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.
當數以千萬計的勞工 處於失業或是低度就業的狀況發生時 就會有不少人會對科技如何影響勞工這個議題有興趣 而當我開始檢視這個議題, 赫然發現 大家關切的主題是正確的 但又同時全然的地忽視了關鍵要點。 在這個主題上所提出的問題, 是關於 這些數位科技是否影響了人們謀生的能力? 或者, 換個說法就是 機器人是否正在搶走人類的工作機會? 有一些證據顯示的確如此 大蕭條(2008~2012)結束時, 美國的 GDP 恢復了
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.
緩慢步調的上昇, 其他的一些 經濟指標也開始反彈,看起來 比較健康也比較迅速了。企業的獲利 是相當高的。事實上,如果把銀行業也包含進來 這些數值比以往任何時候都來得高。 企業在工具與設備的投資 還有硬體和軟體方面, 都處於歷史新高。 所以企業都在拿出支票本花錢投資 但是他們並沒有真正的擴大招募員工 這條紅線是就業人口的比率, 換句話說,就是處於就業年齡的美國人 真的有工作的比例 我們可以看到這個比例在大蕭條時萎靡 但是到現在都還沒有開始反彈回來
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.
但是這個故事並不只是關於大蕭條 十年來,我們剛剛經歷了持續性的 相對低落的就業增長,尤其是當我們 與過去的幾個十年進行比較時, 2000年這個十年 是唯一的一次我們經歷到, 在十年期間的結束時的工作人口, 比十年剛開始的時候 還少的狀況. 這不是大家樂見的 當你用潛在就業人口的數據 來對照國內工作數量作圖,您會看到之間的差距 隨著時間越來越大,, 而在大蕭條的時候差距特別顯著
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.
我做了一些簡單的計算。我把過去的 20 年的國內生產總值增長 和同一期間的勞動生產率的增長 用相當簡單直接的方式 嘗試預測維持經濟持續成長 所需要工作機會的數量, 而這是我算出的數據畫出的線 這是好事還是壞事?來看看政府預測的數據 關於就業人口的未來預測 所以如果這些預測是準確的, 這個差距不會被弭平
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.
問題是,我不認為這些預測是準確的。 明白地說,我認為我的預測是太樂觀的 因為當我做預測時, 我假設了未來應該會 跟過去是相像的 在關於勞動生產力的成長方面,這是我不相信的會成立的假設 因為當我環顧四周,我認為我們並未考慮到那些 關於技術對勞動力市場的衝擊。 只是在過去的幾年中,我們已經看到數位工具
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.
顯示的技能和能力,遠超過以往 而且從某種角度來說, 已經吃進了人類的賴以為生的 就業領域. 讓我舉幾個例子。
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.
在過去的所有的歷史年代,如果你想要把某個文章 從一種語言翻譯成另一種, 必須要靠人類來做 現在我們有了多國語言的,即時的 自動翻譯服務, 還是免費的 經由我們使用的終端裝置, 直接在智慧手機就能用到 而如果有使用過這些翻譯服務,我們就會知道, 做得並不是完美, 但也夠得體了。
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.
在過去的所有的歷史年代,如果你想要寫下一些東西, 比如一份報告或一篇文章,你必須透過人來做 不再是這樣了。這裡有一篇文章, 不久前發表在富比世雜誌上, 是關於蘋果公司的收益的 這篇文章是用演算法寫出來的 寫的不止是得體而已, 而是到了完美
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.
很多人看到這些事情會說, "那又怎樣? 這些都只是非常特定、 狹窄領域的任務, 大多數的知識工作者實際上是通才, 他們做的是, 坐擁一個由專業技能和知識組成的 龐然巨物, 這些人運用龐大的技能與知識 來隨時對無法預測的要求, 馬上做出反應 這是非常、 非常難以自動化的工作" 就以一個最令人印象深刻的知識工作者 大家可能記得最近有一個人, 名叫肯恩 詹寧斯。 他在益智問答節目 "Jeopardy!" 連續贏了74次 把 300 萬美金的獎金帶回家。 在右邊的就是 肯恩, 比數是 三比一, 在與 IBM 的超級電腦 華生(Watson) 進行的 "Jeopardy!" 遊戲中被打敗了 所以當我們在看技術會怎樣影響到 一般知識工作者的時候,我開始思考 也許所謂的通才的特殊之處並不存在 尤其是當我們開始能夠做到例如 把 Siri (蘋果手機的語音助理) 連結到 華生 (IBM的超級電腦) 並且逐漸發展一些技術, 能了解人類說話內容 並且用人類語音回答我們
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.
