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."
作家喬治‧艾略特 (George Eliot) 曾警告我們, 在所有類型的錯誤之中, 預言是最沒根據的, 我們都要感謝這位作家。 就是二十世紀的 尤吉‧貝拉 (Yogi Berra) 也同意, 他說:「預測很困難, 尤其對未來的預測。」
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. 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.
我不理會他們的警告, 而且作出一項特別的預測。 現今的我們創造步調很快, 我們將要看到, 像科幻小說一樣的東西越來越多 而像工作的事越來越少 在不久將來,汽車懂得自行駕駛, 意味著我們需要更少的貨車司機, 我們把 Siri 虛擬個人助理 與 IBM 超級電腦華生連接起來, 並使用這些虛擬助理, 自動執行大量工作, 而現時這些工作須由客服處理、 解答疑難問題和診斷。 我們已經使用阿凸(R2D2), 替他塗上橙色,把他投入工作, 叫他到倉庫拿貨, 意味著我們不需要那麼多的工人 在走道上走來走去。
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.
約二百年來人們一直在說的, 同時也是我現在告訴你們的 — 這年代因科技而產生的失業問題, 就在眼前 — 由英國勒德分子 (Luddites) 搗毀織布機開始, 大約兩個世紀前, 他們一直是錯的。 已發展國家的經濟 幾乎無法實現全民就業。
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. 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. 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."
這帶出了一條關鍵問題: 為什麼這次不一樣了, 真的不一樣嗎? 不一樣的原因是, 在過去的幾年, 我們的機器開始有了 一些前所未見的能力 理解、說話、聆聽、觀看、 答問、書寫,他們仍在學習新的技巧, 例如:行動人型機器人 仍是令人難以置信的原始, 但是國防部的研究部門 剛剛發起了一場競賽, 使他們製造一些類似東西, 如果跟據過往成績紀錄以作參考, 這樣的競賽將會成功。 現在看起來, 我猜想這日子離我們不遠了 人型機器人將會做很多的事, 做很多目前人們在的工作 我們正在創造一個世界,那裡擁有 的科技越來越多,職位卻越來越少, 艾瑞克‧班恩約福森 (Erik Brynjolfsson) 和我叫這世界為 「新機器時代」。
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. 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.
我們要牢記 這絕對是個好消息, 這些日子裡,在這顆星球上, 最大的經濟新聞。 並不是那麼多競爭,對嗎? 就是這些裡最大的經濟新聞, 原因有二: 首先,科技進步容許我們 繼續這項驚人的運作, 而運作正進行中, 產量已持續上升了一段時間, 而同一時間,價格卻在下降, 數量和質量不斷爆發。 現在,有些人看看這個情況, 並且談論起 墮落物質主義, 但是,這絕對是錯誤的看法, 我們的經濟體系提供 數量龐大的供應, 這也正是我們所期待的。 新機器時代是一項好消息的 第二個原因為,一旦人型機器人 開始做這些工作,那麼我們不需要 做同樣的工作了, 可從苦差和勞碌工作中得到釋放。
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." 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. The people who used to be craftsmen and hobbyists are now makers, and they're responsible for massive amounts of innovation. 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.
現在當我和身在劍橋 (麻省) 和矽谷的朋友們說起這話題時, 他們說: 「極好的。再沒有苦差, 再沒有勞碌的工作。 這樣就給我們機會去想像 一個完全不同的社會, 在這裡,創作人、發現者、 表演者、創新者、 與他們的贊助者和融資者一起, 談及不同議題,並款待、開導、 挑釁彼此。」 這樣的社會看起來真的就像一場 TED 研習會, 而事實上這裡有許多真理。 我們看到令人驚異的百花齊放, 在這世界,產生一件物體 就像打印一份文件那麼的容易, 我們有異乎尋常的新可能, 過往的技工、業餘愛好者, 現在成為了製造業者,他們負責 大量的創新, 而藝術家過往因種種制約 而未能做到的事, 現在可做到了。 所以,現在就是繁華昌盛的年代, 我越看得多,我更加堅信 物理學家弗里曼‧戴森 (Freeman Dyson) 所說的 根本不是誇飾, 只是簡單清楚的事實陳述。 我們正處於令人驚訝的時期當中。
["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]
「科技是上帝賜予的禮物。繼生命的 禮物之後,這可是上帝賜予的最大 禮物。這是一切文明、藝術、科學 之母。」 — 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.
這帶來另一個大問題, 在這個新機器時代,可會在什麼樣 的情況下出錯呢? 對嗎?很好、拖延、繁榮、回家, 我們正面對兩項相當棘手的挑戰, 尤其當我們朝著我們創造的未來 一步步前進,
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?"
