夜雨聆风How should bosses talk about AI?老板们应该如何谈论 AI？
Employees are being asked to embrace a technology that causes fear员工们被要求拥抱一项令他们感到恐惧的技术
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.
如果你是一位银行老板并登上新闻头条，那么你要么是 Jamie Dimon，要么就是搞砸了。渣打银行首席执行官 Bill Winters 最近引发争议。渣打是一家总部位于英国、专注于新兴市场的银行，他谈到公司计划在未来四年内削减 15% 的后台岗位。尤其是四个词让他陷入麻烦：他说要用投入自动化的金融资本，取代“低价值人力资本”。这场风波为几乎所有管理者如今面临的一个问题，提供了一个有启发性的案例：该如何谈论人工智能对工作的影响。
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 AI，以提高生产力、击败使用 AI 的竞争对手，以及实现更多目标。但总体而言，员工并没有那么热情。他们能看到这项技术的一些好处，但也能看到它对工作岗位带来的风险。即使目前数据还没有显示大规模裁员已经发生，一场针对 AI 的反弹已经在进行中。它催生了一个缩写词 “FOBO”，即 “fear of becoming obsolete”，意思是“害怕自己变得过时”。这种情绪出现在一些病毒式传播的视频中：美国毕业生在毕业典礼上嘘那些提到 AI 的演讲者；一名即将离职的 Meta 员工则用《American Pie》的曲调，唱出关于这家科技巨头 AI 战略的歌：“现在我要唱着歌，告别职业自豪感。”
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不是好事。它对员工产生的影响最令人不快。斯德哥尔摩大学 Magnus Sverke 及其合著者在 2019 年发表的一篇文献综述发现，工作不安全感通常与更差的健康结果和更低的工作满意度相关。那是在生成式 AI 时代开始之前发表的研究。但企业同样会受到损害。理论上，如果工作不安全感能刺激员工更加努力，它或许会让组织受益。但现实中，它似乎会导致工作表现受损。
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.
不过，员工对公司管理层的信任程度，可以缓解工作不安全感带来的影响。莱斯特大学 Wen Wang 及其合著者的一篇论文，分析了一项针对英国员工和雇主的全国性调查数据，覆盖 1,100 家组织中的 16,000 多名受访者。研究人员发现，工作不安全感的客观指标，例如工时削减，通常与员工承诺水平较低相关；但如果员工认为老板诚实、可靠、公平，这种负面影响就会减弱。
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.
在这一点上，Winters 有一件事大错特错，但其他许多方面做得不错。他最大的错误是措辞。把人称作“人力资本”总是相当奇怪；没有人会在告别演讲中说：“我真正会想念的是这里的人力资本。”不管 Winters 的本意是什么，看起来把人分成低价值和高价值两类，都注定不会有好结果。
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.
这种笨拙的措辞还忽略了一个重要事实。有些工作确实比其他工作更容易受到 AI 影响，例如包含重复性、容易验证任务的岗位，或者不需要人际交往能力的岗位。但受 AI 冲击的工作，并不能被简单归类为“低价值”工作，软件工程师的处境就说明了这一点。程序员正处在风险前线，因为 AI 擅长编码，而且企业对这项技术的资本投入总得通过某种方式来买单——Meta 就把最近的裁员与抵消其他支出的需要联系在一起。
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.
如果看 Winters 更完整的发言，在其他方面，他其实值得肯定。尤其是，他谈到了银行为受后台自动化项目影响、但仍想留在渣打的员工，提前寻找新岗位所做的努力。帮助员工为劳动力市场的变化做好准备，是保留现有员工信任和专业能力的最佳方式。这可能意味着帮助人们掌握从事较不容易被自动化取代的工作的技能。例如，总部位于新加坡的星展银行，就帮助员工从客户服务人员转向销售人员。当然，这也不可避免地意味着大量关于 AI 工具的培训。
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.
AI 对就业的长期影响是无法确切知道的。企业和员工有不同的激励机制——他们并不完全是在同一条船上。而管理大规模冲击的负担，很大程度上将落在政府身上。但老板们仍然可以通过识别未来仍然需要人类具备的技能，并帮助员工获得这些技能，来减轻工作不安全感。要让人们拥抱 AI，也必须让他们为 AI 带来的冲击做好准备。
全篇重点词汇：
kerfuffle /kəˈfʌfl/ 小风波；混乱；争议。a lot of noise, confusion or argument about something that is often not very important.
obsolete /ˈɒbsəliːt/ 过时的；被淘汰的。no longer useful or needed because something newer or better exists.
alleviate /əˈliːvieɪt/ 缓解；减轻。to make pain, difficulty or a problem less severe.
vulnerable /ˈvʌlnərəbl/ 脆弱的；容易受影响的。easily harmed, attacked or affected.
mitigate /ˈmɪtɪɡeɪt/ 减轻；缓和。to make something less harmful, serious or painful.
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