Robots Are Coming for Jobs—But Stealthily机器人悄然进军职场

Look beneath the aggregate economic numbers， and change is afoot.

总体经济数据显示，变化大幕已启。

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. 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.

已经2021年了，按理说应该有更多机器人。10年前，科技学者埃里克·布林约尔松和安德鲁·麦卡菲出版了影响深远的《与机器赛跑》一书，开启了技术变革乐观派与悲观派的激烈辩论。两位作者认为，计算领域的爆发式进步将带来机器能力的巨大飞跃。人工智能的技术突破令人瞩目，似乎在为这样一个观点背书——机器人很快就会颠覆所有职场。鉴于疫情前夕就业岗位充足如常，如今不免让人觉得这些警告有些杞人忧天。然而，新发表的一些经济学论文提醒人们不要沾沾自喜。文章指出，机器人的确要来了——只是可能比预期的慢一点，也更隐蔽一点。

Economists have， on the whole， been fairly sanguine1 about the impact of robots and ai on workers. History is strewn2 with incorrect predictions of the looming irrelevance of human labour. The economic statistics have yet to signal the arrival of a robot-powered job apocalypse3. 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.

大体上，就机器人和人工智能对工人的影响而言，经济学家持相当乐观的态度。纵观历史，预言人类劳动日渐式微的误判比比皆是。经济统计数据却尚未昭示机器人将引发工作末日。例如，虽然经济衰退，企业依旧热衷于雇用人类用工。如果在机器的帮助下，更少的工人带来了更大的产出，那生产力本该激增——但其实至今没有明显增长。不过，透过总体数据表面可以发现，巨变大幕确已开启。

Take work by Daron Acemoglu and David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology， Jonathon Hazell of Princeton University and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University， which was presented at the meeting of the American Economic Association （aea）. The authors use rich data provided by Burning Glass Technologies， a software company that maintains and analyses fine-grained job information gleaned from 40，000 firms. They identify tasks and jobs in the dataset that could be done by ai today （and are therefore vulnerable to displacement）. Unsurprisingly， the 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.

来看看麻省理工学院的达龙·阿西莫格鲁和戴维·奥托尔、普林斯顿大学的乔纳森·黑兹尔与波士顿大学的帕斯夸尔·雷斯特雷波共同进行的一项研究，报告发布在美国经济学会的会议上。研究采用的是燃镜科技公司提供的丰富数据，该软件公司负责维护和分析从4万家公司收集的详细工作信息。他们从数据集里识别出人工智能现在可以完成的工作任务（这些因此很容易被替代）。不出所料，研究人员发现，非常适合采用人工智能的企业确实在雇用具备人工智能专业知识的人。2010年以来，拥有大量人工智能可替代工作的企业发布的招聘广告显示，人工智能相关职位的空缺数量大幅上扬。与此同时，对于同现有人工智能进行竞争的能力，这些公司的需求急剧下降。

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 authors 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. But the relationship between greater use of ai and reduced hiring that is present at the firm level does not show up in aggregate data， the authors note. Machines are not yet depressing labour demand across the economy as a whole. As machines become cleverer， however， that could change.

人工智能引发的工作结构变化并不一定转化为整体雇工数量的减少。如果新技术可以大大助力现有工人或充分提高生产力以刺激扩张，则很可能更多人工智能会与更多就业齐进。这种情况似乎并没有发生。相反，论文作者发现，拥有更多人工智能可替代职位的企业在网上招聘少得多，2014年至2018年间更是如此，当时数据库中人工智能相关职位空缺数激增。但作者指出，公司层面呈现的增加人工智能应用和减少招聘之间的关系并没有体现在总体数据中。机器尚未抑制整体经济的劳动力需求。然而，随着机器变得越来越智能，这种情况可能会改变。

Evidence that ai affects labour markets primarily by taking over human tasks is at odds with some earlier studies of how firms use the technology. A paper from 2019 by Timothy Bresnahan of Stanford University argues that the most valuable applications of ai have nothing to do with displacing humans. Rather， they are examples of “capital deepening”， or the accumulation of more and better capital per worker， in very specific contexts， such as the matching algorithms used by Amazon and Google to offer better product recommendations and ads to users. To the extent that ai leads to disruption， it is at a “system level”， says Mr Bresnahan—as Amazon’s sales displace those of other firms， say.

有证据表明，人工智能主要通过取代人类工作来影响劳动力市场，这与关于企业如何使用该技术的一些早期研究不符。2019年，斯坦福大学的蒂莫西·布雷斯纳汉发表论文称，人工智能最有价值的应用与取代人类无关。相反，这是“资本深化”的例证，或在很具体的情况下，是工人人均更多、更好资本的积累，比如亚马逊和谷歌使用匹配算法为用户提供更好的产品推荐和广告。布雷斯纳汉认为，从人工智能所致破坏的程度看，这是在“系统层面”的，比如，就像亚马逊的销售取代了其他公司的一样。

New work by Ajay Agrawal， Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb of the University of Toronto suggests that this state of affairs may not persist for long， though. As the quality of ai predictions improves， they write， it becomes increasingly attractive for ai-using firms to restructure in more radical ways. At some level of accuracy， for example， Amazon’s ability to predict consumers’ desires could encourage the firm to adjust its business model—by pre-emptively shipping goods to consumers before they ever go searching at Amazon in the first place—in ways that are likely to change how many workers and of what sort the firm requires. In that event， the influence of ai on the economy could change dramatically.