T
Yogi Berra, agreed. He said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." he writer
George Eliot cautioned us that, among all forms of mistake, prophesy is the most gratuitous. The person that we would all acknowledge as her 20th-century counterpart,
I'm going to ignore their cautions and make one very specific forecast. In the world that we are creating very quickly, we're going to see more and more things that look like science fiction, and fewer and fewer things that look like jobs. Our cars are very quickly going to start driving themselves, which means we're going to need fewer truck drivers. We're going to hook Siri up to Watson and use that to automate a lot of the work that's currently done by customer service reps and troubleshooters and diagnosers, and we're already taking R2D2, painting him orange, and putting him to work carrying shelves around warehouses, which means we need a lot fewer people to be walking up and down those aisles.
Now, for about 200 years, people have been saying exactly what I'm telling you -- the age of technological unemployment is at hand — starting with the Luddites smashing looms in Britain just about two centuries ago, and they have been wrong. Our economies in the developed world have coasted along on something pretty close to full employment.
Which brings up a critical question: Why is this time different, if it really is? The reason it's different is that, just in the past few years, our machines have started demonstrating skills they have never, ever had before: understanding, speaking, hearing, seeing, answering, writing, and they're still acquiring new skills. For example, mobile humanoid robots are still incredibly primitive, but the research arm of the
Defense Department just launched a competition to have them do things like this, and if the track record is any guide, this competition is going to be successful. So when I look around, I think the day is not too far off at all when we're going to have androids doing a lot of the work that we are doing right now. And we're creating a world where there is going to be more and more technology and fewer and fewer jobs. It's a world that
Erik Brynjolfsson and I are calling "the new machine age."
The thing to keep in mind is that this is absolutely great news. This is the best economic news on the planet these days. Not that there's a lot of competition, right? This is the best economic news we have these days for two main reasons. The first is, technological progress is what allows us to continue this amazing recent run that we're on where output goes up over time, while at the same time, prices go down, and volume and quality just continue to explode. Now, some people look at this and talk about shallow materialism, but that's absolutely the wrong way to look at it. This is abundance, which is exactly what we want our economic system to provide. The second reason that the new machine age is such great news is that, once the androids start doing jobs, we don't have to do them anymore, and we get freed up from drudgery and toil.
Now, when I talk about this with my friends in
Cambridge and
Silicon Valley, they say, "Fantastic. No more drudgery, no more toil. This gives us the chance to imagine an entirely different kind of society, a society where the creators and the discoverers and the performers and the innovators come together with their patrons and their financiers to talk about issues, entertain, enlighten, provoke each other." It's a society really, that looks a lot like the
TED Conference. And there's actually a huge amount of truth here. We are seeing an amazing flourishing taking place. In a world where it is just about as easy to generate an object as it is to print a document, we have amazing new possibilities. The people who used to be craftsmen and hobbyists are now makers, and they're responsible for massive amounts of innovation. And artists who were formerly constrained can now do things that were never, ever possible for them before. So this is a time of great flourishing, and the more I look around, the more convinced I become that this quote, from the physicist
Freeman Dyson, is not hyperbole at all. This is just a plain statement of the facts. We are in the middle of an astonishing period.
["Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences." —
Freeman Dyson] ( 科技是上帝的恩賜。自生命的禮物後，它也許是最偉大之神的恩賜。它是文明、藝術和科學之母 — Freeman Dyson )
Which brings up another great question: What could possibly go wrong in this new machine age? Right? Great, hang up, flourish, go home. We're going to face two really thorny sets of challenges as we head deeper into the future that we're creating.
The first are economic, and they're really nicely summarized in an apocryphal story about a back-and-forth between
Henry Ford II and
Walter Reuther, who was the head of the auto workers union. They were touring one of the new modern factories, and Ford playfully turns to Reuther and says, "Hey Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?" And Reuther shoots back, "Hey Henry, how are you going to get them to buy cars?"
Reuther's problem in that anecdote is that it is tough to offer your labor to an economy that's full of machines, and we see this very clearly in the statistics. If you look over the past couple decades at the returns to capital -- in other words, corporate profits -- we see them going up, and we see that they're now at an all-time high. If we look at the returns to labor, in other words total wages paid out in the economy, we see them at an all-time low and heading very quickly in the opposite direction.
