Pity school careers advisers. If economists are to be believed, vast numbers of jobs will have evaporated by the time today’s pupils reach the labour market. Oxford university’s Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne say almost half of the jobs in the US are at high risk from computerisation in the next two decades, together with two-thirds of those in India and three-quarters in China.

学校的就业顾问真可怜。如果经济学家的话可以相信，当如今的小学生有朝一日进入劳动力市场时，大量就业岗位将已经消失。牛津大学(Oxford university)的卡尔•贝内迪克特•弗雷(Carl Benedikt Frey)和迈克尔•奥斯本(Michael Osborne)称，未来二十年，美国几乎一半的就业岗位、印度三分之二的岗位以及中国四分之三的工作都很可能被计算机取代。

While workers worry about whether robots will take their jobs, teachers are wondering how to use education to insulate the next generation from such a fate. This has worked before. When the last wave of automation swept the developed world at the start of the 20th century, policymakers decided education was the answer. If machines were going to substitute for brawn, they reasoned, more people would need to use their brains.

在劳动者担心机器人是否会抢走他们的饭碗之际，老师们却在思考如何利用教育使下一代人免遭这种命运。这种方法以前成功过。20世纪初，当上一波自动化浪潮席卷发达世界时，政策制定者认定，解决方案是教育。如果机器将取代人类的体力，他们推断，更多人将需要从事脑力劳动。

The US invested heavily in education, with good results. Workers reaped the benefits through better jobs and higher wages. Economists Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson summed it up like this: “The industrial revolution started a race between technology and education — and, for most of the 20th century, humans won that race.”

于是美国大举投资教育，并取得了很好的效果。劳动者通过更好的工作和薪酬待遇获得了好处。经济学家安德鲁•麦卡菲(Andrew McAfee)和埃里克•布林约尔松(Erik Brynjolfsson)这样总结道：“工业革命开启了科技与教育之间的竞赛——在20世纪的多数时间里，人类是这场竞赛的赢家。”

But the next race will be against technology that replaces brains and brawn. Machine learning algorithms are already starting to supplant the likes of mergers and acquisition bankers and currency traders. Some experts argue we need to respond with another fundamental rethink of education.

但是，下一场竞赛的对手将是同时取代人类的脑力和体力的技术。机器学习算法已经开始取代并购业务银行家和外汇交易员之类的岗位。一些专家认为，我们需要以再一次彻底反思教育来应对挑战。

“School education has tended to focus on developing the core cognitive competences — for example, reading, writing and arithmetic,” said Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, in a recent speech. “Smart machines have long since surpassed humans in their ability to do the first and third of these. And they are fast catching-up on the second. That begs the question of whether there are other skills where humans’ comparative advantage is greater.”

“学校教育往往注重开发核心认知能力——例如，阅读、写作和算术，”英国央行(Bank of England)首席经济学家安迪•霍尔丹(Andy Haldane)在最近一次演讲中表示，“智能机器早已在第一项和第三项上超越了人类。同时它们在第二项上奋起直追。这就引出了一个问题：有没有人类拥有更大比较优势的其他技能？”

So what skills should we teach our children to robot-proof their careers?

因此，为了让我们的孩子免遭被机器人抢走工作的命运，我们应该教给他们什么技能？

How to be creative

如何拥有创造力

Artificial intelligence tends to solve problems methodically but the human brain is far better at making logical leaps of imagination. It is more intuitive, creative and better at persuasion. Humans can also combine their creativity with robot-surpassing dexterity to cut someone’s hair, for example, or cook a delicious meal. “It’s good to invest in creative education because these are some of the skills that should be left [after automation],” says Stian Westlake, head of policy and research at Nesta, the UK innovation charity.

人工智能往往可以井井有条地解决问题，但是人类大脑在有逻辑地发挥想象力、进行跳跃性思维方面要出色得多。人脑直觉更好、更具创造性、更有说服力。人类还可以结合自己的创造力和让机器人望尘莫及的灵巧，去给人理发或者烹调美食。“投资创造性方面的教育很好，因为创造力属于（自动化）应该无法取代的技能，”英国国家科技艺术基金会(Nesta)政策和研究主管斯蒂安•韦斯特莱克(Stian Westlake)称。

When you start to look at the world like this, you turn some familiar tropes about global education on their head.