現在,Siri 還撐不上完美, 我們也常拿它的一些差錯 來開玩笑,但是我們仍應該記住, 如果像 Siri 和 華生 這樣的技術的改進 是沿著 摩爾法則 的預測軌跡,他們將 在六年中,這些技術將不只是進步兩倍 或進步四倍,他們會比現在進步 16 倍。 所以我開始覺得, 很多知識工作都將會受到技術的影響
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.
而且 數位技術不只影響知識工作而已 它們也開始在實體世界大展身手了 前一陣子我有機會坐上了 Google 的自動駕駛汽車 它坐起來跟聽起來一樣的酷
(Laughter)
我可以做證, 它能夠處理走走停停的路況
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.
在101號公路上面, 開得非常平穩 總共大概有 350萬的人 在美國這裡, 以開卡車為職業謀生 我想這些人中, 有一部份會受到這項科技的影響 在目前, 人形機器人仍然還 非常的原始。它們會做的事情不多 但是它們發展得很快, 而且 DARPA, 就是國防部的投資部門, 一直試著讓他們的發展更加速。
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."
所以,簡單地說,對啦,機器人就要來搶我們的工作了。 在短期內,我們可以刺激就業增長 透過鼓勵創業, 還有投資在基礎建設上 因為機器人目前仍然不是 很擅長修復橋樑。 但在不用太久,我想在場的各位 在有生之年,我們將會經歷到 經濟型態的轉變, 一種非常具有生產力 但是不需要許多的人類工作者的狀況 而如何管理這個轉變的發生, 將會是 我們的社會所面臨的最大挑戰。 伏爾泰總結了其中的原因。他說,"工作讓我們避開了 三個魔鬼: 無聊、 墮落, 和需要。"
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?
縱使有這樣的挑戰,至少就我個人來說, 我仍然是個超級的數位樂觀主義者,我也同時 十分自信地認為,我們現在發展的數位技術 將會帶領我們進入一個烏托邦的未來, 而不是一個 反烏托邦式的未來。要解釋為什麼, 我想要丟出一個有些過度誇張大的問題。 我想問的是, 在人類歷史上 最重要的發展是什麼?
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!"
現在,我想分享一些我所找到的答案 來回答這個問題。這是一個很棒的問題 一問了就會展開無窮無盡的爭論 因為有些人會搬出 西方和東方的哲學的系統, 這些的確改變了很多人看待世界的方式 然後其他人會說:"才不是這樣,真正重大的 關鍵的發展, 是世界上主要宗教的建立 宗教改變了各地的文明 也改變並影響了無數人的一生如何度過 然後一些其他人會說, "其實,改變文明的,改變人們觀點的, 改變人們生活的 其實是帝國,在人類歷史上的重大發展 主要是關於征服與戰爭的故事" 然後一些愛開玩笑的人就會跟著提出說 "嘿,別忘了還有那些瘟疫。"(笑聲)
(Laughter)
對這個問題,有一些樂觀的答案
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.
比如有些人會提出的是 探索的年代(十五世紀) 對整個世界的開拓 其他人則將提出: 智慧方面的成就 在一些學科, 例如 數學, 就幫助人類對於 世界有更好的理解, 還有一些人會提出 那個 藝術與科學 深度繁榮發展 的時期。所以像這樣的辯論可以一直談下去 這個辯論談不完, 也不會有結論 也沒有唯一的答案。但如果你像我一樣,是個阿宅工程師 你會問,"嗯,有沒有實際的資料, 資料怎麼說?" 那你就會開始做一些我們有興趣的事情, 像是畫圖表 比方全世界的人口總數, 或是某些社會發展的數據, 或是社會進步的狀態 然後你開始繪製這些資料,因為,通過這樣的方式, 整個故事的全貌,在人類歷史上的大發展 應該會是那些造成這些圖表曲線變彎很多的
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.
所以當你這樣做了,把資料畫出圖表了 你很快就會得到一些奇怪的結論 你做出的結論是,事實上,前面講的這些答案 沒有一個是真正重要的。(笑聲)
(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.
這些答案根本對這些圖表曲線沒有影響。(笑聲) 事實上只有一個故事, 一項發展 在人類的歷史上, 真正折彎了那些曲線, 而且彎了 將近90 度,這個故事, 就是 技術。
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?
像是蒸汽引擎, 還有其它的相關技術 帶動了工業革命, 改變了整個世界 對人類歷史產生的重大的影響 套用 歷史學家 伊恩 · 莫里斯 (Ian Morris) 的話說, 這項發展讓先前發生的其它事情都變得微不足道了 這項發展, 把我們的肌肉力量 放大了無窮倍 克服了人類身體肌肉的限制 而現在, 我們正經歷著 超越人類個別大腦的限制的時機 將我們的心智能力放大無窮多倍的時候 這必然也是一個至少 跟克服人類的肌肉力量限制 一樣重大的發展吧?
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.
