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.
员工被要求拥抱一项引发恐惧的技术。
If you are a bank boss and in the headlines, you are either Jamie Dimon or you have screwed up.
如果你是银行老板并且上了新闻头条，要么你是摩根大通CEO杰米·戴蒙，要么你搞砸了。
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.
渣打银行是总部位于英国的新兴市场银行，其CEO比尔·温特斯最近谈及计划在未来四年内削减15%的后台岗位，这一言论引起了轩然大波。
Four words in particular landed him in trouble: a reference to the replacement of "lower-value human "FOBO", for "fear of becoming capital" by financial capital invested in automation.
特别是其中四个词让他陷入了麻烦:他提到用投资于自动化的金融资本取代“低价值人力资本”。
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.
这场风波为几乎所有管理者现在面临的一个问题提供了有启发性的案例研究:如何谈论人工智能对工作的影响。
Bosses want employees to use Al in order to improve productivity, see off Al-using rivals and more.
老板们希望员工使用AI以提高生产力、打败使用AI的竞争对手等等。
Employees, on the whole, are less enthused.
总体来说，员工们对AI没那么热情。
They can see some benefits to the technology.
他们能看到这项技术的一些好处。
But they can also see the risks that it poses to jobs.
但他们也能看到AI对就业构成的威胁。
Even if the numbers do not point to widespread lay-offs yet, an Al backlash is well under way.
即使数据尚未指向大规模裁员，对AI的强烈抵制已然展开。
It has spawned the acronym "FOBO", for "fear of becoming obsolete".
目前已催了缩写词FOBO，意为“对被淘汰的恐惧”。
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 Al strategy to the tune of "American Pie" ("And now I'm singing bye bye to professional pride").
这一现象在被疯传的网络视频中出现一一美国毕业生们对提到AI的毕业典礼演讲者发出嘘还有一名即将离职的Meta员工用《美国派》的旋律唱出Meta的AI战略(“我高唱再见，告别职业尊严”)。
Job insecurity is not great for anyone.
工作不安全感对任何人来说都不是好事。
It has the most unpleasant effects on employees.
对员工会产生最为令人不快的效果。
A literature review by Magnus Sverke of Stockholm University his co-authors-published in 2019, before the start of the generative-Al age-found that it is generally associated with worse health outcomes and decreased job satisfaction.
斯德哥尔摩大学的马格努斯·斯韦尔克及其合著者于2019年(在生成式AI时代开启之前)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相关。
But firms suffer, too.
但是公司也会遭受损失。
In theory, job insecurity might benefit organisations if it spurred greater employee effort.
从理论上讲，如果工作不安全感能鞭策员工更努力，那么或许对组织有益。
In practice, it seems to lead to impaired performance.
在实践中，工作不安全感似乎会导致表现被削弱。
The degree of trust that employees have in the management of their firms can alleviate the effects of job insecurity, however.
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的影响。
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.
莱斯特大学王文(音译)及其合著者的一篇论文分析了对英国雇员与雇主的全国调查数据， 覆盖1100家机构的超过1.6万名受访者。
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.
研究人员发现，工作不安全的客观衡量标准(例如工作时长缩减)通常与员工投入度降低相关，但是如果员工认为上司诚实、可靠、公正，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.
在这方面，温特斯犯了严重的错误，但在其他许多方面都做对了。
His choice of words was his big mistake.
他的措辞选择是一大错误。
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".
将人称为"人力资本"总是相当奇怪，没有人会在告别讲话时说“我真正想念的是人力资本”。
Appearing to divide people into lower-value and higher-value categories was never going to work out well, whatever Mr Winters's intention.
将人们划分为低价值和高价值，无论温特斯的初衷如何，这种做法永远不会有好结果。
The clumsy phrasing also missed an important truth.
笨拙的措辞同样遗漏了一个重要的事实。
Some jobs are more vulnerable than others to Al: roles that comprise repetitive and easily verifiable tasks, for example, or that do not require interpersonal skills.
有些工作比其他工作更容易受到AI的影响:比如包含重复的、易于验证的任务的职位，或者不需要人际交往能力的职位。
But exposed jobs cannot be neatly categorised as low-value, as the fate of software engineers shows.
但是暴露在AI风险中的工作并不能简单地被归类为低价值，正如软件工程师的命运所展示的。
Programmers are in the firing line because Al is good at coding and because capital investment in the technology has to be paid for somehow-Meta connected its lay-offs to the need to offset other spending.
程序员们正受到AI火力扫射，因为AI擅长编码， 也因为对AI的资本投入总得有个回报--Meta 将其最近的裁员与需要抵消其他开支联系起来。
Look at the fuller version of Mr Winters's remarks, and in other respects, he deserves credit.
看看温特斯讲话的更完整版本，在其他方面， 他其实值得称赞。
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.
尤其是他讲到，对于将受到后台自动化项目影响，但又想留在渣打银行的员工，银行采取提前主动措施，帮他们寻找新岗位。
Preparing employees for changes the labour market is the best way to retain the trust and expertise of existing staff.
帮助员工为劳动力市场的变化做好准备，这是留住现有员工的信任与专业技能的最佳途径。
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.
这可能意味着赋予人们从事不易被自动化替代的工作的技能，例如，总部位于新加坡的星展银行已让员工准备好从客服专员转岗为销售。
It also, inevitably, means lots of training on Al tools.
这也不可避免地意味着进行大量的AI工具训练。
The long-term impact of Al on jobs is unknowable.
AI对就业的长期影响是不可预知的。
Firms and employees have different incentives-they are not all in this together
公司和员工有不同的动力，他们并非完全同心协力。
And the burden of managing widespread disruption will fall largely on governments.
而管理大范围扰乱的负担将主要落在政府身上。
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.
但老板们仍可减轻工作不安全感，办法是明确指出他们仍将需要人类具备哪些技能，并帮助员工获得这些技能。
For people to embrace Al, they have to be braced for it, too.
要让人们拥抱AI，老板们也得让人们为AI做好准备。
