机器人取代人类仍是科幻_时事_双语阅读-查字典英语网

机器人取代人类仍是科幻

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 plausible: we are surrounded by cheap, powerful computers; manypeople 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 usualmeasure of productivity is output per hour worked — by a human. Robots can produceeconomic output without any hours of human labour at all, so a sudden onslaught of robotworkers should cause a sudden acceleration 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 growthaveraged an impressive 2.8 per cent per year from 1948 to 1973. The result was massaffluence rather than mass joblessness. Productivity then slumped for a generation andperked up in the late 1990s but has now sagged 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.