[TED]未来人类的工作被人工智能代替了之后该怎么赚钱呢？ [美国媒体]

Machines that can think, learn and adapt are coming -- and that could mean that we humans will end up with significant unemployment. What should we do about it? In a straightforward talk about a controversial idea, futurist Martin Ford makes the case for separating income from traditional work and instituting a universal basic income.

演讲相关：能够思考、学习和自适应的机器正在出现——这可能意味着我们人类最终将会面临大量的失业。我们该怎么做呢?在针对此问题的一次演讲中，未来学家马丁·福特主张将收入与传统工作分离，并制定一个普遍的基本收入。

I'm going to begin with a scary question: Are we headed toward a future without jobs? The remarkable progress that we're seeing in technologies like self-driving cars has led to an explosion of interest in this question, but because it's something that's been asked so many times in the past, maybe what we should really be asking is whether this time is really different. The fear that automation might displace workers and potentially lead to lots of unemployment goes back at a minimum 200 years to the Luddite revolts in England. And since then, this concern has come up again and again.

我要从一个可怕的问题开始讲起:我们是否会走向一个没有工作的未来?我们在自动驾驶汽车等技术上所取得的显着进步，已经引起了人们对这个问题的兴趣。但因为这个问题曾在过去多次被提及，也许我们真正应该问的是——这一次是否真的不同。人们担心自动化可能会取代工人，并有可能导致大量失业，这至少可以追溯到200年前勒德分子的起义（译注：19世纪英国手工业工人曾爆发捣毁机器的运动）。从那以后，这种担便忧一次又一次地出现了。

I'm going to guess that most of you have probably never heard of the Triple Revolution report, but this was a very prominent report. It was put together by a brilliant group of people -- it actually included two Nobel laureates -- and this report was presented to the President of the United States, and it argued that the US was on the brink of economic and social upheaval because industrial automation was going to put millions of people out of work. Now, that report was delivered to President Lyndon Johnson in March of 1964. So that's now over 50 years, and, of course, that hasn't really happened.And that's been the story again and again.

我猜你们大多数人可能从未听说过“第三次技术革命”报告，但这是一份非常杰出的报告。这是由一群才华横溢的人所撰写的——实际上包括两个诺贝尔奖获得者——这份报告被提交给了美国总统,其宣称因为工业自动化将促使数以百万计的人失业，我们正处于社会崩溃的边缘。这份报告递交给林登·约翰逊总统的日期是1964年3月，这距今已经超过50年了。当然，这一切并没有发生，只是不断有人旧调重弹。

This alarm has been raised repeatedly, but it's always been a false alarm. And because it's been a false alarm, it's led to a very conventional way of thinking about this. And that says essentially that yes, technology may devastate entire industries. It may wipe out whole occupations and types of work. But at the same time, of course, progress is going to lead to entirely new things. So there will be new industries that will arise in the future, and those industries, of course, will have to hire people.There'll be new kinds of work that will appear, and those might be things that today we can't really even imagine. And that has been the story so far, and it's been a positive story.

这一警告已多次被提起，但它始终是一个错误的警告。而因为这一直是一个错误的警告，它导致人们产生了一种惯性思维——从本质上说，是的，技术可能摧毁整个产业。它可能会毁掉整个行业和相关工作类型。不过与此同时，进步也会带来全新的东西。所以未来会有新的产业出现，当然，这些产业也必须得雇佣员工。所以肯定会有新的工作出现，只不过这些工作对于今天的我们来说可能是无法想象的。但到目前为止，这都是一个猜想，一个积极的猜想。

It turns out that the new jobs that have been created have generally been a lot better than the old ones. They have, for example, been more engaging. They've been in safer, more comfortable work environments, and, of course, they've paid more. So it has been a positive story. That's the way things have played out so far. But there is one particular class of worker for whom the story has been quite different. For these workers, technology has completely decimated their work, and it really hasn't created any new opportunities at all. And these workers, of course, are horses.

