首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
(1)Innovation, the elixir of progress, has always cost people their jobs. In the Industrial Revolution artisan weavers were swep
(1)Innovation, the elixir of progress, has always cost people their jobs. In the Industrial Revolution artisan weavers were swep
admin
2018-09-19
55
问题
(1)Innovation, the elixir of progress, has always cost people their jobs. In the Industrial Revolution artisan weavers were swept aside by the mechanical loom. Over the past 30 years the digital revolution has displaced many of the mid-skill jobs that underpinned 20th-century middle-class life. Typists, ticket agents, bank tellers and many production-line jobs have been dispensed with, just as the weavers were.
(2)For those who believe that technological progress has made the world a better place, such churn is a natural part of rising prosperity. Although innovation kills some jobs, it creates new and better ones, as a more productive society becomes richer and its wealthier inhabitants demand more goods and services. Optimism remains the right starting-point, but for workers the dislocating effects of technology may make themselves evident faster than its benefits. Even if new jobs and wonderful products emerge, in the short term income gaps will widen, causing huge social dislocation and perhaps even changing politics.
(3)Why be worried? It is partly just a matter of history repeating itself. In the early part of the Industrial Revolution the rewards of increasing productivity went disproportionately to capital: later on, labor reaped most of the benefits. The pattern today is similar. The prosperity unleashed by the digital revolution has gone overwhelmingly to the owners of capital and the highest-skilled workers. Over the past three decades, labor’s share of output has shrunk globally from 64% to 59%. Meanwhile, the share of income going to the top 1% in America has risen from around 9% in the 1970s to 22% today. Unemployment is at alarming levels in much of the rich world, and not just for cyclical reasons. Fifteen years ago, 65% of working-age Americans were in work: since then the proportion has fallen, during good years as well as bad, to the current level of 59%.
(4)Worse, it seems likely that this wave of technological disruption to the job market has only just started. From driverless cars to clever household gadgets, innovations that already exist could destroy swathes of jobs that have hitherto been untouched. The public sector is one obvious target: it has proved singularly resistant to tech-driven reinvention. But the step change in what computers can do will have a powerful effect on middle-class jobs in the private sector too.
(5)Until now the jobs most vulnerable to machines were those that involved routine, repetitive tasks. But thanks to the exponential rise in processing power and the ubiquity of digitised information ("big data"), computers are increasingly able to perform complicated tasks more cheaply and effectively than people. Clever industrial robots can quickly "learn" a set of human actions. Services may be even more vulnerable. Computers can already detect intruders in a closed-circuit camera picture more reliably than a human can. By comparing reams of financial or biometric data, they can often diagnose fraud or illness more accurately than any number of accountants or doctors.
(6)At the same time, the digital revolution is transforming the process of innovation itself. Thanks to off-the-shelf code from the internet and platforms that host services (such as Amazon’s cloud computing), provide distribution (Apple’s app store)and offer marketing (Facebook), the number of digital startups has exploded. Just as computer-games designers invented a product that humanity never knew it needed but now cannot do without, so these firms will no doubt dream up new goods and services to employ millions. But for now they are singularly light on workers. When Instagram, a popular photo-sharing site, was sold to Facebook for about $1 billion in 2012, it had 30 million customers and employed 13 people. Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy a few months earlier, employed 145,000 people in its heyday.
(7)The problem is one of timing as much as anything. Google now employs 46,000 people. But it takes years for new industries to grow, whereas the disruption a startup causes to incumbents is felt sooner. Airbnb may turn homeowners with spare rooms into entrepreneurs, but it poses a direct threat to the lower end of the hotel business—a massive employer.
(8)If this analysis is halfway correct, the social effects will be huge. Many of the jobs most at risk are lower down the ladder (logistics, haulage), whereas the skills that are least vulnerable to automation (creativity, managerial expertise)tend to be higher up, so median wages are likely to remain stagnant for some time and income gaps are likely to widen.
(9)Anger about rising inequality is bound to grow, but politicians will find it hard to address the problem. Shunning progress would be as futile now as the Luddites’ protests against mechanised looms were in the 1810s, because any country that tried to stop would be left behind by competitors eager to embrace new technology. The freedom to raise taxes on the rich to punitive levels will be similarly constrained by the mobility of capital and highly skilled labour.
(10)The main way in which governments can help their people through this dislocation is through education systems. One of the reasons for the improvement in workers’ fortunes in the latter part of the Industrial Revolution was because schools were built to educate them—a dramatic change at the time. Now those schools themselves need to be changed, to foster the creativity that humans will need to set them a-part from computers. There should be less rote-learning and more critical thinking. Technology itself will help, whether through MOOCs (massive open online courses)or even video games that simulate the skills needed for work.
