《机器人的崛起》的悲观预言
Martin Ford’s The Rise of the Robots , this year’s business book of the year, is in some ways the dystopian bookend to Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat , which won the first Financial Times prize for compelling business books 10 years ago.
马丁輠祹(Martin Ford)的《机器人的崛起》(The Rise of the Robots)荣获英国《金融时报》和麦肯锡2015年度最佳商业图书奖(2015 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award)。在某种意义上，这本书是与托马斯弗里德曼(Thomas Friedman)的《世界是平的》(The World is Flat)对立的反面乌托邦版本，后者在10年前获得了第一届英国《金融时报》最有影响力商业图书奖。
Where Mr Friedman was breathlessly optimistic about the prospects for a working world connected, lubricated and energised by technology, Mr Ford, a software entrepreneur, is much more pessimistic.
弗里德曼认为技术将连接和润滑我们工作的世界，并向其中注入活力，他对此极为乐观，而身为软件企业家的福特则悲观得多。
He envisages a world of fewer jobs and relentless pressure on both manufacturing and professional workers, as machines take over an increasing range of tasks. If action is not taken, inequality will increase (a phenomenon also addressed by Thomas Piketty in last year’s award-winning book Capital in the Twenty-First Century ) and economic growth could stall.
在福特所设想的世界，由于机器负责的任务范围越来越广，工作机会变得更少，制造业和专业领域的劳动者处于无休无止的压力下。如果不采取行动，不平等程度将会上升（去年获奖的托马斯皮凯蒂(Thomas Piketty)的《21世纪的资本》(Capital in the Twenty-First Century)也讨论过这个现象），经济增长可能停滞。
At Tuesday’s judging session for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, Shriti Vadera, board director and former UK business minister, said Mr Ford’s book pointed to “an incredibly turbulent time as we adjust to [a change] more profound than the industrial revolution”.
在周二的评审会议上，前英国商务大臣、企业董事什里蒂瓦德拉(Shriti Vadera)表示，福特的著作指向了“一个日益动荡的时代，因为我们要适应一个比工业革命更深刻（的改变）”。
As Mr Ford writes: “While human-machine collaboration jobs will certainly exist, they seem likely to be relatively few in number and often shortlived. In a great many cases, they may also be unrewarding and even dehumanising.”
福特写道：“尽管必然存在人机协作的工作，这种工作似乎相对较少，通常也不长久。在许多情况下，它们还有可能无法给人以成就感，甚至使人丧失人性。”
Mr Ford warns in the book that “a fundamental restructuring of our economic rules” may be needed to mitigate the impact of the advance of robotics and automation. He proposes a guaranteed minimum basic income — or “citizen’s dividend” — as one radical remedy.
福特在其著作中警告称，我们或许需要“从根本上重构我们的经济规则”，以缓和机器人和自动化的进步带来的影响。作为一项激进的应对举措，他建议提供有保证的最低基本收入，或者“公民红利”。
Such solutions looked unpalatable to a number of the judges, but they agreed that, of the six strong contenders on this year’s shortlist, The Rise of the Robots was the book likely to have the greatest impact. One judge, Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, said: “I believe that basic income is a plan of near last resort. I disagree that we get there inevitably from now.” He believes there are various ways in which entrepreneurship might be able to solve the issues highlighted in the book.
有几位评委并不认同这样的解决方法，但他们认同，在今年入围奖项角逐的6本商业图书中，《机器人的崛起》可能最有影响。领英(LinkedIn)联合创始人、评委里德霍夫曼(Reid Hoffman)表示：“我相信，基本收入是一种接近最后手段的办法。我不认同从现在起我们将不可避免地到达那种地步。”他相信企业家或许有多种办法解决本书强调的问题。
But the panel agreed that the book was an important call to action. Lionel Barber, FT editor and chair of the judging panel, called The Rise of the Robots “a tightly written and deeply researched addition to the public policy debate”.
评审小组的一致意见是，这本书是一次呼吁采取行动的重要警示。英国《金融时报》总编辑以及评审委员会主席莱昂内尔巴伯(Lionel Barber)称《机器人的崛起》“行文紧凑、研究深入，是公共政策辩论领域的又一佳作”。
Since 2005, when the 30,000 business book award was launched, successive panels of judges have tried to pick the titles that provided “the most compelling and enjoyable insights into modern business issues”. The rules were tweaked in 2014 to underline that durability of the ideas was also important. As board director and author Dambisa Moyo, new to this year’s judging panel, put it on Tuesday, the judges need to ask themselves: “Is there something in this book that we should know that we don’t?” and “What is the shelf life of these ideas?”
