Part IX: Work and What Comes Next

第九部分：工作及其未来发展

The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.

—Rabindranath Tagore

种树的人，虽然知道他永远不会在树荫下休息，但至少开始理解了生活的意义。

—拉宾德拉纳特·泰戈尔

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

—Pablo Picasso

像专业人士一样学习规则，然后像艺术家一样打破它们。

—巴勃罗·毕加索

Employment in an AI World

AI 世界中的就业

Many people fear that AI is going to lead to mass layoffs in favor of new, AI-powered tools that can do jobs faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than humans. Some companies have already paused hiring for roles that they think artificial intelligence will replace in the coming years. In 2023, IBM announced that it was suspending or slowing back-office hiring by 30 percent over a five-year period for jobs that could ultimately be done by AI. IBM’s revelation suggests that the future of work is going to roll out differently, with back- or middle-office jobs disappearing, together with non-client-facing roles involving tasks such as creating budgets, managing data, and organizing records. Reading the tea leaves, we can see where this might be going.

许多人担心，AI 会导致大规模裁员，因为新型的人工智能工具能够比人类更快、更便宜、更高效地完成工作。一些公司已经暂停了他们认为未来几年将被人工智能取代的岗位招聘。2023 年，IBM 宣布将在五年内暂停或放缓 30% 的后台岗位招聘，因为这些岗位最终可以由 AI 完成。IBM 的披露表明，未来的工作将以不同的方式展开，后台或中台岗位将消失，以及涉及创建预算、管理数据和组织记录等任务的非面向客户的角色。通过解读这些迹象，我们可以预见未来的走向。

What will jobs in an AI-infused marketplace look like and how do we prepare our learners for them? Since ChatGPT came on the scene, many in the know have been saying that you won’t get replaced by AI, but you might get replaced by someone else using AI.

在一个充满人工智能的市场中，工作将是什么样子？我们如何让我们的学习者为这些工作做好准备？自从 ChatGPT 问世以来，许多知情人士一直在说，你不会被 AI 取代，但你可能会被使用 AI 的其他人取代。

Writers and copywriters using AI could potentially be three to five times as productive. The same will go for software engineers who are using AI copilots to debug and fill in large portions of their code. Graphic designers will be able to make fifty variations of a logo by tweaking a series of text-based prompts. Given this increase in productivity, are we going to need as many copywriters, engineers, and graphic designers?

使用 AI 的作家和文案可能会提高三到五倍的生产力。软件工程师在使用 AI 助手调试和填写大量代码时也是如此。平面设计师可以通过调整一系列基于文本的提示来制作出五十种不同的徽标变体。鉴于这种生产力的提高，我们是否仍然需要那么多的文案、工程师和平面设计师？

I suspect it will be a mixed bag. Because we are at such a technological inflection point that allows us to do so much more with generative AI, the demand for engineers, especially ones who are five to ten times more productive, is only going to go up. We’ve seen this happen in the past. In the early 2000s, accelerating globalization allowed a lot of software engineering work to be outsourced to places such as India. As a young engineer at the time, I thought I had to go to business school and change to a career in finance to avoid being disrupted by low-cost labor from abroad.

我认为这将是一个混合局面。由于我们处在一个允许我们使用生成式人工智能做更多事情的技术拐点，特别是工程师的需求将会大幅增加，尤其是那些生产力提高五到十倍的工程师。我们已经看到过这种情况。在 21 世纪初，加速的全球化使许多软件工程工作可以外包到印度等地。作为当时的一 名年轻工程师，我认为我必须去商学院学习，并转行从事金融行业，以避免受到来自国外低成本劳动力的冲击。

I was wrong. Since then, software engineering salaries have gone up much faster than the rate of inflation. This is because smartphones and the rise of the internet created an environment conducive to new software-based solutions. Generative AI is creating an even riper environment for further innovation. From my vantage point, because of generative AI, there is endless work for engineers who can creatively apply these technologies to solve new problems in nearly every industry.

我错了。从那时起，软件工程师的薪水上涨速度远远超过了通货膨胀率。这是因为智能手机和互联网的兴起创造了一个有利于新软件解决方案的环境。生成式 AI 正在创造一个更成熟的环境，适合进一步的创新。在我看来，生成式 AI 的出现，能够创造性地应用这些技术来解决几乎所有行业的新问题的工程师有做不完的工作。

On the other hand, I’m not as bullish for, say, the people currently writing news summaries about daily stock market fluctuations. If it isn’t already happening, these types of tasks will soon be done by generative AI. The copywriters and technical writers who are going to survive are going to be the ones who lean in most on AI to increase their productivity. The other 90 percent are going to have to find something else to do.

另一方面，我对那些目前撰写每日股票市场波动新闻摘要的人并不那么乐观。如果这种情况尚未发生，这类任务很快将由生成式 AI 完成。能够生存下来的文案和技术作家将是那些利用 AI 提高生产力的人。其他 90% 的人将不得不寻找其他的工作。

The good news is, generative AI will require new kinds of work. One of the hottest jobs today is being a prompt writer or prompt engineer. Two years ago, no one knew what those jobs were. It turns out that an open-minded and creative copywriter could transition quite well into some of these roles. Generative AI is also making us envision entirely new opportunities around safety, security, and antibias. I suspect that as more organizations wrestle with how to apply this technology, new opportunities will continue to emerge.

