人类不应害怕技术 更不该反技术
Lord Byron was a Luddite. The Romantic poet’s only speech in the House of Lords defended the followers of Ned Ludd, who were smashing the mechanical looms in England during the early 1800s because they feared the machines would put people out of work. Back then, some believed that technology would create unemployment. They were wrong. The industrial revolution made England richer and increased the total number of people in work, including in the fabric and clothing industries.
Byron’s daughter Ada, Countess of Lovelace, was More prescient. On a trip through the English Midlands, she admired how punch cards instructed the looms to produce beautiful patterns, and envisaged how such cards could enable the numerical calculator being designed by her friend Charles Babbage to process not just numbers but words, music, patterns and anything else that could be encoded in symbols — a computer, in other words.
拜伦的女儿埃达，也就是洛夫莱斯伯爵夫人(Countess of Lovelace)，则比她父亲更有远见。有一次在英格兰米德兰地区旅行时，她看到穿孔卡发出指令使纺织机织出了美丽的图案，十分叹服，并想到这种穿孔卡可以用在她的朋友查尔斯•巴比奇(Charles Babbage)正在设计的一种数字运算计算机上，让机器不仅能处理数字，还能处理文字、音乐、图案及其他任何能够以符号编程的东西，这也就是计算机的雏形。Today’s pessimists predict that these computers will put people out of work. These latter-day Luddites are also wrong. Technology can be disruptive. It can eliminate jobs, from weavers to buggy-whip makers. But 200 years of data show it improves productivity and increases wealth, leading to more demand and new types of jobs.
今天的悲观者预言，计算机会让人们失业。这些当代的卢德派也错了。技术或许会毁灭一些东西。它会让一些职业消失，从织工到马鞭制造者。但200年来的数据显示，技术能提高生产率，增加财富，从而扩大需求、创造新的工作种类。
Take those mechanical looms. They were invented just after 1800 by Joseph Marie Jacquard in Lyon. Did that end up reducing employment in the textile industry in eastern France? No. Two centuries later, Lyon is Europe’s top centre for high-tech textiles. The city is the home of the Textile and Chemical Institute, 40 labs and schools, 140 companies and 10,000 textile jobs. Nor did the machines destroy employment in England, as Lord Byron feared.
就拿纺织机来说，进入1800年后，约瑟夫•马里•雅卡尔(Joseph Marie Jacquard)在里昂发明了这种机器。它最终有没有导致法国东部纺织业就业人数下降？没有。两个世纪过去，如今的里昂是欧洲高科技纺织业的第一大中心。这个城市是纺织与化学研究所(Textile and Chemical Institute)所在地，有40所实验室和学校，140家公司，还有1万个纺织业工人。纺织机也没有像拜伦爵士担心的那样，在英国造成大量失业。The combination of computers and the internet began transforming our economy decades ago. The “app economy” is the latest example. It began in 2008 when Steve Jobs yielded to the advice of his team at Apple and decided to let outside developers create apps for the iPhone. The global app economy last year was worth $100bn, more than the film industry. This is an industry that did not exist seven years ago.
几十年前，计算机和互联网的结合开始给我们的经济带来根本变化。“应用经济”(app economy)就是最新的例子。2008年，苹果公司的史蒂夫•乔布斯(Steve Jobs)听取了手下团队的建议，决定让外部程序员开发iPhone应用，“应用经济”就此诞生。去年，全球“应用经济”总产值达到1000亿美元，超过电影业，而它是一个7年前还不存在的行业。Apps and other advances in technology have helped create new forms of work, such as the “sharing economy” in which enterprising folks can rent out rooms on Airbnb and provide rides on Uber and Lyft. Likewise, online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay have recreated the kind of artisanal cottage industry that existed in the pre-industrial age. If you have a good recipe or can make a cool product or service, you can find customers. If you create a book or song, you now have ways to self-publish and distribute. If you dream up a new specialism — ethical hacker, pet psychologist, nutrition coach? — you have a chance of finding takers. More than 600,000 people nowadays earn a living by selling on Amazon and eBay.
应用和其他技术进步帮助创造了新的工作类型，比如“分享经济”让那些有生意头脑的人能够在Airbnb上出租空置的房间、在优步(Uber)和Lyft上提供搭乘服务。类似的，亚马逊(Amazon)和eBay等在线市场让“前工业时代”的手工作坊行业重新出现。如果你有好的创意、或能够提供某种吸引人的产品或服务，你就能找到客户。如今如果你写了一本书或一首歌，你有办法自己出版和传播它。如果你想出了一种新职业——有道德的黑客、宠物心理师或营养教练？——你有机会找到客户。如今有超过60万人通过亚马逊和eBay出售商品和服务赚钱谋生。If new technologies reduced the total number of jobs, we would all be out of work by now. But times of technological advance have been times of job creation. Last year, as whole new waves of robotic systems were introduced, the US added 3m jobs. The unemployment rate hit a six-year low, and average hourly earnings for private sector workers rose.
如果新技术减少了工作岗位总数，那么我们大家现在肯定都已经失业了。但一直以来，技术进步总是伴随着就业增加。去年，随着新一批机器人系统投入使用，美国新增了300万个工作岗位。失业率触及6年来新低，私营部门劳动者的平均时薪也提高了。Be wary of those who lament the demise of jobs for checkout clerks and meter readers, as if preserving such jobs will lead to a healthier economy. This Luddite fallacy is based on a presumption that there is only a set amount of goods and services people want. If technology permits those things to be produced more efficiently, Luddites argue, there will be less work to do. In reality, technology leads to an increase in productivity and wealth. That in turn leads to increased demand for goods and services and thus more jobs, including ones in fields we can barely imagine.
警惕那些哀叹收银员和抄表员会失去饭碗的人，他们好像觉得保留这类工作岗位会让经济更健康。这种卢德式错误是基于这样一种假设，即人们所需商品和服务的数量是固定的。卢德派认为，如果技术使得这些东西能够以更高的效率生产出来，那么需要人们做的工作就会减少。事实上，技术会带来生产率提高和财富增加。这反过来会使得人们对商品和服务的需求增加，从而创造更多工作岗位，其中一些可能会出现在我们根本难以想象的领域。The writer is chief executive of the Aspen Institute and author of ‘The Innovators’
本文作者是阿斯彭研究所(Aspen Institute)首席执行官、《创新者》(The Innovators)一书作者