当你开始这样看待世界时，你会完全改变对一些有关全球教育的常见比喻的看法。

Mr Westlake says: “It’s a paradoxical story where countries like the UK come out well, because our creative economy is quite strong. We beat ourselves up over our inability to be as good at Singapore and Shanghai at coding and things like this, but actually it turns out it’s quite possible that sort of stuff is going to be the stuff that’s very easy for artificial intelligence to automate.”

韦斯特莱克称：“出人意料的是，因为创意经济相当强劲，英国等国家会安然无恙。我们因为自己在编码等方面的能力不如新加坡和上海而苛责自己，但是事实上，这类工作最后很可能会是人工智能很容易用自动化取代的东西。”

How to be nice

情商致胜

Some machines may have learnt how to seem caring but humans still have an unsurpassed ability to empathise with others. The new phrase is “EQ”, which stands for emotional quotient (or emotional intelligence). “The high-skill, high-pay jobs of the future may involve skills better measured by EQs than IQs, by jobs creating social as much as financial value,” the BOE’s Mr Haldane said.

一些机器或许已经学会如何表示关心，但是人类仍然拥有机器无法超越的“同理”能力。新的说法是“情商”(EQ)，代表情绪商数（或情绪智商）。“未来的高技能、高薪工作需要的技能，可能对情商的要求高过对智商的要求，并要求工作不仅创造经济价值，还要创造同样多的社会价值，”英国央行的霍尔丹称。

Whether or not such skills can be taught is an open question. Still, some organisations are giving it a go. ING, the Dutch bank, has recently put 350 staff through an “EQ training programme”. The aim is to teach these bankers how to “build trust with the client through asking lots more questions and listening out for feelings and beliefs as opposed to just listening out for content,” explains Steve Ellis, director at Rogensi, a consultancy that developed the project with ING.

关于这些技能能否传授的问题尚未定论。不过，一些组织正在尝试。荷兰银行国际集团(ING)最近让350名员工参加了“情商培训课程”。目的是教这些银行员工如何“通过多提问题、聆听客户的感受和想法（而非只听内容），来建立与客户之间的信任，”与ING合作开发该项目的咨询公司rogenSi的主管史蒂夫•埃利斯(Steve Ellis)称。

One of the exercises involves sitting bankers in a room, showing them pictures of people’s facial expressions and asking them to identify the emotion felt. Mark Pieter de Boer, head of financial market sales at ING, admits some bankers were initially resistant. “Typically, what you see is people who are very much IQ-focused struggle with making that change.”

其中一项练习是，让银行员工坐在一个房间内，展示一些人们面部表情的图片，让他们识别这些表情反映的情绪。ING金融市场销售主管马克•彼得•德博尔(Mark Pieter de Boer)承认，一些员工一开始有抵触心理。“一般情况下，你看到那些非常注重智商的人很难做出这样的改变。”

But he says enthusiasm increased when staff saw the training had results. A survey by the company found people who had been on the course were more motivated, there was greater collaboration between departments and productivity increased by 10 per cent.

但是他称，当员工发现训练有成效后，他们的积极性提高了。该公司的调查发现，参加该课程的员工更有干劲，部门之间的合作更顺畅，生产率提高了10%。

Remember the basics

别忘了基本技能

Even if the promised age of artificial intelligence does arrive, experts say we cannot afford to dispense with hard cognitive skills such as reading, writing and mathematics.

即使人工智能的有福时代最终真的到来，专家称我们也不能免除学习阅读、写作和算术等高难度认知技能。

Daisy Christodoulou, research and development manager at the UK’s Ark Schools chain, says that, unless we have these foundations in place, we will not have the mental frameworks to solve higher-order problems creatively.

英国连锁学校Ark Schools的研发经理黛西•克里斯托杜卢(Daisy Christodoulou)称，除非掌握这些基本技能，否则我们无法建立起创造性解决高阶问题的思维框架。

“Even if we do arrive at a point where most work is done by computers, cognitive skills will still matter — not for the economy, but for the successful functioning of a democratic society,” she says. “In such a society, a great deal will turn on the ownership and regulation of the computers and robots doing all the work, and the debates around such issues will require an educated and informed populace.”

“即使真的到了计算机完成大多数工作的那一天，认知技能仍然很重要——不是对于经济而言，而是为了民主社会的顺利运转。”她称，“在那样的社会中，对完成所有工作的计算机和机器人的拥有和监管将关系重大，围绕这类问题的讨论将需要受过教育、有知识的民众。