园来解决它，我最担心的，是我们要创建的世界 虽有闪闪发光的技术却还是一套破旧的社会体制，由不公而非机会所维持的经济。

But I actually don't think that's what we're going to do. I think we're going to do something a lot better for one very straightforward reason: The facts are getting out there. The realities of this new machine age and the change in the economy are becoming more widely known. If we wanted to accelerate that process, we could do things like have our best economists and policymakers play "Jeopardy!" against Watson. We could send Congress on an autonomous car road trip. 

但我并不认为我们会维持现在的所作所为，我认为我们会做得更好。一个非常简单的原因：事实已经呈现在眼前。新机器时代已经到来，经济的变革也更加广为人知。如果我们想要加快这一进程，我们可以做的事情比如让我们最好的经济学家和政策制定者，对人工智能程序发出"危险!"警告。我们可以通过自发的公路游行向国会传达。

And if we do enough of these kinds of things, the awareness is going to sink in that things are going to be different. And then we're off to the races, because I don't believe for a second that we have forgotten how to solve tough challenges or that we have become too apathetic or hard-hearted to even try.

如果我们做足够多的这类事情，这种意识就会渗入社会，情况就会发生变化。然后我们就出发去行动，哪怕只有一秒，我也不会相信。我们会忘记如何解决严峻的挑战或者我们已经变得太冷漠、麻木甚至不敢尝试。

I started my talk with quotes from wordsmiths who were separated by an ocean and a century. Let me end it with words from politicians who were similarly distant.

我通过引用文豪的名言开始我的演讲，他们来自一个世纪前海洋的另一端。现在让我用政治家的言论来结束演讲，他们同样地遥远。

Winston Churchill came to my home of MIT in 1949, and he said, "If we are to bring the broad masses of the people in every land to the table of abundance, it can only be by the tireless improvement of all of our means of technical production."

温斯顿 · 丘吉尔在1949年来到麻省理工学院，他说，“如果我们要带领广大人民群众走向繁荣富裕，只能通过不懈的改进改进一切技术生产手段。”

Abraham Lincoln realized there was one other ingredient. He said, "I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to give them the plain facts."

亚伯拉罕 · 林肯认识到另一个方面。他说，"我是一位对人民有坚定信心的人。如果给他们真相，他们可以面对任何国家的危机。最重要的是，给他们真正的事实。”

So the optimistic note, great point that I want to leave you with is that the plain facts of the machine age are becoming clear, and I have every confidence that we're going to use them to chart a good course into the challenging, abundant economy that we're creating.

所以乐观的说，我想要留给你们的是新机器时代的到来已经是显而易见的事实，我有十足的信心，我们可以驾驭机器来通过充满挑战的社会课程，迎接我们正在创造的经济繁荣。

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

非常感谢。

（掌声）

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