大多數(shù)企業(yè)高管通常都不會去關(guān)注有關(guān)豬內(nèi)臟手術(shù)的新聞報道。但是他們都應(yīng)該重視上周五(5月6日)早上的一條新聞,因為它很快便會引發(fā)人們?nèi)ヌ接懸粋€所有高管都必須面對的問題:哪些雇員必須被科技取代,哪些是無法替代的? 該報道介紹了機器人如何自主地完成豬小腸的縫合,而且整個過程都由機器人獨立完成。手術(shù)機器人面世的時間并不長,但它們并不完全是機器人,而是由手術(shù)醫(yī)生操控的電動工具。然而,這臺機器人卻沒有人操作。它自行完成了被刺穿豬小腸的縫合手術(shù);它不僅在實驗室完成了組織縫合,也對麻醉狀態(tài)的豬進行了組織縫合。不用為豬感到擔(dān)憂,因為機器人的手術(shù)完成質(zhì)量要好于受命執(zhí)行同一手術(shù)的外科醫(yī)生。 此事的意義已經(jīng)超越了醫(yī)學(xué)界的范疇,因為,在人們看來,手術(shù)是機器人最不大可能從事的領(lǐng)域,因此也讓人們感到震驚。研究員之一的Peter Kim在電話會議上對記者說:“如今,無人駕駛汽車已經(jīng)走進了人們的生活。這一技術(shù)始于自動泊車,然后發(fā)展成為識別正確的車道。不久之后,自動駕駛汽車便問世了?!焙苊黠@,他認為這代表了外科手術(shù)技術(shù)的發(fā)展方向。 Kim的類比是十分貼切的。周四,通用汽車和Lyft宣布,雙方將在一年內(nèi)開始在公路上測試多輛自動駕駛的雪佛蘭Bolts,而且測試車將搭乘付費乘客。Lyft應(yīng)用將為乘客提供由自動駕駛車輛接送的選項,而且一開始,仍有司機坐在駕駛席上,以防萬一。 大家對這類新聞并不感到十分驚訝,但是別忘了,主流專家在2-3年前曾信誓旦旦地說,自動駕駛汽車進入現(xiàn)實生活還需要10年或更多的時間。如今,今天的新聞報道中還提到了上路的無人駕駛汽車將會越來越多;明天又會出現(xiàn)同樣的新聞。 企業(yè)高管所面臨的問題在于,他們必須弄清楚上述事件和相關(guān)技術(shù)對于公司來說意味著什么,而這一過程的到來比他們預(yù)期的要快得多。在越來越多的工作中,科技的表現(xiàn)都超過了人類,那么從競爭角度而言,它勢必會取代人類去從事那些更為勝任的工作,拒絕這樣做將招致難以承受的成本劣勢。但是就其他工作而言,用科技替代人類可能是致命的錯誤。例如,當(dāng)股市一落千丈時,那些愿意在線開展起經(jīng)紀交易的客戶可能迫切地希望與真實的交易員進行交談。 那哪類工作適合機器人呢?即便在這個科技高度發(fā)達的年代,它最終還是取決于人們自身的判斷。高管們今后需要做出的這類判斷必然不在少數(shù),但卻鮮有前車之轍可以借鑒。(財富中文網(wǎng)) 譯者:馮豐 校對:詹妮 |
Most business leaders would not normally concern themselves with a news report about surgery on porcine innards. But on Friday morning, they all should do so because it takes us quickly to a question they’ll all have to confront: Which employees must be replaced by technology, and which employees must not be? The report tells how a robot stitched together a pig’s small intestine autonomously – entirely on its own. Surgical robots have been around a long time, but they aren’t robots at all; they’re power tools operated by human surgeons. This, however, is the real deal. The robot did the job by itself on a pig intestine that had been cut through; it did this on tissue in the lab and on tissue in an anesthetized pig. Don’t worry about the pig: The robot performed the task better than human surgeons who were assigned to do the same thing. The significance of this, beyond its meaning in the medical world, is that surgery strikes most of us as just about the last job we could imagine a robot doing. But robots are clearly on their way to doing it. “Now driverless cars are coming into our lives,” one of the researchers, Peter Kim, told reporters on a conference call. “It started with self-parking, then a technology that tells you not to go into the wrong lane. Soon you have a car that can drive by itself.” It’s obvious where he thinks the surgical technology is headed. Kim’s analogy is apt. On Thursday, General Motors GM 1.85% and Lyft announced that within a year they will start testing a fleet of self-driving Chevrolet Bolts on public roads – testing them with paying passengers inside. The Lyft app will offer passengers the option of choosing to be picked up by a self-driving car, and initially the cars will operate with a human driver behind the wheel, just in case. No one is very surprised by such news any more, but remember that just two or three years ago, mainstream experts were saying with confidence that autonomous vehicles were a decade or more from real-world use. Now it’s just today’s news story about more self-driving cars on the road; there will be another one tomorrow. The issue for business leaders is that they will have to make decisions much sooner than they expected about what these and related technologies mean for their companies. As technology performs ever more tasks better than humans, it will become competitively necessary to replace the humans doing some of those tasks; not doing so would incur an insupportable cost disadvantage. But in other jobs, replacing the humans could be a fatal error; when stock markets plunge, customers who were happy to conduct their brokerage transactions online may feel a deep and urgent need to speak to a real person, for example. Which jobs are in which category? Even in an age of awesome technology, those are ultimately judgment calls. Leaders will be making lots of those calls with very little history on which to rely. |