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1.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. 人们就去关注科技对劳动力的影响。 2.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. 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。 3.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, 4.are the droids taking our jobs? 5.And there's some evidence that they are. 有证据显示这样的情况的确存在。 6.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 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， 7.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. 企业利润处于有史以来的最高水平。 8.And business investment in gear, in equipment and hardware and software is at an all-time high. 企业在设备、机械、硬件和软件的投资 也处于历史最高水平。 9.So the businesses are getting out their checkbooks. 所以企业虽然在花钱 10.What they're not really doing is hiring. 11.So this red line is the employment-to-population ratio, in other words, the percentage of working age people in America who have work. 有工作人数的比例。 12.And we see that it cratered during the Great Recession, and it hasn't started to bounce back at all. 完全没有开始回升的迹象。 13.But the story is not just a recession story. 14.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 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 15.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. 这种情况有记录以来第一次发生。 16.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, 如果比较潜在雇员和 17.during the Great Recession, it opened up in a huge way. 18.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 19.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. 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。 20.Is that good or bad? This is the government's projection for the working age population going forward. 21.So if these predictions are accurate, that gap is not going to close. 如果这些预测是准确的，两者之间的差距会保持下去。 22.The problem is, I don't think these projections are accurate. 问题是，我认为这些预测并不准确。 23.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 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 24.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 25.when it comes to technology's impact on the labor force. 26.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 27.do for a living. Let me give you a couple examples. 28.Throughout all of history, if you wanted something translated from one language into another, you had to involve a human being. 从一种语言翻译成另外一种语言， 29.Now we have multi-language, instantaneous, automatic translation services available for free via many of our devices all the way down to smartphones. 各种电子设备 使用免费的多语言的即时自动翻译服务。 30.And if any of us have used these, we know that they're not perfect, but they're decent. 31.Throughout all of history, if you wanted something written, a report or an article, you had to involve a person. 有史以来，如果你想写一篇 32.Not anymore. This is an article that appeared in Forbes online a while back about Apple's earnings. 《福布斯》杂志刊登的有关苹果公司收益的文章。 33.It was written by an algorithm. 由一个算法撰写。 34.And it's not decent, it's perfect. 这回不仅是不错了，简直是完美。 35.A lot of people look at this and they say, "Okay, but those are very specific, narrow tasks, and most knowledge workers are actually generalists, 很多人看到这一现象以后说，“好吧， 而大多数知识型人才都是通才， 36.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, 技能和知识并运用它们 随时随地地应对不可预测的要求， 37.and that's very, very hard to automate." 38.One of the most impressive knowledge workers in recent memory is a guy named Ken Jennings. 知识型人才名叫Ken Jennings。 39.He won the quiz show "Jeopardy!" 74 times in a row, took home three million dollars. 40.That's Ken on the right getting beat three to one by Watson, the "Jeopardy!"-playing supercomputer from IBM. 41.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 我开始思考 42.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 尤其是现在，如果我们把Siri 43.and repeat speech back to us. 44.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 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 45.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. 或者4倍，他们会比现在先进16倍。 46.So I start to think that a lot of knowledge work is going to be affected by this. 47.And digital technologies are not just impacting knowledge work. 48.They're starting to flex their muscles in the physical world as well. 他们在体力工作方面也开始展现实力。 49.I had the chance a little while back to ride in the Google autonomous car, which is as cool as it sounds. (Laughter) And I will vouch that it handled the stop-and-go traffic 最近有有机会乘坐了 50.on U.S. 101 very smoothly. 美国101公路上走走停停的交通。 51.There are about three and a half million people who drive trucks for a living in the United States. 52.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. 还处在非常原始的状态。它们所能完成的任务十分有限。 53.But they're getting better quite quickly, and DARPA, which is the investment arm of the Defense Department, is trying to accelerate their trajectory. 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。 54.So, in short, yeah, the droids are coming for our jobs. 简而言之，是的，机器人就要来和我们争夺工作机会了。 55.In the short term, we can stimulate job growth by encouraging entrepreneurship and by investing in infrastructure, because the robots today still aren't 投资基础设施建设来促进工作机会的增长 56.very good at fixing bridges. 并不擅长修建桥梁。 57.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 我们将进入一个生产力非常高 58.just doesn't need a lot of human workers, and managing that transition is going to be the greatest challenge that our society faces. 却不需要很多人类员工的时代， 59.Voltaire summarized why. He said, "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need." 60.But despite this challenge, I'm personally, I'm still a huge digital optimist, and I am supremely confident that the digital technologies that we're 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 61.developing now are going to take us into a utopian future, not a dystopian future. And to explain why, I want to pose kind of a ridiculously broad question. 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 62.I want to ask what have been the most important developments in human history? 我的问题是：人类历史上 最重要的发展是什么？ 63.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 to start an endless debate about, 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， 64.