The number of jobs lost to more efficient machines is only part of the problem...In the past, new industries hired far more people than those they put out of business. But this is not true of many of today’s new industries.”

“更高效机器造成的工作流失数量只是问题的一部分……过去，新行业聘用的员工数量远远超过这些行业砸掉的饭碗。但如今很多新行业却并非如此。”

This sentiment, from Time magazine, dates from the early weeks of John Kennedy’s presidency¹. Yet it would slot nicely into many a contemporary political speech. Like any self-respecting remorseless killer robot from the future, our techno-anxiety just keeps coming back.

来自《时代周刊》杂志(Time)的这种观点可回溯到约翰肯尼迪(John Kennedy)担任总统最初几周。然而，把它放进当今许多政治演讲中也丝毫不会显得突兀。与所有来自未来的那些有自尊心、冷酷无情的杀人机器人一样，我们对科技的担忧也隔一段时间就又回来。

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator was science fiction — but so, too, is the idea that robots and software algorithms are guzzling² jobs faster than they can be created. There is an astonishing mismatch between our fear of automation and the reality so far.

阿诺德施瓦辛格(Arnold Schwarzenegger)主演的《终结者》(Terminator)是科幻电影，而这种看法也是科幻、而非现实：机器人和软件算法葬送就业的速度快于创造就业的速度。我们对于自动化的担忧与目前的现实出现了惊人的不符。

How can this be? The highways of Silicon³ Valley are sprinkled with self-driving cars. Visit the cinema, the supermarket or the bank and the most prominent staff you will see are the security guards, who are presumably there to prevent you stealing valuable machines. Your computer once contented⁴ itself with correcting your spelling; now it will translate your prose into Mandarin⁵. Given all this, surely the robots must have stolen a job or two by now?

怎么会这样？硅谷的高速公路上行驶着不少无人驾驶汽车。去影院、超市或者银行的时候，你看到的最显眼的员工将是保安，他们存在的原因大概是为了防止你偷窃价值高昂的机器。你的电脑曾经满足于纠正你的拼写；如今电脑会把你写的文章翻译成普通话。鉴于这一切，这些机器人现在肯定已经窃取了一两份工作了吧？

Of course, the answer is that automation has been destroying particular jobs in particular industries for a long time, which is why most westerners who weave clothes or cultivate and harvest crops by hand do so for fun. In the past that process made us richer.

当然，答案是长期以来，自动化一直在摧毁某些特定行业的某些特定工作，这就是为什么如今多数西方人亲手织布或种植和收割农作物是为了好玩。过去，做这些能为我们带来收入。

The worry now is that, with computers making jobs redundant⁶ faster than we can generate new ones, the result is widespread unemployment, leaving a privileged class of robot-owning rentiers and highly paid workers with robot-compatible skills.

现在人们担心，考虑到电脑葬送就业的速度快于我们创造新就业的速度，会出现大规模失业，造就一个由拥有机器人的食利者以及拥有兼容机器人技能的高薪员工组成的特权阶级。

This idea is superficially plausible⁷: we are surrounded by cheap, powerful computers; many people have lost their jobs in the past decade; and inequality has risen in the past 30 years.

表面上看来，这种观点是合理的：我们被廉价且强大的电脑包围；过去10年，很多人失业；过去30年，不平等程度一直上升。

But the theory can be put to a very simple test: how fast is productivity growing? The usual measure of productivity is output per hour worked — by a human. Robots can produce economic output without any hours of human labour at all, so a sudden onslaught of robot workers should cause a sudden acceleration⁸ in productivity.

但我们可以用一个非常简单的测试来检验这一理论：生产率增速有多快？衡量生产率的通常标准是一个人类的每小时产出。机器人可以在丝毫不增加人类劳动时间的情况下创造经济产出，因此机器人劳动者的大量侵袭应会带来生产率增长的突然提速。

Instead, productivity has been disappointing. In the US, labour productivity growth averaged an impressive 2.8 per cent per year from 1948 to 1973. The result was mass affluence⁹ rather than mass joblessness. Productivity then slumped¹⁰ for a generation and perked¹¹ up in the late 1990s but has now sagged¹² again. The picture is little better in the UK, where labour productivity is notoriously low compared with the other G7 leading economies, and it has been falling further behind since 2007.

