Many industries are facing a shortage of labour. Warehousing has grown rapidly. And robots are now indispensable, picking items off shelves and helping people pack an exponentially rising numbers of boxes. They are even beginning to walk slowly along some pavements, delivering goods or food right to people’s doors. Having more robots to boost productivity would be a good thing.
And yet many people fear that robots will destroy jobs. A paper in 2013 by economists at Oxford University was widely misinterpreted as meaning that 47% of American jobs were at risk of being automated.
In fact, concerns about mass unemployment because of robots are overblown. The evidence suggests robots will be ultimately beneficial for labour markets. A Yale University study found that an increase of one robot unit per 1, 000 workers boosted a company’s employment in Japan. Another study, by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues elsewhere, looked at Finnish firms and concluded that their use of advanced technologies led to increases in hiring.
For all that, the march of the robots will bring big changes to workplaces. The skills and firms that are rewarded will shift, too. But that need not be the disaster many fear. One supposed example of “bad automation” is self-service checkouts in supermarkets because they displace human workers. Checkout staff who retrain to help customers pick items from aisles may well find that dealing with people in need is more rewarding than spending all day scanning barcodes.
Certainly, some people will be on the losing end of change even as the robots make society as a whole better off. One lesson from the freewheeling globalization of the 1990s and 2000s is that the growth in trade that was overwhelmingly beneficial contributed to a political backlash (强烈抵制) because the losers felt left behind. That’s one more reason why firms and governments would do well to recognize the value of retraining and lifelong learning. As jobs change, workers should be helped to acquire new skills, including how to work with and manage the robots that will increasingly be their colleagues.
The potential gains from the robot revolution have just started. It won’t be the plot in some films where the robots fight against their human masters and cause mass unemployment.
【小题1】What does the underlined word “indispensable” mean in Paragraph 1?| A．Essential. | B．Spare. | C．Detective. | D．Complicated. |
| A．To prove that robots will not be a disaster. |
| B．To remind us of the big changes at workplaces. |
| C．To illustrate checkout staff will scan barcodes slowly. |
| D．To tell firms the value of retraining and lifelong learning. |
| A．It will push losers to leave behind. |
| B．Robots may lead to mass unemployment. |
| C．People will help robots to gain new skills. |
| D．Robots and people may become co-workers. |
| A．Jobs will be at risk due to robots. |
| B．No evidence shows that robots will destroy jobs. |
| C．Lifelong learning will quickly boost mass employment. |
| D．People have benefited a lot from the robot revolution. |