So this is clearly bad news for Reuther. It looks like it might be great news for Ford, but it's actually not. If you want to sell huge volumes of somewhat expensive goods to people, you really want a large, stable, prosperous middle class. We have had one of those in
America for just about the entire postwar period. But the middle class is clearly under huge threat right now. We all know a lot of the statistics, but just to repeat one of them, median
income in America has actually gone down over the past 15 years, and we're in danger of getting trapped in some vicious cycle where inequality and polarization continue to go up over time.
The societal challenges that come along with that kind of inequality deserve some attention. There are a set of societal challenges that I'm actually not that worried about, and they're captured by images like this. This is not the kind of societal problem that I am concerned about. There is no shortage of dystopian visions about what happens when our machines become self-aware, and they decide to rise up and coordinate attacks against us. I'm going to start worrying about those the day my computer becomes aware of my printer.
So this is not the set of challenges we really need to worry about. To tell you the kinds of societal challenges that are going to come up in the new machine age, I want to tell a story about two stereotypical
American workers. And to make them really stereotypical, let's make them both white guys. And the first one is a college-educated professional, creative type, manager, engineer, doctor, lawyer, that kind of worker. We're going to call him "Ted." He's at the top of the
American middle class. His counterpart is not college-educated and works as a laborer, works as a clerk, does low-level white collar or blue collar work in the economy. We're going to call that guy "Bill."
And if you go back about 50 years, Bill and Ted were leading remarkably similar lives. For example, in 1960 they were both very likely to have full-time jobs, working at least 40 hours a week. But as the social researcher Charles Murray has documented, as we started to automate the economy, and 1960 is just about when computers started to be used by businesses, as we started to progressively inject technology and automation and digital stuff into the economy, the fortunes of Bill and Ted diverged a lot. Over this time frame, Ted has continued to hold a full-time job. Bill hasn't. In many cases, Bill has left the economy entirely, and Ted very rarely has. Over time, Ted's marriage has stayed quite happy. Bill's hasn't. And Ted's kids have grown up in a two-parent home, while Bill's absolutely have not over time. Other ways that Bill is dropping out of society? He's decreased his voting in presidential elections, and he's started to go to prison a lot more often. So I cannot tell a happy story about these social trends, and they don't show any signs of reversing themselves. They're also true no matter which ethnic group or demographic group we look at, and they're actually getting so severe that they're in danger of overwhelming even the amazing progress we made with the Civil Rights Movement.
And what my friends in Silicon Valley and Cambridge are overlooking is that they're Ted. They're living these amazingly busy, productive lives, and they've got all the benefits to show from that, while Bill is leading a very different life. They're actually both proof of how right Voltaire was when he talked about the benefits of work, and the fact that it saves us from not one but three great evils.
["Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice and need." — Voltaire] ( 工作拯救一個人離開三個魔鬼：無聊，墮落和生活需求 - Voltaire )
So with these challenges, what do we do about them?
The economic playbook is surprisingly clear, surprisingly straightforward, in the short term especially. The robots are not going to take all of our jobs in the next year or two, so the classic Econ 101 playbook is going to work just fine: Encourage entrepreneurship, double down on infrastructure, and make sure we're turning out people from our educational system with the appropriate skills.
But over the longer term, if we are moving into an economy that's heavy on technology and light on labor, and we are, then we have to consider some more radical interventions, for example, something like a guaranteed minimum income. Now, that's probably making some folk in this room uncomfortable, because that idea is associated with the extreme left wing and with fairly radical schemes for redistributing wealth. I did a little bit of research on this notion, and it might calm some folk down to know that the idea of a net guaranteed minimum income has been championed by those frothing-at-the-mouth socialists Friedrich Hayek, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman. And if you find yourself worried that something like a guaranteed income is going to stifle our drive to succeed and make us kind of complacent, you might be interested to know that social mobility, one of the things we really pride ourselves on in the United States, is now lower than it is in the northern European countries that have these very generous social safety nets. So the economic playbook is actually pretty straightforward.
The societal one is a lot more challenging. I don't know what the playbook is for getting Bill to engage and stay engaged throughout life.
