DEREK THOMPSON is a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly, where he writes about economics, labor markets, and the entertainment business. This essay first appeared in the July/August 2015 issue. 德里克·汤普森是《大西洋月刊》高级编辑，主要撰写经济学、劳动力市场和娱乐产业相关文章。本文首发于 2015 年 7/8 月刊。
1. YOUNGSTOWN, U.S.A. 1. 美国扬斯敦纪事
The end of work is still just a futuristic concept for most of the United States, but it is something like a moment in history for Youngstown, Ohio, one its residents can cite with precision: September 19, 1977. 对多数美国人而言，"工作终结"仍是个未来概念，但对俄亥俄州扬斯敦的居民来说，这已是刻骨铭心的历史时刻——他们能准确报出那个日期：1977 年 9 月 19 日。
For much of the 20th century, Youngstown’s steel mills delivered such great prosperity that the city was a model of the American dream, boasting a median income and a homeownership rate that were among the nation’s highest. But as manufacturing shifted abroad after World War II, Youngstown steel suffered, and on that gray September afternoon in 1977, Youngstown Sheet and Tube announced the shuttering of its Campbell Works mill. Within five years, the city lost 50,000 jobs and $1.3\$ 1.3 billion in manufacturing wages. The effect was so severe that a term was coined to describe the fallout: regional depression. 20 世纪大部分时间里，扬斯敦的钢铁厂带来了巨大繁荣，使这座城市成为美国梦的典范——其中位收入水平和住房自有率曾位居全美前列。但随着二战后制造业向海外转移，扬斯敦的钢铁业遭受重创。1977 年那个阴沉的九月下午，扬斯敦薄板钢管公司宣布关闭其坎贝尔工厂。五年内，这座城市失去了 5 万个工作岗位和 $1.3\$ 1.3 亿美元的制造业工资收入。冲击如此剧烈，以至于人们创造了一个新词来描述其后果：区域性经济萧条。
Youngstown was transformed not only by an economic disruption but also by a psychological and cultural breakdown. Depression, spousal abuse, and suicide all became much more prevalent; the caseload of the area’s mental-health center tripled within a decade. The city built four prisons in the mid1990s - a rare growth industry. One of the few downtown construction projects of that period was a museum dedicated to the defunct steel industry. 扬斯敦不仅经历了经济崩溃，更遭受了心理与文化层面的瓦解。抑郁、家暴和自杀现象急剧增加——当地心理健康中心的接诊量十年间增长了两倍。1990 年代中期，这座城市新建了四所监狱，成为罕见的增长行业。同期市中心为数不多的建设项目之一，竟是一座纪念消亡钢铁工业的博物馆。
This winter, I traveled to Ohio to consider what would happen if technology permanently replaced a great deal of human work. I wasn’t seeking a tour of our automated future. I went because Youngstown has become a national metaphor for the decline of labor, a place where the middle class of the 20th century has become a museum exhibit. 这个冬天，我前往俄亥俄州思考一个问题：如果科技永久取代大量人类工作，世界将会怎样？我并非去参观自动化未来图景，而是因为扬斯敦已成为美国劳动力衰退的象征——这里 20 世纪的中产阶级生活已沦为博物馆展品。
In the past few years, even as the United States has pulled itself partway out of the jobs hole created by the Great Recession, some economists and technologists have warned that the economy is near a 过去几年间，尽管美国已从大衰退造成的就业深渊中部分复苏，但一些经济学家和技术专家警告称，经济正濒临
tipping point. When they peer deeply into labormarket data, they see troubling signs, masked for now by a cyclical recovery. And when they look up from their spreadsheets, they see automation high and low - robots in the operating room and behind the fast-food counter. They imagine self-driving cars snaking through the streets and Amazon drones dotting the sky, replacing millions of drivers, warehouse stockers, and retail workers. They observe that the capabilities of machines - already formidable continue to expand exponentially, while our own remain the same. And they wonder: Is any job truly safe? 临界点。当他们深入剖析劳动力市场数据时，发现了被周期性复苏暂时掩盖的危机信号。而当他们从数据表格中抬起头，自动化已无处不在——从手术室到快餐店收银台后都有机器人的身影。他们预见自动驾驶汽车将在街道穿梭，亚马逊无人机将布满天空，取代数百万司机、仓库理货员和零售店员。他们注意到机器能力正以指数级速度突破人类极限，不禁发出诘问：还有真正安全的工作吗？
