Here's a startling fact: in the 45 years since the introduction of the automated teller machine, those vending machines that dispense cash, the number of human bank tellers employed in the United States has roughly doubled, from about a quarter of a million to a half a million. A quarter of a million in 1970 to about a half a million today, with 100,000 added since the year 2000.
这里有一个惊人的事实: 自从自动取款机,就是那些 可以取现金的机器出现的45年来, 美国银行柜员的数量 大概增加了两倍, 从约25万增加到了50万。 也就是说1970年的25万 到现在的50万, 其中有10万是2000年以后增加的。
These facts, revealed in a recent book by Boston University economist James Bessen, raise an intriguing question: what are all those tellers doing, and why hasn't automation eliminated their employment by now? If you think about it, many of the great inventions of the last 200 years were designed to replace human labor. Tractors were developed to substitute mechanical power for human physical toil. Assembly lines were engineered to replace inconsistent human handiwork with machine perfection. Computers were programmed to swap out error-prone, inconsistent human calculation with digital perfection. These inventions have worked. We no longer dig ditches by hand, pound tools out of wrought iron or do bookkeeping using actual books. And yet, the fraction of US adults employed in the labor market is higher now in 2016 than it was 125 years ago, in 1890, and it's risen in just about every decade in the intervening 125 years.
这些事实,在最近的一本 由波士顿大学经济学家 James Bessen撰写的书中, 引发了一个有趣的问题: 这些银行职员都在做什么? 为什么自动化服务到现在 还没有让他们失业? 如果你想一下, 过去200年内的许多伟大发明的 设计初衷都是替代人力劳动。 拖拉机的发明 让机械动力替代了人体的劳作。 流水线的设计 是为了以机器的标准化生产 替代手工作业的不稳定性。 编写计算机程序是为了 避免易错且不稳定的人工运算, 以实现数字化的精准。 这些发明都奏效了。 我们再也不用徒手开挖沟渠, 不用炼铁打铁制造工具, 或者用实体账本记账。 然而,2016年美国成年人口的 就业比例 与125年前的1890年相比更高了, 并且这125年间, 几乎每10年都有增长。
This poses a paradox. Our machines increasingly do our work for us. Why doesn't this make our labor redundant and our skills obsolete? Why are there still so many jobs?
这就构成了一个矛盾。 机器在为我们负担越来越多的工作。 为什么这没有使得人类 劳动力过剩或者技术被淘汰呢? 为什么还有这么多工作岗位?
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I'm going to try to answer that question tonight, and along the way, I'm going to tell you what this means for the future of work and the challenges that automation does and does not pose for our society.
今晚我将尝试回答这个问题, 同时说明这对就业前景意味着什么, 以及在我们的社会中,自动化带来的挑战 和尚未撼动的东西。
Why are there so many jobs? There are actually two fundamental economic principles at stake. One has to do with human genius and creativity. The other has to do with human insatiability, or greed, if you like. I'm going to call the first of these the O-ring principle, and it determines the type of work that we do. The second principle is the never-get-enough principle, and it determines how many jobs there actually are.
为什么还有这么多岗位? 这实际上涉及到两个 经济学基本原则。 其中一个有关人类的聪明才智 和创造力。 另一个有关人类不断求索的天性, 也可以称之为贪婪。 我把第一个原则称为,O形环原则, 它决定了我们工作的类型。 第二个原则叫做“永不满足”原则, 它决定实际存在多少工作岗位。
Let's start with the O-ring. ATMs, automated teller machines, had two countervailing effects on bank teller employment. As you would expect, they replaced a lot of teller tasks. The number of tellers per branch fell by about a third. But banks quickly discovered that it also was cheaper to open new branches, and the number of bank branches increased by about 40 percent in the same time period. The net result was more branches and more tellers. But those tellers were doing somewhat different work. As their routine, cash-handling tasks receded, they became less like checkout clerks and more like salespeople, forging relationships with customers, solving problems and introducing them to new products like credit cards, loans and investments: more tellers doing a more cognitively demanding job. There's a general principle here. Most of the work that we do requires a multiplicity of skills, and brains and brawn, technical expertise and intuitive mastery, perspiration and inspiration in the words of Thomas Edison. In general, automating some subset of those tasks doesn't make the other ones unnecessary. In fact, it makes them more important. It increases their economic value.