I do know that education is a huge part of it. I witnessed this firsthand. I was a Montessori kid for the first few years of my education, and what that education taught me is that the world is an interesting place and my job is to go explore it. The school stopped in third grade, so then I entered the public school system, and it felt like I had been sent to the Gulag. With the benefit of hindsight, I now know the job was to prepare me for life as a clerk or a laborer, but at the time it felt like the job was to kind of bore me into some submission with what was going on around me. We have to do better than this. We cannot keep turning out Bills.
So we see some green shoots that things are getting better. We see technology deeply impacting education and engaging people, from our youngest learners up to our oldest ones. We see very prominent business voices telling us we need to rethink some of the things that we've been holding dear for a while. And we see very serious and sustained and data-driven efforts to understand how to intervene in some of the most troubled communities that we have.
So the green shoots are out there. I don't want to pretend for a minute that what we have is going to be enough. We're facing very tough challenges. To give just one example, there are about five million Americans who have been unemployed for at least six months. We're not going to fix things for them by sending them back to Montessori. And my biggest worry is that we're creating a world where we're going to have glittering technologies embedded in kind of a shabby society and supported by an economy that generates inequality instead of opportunity.
But I actually don't think that's what we're going to do. I think we're going to do something a lot better for one very straightforward reason: The facts are getting out there. The realities of this new machine age and the change in the economy are becoming more widely known. If we wanted to accelerate that process, we could do things like have our best economists and policymakers play "Jeopardy!" against Watson. We could send Congress on an autonomous car road trip. And if we do enough of these kinds of things, the awareness is going to sink in that things are going to be different. And then we're off to the races, because I don't believe for a second that we have forgotten how to solve tough challenges or that we have become too apathetic or hard-hearted to even try.
I started my talk with quotes from wordsmiths who were separated by an ocean and a century. Let me end it with words from politicians who were similarly distant.
Winston Churchill came to my home of MIT in 1949, and he said, "If we are to bring the broad masses of the people in every land to the table of abundance, it can only be by the tireless improvement of all of our means of technical production."
Abraham Lincoln realized there was one other ingredient. He said, "I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to give them the plain facts."
So the optimistic note, great point that I want to leave you with is that the plain facts of the machine age are becoming clear, and I have every confidence that we're going to use them to chart a good course into the challenging, abundant economy that we're creating.
註：自從機器可以聽、說、了解人類基本語言，機器自動將占據人類許多工作，人類社會將啟動另一波革命，人
類將只剩創造、律法、設計、企劃等高階工作，連整個教育工作都將改變，學生大幅知識不再依賴老師取而代之是網路的教學機器透過 Apps 讓孩子、學生與機器人玩中間學習，老師將被有些學生認為該淘汰的東西，機器人及機器不只是搶走許多工作，運用機器人及機器自動化國家及公司也將大幅超越沒有這些能力的，這些沒能力的國家也無能力抵抗有這些機器人自動化國家之經濟、政治力控制。
Andrew McAfee: 機器人搶了我們的工作嗎?