事实证明，创造出来的新工作通常比旧工作好得多。比如说，它们更有吸引力。人们可以在更安全、更舒适的工作环境中工作，当然，也需要付出更多。所以这是一个积极的猜想。到目前为止，事情正是这样发展的。但是也存在特殊的工人阶级，他们的故事是完全不同的。对这些工人来说，技术已经彻底摧毁了他们的工作，而且真的没有为他们创造任何新的机会。嗯，这些工人就是马。

So I can ask a very provocative question: Is it possible that at some point in the future, a significant fraction of the human workforce is going to be made redundant in the way that horses were? Now, you might have a very visceral, reflexive reaction to that. You might say, "That's absurd. How can you possibly compare human beings to horses?" Horses, of course, are very limited, and when cars and trucks and tractors came along, horses really had nowhere else to turn. People, on the other hand, are intelligent; we can learn, we can adapt. And in theory, that ought to mean that we can always find something new to do, and that we can always remain relevant to the future economy.

所以我可以提一个很有煽动性的问题:在未来的某一时刻，人类劳动力中是否有相当一部分将以马的方式被裁掉?现在，你可能会有一种非常本能的、反射性的反应。你可能会说：“这太荒谬了，你怎么能把人类和马相比呢?“当然，马是非常受限的，当汽车、卡车和拖拉机出现时，马就变得毫无用处了。而另一方面，人类是有智慧的;我们可以学习，我们可以适应。从理论上讲，这应该意味着我们总能找到新的事情来做，并且我们可以一直与未来的经济保持联系。

But here's the really critical thing to understand. The machines that will threaten workers in the futureare really nothing like those cars and trucks and tractors that displaced horses. The future is going to be full of thinking, learning, adapting machines. And what that really means is that technology is finally beginning to encroach on that fundamental human capability -- the thing that makes us so different from horses, and the very thing that, so far, has allowed us to stay ahead of the march of progress and remain relevant, and, in fact, indispensable to the economy. So what is it that is really so different about today's information technology relative to what we've seen in the past? I would point to three fundamental things.

但这才是我们真正需要理解的地方。未来威胁工人的机器和那些取代马的汽车、卡车和拖拉机根本不一样。未来的机器将会思考、学习和适应。这真正意味着技术终将开始蚕食人类的基本功能——让我们能与马区别开来的东西；让我们保持进化的领先地位的东西；让我们与经济保持联系，事实上对于经济也是不可或缺的东西。那么，与我们过去看到的信息技术相比，今天的信息技术到底有什么不同呢?我要指出以下三个基本的事实。

The first thing is that we have seen this ongoing process of exponential acceleration. I know you all know about Moore's law, but in fact, it's more broad-based than that; it extends in many cases, for example, to software, it extends to communications, bandwidth and so forth. But the really key thing to understand is that this acceleration has now been going on for a really long time. In fact, it's been going on for decades. If you measure from the late 1950s, when the first integrated circuits were fabricated, we've seen something on the order of 30 doublings in computational power since then.That's just an extraordinary number of times to double any quantity, and what it really means is that we're now at a point where we're going to see just an extraordinary amount of absolute progress, and, of course, things are going to continue to also accelerate from this point. So as we look forward to the coming years and decades, I think that means that we're going to see things that we're really not prepared for. We're going to see things that astonish us.

第一点我们已经看到了，信息技术正在以指数水平不断发展。我知道大家都了解摩尔定律，但事实上，它的应用更广泛;它能扩展到很多情况，例如，软件、通信、带宽等。此外真正需要理解的关键是，这种指数增长已经持续了很长时间了。实际上，这种情况已经持续了几十年。从20世纪50年代末开始，当第一个集成电路被制造出来的时候，我们可以看到现在的计算能力已经超出那时30个数量级（译注：按照摩尔定律这里的量级应该是2为底数，即现今的计算能力是50年前的2的30次幂）。无论什么与此相乘都是非常多的，它真正的意思是表明我们现在正处在一个非常大的绝对进步的时刻，当然，以现在的数值为基数，它还会继续如此发展。因此，当我们展望未来的几年和几十年，我认为这意味着我们将看到一些我们实际上没有准备好的东西。我们将会看到一些让我们震惊的事情。

The second key thing is that the machines are, in a limited sense, beginning to think. And by this, I don't mean human-level AI, or science fiction artificial intelligence; I simply mean that machines and algorithms are making decisions. They're solving problems, and most importantly, they're learning. In fact, if there's one technology that is truly central to this and has really become the driving force behind this, it's machine learning, which is just becoming this incredibly powerful, disruptive, scalable technology.