所以請原諒我又再重覆了,當我觀察到 這段期間內數位科技的發展 我們離這段期間的終點還很遠 而當我看到所發生的事情, 對我們經濟 還有社會所發生的影響, 我的唯一結論是 我們還沒看到重大的里程碑, 最好的日子還在未來。
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 ...
讓我舉幾個例子。 經濟體並不是靠能源運作的, 也不是靠資本 也不是靠勞力。經濟體的運行靠的是想法。 所以創新的工作, 產生新的想法的工作 是人類所能做的 多種 最強大的 最基本的 工作之一,這些工作是人類在經濟體裡 能做的。而這也是我們過去如何創新的方式 我們會發現一大群看起來相當類似的人
(Laughter)
— — (笑聲) — —
We'd take them out of elite institutions, we'd put them into other elite institutions and we'd wait for the innovation. Now --
我們帶他們離開原本的精英的機構,把他們放到 另一個精英的機構,然後等著創新的發生 現在 — — (笑聲) — —
(Laughter)
as a white guy who spent his whole career at MIT and Harvard, I've got no problem with this.
作為一個在麻省理工學院還有哈佛度過整個職涯的白種人 我對這沒有什麼問題。(笑聲)
(Laughter)
But some other people do, and they've kind of crashed the party and loosened up the dress code of innovation.
但一些其他人遇到了問題,他們有點像是 搞砸了派對, 而且放鬆了創新應有的規範 (笑聲)
(Laughter)
這裡是一些 頂尖程式員寫程式大賽的優勝者
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.
我向你保證沒有人在意 這些孩子是在哪裡長大, 在哪裡念書, 或是他們的長相。所有人只會在意 他們工作產出的品質, 他們的點子的品質。
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.
一次又一次的,我們看到這種情況發生 在這個科技推動的世界 創新的工作越來越開放, 更具包容性、 更透明、 和更以志業為基礎, 這會繼續下去, 不管 麻省理工學院和哈佛大學 的觀點,而我對這樣感到非常的快樂。
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."
我偶爾會聽到,"好吧,我同意你的這個說法, 但技術仍是富裕世界的工具 有些事情仍不會發生,這些數位工具也不會 改善金字塔底部的人民的生活"。 我對這樣的說法有個清楚的回應: 一派胡言。 金字塔的底部的人民, 正大大受益於技術的發展。 經濟學家 羅伯特 · 詹森 (Robert Jensen) 做了這項很棒的研究 在前一陣子,他詳細的研究了 在 印度喀拉拉邦的漁村發生的事情 當行動電話第一次交到當地人手上的時候 若你寫的文章是要刊在 經濟學季刊雜誌 的時候 您必須使用非常乏味和非常周到的語言, 但當我讀他的論文的時候,我覺得詹森試圖 對我們尖叫,說,你看,這是一個大題目啊。 價格變穩定了,因此人們可以計畫他們的經濟生活。 廢棄物不僅是減少而已;根本就是沒有廢棄物。 這些村莊裡的買家和賣家的生活 都被明顯地改善了
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.
現在,我不認為 詹森 只是很幸運的 剛好遇上了一群的村莊 碰巧在這些村莊裡 科技讓生活變得更好了 實際上發生的狀況, 是他詳細地記錄了 這些一再重複發生的現像, 當技術 第一次進到一個環境和社會。 人民的生活, 人民的幸福, 都顯著地提高了。
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.
所以,當我看到這些證據, 我想到 未來我們可以有的發展空間, 我當然會變成一個 超級的數位樂觀主義者, 我開始覺得, 物理學家 福利曼 戴森 說的這句話很棒 他說的話並不誇張, 而是對於目前正在發生的現象的一個精準的描述。 我們面臨的數位化 還有科技, 都是偉大的恩賜 處於這個時代的我們, 是非常幸運的 能夠活在這個數位技術蓬勃發展的時期 這些技術的影響越來越廣, 也越來越深 深刻地影響了整個世界
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."
所以,是啊,機器人正在搶走我們的工作, 但若只著重這件事情, 就會漏掉了整件事情的重點了 真正的重點是, 人類可以被解放出來, 做其他的事情 而我們可以做的事情, 我非常確定的說 我們會去做的是減少貧困和苦差事 減少世界各地的苦難。我很有信心 我們會學習如何在這個星球上更輕鬆的過活 我也非常的確信, 我們將會運用 我們的全新的數位化工具, 非常深切的 並且非常良善的用它, 讓先前發生過的每個改變 相較之下都變得微不足道了。 我最後有一句話, 要留給一個人 這個人在數位時代的演進, 是先驅者的地位 就是我們的老朋友, 肯恩 詹寧斯, 我同意他的看法 我打算這樣回應他的話: "我,代表我自己,歡迎我們的新電腦領主"。(笑聲)
(Laughter)
非常感謝。(掌聲)
Thanks very much.
(Applause)