第一是經濟上的, 一個未經證實的故事 貼切地做了總結 那是亨利‧福特二世與華特‧魯瑟之間 的反覆答問, 華特‧魯瑟是汽車工會領袖, 他們在新的現代化工廠巡視中, 福特以開玩笑的口吻對魯瑟說: 「你如何要這些機械人們 向你的工會交會費?」 魯瑟連珠發炮般回應對方:「嘿,亨利, 你怎樣使它們購買你的汽車?」
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. 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.
這段趣聞軼事中魯瑟的問題是, 你很難向一個經濟體提供勞動力, 而這個經濟體滿是機械人。 統計讓我們看清楚這件事, 如果你回望過去幾十年的 資本收益率,換句話說 即是企業利潤, 我們見到持續上升, 現在利潤看起來是空前的高, 如果我們看一下工作回報,簡言之, 在整個經濟裡,資方所給付的總工資, 我們看到工資卻是空前的低, 而且兩者快速向相反方向而行,
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. 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.
所以對魯瑟來說,這真是一則壞消息, 對福特來說,看起來倒像是一則好消息, 然而實際上並不是好消息。如果你想 向人們銷售大批價格稍微 高一點的貨品, 你就真的想要一群穩定的、富足的、 為數可觀的中產階級, 在美國我們就有這樣的一群, 約在整段戰後的時期, 然而中產階級明顯地 正遭逢巨大的威脅, 我們都知道許多的統計資料, 這裡只是重複一項罷, 事實上,美國的收入中位數 在過去 15 年都下跌了, 而我們身在危險中, 受困於惡性的循環, 不平等現象和兩極分化 經過一段時間後繼續往上走,
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. 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.
我們要留意那些社會上的不公平。 我們要留意那些社會上的不公平。 事實上我並不擔心 那一連串的社會挑戰, 他們被這樣形容, 但這並不是我所關心的 社會問題種類。 反烏托邦的願景並不短缺, 當我們的機器變為擁有自我意識時, 而機械人決定揭竿起義, 並聯合起來攻擊我們, 我開始擔心終有一天, 我的電腦察覺到我的印表機,
(Laughter) (Applause)
(笑聲) (掌聲)
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. 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."
所以這不是我們真正需要擔心的挑戰, 為了告訴你在新機器時代 將面對的各種社會挑戰, 我想告訴你一個故事, 是關於兩個陳規定型的美國工人, 為使故事讀來真的是刻板印象的, 就當他們是兩個白種男人罷, 第一個是受過大學教育的, 專業、創作型的、經理、 工程師、醫師、律師、那類型的工作者, 我們稱他為「泰德」, 他位處美國中產階級的頂端。 另一個並沒有接受大學教育, 他是一個勞動者、普通文員、 做一些低級白領或藍領階級的工作, 我們稱他為「比爾」。
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. 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. 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.
如果你回到大約五十年前, 比爾和泰德過著極其相似的生活, 例如:在 1960 年,他們倆極有可能 同樣得到全職職位, 每週工作總時數至少四十小時, 但是社會研究員查爾斯‧麥瑞 (Charles Murray) 用文件證明了, 當我們開始建立自動化時, 而 1960 年就是我們在日常工作中 剛剛開始使用電腦的時候, 我們開始逐步向市場經濟 注入科技、自動化、數位化的東西, 比爾和泰德兩人的財富 就此各走各路。 經過一段時間後,泰德繼續 持有一份全職工作, 比爾則沒有全職工作, 在許多情況下,比爾完全 離開了經濟體系, 而泰德則很少離開。 過了一段時間後,泰德的婚姻 仍然幸福美滿, 比爾的卻不美滿, 泰德的小孩在健全 完整的家庭中長大, 然而長時間來看, 比爾的小孩卻不是。 那麼比爾是否退出了社會? 他總統選舉的投票次數減少了 而他更開始進出監獄,次數漸多, 我並不是在陳述一個令人開心的社會潮流 他們沒有任何可扭轉人生的機會 無論哪個民族 或人口的數量分布結構, 他們也都如此, 實際上,他們變得如此嚴重, 有覆沒的危險, 即使我們在民權運動取得 驚人的進展。
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.
而我在矽谷和在劍橋(麻省)的朋友 所忽略的,就是他們是泰德, 他們過著這些異常忙碌 兼有意義的生活, 從那裡看到,他們得到了所有優勢, 而比爾則過著非常不同的生活。 實際上他們都證實了伏爾泰 談到工作的好處, 他所說的都是正確, 事實是工作救我們脫離不只一種 而是三種大惡,
["Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice and need." — Voltaire]
「工作使人遠離三種罪惡:無聊、惡習 和匱乏。」 — 伏爾泰如是說。
So with these challenges, what do we do about them?
所以我們面對這些挑戰時 應做什麼呢?