好消息是，生成式 AI 将需要新的工作类型。今天最热门的工作之一是提示词撰写员或提示词工程师。两年前，没有人知道这些工作是什么。事实证明，一个思想开放、富有创造力的文案可以很好地过渡到其中一些角色。生成式 AI 还使我们开始设想围绕安全性、保障和反偏见的新机会。我怀疑，随着越来越多的组织努力学习如何应用这项技术，新的机遇将继续出现。

In the same way that teachers are using AI to facilitate their more rote or mundane responsibilities, positions from HR to management will begin to task AI with producing hiring letters or meeting reports. On the surface, this sounds good and helpful, yet I also can’t help but consider the larger consequences.

就像教师使用 AI 来促进他们更死板或琐碎的职责一样，从人力资源到管理的职位将开始要求 AI 来撰写招聘信或会议报告。表面上，这听起来很好，很有帮助，但我也不禁考虑更大的影响。

It isn’t just about individual jobs. AI-induced natural selection is also going to be happening at the corporate level. If we have two companies—one that’s smaller, leaner, and more automated, and another that’s bigger, slower, and more dependent on human labor—over time, the smaller company will be able to offer an equivalent or better product for a lower price and start to gain more market share from the bigger company, which ultimately leads to a net loss of jobs. This is a common trend that we see in many industries, and this will continue as automation and technology advance at a rapid pace. On the one hand, the smaller company can provide goods or services more efficiently and at a lower cost, which can be beneficial for consumers. On the other hand, the job losses can be difficult for those who are directly affected.

这不仅仅是关于个别工作的问题。AI 引发的自然选择也将在公司层面发生。如果我们有两家公司——一家规模较小、更精简、自动化程度更高，另一家规模较大、更慢、更多依赖人工劳动——随着时间的推移，较小的公司将能够以更低的价格提供同等或更好的产品，并开始获得更大的市场份额，最终导致更大公司的净裁员。这是我们在许多行业中看到的常见趋势，随着自动化和技术的快速进步，这种趋势将继续存在。一方面，小公司可以更高效地提供商品或服务，并且成本更低，这对消费者来说是有益的。另一方面，裁员对那些直接受影响的人来说是很困难的。

This is already starting to unfold in dramatic fashion. In 2006, the education technology company Chegg, Inc. launched as a service that assisted nearly three million customers with homework, digital and physical textbook rentals, and online tutoring. Just two and a half years before ChatGPT, Forbescalled the company the most valuable ed-tech business in America. Once ChatGPT arrived, Chegg pivoted and began to incorporate AI into its platform, but it was no match for ChatGPT. When Chegg announced its quarterly earnings in May 2023, the CEO admitted that the service had been struggling to keep up with OpenAI’s offering, because so many students were using the large language model for help with their homework. The company admitted it no longer had any idea how much money it was going to make that year because of the influence of ChatGPT. This bombshell admission led to Chegg’s stock plummeting almost 50 percent. Since the arrival of generative AI, many have worried that these tools will upend established businesses. As distant as this fear once was, it remained speculative until it suddenly became a bit too real, with stories like this.

这种情况已经开始以戏剧性的方式展开。2006 年，教育科技公司 Chegg, Inc. 作为一家为近三百万客户提供家庭作业帮助、数字和实体教材租赁以及在线辅导服务的公司推出。就在 ChatGPT 问世两年半之前，Forbes 称该公司为美国最有价值的教育科技企业。一旦 ChatGPT 出现，Chegg 转向并开始将人工智能整合到其平台中，但这比不过 ChatGPT。当 Chegg 在 2023 年 5 月公布其季度财报时，CEO 承认该服务一直在努力跟上 OpenAI 的步伐，因为有很多学生使用大型语言模型来完成他们的作业。公司承认，由于 ChatGPT 的影响，他们不再知道今年能赚多少钱。这个爆炸性声明导致 Chegg 的股价暴跌近 50%。自生成式 AI 出现以来，许多人担心这些工具会颠覆老牌企业。这种恐惧曾经很遥远，但它一直停留在猜测阶段，直到它突然变得有点过于真实，出现了这样的故事。

These sentiments are not mine alone.

这些感受不仅是我一个人的。

“It’s going to affect every industry differently, every person differently, and every job differently,” Wharton’s Ethan Mollick says. “The job that’s least affected by AI, according to the early-stage research we have, is roofing, and yet I’ve talked to a couple roofers who’re like, ‘Actually, roofing is going to change, too, because we can now do all of our proposals with AI help.’ ”

“它将以不同的方式影响每个行业、每个人和每个工作，”沃顿商学院的伊桑·莫里克（Ethan Mollick）说。“根据我们掌握的早期研究，受人工智能影响最小的工作是屋顶工，但我与几位屋顶工人交谈后，他们也说，‘实际上，屋顶行业也会改变，因为我们现在可以用 AI 帮助做所有的提案。’”

When you develop artificial intelligence that can understand language, recognize patterns, and solve problems, as well as AI that can diagnose illnesses, make stock market trades, compose music, fight lawsuits, understand emotions, analyze genetic code, handle insurance claims, engineer, and write articles, it is not hard to believe that more changes are coming. The successful strategy will not be to resist but to adapt.

当你开发出能够理解语言、识别模式和解决问题的人工智能时，尤其是能够诊断疾病、进行股票市场交易、作曲、打官司、理解情绪、分析遗传密码、处理保险索赔、进行工程设计和撰写文章的人工智能时，你很难不相信更多的变化即将到来。成功的策略不是抵抗，而是适应。

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