當數以千萬計的勞工 處於失業或是低度就業的狀況發生時 就會有不少人會對科技如何影響勞工這個議題有興趣 而當我開始檢視這個議題, 赫然發現 大家關切的主題是正確的 但又同時全然的地忽視了關鍵要點。 在這個主題上所提出的問題, 是關於 這些數位科技是否影響了人們謀生的能力? 或者, 換個說法就是 機器人是否正在搶走人類的工作機會? 有一些證據顯示的確如此
大蕭條(2008~2012)結束時, 美國的 GDP 恢復了 緩慢步調的上昇, 其他的一些 經濟指標也開始反彈，看起來 比較健康也比較迅速了。企業的獲利 是相當高的。事實上，如果把銀行業也包含進來 這些數值比以往任何時候都來得高。 企業在工具與設備的投資 還有硬體和軟體方面, 都處於歷史新高。 所以企業都在拿出支票本花錢投資 但是他們並沒有真正的擴大招募員工 這條紅線是就業人口的比率， 換句話說，就是處於就業年齡的美國人 真的有工作的比例 我們可以看到這個比例在大蕭條時萎靡 但是到現在都還沒有開始反彈回來
但是這個故事並不只是關於大蕭條 十年來，我們剛剛經歷了持續性的 相對低落的就業增長，尤其是當我們 與過去的幾個十年進行比較時, 2000年這個十年 是唯一的一次我們經歷到, 在十年期間的結束時的工作人口, 比十年剛開始的時候 還少的狀況. 這不是大家樂見的 當你用潛在就業人口的數據 來對照國內工作數量作圖，您會看到之間的差距 隨著時間越來越大，, 而在大蕭條的時候差距特別顯著 我做了一些簡單的計算。我把過去的 20 年的國內生產總值增長 和同一期間的勞動生產率的增長 用相當簡單直接的方式 嘗試預測維持經濟持續成長 所需要工作機會的數量, 而這是我算出的數據畫出的線 這是好事還是壞事？來看看政府預測的數據 關於就業人口的未來預測 所以如果這些預測是準確的, 這個差距不會被弭平
問題是，我不認為這些預測是準確的。 明白地說，我認為我的預測是太樂觀的 因為當我做預測時, 我假設了未來應該會 跟過去是相像的 在關於勞動生產力的成長方面，這是我不相信的會成立的假設 因為當我環顧四周，我認為我們並未考慮到那些 關於技術對勞動力市場的衝擊。 只是在過去的幾年中，我們已經看到數位工具 顯示的技能和能力，遠超過以往 而且從某種角度來說, 已經吃進了人類的賴以為生的 就業領域. 讓我舉幾個例子。
在過去的所有的歷史年代，如果你想要把某個文章 從一種語言翻譯成另一種， 必須要靠人類來做 現在我們有了多國語言的，即時的 自動翻譯服務, 還是免費的 經由我們使用的終端裝置, 直接在智慧手機就能用到 而如果有使用過這些翻譯服務，我們就會知道， 做得並不是完美, 但也夠得體了。
在過去的所有的歷史年代，如果你想要寫下一些東西， 比如一份報告或一篇文章，你必須透過人來做 不再是這樣了。這裡有一篇文章， 不久前發表在富比世雜誌上, 是關於蘋果公司的收益的 這篇文章是用演算法寫出來的 寫的不止是得體而已, 而是到了完美
很多人看到這些事情會說, "那又怎樣? 這些都只是非常特定、 狹窄領域的任務， 大多數的知識工作者實際上是通才， 他們做的是, 坐擁一個由專業技能和知識組成的 龐然巨物, 這些人運用龐大的技能與知識 來隨時對無法預測的要求, 馬上做出反應 這是非常、 非常難以自動化的工作" 就以一個最令人印象深刻的知識工作者 大家可能記得最近有一個人, 名叫肯恩 詹寧斯。 他在益智問答節目 "Jeopardy!" 連續贏了74次 把 300 萬美金的獎金帶回家。 在右邊的就是 肯恩, 比數是 三比一, 在與 IBM 的超級電腦 華生(Watson) 進行的 "Jeopardy!" 遊戲中被打敗了 所以當我們在看技術會怎樣影響到 一般知識工作者的時候，我開始思考 也許所謂的通才的特殊之處並不存在 尤其是當我們開始能夠做到例如 把 Siri (蘋果手機的語音助理) 連結到 華生 (IBM的超級電腦) 並且逐漸發展一些技術, 能了解人類說話內容 並且用人類語音回答我們 現在，Siri 還撐不上完美, 我們也常拿它的一些差錯 來開玩笑，但是我們仍應該記住， 如果像 Siri 和 華生 這樣的技術的改進 是沿著 摩爾法則 的預測軌跡，他們將 在六年中，這些技術將不只是進步兩倍 或進步四倍，他們會比現在進步 16 倍。 所以我開始覺得, 很多知識工作都將會受到技術的影響
