Text 9：CanHuman Compete with AI in Future jobs

1    A recent article in The New York Times described new computer software that in aninstant sift through thousands of legal documents looking for a few litigableitems, replacing hundreds of hours spent by lawyers reading the documents. Thisis not the start of a joke about how many lawyers you need to… but it doesraise the question of how many lawyers you need. Economist-columnist PaulKrugman used the story to explain that computerization threatens to replacemany white-collar jobs that are now held by college graduates (And if you don’tneed college graduates, do you need college professors? Uh-oh.)

2    It did not help settle anxieties that thestory appeared shortly after IBM’s Watson computer beat two super-humans at Jeopardy. And now there are reports ofsoftware programs winning big pots on Internet poker. The specter of automationunemploying us all may have finally arrived.

3    For decades, age before personal computers,learned observers wrote about how machines were going to replace humans – forbetter or for ill. Some worried that the masses of dispossessed workers wouldform a revolutionary mob; others suggested introducing people to upliftinghobbies, since we would have so much more leisure time on our hands. But themass job shrinkage that these observers all expected did not come.

4    Has it finally come now?

5    The biggest occupational displacement inAmerican history was the virtual end of farming. Around the time of theRevolution, about 90 percent of Americans were involved in farming; they werefarm owners, farm wives, farm kids, farm hands, farm slaves. Mostly they farmedto keep themselves alive and then farmed some more so they could barter or sellsome surplus. Selling on the market became increasingly important in the 19^thcentury, as roads, canals, and rails linked the farmers to towns and harbors.Big ships then took farmer’s crops to Europe. Farming increasingly became acash business.

6    But as the agricultural industry grew, itneeded fewer and fewer workers to produce a bushel of corn, a gallon of milk,or a head of cattle. The absolute number of people who worked at farming andranching hit its peak in about 1910 – at around 11 or 12 million – and then thenumber dropped off rapidly. Today, agriculture provides fewer than two millionjobs.

7    What happened? In great part, automationhappened – better plows, planting and sowing machines, harvester – as didscientific farming, better seeds, and the like. Millions of farmers and farmhands now made superfluous had to move on. The percentage of American workerswho were farmers dropped from that early 90 percent or so in 1800, to about 40percent of the labor force in 1900 and then to under two percent in 2000.

8    Yet Americans as a whole were not automatedout of work; the farmers – or more typically, the farmers’ sons and daughters –found new kinds of jobs in a growing economy. A lot of those jobs were inmanufacturing. Those jobs both paid better and usually provided better workingconditions than farming did. That’s one reason every rural generation moanedabout how hard it was to keep the kids down on the farm.

9    The early water-and-steam-powered factoriesthat employed many formerly rural American themselves displaced millions ofcraftsmen, a process some scholars have labeled “deskilling”. For example,early 19^th century shoemakers handcrafted shoes, starting with theraw leather and ending with the laces, but by mid century assembly-line shoeswere undercutting their business. In one North Carolina town during the 1830s,church elder and shoemaker Henry Leinbach complained, “It appears there islittle love among us anymore…” One of Leinbach’s neighbors who may have showntoo little love wrote that she preferred to order her shoes from Philadelphia,because they “wear and fit better than any I have ever owned” – and they wereprobably cheaper, too. In place of craftsmen making shoes, machine-handlingfactory workers made them.

10  The number of factory jobs increased aboutsix-fold between 1860 and 1920 (while the population grew only aboutthree-fold). The percentage of American workers in manufacturing rose fromabout 15 to about 25 percent. Then, the factory jobs got harder to find, inpart because of automation. It was one reason – along with a shift to foreignsuppliers – that the number of manufacturing job in the U.S. peaked in 1979 at19 million. That number dropped to 13 million in 2008, even before the GreatRecession really hit.

11  Millions of manufacturing jobs have gone away,as millions of farm and craft jobs went away before. Yet, through all that,more new jobs appeared. Between 1960 and 2010, the population of the U.S. grew1.7 time; but the number of employed Americans grew about 2.4 times. How canthat be? Answer: The magic of growing productivity (combined with mothers andimmigrants joining the labor force to fill those jobs).

12  The automation of farming, craft work, andmanufacturing made products – most importantly, food – incredibly cheaper. Forexample, around 1900 a pound of bread cost an American about half an hour ofhard factory work: around 2000, a pound of fresher, more nutritious bread costabout five minutes of much easier work. The savings from cheaper food, shoes,and the like went into buying all sorts of new goods like cars andrefrigerators and especially into paying service providers: entertainers,doctors, waiters, teachers, software creators, bankers, police officers, yogainstructors, and the like. Many of the displaced farmers, craftsmen, andfactory workers – or much more often, their children – ended up in pink-collar,white-collar, and professional jobs.

13  The story – tragic at the level of thedisplaced worker, happy at the level of the national labor force – summarizedthe work experience in America for centuries. Will it continue? Will thecomputerization of, say, document-searching eliminate jobs today but yieldsavings that will create newer, perhaps better jobs tomorrow?

14  Or has history turned a corner? Is A.I.(artificial intelligence) a new sort of automation, one that undercuts thebrain work that became the mark of late 20^th century employment, onethat will only eliminate the better jobs? Will A.I. machines take over the bestoccupations such as systems analysts and biomedical engineers (paying humansabout $75,000 a year) and leave people to be home health and personal careaides (at about $20,000 a year) – the four jobs that the Bureau of LaborStatistics currently expects will grow the fastest in the next decade?

15  The historical trend in American work suggestssome optimism that better jobs for humans are coming, but history also suggeststhat few trends move in the same direction for very long.

Activity 1: Describe features of the following job typesand provide examples with appropriate job titles.

Blue-collarjob

Pink-collarjob

White-collarjob

Golden-collarjob

Activity 2: Fill in the blanks with appropriateverbs or verb phrases.

Computer software ________ throughcountless documents for... 精选

To ________ hobbies 提升        To ________ the peak 达到顶峰

To ________ ...jobs 替换          To ________ better jobs 使消失

To ________the brainwork削减