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. 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。 65.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 是世界主要宗教的建立， 它们改变了各国文明 66.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 67.and what changes people's lives are empires, so the great developments in human history are stories of conquest and of war." 和人类生活的 68.And then some cheery soul usually always pipes up and says, "Hey, don't forget about plagues." (Laughter) There are some optimistic answers to this question, 我也得到了一些积极的答案， 69.so some people will bring up the Age of Exploration and the opening up of the world. 70.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 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 71.periods when there was a deep flourishing of the arts and sciences. So this debate will go on and on. 繁荣发展的时代 所以这场辩论可以一直进行下去。 72.It's an endless debate, and there's no conclusive, no single answer to it. But if you're a geek like me, you say, "Well, what do the data say?" 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？” 73.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, 制作图标，比如世界人口 74.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, 将这些数据转化为图标之后， 75.are the ones that will bend these curves a lot. 76.So when you do this, and when you plot the data, you pretty quickly come to some weird conclusions. 将数据转化成图形之后 你很快就会得到一些奇怪的结论。 77.You conclude, actually, that none of these things have mattered very much. (Laughter) They haven't done a darn thing to the curves. (Laughter) 其实没有一个真正重要。（笑声） 它们对曲线的走势毫无影响。 78.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. 这就是科学技术。 79.The steam engine, and the other associated technologies of the Industrial Revolution changed the world and influenced human history so much, 对人类历史产生了深远的影响， 80.that in the words of the historian Ian Morris, they made mockery out of all that had come before. 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。 81.And they did this by infinitely multiplying the power of our muscles, overcoming the limitations of our muscles. 这些技术带来了人类无法企及的力量 82.Now, what we're in the middle of now is overcoming the limitations of our individual brains and infinitely multiplying our mental power. 现在，我们所经历的 则是对人类智力的超越 83.How can this not be as big a deal as overcoming the limitations of our muscles? 这和超越体力极限一样 是人类历史上的一件大事。 84.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, 因此请允许我再次强调 我们还远未到达这趟旅程的终点， 85.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. 86.Let me give you a couple examples. 87.Economies don't run on energy. They don't run on capital, they don't run on labor. Economies run on ideas. 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。 88.So the work of innovation, the work of coming up with new ideas, is some of the most powerful, some of the most fundamental work that we can do 是最重要的， 89.in an economy. And this is kind of how we used to do innovation. 90.We'd find a bunch of fairly similar-looking people — (Laughter) — we'd take them out of elite institutions, we'd put them into other elite institutions, and we'd wait for the innovation. 其它的精英组织，然后等待创新的到来。 91.Now — (Laughter) — as a white guy who spent his whole career at MIT and Harvard, I got no problem with this. (Laughter) But some other people do, and they've kind of crashed 现在（笑声） 作为一个整个职业生涯都在麻省理工 92.the party and loosened up the dress code of innovation. 创新世界的派对，降低了进入的门槛。 93.(Laughter) So here are the winners of a Top Coder programming challenge, and I assure you that nobody cares where these kids grew up, where they went to school, 这些孩子在哪里长大，他们在什么地方上学， 94.or what they look like. All anyone cares about is the quality of the work, the quality of the ideas. 他们作品和想法的质量。 95.And over and over again, we see this happening in the technology-facilitated world. 看到这种情况的发生。 96.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 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， 97.think of it, and I couldn't be happier about that development. 都将继续，令我感到非常开心。 98.I hear once in a while, "Okay, 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 但是科技依然是富裕阶层的工具， 99.improving the lives of people at the bottom of the pyramid." 提高处于金字塔底层人们的生活。” 100.And I want to say to that very clearly: nonsense. 对于这种说法，我的答案非常简单：无稽之谈。 101.The bottom of the pyramid is benefiting hugely from technology. 102.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, 经济学家Robert Jensen有一项出色的研究 103.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, 《经济学季刊》刊登的文章 104.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. 105.Prices stabilized, so people could plan their economic lives. 物价稳定，所以人们可以做好经济计划。 106.Waste was not reduced; it was eliminated. 107.And the lives of both the buyers and the sellers in these villages measurably improved. 在这些村庄里，卖方和买方 108.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. 我不认为Jensen运气过人， 碰巧遇到了一些生活水平 109.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. 普遍会发生的情况。 110.The lives of people, the welfares of people, improve dramatically. 居民的生活和福利会得到显著改善。 111.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 因此，对各方证据进行评估 持乐观态度，我开始认为物理学家Freeman Dyson 112.statement from the physicist Freeman Dyson is actually not hyperbole. This is an accurate assessment of what's going on. 所提出的精彩观点 113.Our digital -- 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, 我们的数码技术是上天伟大的礼物， 114.when it is broadening and deepening and becoming more profound all around the world. 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。 115.So, yeah, the droids are taking our jobs, but focusing on that fact misses the point entirely. 116.The point is that then we are freed up to do other things, and what we are going to do, I am very confident, what we're going to do is reduce poverty and drudgery 117.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 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 118.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. 让此前的人类成就 119.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. 一位紧密关注数码技术进步的 |
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