让我们从O形环原则开始讲。 ATM,即自动取款机, 给银行职员的聘用带来了 两种相反的影响。 它们代替了很多柜员业务。 每家银行的职员数量 减少了大约三分之一。 但很快银行发现, 设置新分行的成本也降低了, 而且在同一时期内,分行的数量 增长了大约40。 净结果就是更多的银行 和更多的职员。 不过,这些银行职员的 工作内容发生了变化。 随着他们常规的现金业务的减少, 他们不太像办事员了, 而是更像销售员。 和客户建立关系, 为他们解决问题, 给客户介绍诸如信用卡, 贷款,投资等新的产品: 更多的银行职员从事着 对脑力劳动需求更高的工作。 这里有一个普适的原则。 我们从事的大部分工作 要求多样化的技能。 既要头脑聪明,又要坚韧不拔, 既要求专业技术,又要求敏锐的直觉, 用爱迪生的话来说就是 天才加勤奋。 总的来说,让其中的一些任务自动化 不代表其它的内容变的不必要了。 恰恰相反,这使得其它的技能变得更加重要。 它们的经济价值得到了提升。
Let me give you a stark example. In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded and crashed back down to Earth less than two minutes after takeoff. The cause of that crash, it turned out, was an inexpensive rubber O-ring in the booster rocket that had frozen on the launchpad the night before and failed catastrophically moments after takeoff. In this multibillion dollar enterprise that simple rubber O-ring made the difference between mission success and the calamitous death of seven astronauts. An ingenious metaphor for this tragic setting is the O-ring production function, named by Harvard economist Michael Kremer after the Challenger disaster. The O-ring production function conceives of the work as a series of interlocking steps, links in a chain. Every one of those links must hold for the mission to succeed. If any of them fails, the mission, or the product or the service, comes crashing down. This precarious situation has a surprisingly positive implication, which is that improvements in the reliability of any one link in the chain increases the value of improving any of the other links. Concretely, if most of the links are brittle and prone to breakage, the fact that your link is not that reliable is not that important. Probably something else will break anyway. But as all the other links become robust and reliable, the importance of your link becomes more essential. In the limit, everything depends upon it. The reason the O-ring was critical to space shuttle Challenger is because everything else worked perfectly. If the Challenger were kind of the space era equivalent of Microsoft Windows 2000 --
给你们举一个很直接的例子。 1986年,挑战者号航天飞船 在起飞后不到2分钟的时间内 爆炸并坠落到地面。 后来发现事故原因 是助推火箭上的 一个小小的橡胶O形环 前一晚在发射平台上冻住了, 在发射不久后失效并引发了悲剧。 在这项耗资几十亿美元的巨大工程中, 那个小小的橡胶O形环 决定了发射成功, 还是导致7位航天员的惨死。 对这一悲剧催生的一个巧妙的比喻, 是O形环生产方程 (O-ring production function), 由哈佛大学经济学家Michael Kremer 在挑战者号悲剧之后命名。 O形环生产方程认为一项成果 是由一系列互相联结的步骤 组成的链。 每一处联结都必须牢固 才能保证任务的成功。 如果任意一处的联结失败了, 这项任务,或是产品,或是服务 都会失败。 这种危险的情况 有令人惊讶的积极影响, 因为它可以保证 流程上任何一个环节的可靠性 对其它环节的价值能够 产生一个促进的作用。 具体来说,如果流程中大多数的 联结很脆弱并且易于破裂, 那么每个环节的可靠与否 就显得不那么重要了。 反正很有可能别的东西也会坏掉。 但当所有环节都变得 很坚固可靠时, 每一个环节就都显得很重要。 极限状况下,每个细节都与它息息相关。 O型环对挑战者号很重要的原因, 是因为其它一切都可以很好地运行。 如果挑战者号可以在空间上等同于 微软Windows 2000——
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the reliability of the O-ring wouldn't have mattered because the machine would have crashed.
那么O型环的可靠性 就不那么重要了, 因为机器也多半会(因为其他原因)坏掉。
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Here's the broader point. In much of the work that we do, we are the O-rings. Yes, ATMs could do certain cash-handling tasks faster and better than tellers, but that didn't make tellers superfluous. It increased the importance of their problem-solving skills and their relationships with customers. The same principle applies if we're building a building, if we're diagnosing and caring for a patient, or if we are teaching a class to a roomful of high schoolers. As our tools improve, technology magnifies our leverage and increases the importance of our expertise and our judgment and our creativity.
