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I’m writing these words in York, the city in which, two centuries ago, the British justice system meted out harsh punishments — including execution — to men found guilty of participating in Luddite attacks on spinning and weaving machines. By a curious coincidence, I’ve just read Walter Isaacson’s article in the FT explaining how wrong-headed the Luddites were. I’m not so sure.
这篇文章是我在约克写下的。两个世纪以前，在这座城市，英国司法系统对捣毁纺纱机和编织机的卢德分子（卢德(Luddite)是19世纪初捣毁机器的英国手工业者——译者注）处以严厉惩罚——包括极刑。因为一个奇怪的巧合，我刚刚阅读了沃尔特•艾萨克森(Walter Isaacson)在英国《金融时报》上发表的文章，他在文中解释了卢德分子的观念如何错误。我对此不是很肯定。
“Back then, some believed technology would create unemployment,” writes Isaacson. “They were wrong.”
“当时，一些人认为技术会造成失业，”艾萨克森写道，“他们错了。”
No doubt such befuddled people did exist, and they still do today. But this is a straw man: we can all see, as Isaacson does, that technology has made us richer while employment is as high as ever. (The least appreciated job-creating invention may well have been the washing machine, which helped turn housewives into women with salaries.)
毫无疑问，当时确实存在这样的糊涂人，今天也一样。但这是显而易见的：就像艾萨克森那样，我们都能看到，技术让我们更富有，同时就业也保持在高水平。（在创造就业的发明中，洗衣机大概是最未受赏识的一项，它使家庭主妇能够成为领薪水的职业女性。）
The Luddites themselves had a more subtle view than Isaacson suggests, and one which is as relevant as ever. They believed that the machines were altering economic power in the textile industry, favouring factory owners and low-skilled labourers at the expense of skilled craftsmen. They wanted to defend their interests and they did so violently. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm put it, their frame-breaking activity was “collective bargaining by riot” and “simply a technique of trade unionism” in the days before formal unions existed.
卢德分子的观点比艾萨克森描述的更加细腻，也一如既往地相关。他们相信，机器改变了纺织业的经济实力格局，让工厂主和低技能劳动者受益，牺牲了技术熟练的手工艺人。他们想要捍卫自己的利益，并为此采取了暴力的方式。就如历史学家埃里克•霍布斯鲍姆(Eric Hobsbawm)所说的，他们打破既定模式的行动相当于“通过暴乱形式进行的集体谈判”，相当于正式公会出现之前的“工会主义手法”。
To put it another way, the Luddites weren’t idiots who thought that machines would destroy jobs in general; they were skilled workers who thought that machines would devalue their specific jobs and their specific skills. They were right about that, and sufficiently determined that stopping them required more than 10,000 troops at a time when the British army might have preferred to focus on Napoleon.
换言之卢德分子并不是认为机器会从总体上破坏就业的傻子；他们是一群技术熟练工，认为机器会使他们的特定工作和技能贬值。在这一点上，他们是对的，而且拥有足够强大的决心，以至于在应该全力与拿破仑战斗的时期，英国调派了超过1万陆军兵力阻止这些卢德分子。
The Luddite anxiety has been dormant for many years but has recently enjoyed a resurgence. This is partly because journalists fear for their own jobs. Technological change has hit us in several ways — by moving attention online, where (so far) it is harder to charge money for subscriptions or advertising; by empowering unpaid writers to reach a large audience through blogging; and even by introducing robo-hacks, algorithms that can and do extract data from corporate reports and turn them into financial journalism written in plain(ish) English. No wonder human journalists have started writing about the economic damage the robots may wreak.
多年以来，勒德派的焦虑一直蛰伏着，但最近这种焦虑卷土重来。部分原因是记者们担心自己的工作。技术变革以好几种方式冲击着我们——把人们的注意力移至线上，加大了（到目前为止）对订阅收费或者销售广告的难度；让无薪的作者通过博客接触到大批读者；甚至还有机器人写手——用算法从公司报告中萃取数据，转化成用（基本上）直白的英语撰写的财经新闻。难怪记者们已开始撰写关于机器人可能造成经济损害的报道。
Another reason for the robo-panic is concern about the economic situation in general. Bored of blaming bankers, we blame robots too, and not entirely without reason. Inequality has risen sharply over the past 30 years. Many economists believe that this is partly because technological change has favoured a few highly skilled workers (and perhaps also more mundane trades such as cleaning) at the expense of the middle classes.