(11)Yet however well people are taught, their abilities will remain unequal, and in a world which is increasingly polarised economically, many will find their job prospects dimmed and wages squeezed. The best way of helping them is not, as many on the left seem to think, to push up minimum wages. Jacking up the floor too far would accelerate the shift from human workers to computers. Better to top up low wages with public money so that anyone who works has a reasonable income, through a bold expansion of the tax credits that countries such as America and Britain use.
(12)Innovation has brought great benefits to humanity. Nobody in their right mind would want to return to the world of handloom weavers. But the benefits of technological progress are unevenly distributed, especially in the early stages of each new wave, and it is up to governments to spread them. In the 19th century it took the threat of revolution to bring about progressive reforms. Today’s governments would do well to start making the changes needed before their people get angry.
According to Para. 4, what would happen to the public sector?
选项
A、It would be able to resist to digital revolution as before.
B、It would thrive thanks to the technological innovation.
C、It would bear the brunt of the technological disruption.
D、The effect of new innovations on it is hitherto unknown.
答案
C
解析
第4段最后两句提到,公共部门将会是其中一个受害者(one obvious target),尽管公共部门此前一直抵抗住了新科技发明的冲击。选项C中的bear the brunt of指“首当其冲”,该项实指公共部门是受到新技术冲击的主要受害者,实际上与原文的one obvious target语义一致,故为正确答案。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/rhEK777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
Whatpersonalqualitiesaredesirableinateacher?Probablynotwopeoplewoulddrawupapproximatelysimilarlists,butI【M1】_
Losingweightiseasierwhenthereismoneyontheline,U.S.researcherssaidonTuesday.Theysaidweight-lossprogramsthat
Cross-CulturalCommunicationMulticulturalismisarealityinNorthAmerica.Itis,therefore,importanttoknowhowtobridgec
都市寸土千金,地价炒得越来越高,今后将更高。拥有一个小小花园的希望,对寻常之辈不啻是一种奢望,一种梦想。我想,其实谁都有一个小小花园,这便是我们的内心世界。人的智力需要开发,人的内心世界也是需要开发的。人和动物的区别,除了众所周知的诸多方面,恐怕
PASSAGETWOWhatdoestheauthorsuggesttoshiftthedynamicintheclassroom(Para.11)?
PASSAGETWOWhatistheauthor’sattitudetowardsvanishinglanguagesthroughouttheworld?
A、Sheownedacar.B、Shedrovewell.C、Shelikeddrivers’uniforms.D、Itwasherchildhooddream.D此题需要根据相关内容进行推理和归纳。女士说她从小就想学车,
Women’sworkhasnotchangedconsiderablyinthepast200years,movingfromthehouseholdtotheofficeorthefactory,andlat
(1)It’sagoldenageforstudyinginequality.ThomasPiketty,aFrencheconomist,setthebenchmarkin2014whenhisbook,Capi
A、It’srelaxing.B、It’sunromantic.C、It’spainful.D、It’sdevastating.ASharon提到夫妻之间应该安排moneydate,用以讨论财务问题。她表示财务约会不一定是unromant
随机试题
汽油发动机点火系按其组成和产生高压电的方式不同可分为_______、_______、_______和_______。
MCS-51指令系统中direct表示的含义是:______。
简述我国社会主义市场经济体系的特征。
与质量管理的目标无关的是
男性,40岁,在试戴金属冠时,反映戴上右侧后牙冠时,咬合时下颌有偏移,去除冠后无上述情况发生。临床检查发现:右侧上颌第一磨牙金属冠的颊尖舌斜面有咬合滑走印迹。导致患者下颌在咬合发生偏移的主要原因是
首先提出肾与腰部疾病密切相关的医著是
决定红细胞血型的物质是()
某企业擅自将防治污染的设施拆除,当地环保部门在例行检查中发现该企业污染物排放超过国家排放标准,于是立即下达对该企业的行政处罚,处罚内容是责令该企业重新安装使用防污设施,并处以5000元罚款,请根据我国现行《环境保护法》判断下列哪种说法正确?()
在以下关于综合规划的描述中,正确的是()。
琪琪和表姐小薇差半岁,同时上了幼儿园小班。由于小薇爸爸妈妈工作忙,不久她被送到了小镇上奶奶家。小镇幼儿园的老师非常强调知识学习,一年后,小薇已经能认许多字,而琪琪却整天沉浸在游戏中,几乎不用学习,一个字也不认得。爸爸妈妈开始为此担心,怕幼儿园这样的教学会影
最新回复
(
0
)