这是一个更宽泛的观点。 在我们做的很多工作中 , 我们就是O型环。 是的,ATM机可以做 一些处理现金的任务, 而且跟银行柜员比起来更快、更好, 但这并不代表银行柜员就是多余的。 它提升了他们解决问题的能力, 以及与顾客的关系。 同样的原理也适用于 建造一栋大楼, 诊断和照顾一位病人, 或者是给一教室的高中生 教一门课。 随着我们的工具功能越来越强大, 科技放大了我们的影响力, 提高了专业性的重要性, 同时增强了我们的判断力和创造力。
And that brings me to the second principle: never get enough. You may be thinking, OK, O-ring, got it, that says the jobs that people do will be important. They can't be done by machines, but they still need to be done. But that doesn't tell me how many jobs there will need to be. If you think about it, isn't it kind of self-evident that once we get sufficiently productive at something, we've basically worked our way out of a job? In 1900, 40 percent of all US employment was on farms. Today, it's less than two percent. Why are there so few farmers today? It's not because we're eating less.
这就引出了第二个原则: 永远不满足于现状。 你可能在想,不就是O型环么,明白了, 就是说人们所做的工作将会很重要, 这些必不可少的工作 无法由机器替代完成。 然而那没有告诉我 我们将会需要多少工作。 如果你仔细想这个问题, 难道不是一种 一旦我们在某些事情上足够高效了, 我们实际上就对工作胜券在握了? 在1900年,40的美国雇员 都在农场里工作。 今天,这个数字小于2。 为什么现在只有这么少的农民? 并不是因为我们吃得少了。
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A century of productivity growth in farming means that now, a couple of million farmers can feed a nation of 320 million. That's amazing progress, but it also means there are only so many O-ring jobs left in farming. So clearly, technology can eliminate jobs. Farming is only one example. There are many others like it. But what's true about a single product or service or industry has never been true about the economy as a whole. Many of the industries in which we now work -- health and medicine, finance and insurance, electronics and computing -- were tiny or barely existent a century ago. Many of the products that we spend a lot of our money on -- air conditioners, sport utility vehicles, computers and mobile devices -- were unattainably expensive, or just hadn't been invented a century ago. As automation frees our time, increases the scope of what is possible, we invent new products, new ideas, new services that command our attention, occupy our time and spur consumption. You may think some of these things are frivolous -- extreme yoga, adventure tourism, Pokémon GO -- and I might agree with you. But people desire these things, and they're willing to work hard for them. The average worker in 2015 wanting to attain the average living standard in 1915 could do so by working just 17 weeks a year, one third of the time. But most people don't choose to do that. They are willing to work hard to harvest the technological bounty that is available to them. Material abundance has never eliminated perceived scarcity. In the words of economist Thorstein Veblen, invention is the mother of necessity.
一个世纪农产品生产力的提高 意味着现在几百万的农民 就足以养活一个3.2亿人口的国家。 这是一个惊人的进步, 但这也代表只有一部分 O型环工作还在农业中存在着。 显而易见,科技可以减少工作机会, 农业只是一个例子。 还有很多方面都和农业一样。 但是对于一项产品、服务 或者工业正确的策略, 在经济整体上,从来都不是正确的。 很多我们目前所投身的工业—— 比如健康和医药, 金融和保险, 电子产品和计算机—— 在一个世纪前才初露端倪, 或者几乎不存在。 很多我们花巨资购买的产品—— 比如空调,体育用交通工具, 电脑和移动设备—— 都曾经价格不菲, 或者在一个世纪前还没有问世。 随着自动化让我们有更多自己的时间, 让更多的机遇成为可能, 我们发明了新产品,新想法,新服务, 那些都需要我们的注意力, 占用我们的时间, 以及刺激我们的消费。 你可能觉得有些事情太过浮夸—— 比如极限瑜伽,冒险性的旅游, 或者口袋妖怪游戏—— 我也许会赞同你的想法。 但是人们渴望这些东西, 而且愿意努力工作去得到它们。 2015年的普通工人 若想要实现1915年 普通工人的生活品质, 一年仅仅需要工作17周, 三分之一的时间。 但大部分人并不会这么做。 他们更情愿努力工作 去获得科技带给他们的好处。 物质的富足从没有 消除人们观念中的稀缺。 就像经济学家 Thorstein Veblen说的那样, 创造是需求之母。
Now ... So if you accept these two principles, the O-ring principle and the never-get-enough principle, then you agree with me. There will be jobs. Does that mean there's nothing to worry about? Automation, employment, robots and jobs -- it'll all take care of itself? No. That is not my argument. Automation creates wealth by allowing us to do more work in less time. There is no economic law that says that we will use that wealth well, and that is worth worrying about. Consider two countries, Norway and Saudi Arabia. Both oil-rich nations, it's like they have money spurting out of a hole in the ground.