然而，事实上生产率一直令人失望。在美国，1948年至1973年，劳动生产率增速平均为每年2.8%，这很了不起。结果是大规模富裕，而非大规模失业。接着，生产率下滑了一代人时间，在上世纪90年代末回升，如今又再次陷入低迷。英国的情况也没有好到哪里去，众所周知，英国的劳动生产率低于七国集团(G7)其他成员国，自2007年以来双方差距还一直在拉大。

Taking a 40-year perspective, the impact of this long productivity malaise on typical workers in rich countries is greater than that of the rise in inequality, or of the financial crisis of 2008. In an age peppered with economic disappointments, the worst has been the stubborn failure of the robots to take our jobs. Then why is so much commentary dedicated¹³ to the opposite view? Some of this is a simple error: it has been a tough decade, economically speaking, and it is easy to blame robots for woes¹⁴ that should be laid at the door of others, such as bankers, austerity enthusiasts¹⁵ and eurozone politicians.

以40年的时间段来看，富国普通劳动者生产率长期低迷的影响要超过不平等程度上升或者2008年的金融危机。在经济领域诸多事情令人失望之际，最令人失望的事情就是机器人一直未能夺走我们的工作。那么，为何有如此多言论致力于论述相反的观点？部分原因在于一个简单的错误：从经济的角度来看，过去这十年是艰难的十年，我们很容易将本应怪罪于其他人（比如银行业人士、极力主张紧缩的人士以及欧元区政治界人士）的困境归咎于机器人。

It is also true that robotics is making impressive strides. Gill Pratt, a robotics expert, recently described a “Cambrian explosion” for robotics in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. While robots have done little to cause mass unemployment in the recent past, that may change in future.

机器人产业正取得不俗进展，这也是事实。机器人专家吉尔渠拉特(Gill Pratt)最近在《经济展望期刊》(Journal of Economic Perspectives)中写道机器人科学出现“寒武纪大爆发”。尽管最近机器人几乎没有造成大规模失业，但未来这点可能会发生变化。

Automation has also undoubtedly¹⁶ changed the shape of the job market — economist¹⁷ David Autor, writing in the same journal, documents a rise in demand for low-skilled jobs and highly skilled jobs, and a hollowing out of jobs in the middle. There are signs that the hollow is moving further and further up the spectrum¹⁸ of skills. The robots may not be taking our jobs, but they are certainly shuffling¹⁹ them around.

此外，自动化无疑改变了就业市场的状况，经济学家戴维攠塙尔(David Autor)在同一份期刊中记录了低技能和高技能工作需求的上升以及中等技能岗位的流失。有迹象表明，岗位流失现象正愈发向更高技能的岗位蔓延。机器人或许没有夺走我们的工作，但它们肯定正对我们的工作重新洗牌。

Yet Mr Autor also points to striking statistic²⁰: private investment in computers and software in the US has been falling almost continuously for 15 years. That is hard to square with the story of a robotic job-ocalypse. Surely we should expect to see a surge in IT investment as all those machines are installed?

然而，奥托尔还指出惊人的数据：美国电脑和软件领域的私人投资已几乎持续地下滑了15年。如果说机器人会带来就业末日的话，这很难说得通。既然那么多机器已经就位，我们肯定会预计IT投资会飙升，不是吗？

Instead, in the wake of the great recession, managers have noted²¹ an ample supply of cheap human labour and have done without the machines for now. Perhaps there is some vast underground dormitory somewhere, all steel and sparks and dormant²² androids. In a corner, a chromium-plated robo-hack is tapping away at a column lamenting²³ the fact that the humans have taken all the robots’ jobs.

然而，在大萧条之后，管理者注意到廉价人类劳动力供应充足，一直满足于暂时不使用机器人。或许，在地下某个地方有一个巨大的宿舍，里面都是闪着金属光泽、处于休眠状态的钢铁机器人。在一个角落里，一个镀铬的机器人雇工正在敲打键盘撰写一篇专栏，哀叹人类已夺走所有机器人的工作。