第二个关键问题是，在有限的意义上，机器开始学会思考了。我不是指人类水平的人工智能，也不是科幻小说中的人工智能;我只是说机器和算法现在可以自己做决定。他们能解决问题，最重要的是，他们能学习。事实上，如果说有一种技术是真正的核心，是这背后真正的驱动力，那一定是机器学习，它正在成为一种不可思议的、强大的、破坏性的、可扩展的技术。

One of the best examples I've seen of that recently was what Google's DeepMind division was able to do with its AlphaGo system. Now, this is the system that was able to beat the best player in the worldat the ancient game of Go. Now, at least to me, there are two things that really stand out about the game of Go. One is that as you're playing the game, the number of configurations that the board can be in is essentially infinite. There are actually more possibilities than there are atoms in the universe.So what that means is, you're never going to be able to build a computer to win at the game of Go the way chess was approached, for example, which is basically to throw brute-force computational power at it. So clearly, a much more sophisticated, thinking-like approach is needed. The second thing that really stands out is that, if you talk to one of the championship Go players, this person cannot necessarily even really articulate what exactly it is they're thinking about as they play the game. It's often something that's very intuitive, it's almost just like a feeling about which move they should make.

我最近看到的一个最好的例子是谷歌的DeepMind部门用AlphaGo系统所做到的。现在，这个系统在古代围棋项目中击败了世界上最优秀的选手。对我来说，我知道关于围棋的两个事实。一个是当你在玩这个游戏的时候，棋盘上的可能下法基本上是无限的。实际上，这比整个宇宙中存在的原子数还要多。这就意味着，你永远无法通过建立一台超强计算能力的计算机来赢得围棋的胜利（译注：指单靠穷举方法）。所以很明显，需要一种更复杂的思维方式。第二件事是，如果你和一个围棋冠军交谈，这个人不一定能准确地说出他们在下围棋时在想什么。这通常是一种非常直观的感觉，他们只是感觉该怎么做。

So given those two qualities, I would say that playing Go at a world champion level really ought to be something that's safe from automation, and the fact that it isn't should really raise a cautionary flag for us. And the reason is that we tend to draw a very distinct line, and on one side of that line are all the jobs and tasks that we perceive as being on some level fundamentally routine and repetitive and predictable. And we know that these jobs might be in different industries, they might be in different occupations and at different skill levels, but because they are innately predictable, we know they're probably at some point going to be susceptible to machine learning, and therefore, to automation.And make no mistake -- that's a lot of jobs. That's probably something on the order of roughly half the jobs in the economy.

因此，考虑到这两种特性，我想说，自动化技术达到围棋世界冠军级别的水平是完全安全的，事实上，它本不应该给我们带来警示。究其原因，是由于我们倾向于画出一条区分线，在这条线的一边是我们认为某种程度上是一种基本的、重复的、可预测的工作和任务。这些工作可能分布在不同的产业，不同的行业，需要不同的技能水平，但是因为它们是天生的可预测的，我们知道它们很可能在某种程度上易受机器学习、受自动化的影响。毫无疑问，有很多这样的工作，现有经济中大约一半的工作是此种类型。

But then on the other side of that line, we have all the jobs that require some capability that we perceive as being uniquely human, and these are the jobs that we think are safe. Now, based on what I know about the game of Go, I would've guessed that it really ought to be on the safe side of that line.But the fact that it isn't, and that Google solved this problem, suggests that that line is going to be very dynamic. It's going to shift, and it's going to shift in a way that consumes more and more jobs and tasks that we currently perceive as being safe from automation.

但是在这条线的另一边，我们认为其中所有的工作都需要一些被认为是人类独一无二的能力，这些是我们认为的安全可靠的工作。现在，根据我对围棋的了解，我猜它应该是在这条线的安全可靠的一边。但事实并非如此，谷歌解决了这个问题，这表明这条线将是非常动态的。它将会发生变化，越来越多我们目前认为是安全可靠的工作和任务会被移到线的另一边。

The other key thing to understand is that this is by no means just about low-wage jobs or blue-collar jobs, or jobs and tasks done by people that have relatively low levels of education. There's lots of evidence to show that these technologies are rapidly climbing the skills ladder. So we already see an impact on professional jobs -- tasks done by people like accountants, financial analysts, journalists,lawyers, radiologists and so forth. So a lot of the assumptions that we make about the kind of occupations and tasks and jobs that are going to be threatened by automation in the future are very likely to be challenged going forward.