那么... 如果你接受这两个原则, O型环原则和永不满足原则, 那么你跟我想的一样。 工作始终都会存在。 但那就表示没什么好担心的吗? 自动化,雇员,机器人和工作—— 一切都会顺其自然地和谐发展吗? 不是的。 这并不是我的观点。 自动化会通过提高工作效率 带来财富。 没有哪条经济定律 说我们可以很好地 利用那一部分财富, 而那正是值得担心的东西。 想想这两个国家, 挪威和沙特阿拉伯。 它们都有很多的石油资源, 就好像它们的钱是 从地下的洞喷出来的一样。
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But they haven't used that wealth equally well to foster human prosperity, human prospering. Norway is a thriving democracy. By and large, its citizens work and play well together. It's typically numbered between first and fourth in rankings of national happiness. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy in which many citizens lack a path for personal advancement. It's typically ranked 35th among nations in happiness, which is low for such a wealthy nation. Just by way of comparison, the US is typically ranked around 12th or 13th. The difference between these two countries is not their wealth and it's not their technology. It's their institutions. Norway has invested to build a society with opportunity and economic mobility. Saudi Arabia has raised living standards while frustrating many other human strivings. Two countries, both wealthy, not equally well off.
但是两个国家在利用这笔财富 去帮助人类的发展繁荣上, 没有获得相同的效果。 挪威是个欣欣向荣的民主国家, 总体而言,它的公民工作生活很富足。 国家人民的幸福指数排名,基本都在 第一到第四之间徘徊。 而沙特阿拉伯却是个 君主专制的国家, 在那里很多公民 都没有一个获得个人晋升的渠道。 国家人民的幸福指数 全球排名基本上都落在第35名左右, 对于这样一个富有的国家 来说排名算得上低了。 仅仅为了比较, 美国大都排在第 12 到 13 之间。 这两个国家的差别 不在它们的富有程度, 也不在科技是否发达, 而是它们的制度。 挪威长期来致力于 建立一个充满机会与 经济流动性的社会。 虽然沙特阿拉伯的 生活水平已经有提升, 但公民的很多其它 人性需求仍饱受压抑。 两个国家都很富有, 但人民的幸福水平却存在明显差距。
And this brings me to the challenge that we face today, the challenge that automation poses for us. The challenge is not that we're running out of work. The US has added 14 million jobs since the depths of the Great Recession. The challenge is that many of those jobs are not good jobs, and many citizens cannot qualify for the good jobs that are being created. Employment growth in the United States and in much of the developed world looks something like a barbell with increasing poundage on either end of the bar. On the one hand, you have high-education, high-wage jobs like doctors and nurses, programmers and engineers, marketing and sales managers. Employment is robust in these jobs, employment growth. Similarly, employment growth is robust in many low-skill, low-education jobs like food service, cleaning, security, home health aids. Simultaneously, employment is shrinking in many middle-education, middle-wage, middle-class jobs, like blue-collar production and operative positions and white-collar clerical and sales positions. The reasons behind this contracting middle are not mysterious. Many of those middle-skill jobs use well-understood rules and procedures that can increasingly be codified in software and executed by computers. The challenge that this phenomenon creates, what economists call employment polarization, is that it knocks out rungs in the economic ladder, shrinks the size of the middle class and threatens to make us a more stratified society. On the one hand, a set of highly paid, highly educated professionals doing interesting work, on the other, a large number of citizens in low-paid jobs whose primary responsibility is to see to the comfort and health of the affluent. That is not my vision of progress, and I doubt that it is yours.