机器人恐慌情绪的另一个原因是对整体经济形势的担忧。我们厌倦了责怪银行家，现在我们也责怪机器人，而且并非全无道理。过去30年间，不平等程度急剧上升。许多经济学家认为，部分原因是技术变革偏袒少数高技能员工（可能也有利于某些比较平凡的职业，比如清洁工作），而牺牲了中产阶级的利益。
Finally, there is the observation that computers continue to develop at an exponential pace and are starting to make inroads in hitherto unexpected places — witness the self-driving car, voice-activated personal assistants and automated language translation. It is a long way from the spinning jenny to Siri.
最后，人们也注意到计算机持续以指数级速度发展，开始进入此前意想不到的领域——自动驾驶汽车、声控个人助理和自动语言翻译就是例证。从珍妮纺纱机到Siri，科技取得了长足进展。
What are we to make of all this? One view is that this is business as usual. We’ve had dramatic technological change for the past 300 years but it’s fine: we adapt, we still have jobs, we are incomparably richer — and the big headache of modernity isn’t unemployment but climate change.
我们该从这一切得出什么结论？一个观点是：这是一种常态。过去300年来我们经历了巨大的技术变革，没出什么问题：我们适应了，我们依然有工作，还比以前富有得多——现代世界的大问题并不是失业，而是气候变化。
A second view is that this time is radically different: the robots will, before long, render many people economically valueless — simply incapable of earning a living wage in a market economy. There will be plenty of money around but it will flow to the owners of the machines, and maybe also to the government through taxation. In principle, all could be well in such a future but it would require a radical reimagining of how an economy could work. The state, not the market, would be the arbiter of who gets what. Such a world is probably not imminent but, by 2050, who knows?
第二种观点是，这一次是截然不同的：不久以后，机器人会使许多人失去经济价值——无法在市场经济中挣到足以维生的工资。会有大量资金流通，但这些财富会流向机器的所有者，或者同时通过征税流向政府。原则上，在这样的未来情形中，一切都可能很好，但这需要人们对经济运行体制彻底转变想法。国家，而不是市场，将成为决定谁得到什么的裁决者。这样的世界或许不会很快到来，但是，谁知道到了2050年会怎样呢？
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The third perspective is what we might call the neo-Luddite view: that technology may not destroy jobs in aggregate but rather changes the demand for skills in ways that are real and troubling. Median incomes in the US have been stagnant for decades. There are many explanations for that, including globalisation and the decline of collective bargaining, but technological change is foremost among them.
第三种观点可以被称为新卢德派观点：技术可能不会在总量上消除工作岗位，但技术造成的技能需求变化将是真实存在且令人不安的。数十年来美国的中值收入一直原地踏步。对此有很多种解释，包括全球化以及集体谈判的衰落，但技术变革是最重要的一种解释。
If the neo-Luddites are right, then the challenge in front of us is simply to adapt. Individual workers, companies and the political system will have to deal with wrenching economic changes as old industries are destroyed and new ones created. That seems a plausible view of the near future.
如果新卢德派是对的，那么我们面前的挑战就是去适应它。员工个人、企业和政治体制需要应对痛苦的经济变化，旧的行业被淘汰，新的行业应运而生。这似乎是对近期未来的一种可信看法。
But there is a final perspective that doesn’t get as much attention as it might: it’s that technological change is too slow, not too fast. The robo-booster theory implies a short-term surge in jobs, as all those lovely new machines are designed and built and installed, followed by a long-term surge in productivity as the robots make the economy ruthlessly efficient. It is hard to see much sign of either trend in the economic statistics. Productivity, in particular, has been disappointing in the US and utterly dismal in the UK. Where are the robots when we need them?
但还有最后一种观点似乎没有得到太多的关注：那就是技术变革太慢，而非太快。机器人助推器理论暗示，由于机器需要人工进行设计、制造和安装，就业会在短期内激增，此后长期生产率大幅提高，机器人让经济效率高得无情。目前我们还很难从经济统计中看到上述趋势的迹象。尤其是，近年美国的生产率令人失望，而英国更是糟糕透顶。当我们需要机器人的时候，它们在哪？
Tim Harford is the author of ‘The Undercover Economist Strikes Back’.
本文作者蒂姆•哈福德(Tim Harford)著有《卧底经济学家反击战》(The Undercover Economist Strikes Back)