自2005年设立这项附带3万英镑奖金的最佳商业图书奖以来，每一年的评审小组都努力挑选出“对现代商业问题提供了最令人叹服且最有趣味的深刻见解”的图书。2014年，评审规则发生了一些改变，强调观点的持久性也很重要。今年新加入评审小组的作家、企业董事丹比萨莫约(Dambisa Moyo)周二提出，评委需要问自己：“这本书里有没有什么是我们应该知道，但我们还不知道的？”以及“这些观点的保质期有多久？”
Answering the second of those questions is complicated by the increasing proportion of books about the business impact of technology.
有关技术带来的商业影响的书籍越来越多，这使得回答第二个问题变得更加复杂。
Many of the more than 200 entrants for this year’s prize had a technological theme — with a notable subset about how automation would affect humans in the workplace. Four of this year’s six finalists were books about some aspect of technological disruption: Losing the Signal , by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, who look at how BlackBerry went off course; Digital Gold , Nathaniel Popper’s examination of the rise of bitcoin, the virtual currency; How Music Got Free , Stephen Witt’s history of the way piracy and peer-to-peer sharing have disrupted the recorded music industry. The other two finalists — all of whom receive 10,000 — were Unfinished Business , about the challenge of achieving gender balance; and Misbehaving , in which Richard Thaler traces the development of behavioural economics.
今年逾200本角逐该奖项的作品中很多都围绕技术主题——其中有相当一部分是关于自动化将如何在工作场所影响人类。今年最终入围的6本书中有4本都是关于技术中断的某个方面：杰基麦克尼什(Jacquie Mcnish)和肖恩缠尔科夫(Sean Silcoff)所著的《失去信号》(Losing the Signal)讲述了黑莓(BlackBerry)偏离轨道的经过；纳塔涅尔波佩尔(Nathaniel Popper)的《数字黄金》(Digital Gold)探寻了虚拟货币比特币的崛起；斯蒂芬威特(Stephen Witt)所写的《音乐如何变免费》讲述了盗版和对等网络共享(P2P，peer-to-peer）对唱片行业造成的破坏。其他两本入围作品——所有入围作品都会获得1万英镑的奖金——分别是关于实现性别平衡所面临的挑战的《做不完的事》(Un滻椀猀栀攀搀 Business)；以及理查德泰勒(Richard Thaler)所著、讲述行为经济学发展轨迹的《行为不端》(Misbehaving)。
Last year’s finalist The Second Machine Age , by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, is notably more optimistic about the jobs that will be created as a result of the technology revolution. Mr Ford’s first book, The Lights in the Tunnel, was attacked for being too gloomy. But as Edward Luce wrote, reviewing The Rise of the Robots for the FT, his latest work is “well-researched and disturbingly persuasive”.
去年的入围作品——埃里克布林约尔松(Erik Brynjolfsson)和安德鲁麦卡菲(Andrew McAfee)合著的《第二个机器时代》(The Second Machine Age)要乐观得多，认为技术革命将创造就业。福特的第一本书《隧道中的光明》(The Lights in the Tunnel)被批评太过悲观。但是正如爱德华戠斯(Edward Luce)在为FT撰写《机器人的崛起》的书评时所写的那样，福特的新作“研究深入、极具说服力”。
Mr Ford holds out the slim hope that, handled properly, the technological revolution could usher in an automated utopia of greater prosperity and leisure. But he warned on Tuesday, as he received the award, that his predictions “could unfold faster than we expect”, sweeping away the advantages of education and training. “Even people that do everything they are supposed to do [to get a good job] may find it difficult to get a foothold in the economy,” he told the New York audience.
福特对技术革命（假如处理得当）可能引领自动化的乌托邦时代、给人类带来更大繁荣以及更多安逸仍抱持微弱的希望。但是，他周二获奖时警告称，他的预言“可能比我们想象中来得更快”，彻底否定了教育和培训的好处。“即使人们（为找到好工作）竭尽所能，可能也会发现很难在经济中找到立足之地，”他在纽约的颁奖礼上对观众表示。
3At the same ceremony in New York, Dominic Barton, McKinsey’s global managing director, awarded the 15,000 Bracken Bower Prize for young business writers to Christopher Clearfield and András Tilcsik. Their proposed book would look at how businesses can manage the risk of catastrophic failure.
在这场颁奖仪式上，麦肯锡全球董事总经理鲍达民(Dominic Barton)为克里斯托弗克利尔菲尔德(Christopher Clearfield)和安德拉什舠尔奇克(András Tilcsik)颁发了“布拉肯贠尔”青年商业作家奖(Bracken Bower Prize for young business writers)以及1.5万英镑的奖金。二人计划出版的图书将探索企业如何能够管控发生灾难性失败的风险。
