As it turns out, when tens of millions of people are unemployed or underemployed, there's a fair amount of interest in what technology might be doing to the labor force. And as I look at the conversation, it strikes me that it's focused on exactly the right topic, and at the same time, it's missing the point entirely. The topic that it's focused on, the question is whether or not all these digital technologies are affecting people's ability to earn a living, or, to say it a little bit different way, are the droids taking our jobs? And there's some evidence that they are.
事实上,当成千上万的人 没有工作或者被大材小用时 人们就去关注科技对劳动力的影响。 我看到这方面的新闻与报导之后发现 它们关注的主题都没有问题 但却彻底错过了重点。 它们关注的主题是, 数码科技会不会影响人们 谋生的能力,换句话说, 就是机器是不是抢走了我们的工作? 有证据显示这样的情况的确存在。 大萧条结束时
The Great Recession ended when American GDP resumed its kind of slow, steady march upward, and some other economic indicators also started to rebound, and they got kind of healthy kind of quickly. Corporate profits are quite high; in fact, if you include bank profits, they're higher than they've ever been. And business investment in gear -- in equipment and hardware and software -- is at an all-time high. So the businesses are getting out their checkbooks. What they're not really doing is hiring. So this red line is the employment-to-population ratio, in other words, the percentage of working-age people in America who have work. And we see that it cratered during the Great Recession, and it hasn't started to bounce back at all.
美国的GDP恢复了缓慢稳定的增长, 一些其它经济指标也开始快速健康地回升, 企业利润很高。 事实上,如果算上银行利润, 企业利润处于有史以来的最高水平。 企业在设备、机械、硬件和软件的投资 也处于历史最高水平。 所以企业虽然在花钱 却没有雇人。 这条红线是就业人数和人口的比例, 换句话说就是美国处于工作年龄的人口中 有工作人数的比例。 我们可以看到大萧条期间这一比例显著下降, 完全没有开始回升的迹象。
But the story is not just a recession story. The decade that we've just been through had relatively anemic job growth all throughout, especially when we compare it to other decades, and the 2000s are the only time we have on record where there were fewer people working at the end of the decade than at the beginning. This is not what you want to see. When you graph the number of potential employees versus the number of jobs in the country, you see the gap gets bigger and bigger over time, and then, during the Great Recession, it opened up in a huge way.
这一现象不仅仅存在于萧条时期。 十年之内工作数量的增长微乎其微 和其它的十年比尤其如此 事实上,在二十一世纪的第一个十年中 2009年的就业人数少于2000年 这种情况有记录以来第一次发生。 是我们不希望看到的趋势。 如果比较潜在雇员和 工作机会的数量,你会发现 两者之间的差距随着时间的推移越来越大 在大萧条期间,这种距离更是显著拉大。
I did some quick calculations. I took the last 20 years of GDP growth and the last 20 years of labor-productivity growth and used those in a fairly straightforward way to try to project how many jobs the economy was going to need to keep growing, and this is the line that I came up with. Is that good or bad? This is the government's projection for the working-age population going forward. So if these predictions are accurate, that gap is not going to close.
我进行了一些计算。我直接运用过去二十年GDP增长 和劳动生产率增长的数据 尝试预测 我们需要多少工作机会才能保证 经济的持续增长,最终的结果就是这条曲线。 这个结果是好是坏?这是政府 对适龄工作人口增长的预测。 如果这些预测是准确的,两者之间的差距会保持下去。
The problem is, I don't think these projections are accurate. In particular, I think my projection is way too optimistic, because when I did it, I was assuming that the future was kind of going to look like the past, with labor productivity growth, and that's actually not what I believe. Because when I look around, I think that we ain't seen nothing yet when it comes to technology's impact on the labor force.
问题是,我认为这些预测并不准确。 不幸的是,我认为我的预测过于乐观了 因为我的预测建立在 劳动生产率增长速率和过去持平的假设上 但我不认为事情会这样发展 因为当我环顾四周时,我认为我们还没有意识到 科技对劳动力的影响。 近些年来,我们见证了数码工具
Just in the past couple years, we've seen digital tools display skills and abilities that they never, ever had before, and that kind of eat deeply into what we human beings do for a living. Let me give you a couple examples.
