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这是一篇有关管理与职场的文章。文章以渣打银行CEO温拓思（Bill Winters）的“失言风波”为切入点，极其敏锐地探讨了当下所有企业管理者共同面临的终极难题：在AI浪潮下，如何平衡企业效率与员工的“职场安全感（Job Security）”，以及如何得体地与员工沟通技术变革。

How should bosses talk about AI?

老板应该如何谈论人工智能？

Employees are being asked to embrace a technology that causes fear

员工们被要求接受一项令人恐惧的技术

If you are a bank boss and in the headlines, you are either Jamie Dimon or you have screwed up. Bill Winters, the chief executive of Standard Chartered, an emerging-markets bank headquartered in Britain, made waves recently when he talked about a planned 15% reduction in back-office jobs over the next four years. Four words in particular landed him in trouble: a reference to the replacement of“lower-value human capital”by financial capital invested in automation. The kerfuffle provides an instructive case study in a problem now faced by almost every manager: how to talk about the effect of artificial intelligence on jobs.

如果你是一位银行高管，并且频频登上新闻头条，那么你要么是像杰米·戴蒙那样成功，要么就是搞砸了。总部位于英国的新兴市场银行渣打银行的首席执行官比尔·温特斯最近就因为谈到未来四年计划裁减15%的后台岗位而引发轩然大波。尤其让他陷入困境的，是他提到的用投资于自动化的金融资本来取代“低价值的人力资本”。这场风波为几乎所有管理者都面临的一个问题提供了一个极具启发性的案例：如何谈论人工智能对就业的影响。

Bosses want employees to use AI in order to improve productivity, see off AI-using rivals and more. Employees, on the whole, are less enthused. They can see some benefits to the technology. But they can also see the risks that it poses to jobs. Even if the numbers do not point to widespread lay-offs yet, an AI backlash is well under way. It has spawned the acronym “FOBO”, for “fear of becoming obsolete”. It shows up in viral videos—of American graduates booing commencement speakers who mention the technology and of a departing Meta employee singing about the tech giant’s AI strategy to the tune of “American Pie” (“And now I’m singing bye bye to professional pride”).

老板们希望员工使用人工智能来提高生产力、击败使用人工智能的竞争对手等等。但员工们总体上对此并不那么热情。他们看到了这项技术的一些好处，但也看到了它对就业构成的风险。即使目前的数据尚未显示出大规模裁员的迹象，但对人工智能的抵制已经开始。它催生了“FOBO”这个缩写，即“害怕被淘汰”（fear of coming obsolete）。它出现在一些病毒式传播的视频中——比如美国毕业生对提及人工智能技术的毕业典礼演讲者发出嘘声，以及一位即将离职的Meta员工用《美国派》的曲调唱着这家科技巨头的AI战略（“现在我要向职业骄傲告别了”）。

Job insecurity is not great for anyone. It has the most unpleasant effects on employees. A literature review by Magnus Sverke of Stockholm University and his co-authors—published in 2019, before the start of the generative-AI age—found that it is generally associated with worse health outcomes and decreased job satisfaction. But firms suffer, too. In theory, job insecurity might benefit organisations if it spurred greater employee effort. In practice, it seems to lead to impaired performance.

工作不安全感对任何人都没有好处。它对员工的影响尤为负面。斯德哥尔摩大学的Magnus Sverke及其合作者在2019年（生成式人工智能时代开始之前）发表的一篇文献综述发现，工作不安全感通常与健康状况恶化和工作满意度下降有关。但企业也会受到影响。理论上，如果工作不安全感能够激励员工更加努力，那么它可能对企业有利。但在实践中，它似乎会导致绩效下降。

The degree of trust that employees have in the management of their firms can alleviate the effects of job insecurity, however. A paper by Wen Wang of the University of Leicester and her co-authors analysed data from a national survey of British employees and employers, covering over 16,000 respondents at 1,100 organisations. The researchers found that objective measures of job insecurity, such as cuts in working hours, were generally associated with lower levels of employee commitment, but that this effect was weaker if workers viewed bosses as being honest, reliable and fair.