而且 數位技術不只影響知識工作而已 它們也開始在實體世界大展身手了 前一陣子我有機會坐上了 Google 的自動駕駛汽車 它坐起來跟聽起來一樣的酷 我可以做證, 它能夠處理走走停停的路況 在101號公路上面, 開得非常平穩 總共大概有 350萬的人 在美國這裡, 以開卡車為職業謀生 我想這些人中, 有一部份會受到這項科技的影響 在目前, 人形機器人仍然還 非常的原始。它們會做的事情不多 但是它們發展得很快, 而且 DARPA, 就是國防部的投資部門, 一直試著讓他們的發展更加速。
所以，簡單地說，對啦，機器人就要來搶我們的工作了。 在短期內，我們可以刺激就業增長 透過鼓勵創業, 還有投資在基礎建設上 因為機器人目前仍然不是 很擅長修復橋樑。 但在不用太久，我想在場的各位 在有生之年，我們將會經歷到 經濟型態的轉變, 一種非常具有生產力 但是不需要許多的人類工作者的狀況 而如何管理這個轉變的發生, 將會是 我們的社會所面臨的最大挑戰。 伏爾泰總結了其中的原因。他說，"工作讓我們避開了 三個魔鬼： 無聊、 墮落, 和需要。"
縱使有這樣的挑戰，至少就我個人來說， 我仍然是個超級的數位樂觀主義者，我也同時 十分自信地認為，我們現在發展的數位技術 將會帶領我們進入一個烏托邦的未來， 而不是一個 反烏托邦式的未來。要解釋為什麼， 我想要丟出一個有些過度誇張大的問題。 我想問的是, 在人類歷史上 最重要的發展是什麼?
現在，我想分享一些我所找到的答案 來回答這個問題。這是一個很棒的問題 一問了就會展開無窮無盡的爭論 因為有些人會搬出 西方和東方的哲學的系統， 這些的確改變了很多人看待世界的方式 然後其他人會說："才不是這樣，真正重大的 關鍵的發展, 是世界上主要宗教的建立 宗教改變了各地的文明 也改變並影響了無數人的一生如何度過 然後一些其他人會說， "其實，改變文明的，改變人們觀點的, 改變人們生活的 其實是帝國，在人類歷史上的重大發展 主要是關於征服與戰爭的故事" 然後一些愛開玩笑的人就會跟著提出說 "嘿，別忘了還有那些瘟疫。"（笑聲） 對這個問題，有一些樂觀的答案 比如有些人會提出的是 探索的年代(十五世紀) 對整個世界的開拓 其他人則將提出: 智慧方面的成就 在一些學科, 例如 數學, 就幫助人類對於 世界有更好的理解, 還有一些人會提出 那個 藝術與科學 深度繁榮發展 的時期。所以像這樣的辯論可以一直談下去 這個辯論談不完, 也不會有結論 也沒有唯一的答案。但如果你像我一樣，是個阿宅工程師 你會問，"嗯，有沒有實際的資料, 資料怎麼說？" 那你就會開始做一些我們有興趣的事情, 像是畫圖表 比方全世界的人口總數， 或是某些社會發展的數據， 或是社會進步的狀態 然後你開始繪製這些資料，因為，通過這樣的方式， 整個故事的全貌，在人類歷史上的大發展 應該會是那些造成這些圖表曲線變彎很多的
所以當你這樣做了，把資料畫出圖表了 你很快就會得到一些奇怪的結論 你做出的結論是，事實上，前面講的這些答案 沒有一個是真正重要的。（笑聲） 這些答案根本對這些圖表曲線沒有影響。（笑聲） 事實上只有一個故事, 一項發展 在人類的歷史上, 真正折彎了那些曲線, 而且彎了 將近90 度，這個故事, 就是 技術。