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.
經濟劇本是出奇的清晰, 出奇的直截了當,特別是短期內, 在未來一至兩年,機械人不會拿走 我們所有的職位, 所以經典的經濟學 101 劇本仍可 有效運用於實際情況, 鼓勵創業、 雙倍減低基礎設施的投資、 確定我們教育系統培養出來的學生 配搭適合的技能,
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. 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. 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.
但就長遠來看,即將來臨的經濟是 注重科技而看輕勞工, 我們必須考慮 一些較為激進的干預, 例如:類似最低薪資保障的事物, 現在也許使這房間裡的一些人 感到不舒服, 因為這意念與極端左翼相關聯的, 也與財富重新分配的激進計劃有所關聯。 我對這概念做了些少的研究, 也許使那些人平靜下來, 最低薪資保障是受到 口吐白沫的社會主義者維護支持 - 弗里德里希‧海耶克、理察‧尼克森、 米爾頓‧弗里德曼。 如果你擔心 薪資保障類似的事物 會扼殺我們的成功驅動力, 並使我們自滿, 你或許有興趣知道, 我們在美國確實感到自豪的 其中一件事就是, 社會流動性較北歐國家來得低, 其社會安全網可算是非常慷慨的, 所以其經濟劇本實際上 非常簡單直接,
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.
社會劇本更為富有挑戰。 我並不知道什麼劇本 使比爾一生中從事什麼職業,
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. 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.
我只知道教育佔了很重要一部分, 我直接見證了這點。 在最初頭幾年,我接受教育時, 我是一位蒙特梭利小孩, 學校教導了我, 這個世界是一塊有趣的地方, 我的職責就是去探索它。 在小學三年級時,這學校停辦了, 於是我進入了公立學校體系, 感覺就像被送到古拉格 (Gulag), 事後看來,我現在才知道, 他們要 使我終生成為普通文員或 體力勞動者, 但是他們當時的工作就像 要使我厭煩,並使我屈服於 周遭發生的事。 我們要做得更好, 我們不能老是成為比爾,
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. 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.
我們看見一些新枝嫩芽, 也看到事情變得更好, 我們看見科技對教育帶來 相當大的衝擊, 並吸引著不同的人, 從最年輕的學習者 到最年老的。 我們聽到最傑出的商界聲音, 告訴我們,我們需要重新思考 那些已看重了一段時間的事情, 而我們看見一些很認真的、持續的、 受數據驅動的努力去理解 如何介入其中最麻煩的社區。
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.
新枝嫩芽都在那裡, 就算是一分鐘,我也無法謊稱 我們所有的已經足夠, 我們面對十分艱苦的挑戰, 舉個例子來說,約五百萬美國人 處於失業狀態最少六個月, 我們不打算幫助他們解決件事, 把他們送回蒙特梭利。 我最大的憂慮就是我們 創造了一方世界, 在那裡我們擁有閃閃發光的科技, 嵌入在破舊簡陋的社會, 並支持一個經濟體系, 以帶來不平等, 而不是機會。
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. 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.
但是我並不認為我們將會這樣做, 我認為我們將會做些 好得多的事情, 原因非常簡單直接, 事實就擺在那裡, 這新機器時代的現實 和經濟上的變化更廣為人知, 如果我們想加速這過程,我們可以 做一些事情,例如:我們把 最好的經濟學家和政策制定者 與 IBM 超級電腦華生一起 玩「Jeopardy!」,一決高下, 我們可以送國會一趟 自動化汽車之旅程, 如果我們做這樣的事情足夠地多, 意識就要沉入潛意識, 事情就會有所不同, 然後我們走去競爭, 因為我從不相信, 我們已忘記了如何解決嚴峻的挑戰, 或者我們已經變得無動於衷 或鐵石心腸,不再去嘗試。
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.
開始時我引述了舞文弄墨者的文字, 我們和他們相隔距離以海洋計 以世紀計, 讓我以政治家的說話作總結, 他們和我們同樣遙遠。
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."
在 1949 年,溫斯頓‧邱吉爾來到 我的家麻省理工學院, 他說:「如果我們要把每塊土地上 的廣大群眾富裕, 我們只可以孜孜不倦地追求改進 所有的技術生產。」
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."
亞伯拉罕‧林肯意識到還有另一成分。 他說:「我對人們有堅定的信念。 如果事實放在眼前, 他們可以受到社會的信賴 去面對任何的國家危機, 重點是給他們簡單的事實。」
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.
我把這樂觀的好點子留給你們, 就是新機器時代這個簡單的事實 變得更加明確, 我十分有信心我們將會使用他們 展開一段不錯的旅程,就是 我們會創造富足的經濟
Thank you very much.
謝謝
(Applause)
(掌聲)