It’s a bot time
机器人时代已经到来
The machines are coming for jobs—if you look in the right places
在一些领域，机器正在和我们抢工作
The year is 2021, and honestly there ought to be more robots. It was a decade ago that two scholars of technology, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, published “Race Against the Machine”, an influential book that marked the start of a fierce debate between optimists and pessimists about technological change. The authors argued that exponential progress in computing was on the verge of delivering explosive advances in machine capabilities.
诚然，2021年应该有更多的机器人。正是在十年前，两位科技领域学者埃里克·布林约尔松和安德鲁·麦卡菲出版了一本有影响力的著作《与机器赛跑》，掀起了一场科技变革乐观派和悲观派之间激烈辩论。作者认为，计算机技术的指数级进步即将实现机器能力的爆炸性发展。
Headline-grabbing breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) seemed to support the idea that the robots would soon upend every workplace. Given that, on the eve of the pandemic, jobs were as plentiful as ever, you might now conclude that the warnings were overdone. But a number of new economics papers caution against complacency. The robots are indeed coming, they reckon—just a bit more slowly and stealthily than you might have expected.
人工智能领域令人瞩目的突破似乎昭示着：机器人不久就会颠覆任何一个工作领域。尽管如此，在疫情爆发之前，就业岗位仍然充足，你可能认为上述警告言过其实了。但是大量新发表的经济学论文却告诫我们不要自鸣得意。他们认为，机器人的确是在向我们袭来，只不过比我们预想的更加缓慢且不易觉察。
Economists have, on the whole, been fairly sanguine about the impact of robots and AI on workers. History is strewn with incorrect predictions of the looming irrelevance of human labour. The economic statistics have yet to signal the arrival of a robot-powered job apocalypse. Outside of slumps, firms remain keen to hire humans, for example. Growth in productivity—which ought to be surging if machines are helping fewer workers produce more output—has been unimpressive. A look beneath the aggregate numbers, though, reveals that change is indeed afoot.
总体上看，对于机器人和人工智能对劳动力的影响，经济学家们是相当乐观的。历史上充满了对于人类劳动力无关论的错误预判。比如，除了在经济萧条时期，公司仍然热衷于雇佣人类作为劳动力。根据目前的经济学数据，机器人驱动的职场末日还未到来。（理论上）如果更少的人在机器的帮助下产出更多，生产率就会激增，然而（实际上）该增长并非特别突出。然而，一些总体数据却告诉我们，变化的确正在发生。
Researchers find that businesses that are well-suited to the adoption of AI are indeed hiring people with AI expertise. Since 2010 there has been substantial growth in the number of AI-related job vacancies advertised by firms with lots of AI-vulnerable jobs. At the same time, there has been a sharp decline in these firms’ demand for capabilities that compete with those of existing AI.
研究者发现，那些完全适应于人工智能的企业其实在雇佣那些拥有人工智能专业知识的人才。自2010年以来，各企业发布的人工智能相关职位招聘大幅增长，而这些公司恰恰有很多易于被人工智能冲击的工作岗位。与此同时，这些公司对于那些人工智能所无法媲美的技能的需求却大幅下降。
An AI-induced change in the mix of jobs need not translate into less hiring overall. If new technologies largely assist current workers or boost productivity by enough to spark expansion, then more AI might well go hand-in-hand with more employment. This does not appear to be happening. Instead the researchers find that firms with more AI-vulnerable jobs have done much less hiring on net; that was especially the case in 2014-18, when AI-related vacancies in the database surged. Machines are not yet depressing labour demand across the economy as a whole. As machines become cleverer, however, that could change.
人工智能给各行各业所带来的改变并非意味着总体雇佣量的下降。如果新技术能够辅助现有劳动力，或者提高生产力从而引发行业扩张，那么人工智能增加与就业增多很可能是并行不悖的。而事实似乎并非如此。相反，研究者却发现，那些拥有更多易受到人工智能冲击岗位的公司的净雇佣量大幅下降了，这一点在2014年至2018年尤为突出，该时期数据库中人工智能相关的岗位空缺激增。机器还没有削减各行业的总体劳动力需求，然而随着机器更加智能，变数也就来了。