像是蒸汽引擎, 還有其它的相關技術 帶動了工業革命, 改變了整個世界 對人類歷史產生的重大的影響 套用 歷史學家 伊恩 · 莫里斯 (Ian Morris) 的話說， 這項發展讓先前發生的其它事情都變得微不足道了 這項發展, 把我們的肌肉力量 放大了無窮倍 克服了人類身體肌肉的限制 而現在, 我們正經歷著 超越人類個別大腦的限制的時機 將我們的心智能力放大無窮多倍的時候 這必然也是一個至少 跟克服人類的肌肉力量限制 一樣重大的發展吧? 所以請原諒我又再重覆了，當我觀察到 這段期間內數位科技的發展 我們離這段期間的終點還很遠 而當我看到所發生的事情, 對我們經濟 還有社會所發生的影響, 我的唯一結論是 我們還沒看到重大的里程碑, 最好的日子還在未來。
讓我舉幾個例子。 經濟體並不是靠能源運作的, 也不是靠資本 也不是靠勞力。經濟體的運行靠的是想法。 所以創新的工作, 產生新的想法的工作 是人類所能做的 多種 最強大的 最基本的 工作之一，這些工作是人類在經濟體裡 能做的。而這也是我們過去如何創新的方式 我們會發現一大群看起來相當類似的人 — — （笑聲） — — 我們帶他們離開原本的精英的機構，把他們放到 另一個精英的機構，然後等著創新的發生 現在 — — （笑聲） — — 作為一個在麻省理工學院還有哈佛度過整個職涯的白種人 我對這沒有什麼問題。（笑聲） 但一些其他人遇到了問題，他們有點像是 搞砸了派對, 而且放鬆了創新應有的規範 （笑聲） 這裡是一些 頂尖程式員寫程式大賽的優勝者 我向你保證沒有人在意 這些孩子是在哪裡長大, 在哪裡念書, 或是他們的長相。所有人只會在意 他們工作產出的品質, 他們的點子的品質。
一次又一次的，我們看到這種情況發生 在這個科技推動的世界 創新的工作越來越開放， 更具包容性、 更透明、 和更以志業為基礎， 這會繼續下去, 不管 麻省理工學院和哈佛大學 的觀點，而我對這樣感到非常的快樂。
我偶爾會聽到，"好吧，我同意你的這個說法， 但技術仍是富裕世界的工具 有些事情仍不會發生，這些數位工具也不會 改善金字塔底部的人民的生活"。 我對這樣的說法有個清楚的回應： 一派胡言。 金字塔的底部的人民, 正大大受益於技術的發展。 經濟學家 羅伯特 · 詹森 (Robert Jensen) 做了這項很棒的研究 在前一陣子，他詳細的研究了 在 印度喀拉拉邦的漁村發生的事情 當行動電話第一次交到當地人手上的時候 若你寫的文章是要刊在 經濟學季刊雜誌 的時候 您必須使用非常乏味和非常周到的語言， 但當我讀他的論文的時候，我覺得詹森試圖 對我們尖叫，說，你看，這是一個大題目啊。 價格變穩定了，因此人們可以計畫他們的經濟生活。 廢棄物不僅是減少而已；根本就是沒有廢棄物。 這些村莊裡的買家和賣家的生活 都被明顯地改善了 現在，我不認為 詹森 只是很幸運的 剛好遇上了一群的村莊 碰巧在這些村莊裡 科技讓生活變得更好了 實際上發生的狀況, 是他詳細地記錄了 這些一再重複發生的現像, 當技術 第一次進到一個環境和社會。 人民的生活, 人民的幸福, 都顯著地提高了。
所以，當我看到這些證據, 我想到 未來我們可以有的發展空間, 我當然會變成一個 超級的數位樂觀主義者, 我開始覺得, 物理學家 福利曼 戴森 說的這句話很棒 他說的話並不誇張, 而是對於目前正在發生的現象的一個精準的描述。 我們面臨的數位化 還有科技, 都是偉大的恩賜 處於這個時代的我們, 是非常幸運的 能夠活在這個數位技術蓬勃發展的時期 這些技術的影響越來越廣, 也越來越深 深刻地影響了整個世界
所以，是啊，機器人正在搶走我們的工作， 但若只著重這件事情, 就會漏掉了整件事情的重點了 真正的重點是, 人類可以被解放出來, 做其他的事情 而我們可以做的事情, 我非常確定的說 我們會去做的是減少貧困和苦差事 減少世界各地的苦難。我很有信心 我們會學習如何在這個星球上更輕鬆的過活 我也非常的確信, 我們將會運用 我們的全新的數位化工具, 非常深切的 並且非常良善的用它, 讓先前發生過的每個改變 相較之下都變得微不足道了。 我最後有一句話, 要留給一個人 這個人在數位時代的演進, 是先驅者的地位 就是我們的老朋友, 肯恩 詹寧斯, 我同意他的看法 我打算這樣回應他的話： "我，代表我自己，歡迎我們的新電腦領主"。 非常感謝。