展示出以前从未有过的技能和能力 并且对人类生活影响很大。 请允许我举几个例子。
Throughout all of history, if you wanted something translated from one language into another, you had to involve a human being. Now we have multi-language, instantaneous, automatic translation services available for free via many of our devices, all the way down to smartphones. And if any of us have used these, we know that they're not perfect, but they're decent.
有史以来,如果你需要把一些文字 从一种语言翻译成另外一种语言, 必须有人类参与。 现在我们可以通过包括智能手机在内的 各种电子设备 使用免费的多语言的即时自动翻译服务。 如果你使用过这这种服务,你就会知道 尽管并不完美,他们已经非常不错了。
Throughout all of history, if you wanted something written, a report or an article, you had to involve a person. Not anymore. This is an article that appeared in Forbes online a while back, about Apple's earnings. It was written by an algorithm. And it's not decent -- it's perfect.
有史以来,如果你想写一篇 报告或者文章,必须有人类参与。 现在不用了。这是一篇不久以前 《福布斯》杂志刊登的有关苹果公司收益的文章。 由一个算法撰写。 这回不仅是不错了,简直是完美。
A lot of people look at this and they say, "OK, but those are very specific, narrow tasks, and most knowledge workers are actually generalists. And what they do is sit on top of a very large body of expertise and knowledge and they use that to react on the fly to kind of unpredictable demands, and that's very, very hard to automate." One of the most impressive knowledge workers in recent memory is a guy named Ken Jennings. He won the quiz show "Jeopardy!" 74 times in a row. Took home three million dollars. That's Ken on the right, getting beat three-to-one by Watson, the Jeopardy-playing supercomputer from IBM. So when we look at what technology can do to general knowledge workers, I start to think there might not be something so special about this idea of a generalist, particularly when we start doing things like hooking Siri up to Watson, and having technologies that can understand what we're saying and repeat speech back to us.
很多人看到这一现象以后说,“好吧, 但这些都是具体的、针对性强的任务, 而大多数知识型人才都是通才, 他们拥有很多 技能和知识并运用它们 随时随地地应对不可预测的要求, 这一点机器很难做到。“ 最近最令人印象深刻的 知识型人才名叫Ken Jennings。 他连续74次在答题节目”抢答(Jeopardy!)“中取得胜利, 赢得了三百万美金。 右边的这位就是Ken,在和IBM的超级机器人Watson 一同参加”抢答“比赛时,他以三比一败北。 看到科技产品胜过这样的通才 我开始思考 通才的概念可能也没有多么特别 尤其是现在,如果我们把Siri 和Watson的技术相结合 就会得到可以理解人类语言 并得到自然语言反馈的技术。
Now, Siri is far from perfect, and we can make fun of her flaws, but we should also keep in mind that if technologies like Siri and Watson improve along a Moore's law trajectory, which they will, in six years, they're not going to be two times better or four times better, they'll be 16 times better than they are right now. So I start to think a lot of knowledge work is going to be affected by this.
现在,Siri还远不完美,所以我们可以嘲笑 她的缺陷,但是我们也应该想到 如果Siri和Watson的技术 也按照摩尔定律发展,那么 六年之后,他们不是提高2倍 或者4倍,他们会比现在先进16倍。 所以我认为很多知识型的工作会受到这一发展趋势的影响。
And digital technologies are not just impacting knowledge work, they're starting to flex their muscles in the physical world as well. I had the chance a little while back to ride in the Google autonomous car, which is as cool as it sounds.
数码技术并非只对知识型的工作有影响。 他们在体力工作方面也开始展现实力。 最近有有机会乘坐了 谷歌自动汽车,它就像它的名字一样酷。(笑声)
(Laughter)
我可以确定的说它有能力自如应对
And I will vouch that it handled the stop-and-go traffic on US 101 very smoothly. There are about three and a half million people who drive trucks for a living in the United States; I think some of them are going to be affected by this technology. And right now, humanoid robots are still incredibly primitive. They can't do very much. But they're getting better quite quickly and DARPA, which is the investment arm of the Defense Department, is trying to accelerate their trajectory.