接下来,我要来谈谈 我们目前所面临的挑战, 自动化给我们所带来的挑战。 这挑战不是因为工作的短缺。 美国自金融海啸以来 已经增加了1400万个就业机会。 问题是这些工作中很多 都不是好的工作, 然而很多公民无法胜任 那些被创造出来的 好的工作。 美国以及其它 发达国家的就业增长 就像一个杠铃, 在横杠的两端都在增重。 一方面, 有学历高薪酬高的工作, 比如说医生和护士, 程序员和工程师, 市场营销经理。 在这些行业中就业率还在持续增长。 同样的,低学历低收入的工作 就业率也在增长, 比如餐饮服务业, 清洁,安保, 家庭健康护理。 与此同时,失业率也在 许多中等教育,中等收入, 中产阶级中不断下降, 比如说蓝领工人和运营岗位, 办公室白领和销售岗位。 中产阶级规模缩小的背后原因 并不是什么不解之谜。 许多这些中等难度的职位 都遵循着简洁明了的规则和制度, 它们可以被编入程序, 并交由电脑执行。 这个现象所带来的挑战, 也就是经济学家所说的就业两极化, 就像少了支撑的梯子, 使中产阶级的规模缩小 并加剧社会分层。 一方面,一群受过高等教育, 收入丰厚的就业者 做着有趣的工作, 另一方面,一大群收入很低的公民, 他们的责任是保证 富足所带来的舒适和健康。 这并不是我眼中的进步, 可能也不是你们的。
But here is some encouraging news. We have faced equally momentous economic transformations in the past, and we have come through them successfully. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, when automation was eliminating vast numbers of agricultural jobs -- remember that tractor? -- the farm states faced a threat of mass unemployment, a generation of youth no longer needed on the farm but not prepared for industry. Rising to this challenge, they took the radical step of requiring that their entire youth population remain in school and continue their education to the ripe old age of 16. This was called the high school movement, and it was a radically expensive thing to do. Not only did they have to invest in the schools, but those kids couldn't work at their jobs. It also turned out to be one of the best investments the US made in the 20th century. It gave us the most skilled, the most flexible and the most productive workforce in the world. To see how well this worked, imagine taking the labor force of 1899 and bringing them into the present. Despite their strong backs and good characters, many of them would lack the basic literacy and numeracy skills to do all but the most mundane jobs. Many of them would be unemployable.
但也有一些比较令人振奋的消息。 我们已经经历了同样 具有重大意义的经济改革, 并取得了成功。 在19世纪末20世纪初, 当自动化设备消除了大量人工农业劳动—— 记得拖拉机吗—— 农场面临着失业率的上升 一代人年轻人 不再需要在农场上工作了, 但他们并没有为工业化做好准备。 面对挑战, 他们迈出了巨大的一步, 要求那一代的青年在学校读书, 继续他们的教育, 直到16岁达到心智成熟。 这被叫做高中运动, 其代价不菲。 人们不仅要投资学校, 孩子们还不能打工。 从效果来看,这是20世纪 美国人做的最好的投资。 它带给了我们全世界最有技术,最灵活, 也最高效的劳动力。 如果要看这些变革所带来的好处, 我们可以想像把1899年的劳动力 带到现在。 尽管这些人身体强壮,品格也很好, 但他们缺乏基本的识字与算数能力, 只能做最简单的日常工作。 他们中很多人会失业。
What this example highlights is the primacy of our institutions, most especially our schools, in allowing us to reap the harvest of our technological prosperity.
这些例子说明了教育机构的重要性, 特别是我们的学校, 让我们获取了 科技繁荣所带来的成果。
It's foolish to say there's nothing to worry about. Clearly we can get this wrong. If the US had not invested in its schools and in its skills a century ago with the high school movement, we would be a less prosperous, a less mobile and probably a lot less happy society. But it's equally foolish to say that our fates are sealed. That's not decided by the machines. It's not even decided by the market. It's decided by us and by our institutions.
说不用担心,难免有些夜郎自大。 我们千万别误会了。 如果美国政府在一世纪前的 高中教育改革运动中 没有投资学校和技术, 生活可能就不会这么富足和便利, 社会的幸福感可能也会大大地减少。 但说这一切都是命中注定, 也是同样并不明智。 我们的命运并不是由机械决定, 甚至不是由市场决定。 这取决于我们自己以及我们的机构。
Now, I started this talk with a paradox. Our machines increasingly do our work for us. Why doesn't that make our labor superfluous, our skills redundant? Isn't it obvious that the road to our economic and social hell is paved with our own great inventions?
现在,我想谈谈一个矛盾的现象。 机械不断地取代我们的工作。 为什么我们的劳工没有过剩, 技术没有被淘汰掉? 我们伟大的发明将我们的 经济与社会推入了地狱之门, 这一点不是很明显吗?
History has repeatedly offered an answer to that paradox. The first part of the answer is that technology magnifies our leverage, increases the importance, the added value of our expertise, our judgment and our creativity. That's the O-ring. The second part of the answer is our endless inventiveness and bottomless desires means that we never get enough, never get enough. There's always new work to do. Adjusting to the rapid pace of technological change creates real challenges, seen most clearly in our polarized labor market and the threat that it poses to economic mobility. Rising to this challenge is not automatic. It's not costless. It's not easy. But it is feasible. And here is some encouraging news. Because of our amazing productivity, we're rich. Of course we can afford to invest in ourselves and in our children as America did a hundred years ago with the high school movement. Arguably, we can't afford not to.