另一个需要理解的关键问题是，这绝不仅仅是低工资的工作或蓝领工作，或者是那些受教育水平相对较低的人所做的工作和任务受影响。有大量证据表明，信息技术正在迅速提升其技能水平。因此，我们已经看到了其对专业工作的影响——会计师、金融分析师、记者、律师、放射学家等工作。所以我们对未来的职业、任务和工作所做的很多假设都很有可能会受到挑战。

So as we put these trends together, I think what it shows is that we could very well end up in a futurewith significant unemployment. Or at a minimum, we could face lots of underemployment or stagnant wages, maybe even declining wages. And, of course, soaring levels of inequality. All of that, of course, is going to put a terrific amount of stress on the fabric of society. But beyond that, there's also a fundamental economic problem, and that arises because jobs are currently the primary mechanismthat distributes income, and therefore purchasing power, to all the consumers that buy the products and services we're producing.

因此，当我们把这些趋势放在一起的时候，我认为这表明我们很有可能会在未来的某个时候出现严重的失业。或者至少，我们可能面临大量的就业不足或工资滞涨的情况，甚至可能工资还会下降。当然，还有不断飙升的不平等程度。当然，所有这些都将给社会结构造成极大的压力。除此之外，还有一个根本的经济问题，因为就业是主要的社会机制，它将收入分配给所有购买我们生产的产品和服务的消费者。

In order to have a vibrant market economy, you've got to have lots and lots of consumers that are really capable of buying the products and services that are being produced. If you don't have that, then you run the risk of economic stagnation, or maybe even a declining economic spiral, as there simply aren't enough customers out there to buy the products and services being produced.

为了构建一个充满活力的市场经济，你必须有大量的消费者，他们有能力购买正在生产的产品和服务。如果你没有这样做，那么你就会面临经济停滞的风险，或者甚至是经济螺旋式下降的风险，因为根本没有足够的客户来购买产品和服务。

It's really important to realize that all of us as individuals rely on access to that market economy in order to be successful. You can visualize that by thinking in terms of one really exceptional person.Imagine for a moment you take, say, Steve Jobs, and you drop him on an island all by himself. On that island, he's going to be running around, gathering coconuts just like anyone else. He's really not going to be anything special, and the reason, of course, is that there is no market for him to scale his incredible talents across. So access to this market is really critical to us as individuals, and also to the entire system in terms of it being sustainable.

重要的是要认识到我们每个人都是依赖于进入市场经济来获得成功的。你可以从一个非常特别的角度来看待这个问题。想象一下，比如说你把史蒂夫·乔布斯单独一个人扔在一个岛上。在那个岛上，他会撒欢一样到处跑，像别人一样采集椰子。他真的不会有什么特别的地方，究其原因是由于他没有市场可以发挥他的惊人天赋。因此，进入市场对我们个人来说是至关重要的，而对于整个系统来说，它才能可持续的运转。

So the question then becomes: What exactly could we do about this? And I think you can view this through a very utopian framework. You can imagine a future where we all have to work less, we have more time for leisure, more time to spend with our families, more time to do things that we find genuinely rewarding and so forth. And I think that's a terrific vision. That's something that we should absolutely strive to move toward. But at the same time, I think we have to be realistic, and we have to realize that we're very likely to face a significant income distribution problem. A lot of people are likely to be left behind. And I think that in order to solve that problem, we're ultimately going to have to find a way to decouple incomes from traditional work. And the best, more straightforward way I know to do that is some kind of a guaranteed income or universal basic income.

所以问题就变成了:我们能做些什么呢?我认为你可以通过一个非常理想化的框架来看待这个问题。你可以想象这样一个未来，我们都只有很少工作，有更多的休闲时间，有更多的时间和家人在一起，有更多的时间去做我们认为真正有意义的事情。我认为这是一个非常棒的愿景。这是我们绝对应该努力的方向。但与此同时，我认为我们必须现实一些，我们必须意识到，我们很可能面临严重的收入分配问题。很多人可能会被甩在后面。我认为，为了解决这个问题，我们最终必须找到一种方法，让收入与传统的工作分离。而我所知道的最好的、更直接的方法是保证收入或普遍的基本收入。

Now, basic income is becoming a very important idea. It's getting a lot of traction and attention, there are a lot of important pilot projects and experiments going on throughout the world. My own view is that a basic income is not a panacea; it's not necessarily a plug-and-play solution, but rather, it's a place to start. It's an idea that we can build on and refine. For example, one thing that I have written quite a lot about is the possibility of incorporating explicit incentives into a basic income. To illustrate that, imagine that you are a struggling high school student. Imagine that you are at risk of dropping out of school. And yet, suppose you know that at some point in the future, no matter what, you're going to get the same basic income as everyone else. Now, to my mind, that creates a very perverse incentive for you to simply give up and drop out of school.