美国101公路上走走停停的交通。 美国有三百五十万人 开卡车为生。 我认为这项技术可能会影响 他们中的一部分人。现在,拟人机器人 还处在非常原始的状态。它们所能完成的任务十分有限。 但性能在快速提高。 美国国防部的投资机构高级研究计划局(DARPA) 正在尝试推进此类研究的发展。
So, in short, yeah, the droids are coming for our jobs. In the short term, we can stimulate job growth by encouraging entrepreneurship and by investing in infrastructure, because the robots today still aren't very good at fixing bridges. But in the not-too-long-term, I think within the lifetimes of most of the people in this room, we're going to transition into an economy that is very productive, but that just doesn't need a lot of human workers. And managing that transition is going to be the greatest challenge that our society faces. Voltaire summarized why; he said, "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need."
简而言之,是的,机器人就要来和我们争夺工作机会了。 短期内,我们可以通过鼓励创业和 投资基础设施建设来促进工作机会的增长 因为现在的机器人 并不擅长修建桥梁。 然而,在不远的将来, 我想今天的大部分观众有生之年都有可能见证 我们将进入一个生产力非常高 却不需要很多人类员工的时代, 应对这样的转变 则是我们的社会所面临的最大挑战。 伏尔泰(Voltaire)总结了原因。他说: "工作撵跑三个魔鬼:无聊,堕落和贫穷。"
But despite this challenge -- personally, I'm still a huge digital optimist, and I am supremely confident that the digital technologies that we're developing now are going to take us into a Utopian future, not a dystopian future. And to explain why, I want to pose a ridiculously broad question. I want to ask: what have been the most important developments in human history?
尽管如此,我个人 仍是一个数码技术乐观主义者, 我坚信我们现在正在开发的数码技术 会带我们进入一个大同社会, 而不是可怕的灾难。为了解释我为什么这样乐观 我想要问一个宽泛到有些荒唐的问题。 我的问题是:人类历史上 最重要的发展是什么?
Now, I want to share some of the answers that I've gotten in response to this question. It's a wonderful question to ask and start an endless debate about, because some people are going to bring up systems of philosophy in both the West and the East that have changed how a lot of people think about the world. And then other people will say, "No, actually, the big stories, the big developments are the founding of the world's major religions, which have changed civilizations and have changed and influenced how countless people are living their lives." And then some other folk will say, "Actually, what changes civilizations, what modifies them and what changes people's lives are empires, so the great developments in human history are stories of conquest and of war." And then some cheery soul usually always pipes up and says, "Hey, don't forget about plagues!"
现在我想与你们分享一些就这个问题 我所得到的答案。这是一个很棒的问题, 问出来可以引起无休止的辩论, 有些人会提起 改变很多人对世界看法的 各种东西方哲学体系。 其他人则会说。“不,真正重要的发展 是世界主要宗教的建立, 它们改变了各国文明 改变和影响力了无数人的 生活方式。“还有人会说, ”事实上,改变文明 和人类生活的 是帝国,所以人类历史上最重要的发展 是征服和战争。” 还有些生性欢快的人物常常会跳起来说 “嗨,别忘了瘟疫。”(笑声)
(Laughter)
我也得到了一些积极的答案,
There are some optimistic answers to this question, so some people will bring up the Age of Exploration and the opening up of the world. Others will talk about intellectual achievements in disciplines like math that have helped us get a better handle on the world, and other folk will talk about periods when there was a deep flourishing of the arts and sciences. So this debate will go on and on. It's an endless debate and there's no conclusive, single answer to it. But if you're a geek like me, you say, "Well, what do the data say?" And you start to do things like graph things that we might be interested in -- the total worldwide population, for example, or some measure of social development or the state of advancement of a society. And you start to plot the data, because, by this approach, the big stories, the big developments in human history, are the ones that will bend these curves a lot.
有些人提起了地理大发现时代 和对世界的探索。 有人认为是包括数学在内的一些学科上的 学术进步帮助我们更好的 应对世界,也有人说到艺术和科学 繁荣发展的时代 所以这场辩论可以一直进行下去。 这是永远不会结束的争论,也没有 明确的唯一答案。但是,如果你和我一样是技术宅, 你就会问,“那么,数据会给出什么样的答案呢?” 然后我们就开始以感兴趣的东西为主题 制作图标,比如世界人口 或者是某钟衡量社会发展的标准, 或者社会进步的状态, 将这些数据转化为图标之后, 就可以看到人类历史上的重要事件和伟大发展, 都会对这些曲线造成明显的变化。
So when you do this and when you plot the data, you pretty quickly come to some weird conclusions. You conclude, actually, that none of these things have mattered very much.