历史已经不止一次地为 这一矛盾的现象提供了答案。 答案的第一个部分就是: 科技放大了我们存在的功能性, 增进了我们的重要性和价值, 使我们的专业判断与创造力得到提升。 这是O型环原则。 答案的第二部分就是: 我们永无止境的发明 以及无穷的欲望, 意味着我们永远不知足, 总是把精力投入到新鲜事物中。 适应快速的科技变化 创造出了真实的挑战, 最明显的就是, 我们劳动市场的两极化, 以及它为经济活跃度 所带来的威胁。 迎接这一挑战并不是自然而然的, 它并非没有代价, 也不是轻而易举, 但是是可行的。 这里有一些好消息。 得益于惊人的生产力, 我们变得富有了, 我们当然可以负担起 投资我们自己和孩子, 就像美国一百年前的 高中教育改革运动一样。 甚至可以说,我们无法承担不这么做的后果。
Now, you may be thinking, Professor Autor has told us a heartwarming tale about the distant past, the recent past, maybe the present, but probably not the future. Because everybody knows that this time is different. Right? Is this time different? Of course this time is different. Every time is different. On numerous occasions in the last 200 years, scholars and activists have raised the alarm that we are running out of work and making ourselves obsolete: for example, the Luddites in the early 1800s; US Secretary of Labor James Davis in the mid-1920s; Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief in 1982; and of course, many scholars, pundits, technologists and media figures today.
你可能在想, 奥图教授已经告诉了我们一个 有关于久远的历史, 近代历史, 也许是当代的温暖的童话, 但可能并没有涉及到未来。 因为大家都知道, 这次的情况是不一样的。 对吧?这次会不一样吗? 当然不一样。 每次都不一样。 在过去200年的无数场合中, 学者与社会运动者不断地警告我们 工作要消失了, 我们会被自己淘汰掉, 例如,19世纪初的卢德份子 (英国参与捣毁机器的人); 20世纪20年代的美国劳工部长 詹姆士 · 戴维斯; 1982年诺贝尔经济学家 瓦西里 · 列昂季耶夫; 当然,还有很多学者、 评论员、科技家, 还有今日的媒体明星。
These predictions strike me as arrogant. These self-proclaimed oracles are in effect saying, "If I can't think of what people will do for work in the future, then you, me and our kids aren't going to think of it either." I don't have the guts to take that bet against human ingenuity. Look, I can't tell you what people are going to do for work a hundred years from now. But the future doesn't hinge on my imagination. If I were a farmer in Iowa in the year 1900, and an economist from the 21st century teleported down to my field and said, "Hey, guess what, farmer Autor, in the next hundred years, agricultural employment is going to fall from 40 percent of all jobs to two percent purely due to rising productivity. What do you think the other 38 percent of workers are going to do?" I would not have said, "Oh, we got this. We'll do app development, radiological medicine, yoga instruction, Bitmoji."
这些人的预测在我看来似乎都很狂妄。 这些自称圣贤的人像是在告诉我们, “ 如果我都想像不到 人们未来可以做什么工作, 那么你,我和我们的小孩 也都不会想像得到。” 我没有胆量在公众面前 质疑人类的聪明才智。 听着,我无法告诉你一百年后 人类会从事什么工作。 因为未来不是我说了算。 如果我是1900年爱荷华州的一位农夫, 有一位21世纪的经济学家 瞬间移动来到我的农场, 跟我说,“嘿,奥图农夫,你知道吗? 接下来的几百年, 农业的从业人员将从40 减少到2, 只因为生产力提升了。 你觉得剩下38的人 将来会做什么工作? ” 我不可能会说,“哦,我们早就知道了, 我们会开发应用软件,放射性药物, 瑜珈课程、手机表情符号软件。”
(Laughter)
(观众笑声)
I wouldn't have had a clue. But I hope I would have had the wisdom to say, "Wow, a 95 percent reduction in farm employment with no shortage of food. That's an amazing amount of progress. I hope that humanity finds something remarkable to do with all of that prosperity."
我根本不会知道的。 但我希望我可以明智地说出, “哇,农场工人减少了95, 却没有造成食物短缺, 真的是一大进步啊! 我希望人类繁荣后 能找到更有意义的事来做。”
And by and large, I would say that it has.
总体来讲,我觉得我们已经在做了。
Thank you very much.
非常感谢。
(Applause)
(观众掌声)