现在，基本收入已经成为一个非常重要的概念。它吸引了大量的关注，有很多重要的试点项目和实验在全世界范围内进行。我自己的观点是，基本收入不是万灵药;它并不一定是一种即插即用式的解决方案，但我们可以以此作为开始。这是一个我们可以建立和完善的基础想法。举个例子，我写了很多关于把明确的激励因素纳入基本收入的可能性。为了说明这一点，想象一下你是一个苦苦挣扎的高中生。想象一下，你有辍学的危险。但是，假设你知道在未来的某一时刻，无论如何，你将得到和其他人一样的基本收入。现在，在我看来，这就产生了一种非常不合理的激励，让你放弃学业，然后辍学。

So I would say, let's not structure things that way. Instead, let's pay people who graduate from high school somewhat more than those who simply drop out. And we can take that idea of building incentives into a basic income, and maybe extend it to other areas. For example, we might create an incentive to work in the community to help others, or perhaps to do positive things for the environment, and so forth. So by incorporating incentives into a basic income, we might actually improve it, and also, perhaps, take at least a couple of steps towards solving another problem that I think we're quite possibly going to face in the future, and that is, how do we all find meaning and fulfillment, and how do we occupy our time in a world where perhaps there's less demand for traditional work?

所以我想说，我们不要用那种方式来组织。相反，让我们为那些从高中毕业的人支付比那些辍学的人更多的钱。我们可以把激励措施建立在基本收入的基础上，并将其扩展到其他领域。例如，我们可能会鼓励在社区中工作来帮助他人，或者为环境做一些积极的事情等等。通过将激励纳入基本收入,我们可能会对此有所改善,而且在解决我们在未来可能面对的另一个问题上也迈出了几大步,那就是：如果对于传统工作的需求减少了，我们如何找到存在的意义和满足感,我们如何支配我们在这个世界上的时间?

So by extending and refining a basic income, I think we can make it look better, and we can also, perhaps, make it more politically and socially acceptable and feasible -- and, of course, by doing that,we increase the odds that it will actually come to be.

因此，通过扩展和改善基本收入的概念，我认为我们可以让它看起来更好，我们也可以让它在政治上和社会上都可以接受和可行——当然，通过这些，我们也增加了它实际会出现的几率。

I think one of the most fundamental, almost instinctive objections that many of us have to the idea of a basic income, or really to any significant expansion of the safety net, is this fear that we're going to end up with too many people riding in the economic cart, and not enough people pulling that cart.And yet, really, the whole point I'm making here, of course, is that in the future, machines are increasingly going to be capable of pulling that cart for us. That should give us more options for the way we structure our society and our economy, And I think eventually, it's going to go beyond simply being an option, and it's going to become an imperative. The reason, of course, is that all of this is going to put such a degree of stress on our society, and also because jobs are that mechanism that gets purchasing power to consumers so they can then drive the economy. If, in fact, that mechanism begins to erode in the future, then we're going to need to replace it with something else or we're going to face the risk that our whole system simply may not be sustainable.

我认为最基本的一点,我们许多人对于基本收入和安全保障几乎是本能的反对,这是出于担心太多人坐在经济这辆车上却没有人去拉车。然而，实际上，我在这里所表达的全部观点就是——在未来，机器将越来越有能力为我们拉动那辆车。这将给我们提供更多的选择来构建我们的社会和经济结构。我认为，最终，基本收入将不仅仅是一个选项，它将变得势在必行。这是因为我们的社会将面临巨大的压力，因为就业是一种能让消费者获得购买力从而推动经济发展的机制。如果这种机制在未来会逐渐消失，那么我们就需要用其他的东西来代替它，否则我们可能将面临整个系统无法持续的风险。

But the bottom line here is that I really think that solving these problems, and especially finding a way to build a future economy that works for everyone, at every level of our society, is going to be one of the most important challenges that we all face in the coming years and decades.

我真的认为解决这些问题,特别是找到一个方法，构建一个适合每个人的未来的经济模式,对我们社会的每一个层次都将是最重要的挑战,是我们在未来几年、几十年都必须面对的事情。

Thank you very much.

谢谢大家！