将数据转化成图形之后 你很快就会得到一些奇怪的结论。 事实上,你的结论是这些因素 其实没有一个真正重要。(笑声)
(Laughter)
They haven't done a darn thing to the curves. There has been one story, one development in human history that bent the curve, bent it just about 90 degrees, and it is a technology story.
它们对曲线的走势毫无影响。 人类历史上只有一个事件,一个发展 改变了这条曲线,让它发生了近90度的上升 这就是科学技术。
The steam engine and the other associated technologies of the Industrial Revolution changed the world and influenced human history so much, that in the words of the historian Ian Morris, "... they made mockery out of all that had come before." And they did this by infinitely multiplying the power of our muscles, overcoming the limitations of our muscles. Now, what we're in the middle of now is overcoming the limitations of our individual brains and infinitely multiplying our mental power. How can this not be as big a deal as overcoming the limitations of our muscles?
蒸汽机以及工业革命期间出现的其它相关技术 改变了世界 对人类历史产生了深远的影响, 用历史学家Ian Morris的话说 它们简直是对人类此前所取得的所有成就的嘲弄。 这些技术带来了人类无法企及的力量 解放了人们的双手。 现在,我们所经历的 则是对人类智力的超越 解放人们的大脑。 这和超越体力极限一样 是人类历史上的一件大事。
So at the risk of repeating myself a little bit, when I look at what's going on with digital technology these days, we are not anywhere near through with this journey. And when I look at what is happening to our economies and our societies, my single conclusion is that we ain't seen nothing yet. The best days are really ahead.
因此请允许我再次强调 从当今数码科技发展的趋势来看 我们还远未到达这趟旅程的终点, 从当今的经济和社会发展趋势来看 我认为我们尚未见证 真正的变革。未来充满了激动人心的可能性。
Let me give you a couple examples. Economies don't run on energy. They don't run on capital, they don't run on labor. Economies run on ideas. So the work of innovation, the work of coming up with new ideas, is some of the most powerful, most fundamental work that we can do in an economy. And this is kind of how we used to do innovation. We'd find a bunch of fairly similar-looking people ...
请允许我举几个例子。 经济发展靠的不是能源、不是资本 也不是劳动力。经济发展靠的是理念。 所以带来创新的工作 是最重要的, 是经济发展中最基础的工作。 我们过去是这样从事创新工作的。 我们找一群长的差不多的人
(Laughter)
(笑声)
We'd take them out of elite institutions, we'd put them into other elite institutions and we'd wait for the innovation. Now --
他们来自精英组织,我们再让他们进入 其它的精英组织,然后等待创新的到来。 现在(笑声)
(Laughter)
as a white guy who spent his whole career at MIT and Harvard, I've got no problem with this.
作为一个整个职业生涯都在麻省理工 和哈佛工作的白人,我对此没有意见。(笑声)
(Laughter)
But some other people do, and they've kind of crashed the party and loosened up the dress code of innovation.
但是其他人不这样想,他们闯进 创新世界的派对,降低了进入的门槛。 (笑声)
(Laughter)
这是Top Coder编程比赛的获胜者,
So here are the winners of a Topcoder programming challenge, and I assure you that nobody cares where these kids grew up, where they went to school, or what they look like. All anyone cares about is the quality of the work, the quality of the ideas.
我相信没有人在意 这些孩子在哪里长大,他们在什么地方上学, 以及他们的长相。我们在乎的只有 他们作品和想法的质量。
And over and over again, we see this happening in the technology-facilitated world. The work of innovation is becoming more open, more inclusive, more transparent and more merit-based, and that's going to continue no matter what MIT and Harvard think of it, and I couldn't be happier about that development.