然而，员工对公司管理层的信任程度可以缓解工作不安全感的影响。莱斯特大学的王雯（音译）及其合作者分析了一项针对英国雇员和雇主的全国性调查数据，该调查涵盖了1100家机构的16000多名受访者。研究人员发现，诸如工时缩减等工作不安全感的客观指标通常与员工敬业度降低相关，但如果员工认为老板诚实、可靠且公平，这种影响就会减弱。

On this score, Mr Winters got one thing badly wrong but a lot of other things right. His choice of words was his big mistake. Referring to people as human capital is always pretty weird; no one gives a farewell speech saying “what I’m really going to miss is the human capital”. Appearing to divide people into lower-value and higher-value categories was never going to work out well, whatever Mr Winters’s intention.

就此而言，温特斯先生犯了一个严重的错误，但其他方面却有很多正确之处。他最大的失误在于措辞。将人称为人力资本总是显得很奇怪；没有人会在告别演说中说“我真正怀念的是人力资本”。无论温特斯先生的初衷如何，将人划分为低价值和高价值两类的做法注定不会奏效。

The clumsy phrasing also missed an important truth. Some jobs are more vulnerable than others to AI: roles that comprise repetitive and easily verifiable tasks, for example, or that do not require interpersonal skills. But exposed jobs cannot be neatly categorised as low-value, as the fate of software engineers shows. Programmers are in the firing line because AI is good at coding and because capital investment in the technology has to be paid for somehow—Meta connected its latest lay-offs to the need to offset other spending.

这种笨拙的措辞也忽略了一个重要的事实。有些工作比其他工作更容易受到人工智能的影响：例如，那些包含重复性且易于验证的任务，或者不需要人际交往能力的工作。但正如软件工程师的遭遇所表明的那样，这些易受影响的工作不能简单地归类为低价值工作。程序员首当其冲，因为人工智能擅长编码，而且对这项技术的资本投资必须以某种方式支付——Meta公司将其最近的裁员与抵消其他支出的需求联系起来。

Look at the fuller version of Mr Winters’s remarks, and in other respects, he deserves credit. In particular, he talked about the pre-emptive efforts that the bank made to find new jobs for employees who were going to be affected by a back-office automation project but wanted to stay at Standard Chartered. Preparing employees for changes in the labour market is the best way to retain the trust and expertise of existing staff. That might mean giving people the skills to do a less automatable kind of job; DBS, a Singapore-based bank, has positioned employees to move from being customer-service agents, say, to becoming salespeople. It also, inevitably, means lots of training on AI tools.

看看温特斯先生的完整发言，在其他方面，他确实值得称赞。特别是，他谈到了渣打银行为那些将受到后台自动化项目影响但希望留在渣打的员工所做的预先努力，即为他们寻找新的工作。让员工为劳动力市场的变化做好准备是留住现有员工的信任和专业知识的最佳方式。这可能意味着赋予员工从事不易自动化工作的技能；总部位于新加坡的星展银行（DBS）已安排员工从客服专员等岗位转型为销售人员。这也必然意味着需要接受大量的AI工具培训。

The long-term impact of AI on jobs is unknowable. Firms and employees have different incentives—they are not all in this together. And the burden of managing widespread disruption will fall largely on governments. But bosses can still mitigate job insecurity by identifying the skills they will continue to want from humans, and then helping employees to acquire them. For people to embrace AI, they have to be braced for it, too.

人工智能对就业的长期影响尚不可知。企业和员工的利益诉求各不相同——他们并非目标一致。应对人工智能带来的广泛冲击的重担将主要落在政府身上。但企业管理者仍然可以通过明确自身对员工技能的需求，并帮助员工掌握这些技能，来降低员工的就业不稳定性。人们要想接受人工智能，也必须做好迎接它的准备。

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