If you were to design a robot to assist in a kindergarten, handing out water, tidying and watching out for grazed knees, what would it look like? A bulky, shouty metal hulk? Or a gentle-voiced android that mimicked a carer?

如果让你设计一款在幼儿园协助发放饮水、清洁整理和关怀擦伤膝盖的孩子的机器人，你会把它设计成什么样子呢？一个笨重、发出巨大吼声的大金属块？还是一个柔声细语、像看护员一样的人形机器人呢？

Assuming you are not the Child Catcher, the answer is likely to be the latter. If robots are to provide support in the workplace of the future, they might prove less shocking if they attempt to blend in. Carers tend to be women, so perhaps engineers should recreate them in metal form: with female voices and bobbed helmet hair.

假如你不讨厌孩子，你的答案可能是后者。假设将来机器人要在工作场所提供帮助，如果它们能够融入周围环境，它们也许就不会那么让人震惊。看护员往往是女性，因此工程技术人员也许应该把金属的机器人做成女性的形象：发出女性的语音，配有波波头发型。

To be human is to anthropomorphise. In an experiment published this year in Nature, participants were shown photographs of a human and a robot hand being cut with a knife. The volunteers felt empathy for the human and the robot.

拟人化意味着人格化。《自然》(Nature)杂志去发表了一项实验，研究人员向参与者展示了一些照片，照片上是用刀子割一个人的手和一个机器人的手。这些志愿者对人和机器人都感到同情。

The extent of this tendency to impute human characteristics to machines was brought home to me earlier this year when I visited Xchanging, a company in the City of London that provides business process services, procurement management and IT outsourcing. The machines that replaced the mundane and tedious work of data entry were no more human than a hard drive, yet they were dubbed Henry and Poppy. Even the French boring drills used in the Channel tunnel were given names.

我在去年早些时候认识到这种赋予机器人格的倾向已经到了何种程度。我走访了伦敦金融城(City of London)的企业Xchanging，该公司提供业务流程服务、采购管理和IT外包。这家公司取代人力执行单调繁琐的数据录入任务的机器不比一块硬盘更像人，但是它们被称为亨利(Henry)和波普伊(Poppy)。甚至连英法海底隧道中使用的法国钻头都被起了名字。

There have been cases where a machine’s “gender” has caused problems. In the 1990s, BMW reportedly had to recall German cars installed with its navigation system because back then, it seems, male drivers objected to taking directions from a woman.

在一些案例中，机器的“性别”引起了麻烦。20世纪90年代有报道称，宝马公司(BMW)不得不召回安装了语音导航系统的德国汽车，因为当时男性司机似乎不喜欢听从女性的语音指令。

There is a danger that by assigning a gender to robots we reinforce stereotypes in the workforce: a problem not just for women but men too. Research by the University of Bielefeld, in Germany, published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, investigated attitudes to robots when they were assigned a gender. In the experiment, they showed two robots to a group of men and women. The robots looked the same except for their hairstyles and the shape of their lips. The one with longer hair and fuller lips was seen by the groups as “female”, the short-haired one was “male”.

给机器指定性别会造成一种危险，那就是加深我们对劳动者的成见：不仅女性，男性也会面临这一问题。在德国，比勒费尔德大学(University of Bielefeld)在《应用社会心理学期刊》(Journal of Applied Social Psychology)发表的研究调查了人们对指定性别的机器人的态度。在实验中，研究人员向一组有男有女的参与者展示了两个机器人。两个机器人除了发型和嘴唇形状以外一模一样。参与者将头发更长、嘴唇更厚的机器人视为“女性”，将短发的那个机器人视为“男性”。

Consequently, the male robot was perceived as capable of more “masculine” tasks — repairing technical devices, guarding a home. The female robot was seen as suitable for stereotypical activities such as housework and caring.

结果是，他们认为男性机器人能够干一些比较“阳刚”的工作——修理技术设备、保家护院。女性机器人被认为适合做家务、看护等人们的固有观念中由女性承担的工作。

While humanoid robots are not about to take over our nurseries in the immediate future, such studies raise important questions about gender and technology. Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at the UK’s University of Southampton, notes that there is a tendency to see science as pure and objective. Yet even algorithms — a set of instructions to be applied to data — reflect human assumptions. They model the world and can be infused with unconscious bias, she told me. This was brought home in a study of Google’s algorithms, for example. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the International Computer Science Institute found that male job seekers were more likely than their female peers to be shown ads by the search engine for high-paying executive jobs.

虽然人形机器人不会很快接管我们的托儿所，但是这样的研究还是提出了有关性别和科技的重要问题。英国南安普顿大学(University of Southampton)计算机科学教授温迪霍尔(Wendy Hall)指出，人们倾向于把科学视为纯粹和客观的。然而即使是算法（一组应用于数据的指令）也会反映人类的设定。她告诉我，人们会无意识地在为客观世界建模时注入一些偏见。比如，关于谷歌(Google)算法的一项研究突显了这一点。卡内基梅隆大学(Carnegie Mellon University)和国际计算机科学研究所(ICSI)的研究人员发现，比起女性求职者，搜索引擎更有可能向男性求职者展示高薪管理岗位的广告。

When it comes to talking about the structure of work in the next machine age, gender has largely been left out. Hopefully, this will be redressed in part by the World Economic Forum, which is researching the topic ahead of its annual meeting in Davos in January. In a paper published in November, it stated: “What is missing from the debate is a gender lens.”

在人们探讨下一个机器时代的工作结构时，性别在很大程度上被排除在外。世界经济论坛(WEF)有望在一定程度上纠正这一情况。世界经济论坛正在1月份达沃斯年度会议之前研究这一议题。在11月发表的一份文件中，该论坛写道：“当前的辩论缺失性别视角。”

It is not yet clear how automation will affect men’s and women’s work. Martin Ford, the author of The Rise of the Robots , which won the FT and McKinsey business book of 2015 awards, believes that industries where men tend to work — manufacturing, finance and warehouses — are particularly susceptible to automation, either via actual machines and robots or software. “In the near-term automation seems likely to fall more heavily on men,” he says.

目前尚不清楚自动化将如何影响男性和女性的工作。马丁輠祹(Martin Ford)的《机器人的崛起》(The Rise of the Robots)荣获英国《金融时报》和麦肯锡2015年度最佳商业图书奖(2015 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award)。他相信，男性倾向于工作的产业——制造业、金融和仓储业——尤其容易受到自动化的冲击，或者是受到实体的机器和机器人影响，或者是受到软件影响。“短期内，自动化可能给男性带来更大冲击，”他说。

I doubt this spells “the end of men” to borrow the title of Hanna Rosin’s 2012 book, which argued that women would dominate the future workforce. The male-dominated technology sectors are in the ascendancy, after all.

汉娜圠魿(Hanna Rosin) 2012年的一本著作提出，女性将在未来的劳动大军中占主导地位，借用这本书的标题，我怀疑这意味着“男性的终结”(The End of Men)。毕竟，由男性主导的科技业蒸蒸日上。

Yet it does highlight that the future of work should not be viewed just through the prism of “man and machine” but of women too.

但这的确强调了一点，人类工作的未来不应该只通过“男人与机器”的棱镜来看待，还要加上女性。