我们一次又一次的在技术驱动的世界中 看到这种情况的发生。 创新工作正在变的更加开放, 更具包容性,更加透明,更加注重成绩, 无论麻省理工和哈佛怎么想,这种趋势 都将继续,令我感到非常开心。
I hear once in a while, "OK, I'll grant you that, but technology is still a tool for the rich world, and what's not happening, these digital tools are not improving the lives of people at the bottom of the pyramid." And I want to say to that very clearly: nonsense. The bottom of the pyramid is benefiting hugely from technology. The economist Robert Jensen did this wonderful study a while back where he watched, in great detail, what happened to the fishing villages of Kerala, India, when they got mobile phones for the very first time. And when you write for the Quarterly Journal of Economics, you have to use very dry and very circumspect language. But when I read his paper, I kind of feel Jensen is trying to scream at us and say, "Look, this was a big deal. Prices stabilized, so people could plan their economic lives. Waste was not reduced -- it was eliminated. And the lives of both the buyers and the sellers in these villages measurably improved."
我时不时听到这样的说法,“好,这些我可以接受, 但是科技依然是富裕阶层的工具, 现实的缺失是,这些数码工具没有 提高处于金字塔底层人们的生活。” 对于这种说法,我的答案非常简单:无稽之谈。 科技大大改善了底层人民的生活。 经济学家Robert Jensen有一项出色的研究 不久之前,他仔细观察了 印度喀拉拉邦地区小渔村居民得到手机后 生活发生的变化。 《经济学季刊》刊登的文章 语言一向干涩谨慎 然而读到Jensen的文章时, 却感觉他向我们疾呼:看,这真的非常了不起。 物价稳定,所以人们可以做好经济计划。 浪费不是减少了,而是彻底被消灭了。 在这些村庄里,卖方和买方 的生活水平都提高了。
Now, what I don't think is that Jensen got extremely lucky and happened to land in the one set of villages where technology made things better. What happened instead is he very carefully documented what happens over and over again when technology comes for the first time to an environment and a community: the lives of people, the welfares of people, improve dramatically.
我不认为Jensen运气过人, 碰巧遇到了一些生活水平 因科技而大大改善的村子。 事实上,他只是非常详细的记录了 新技术被引进新的环境和社区时 普遍会发生的情况。 居民的生活和福利会得到显著改善。
So as I look around at all the evidence and I think about the room that we have ahead of us, I become a huge digital optimist and I start to think that this wonderful statement from the physicist Freeman Dyson is actually not hyperbole. This is an accurate assessment of what's going on. Our technologies are great gifts, and we, right now, have the great good fortune to be living at a time when digital technology is flourishing, when it is broadening and deepening and becoming more profound all around the world.
因此,对各方证据进行评估 并考虑未来发展空间之后,我对数码技术 持乐观态度,我开始认为物理学家Freeman Dyson 所提出的精彩观点 并不夸张,而是对当前形势的精确评估。 我们的数码技术是上天伟大的礼物, 如今数码技术繁荣发展 涉及范围不断拓宽加深 在世界上的影响也越来越深远 能生活在这样一个时代是我们莫大的幸运。
So, yeah, the droids are taking our jobs, but focusing on that fact misses the point entirely. The point is that then we are freed up to do other things, and what we're going to do, I am very confident, what we're going to do is reduce poverty and drudgery and misery around the world. I'm very confident we're going to learn to live more lightly on the planet, and I am extremely confident that what we're going to do with our new digital tools is going to be so profound and so beneficial that it's going to make a mockery out of everything that came before. I'm going to leave the last word to a guy who had a front-row seat for digital progress, our old friend Ken Jennings. I'm with him; I'm going to echo his words: "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."
因此,机器人确实在侵蚀我们的工作 然而这并不是值得关注的重点。 真正值得关注的是技术给我们自由从事其他活动的机会 以及我们如何利用这样的机会,我坚信 我们将会减少世界上的贫困、单调乏味的工作 和苦痛。我相信 我们可以降低对地球资源的需求, 我相信我们未来对数码工具会有更深刻运用 造福世界, 让此前的人类成就 都显得微不足道。 最后我将引用Ken Jennings 一位紧密关注数码技术进步的 老朋友所说的一句话。我认同他的观点。 我直接转述他的原话: “我,欢迎我们的新一代机器人领主。”(笑声)
(Laughter)
非常感谢。(掌声)
Thanks very much.
(Applause)