Futurists and science-fiction writers have at times looked forward to machines’ workplace takeover with a kind of giddy excitement, imagining the banishment of drudgery and its replacement by expansive leisure and almost limitless personal freedom. And make no mistake: if the capabilities of computers continue to multiply while the price of computing continues to decline, that will mean a great many of life’s necessities and luxuries will become ever cheaper, and it will mean great wealth at least when aggregated up to the level of the national economy. 未来主义者和科幻作家有时会以近乎眩晕的兴奋期待机器接管职场，幻想着苦差事的消失，取而代之的是广阔的闲暇和近乎无限的个人自由。毋庸置疑：如果计算机的能力持续倍增而计算成本不断下降，这将意味着生活中诸多必需品和奢侈品会变得越来越便宜，至少从国民经济整体层面来看，这将创造巨大财富。
But even leaving aside questions of how to distribute that wealth, the widespread disappearance of work would usher in a social transformation unlike any we’ve seen. If John Russo is right, then saving work is more important than saving any particular job. Industriousness has served as America’s unofficial religion since its founding. The sanctity and preeminence of work lie at the heart of the country’s politics, economics, and social interactions. What might happen if work goes away? 但即便撇开财富分配问题不谈，工作机会的大规模消失也将引发我们前所未见的社会变革。如果约翰·鲁索的观点正确，那么挽救工作本身比保住任何具体岗位都更重要。勤劳自美国立国之初就是其非官方信仰。工作的神圣性与至高地位构成了这个国家政治、经济和社会交往的核心。如果工作消失，可能会发生什么？
The U.S. labor force has been shaped by millennia of technological progress. Agricultural technology birthed the farming industry, the industrial revolution moved people into factories, and then globalization and automation moved them back out, giving rise to a nation of services. But throughout these reshufflings, the total number of jobs has always increased. What may be looming is something different: an era of technological unemployment, in which computer scientists and software engineers essential- 美国劳动力市场历经数千年技术进步的塑造。农业技术催生了农耕产业，工业革命将人们送入工厂，随后全球化和自动化又使他们重返服务业，造就了一个服务型国家。但贯穿这些变革，就业总量始终在增长。而即将降临的可能是另一番景象：一个技术性失业的时代，届时计算机科学家和软件工程师将成为——
ly invent us out of work, and the total number of jobs declines steadily and permanently. 最终将彻底取代人类劳动，工作岗位总量将持续永久性下降。
This fear is not new. The hope that machines might free us from toil has always been intertwined with the fear that they will rob us of our agency. In the midst of the Great Depression, the economist John Maynard Keynes forecast that technological progress might allow a 15-hour workweek, and abundant leisure, by 2030. But around the same time, President Herbert Hoover received a letter warning that industrial technology was a “Frankenstein monster” that threatened to upend manufacturing, “devouring our civilization.” (The letter came from the mayor of Palo Alto, of all places.) In 1962, President John F. Kennedy said, “If men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work.” But two years later, a committee of scientists and social activists sent an open letter to President Lyndon B. Johnson arguing that “the cybernation revolution” would create “a separate nation of the poor, the unskilled, the jobless,” who would be unable either to find work or to afford life’s necessities. 这种恐惧并非新鲜事。机器可能将我们从劳役中解放的希望，始终与它们会剥夺人类能动性的恐惧交织在一起。大萧条期间，经济学家约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯曾预言，到 2030 年技术进步或将实现每周 15 小时工作制与充裕闲暇。但就在同一时期，赫伯特·胡佛总统收到一封警告信，称工业技术是威胁颠覆制造业的"弗兰肯斯坦怪物"，正在"吞噬我们的文明"（这封信竟来自帕洛阿尔托市长）。1962 年，约翰·F·肯尼迪总统宣称："如果人类有天赋发明让工人失业的新机器，就有能力让这些人重新就业。"但两年后，一个由科学家和社会活动家组成的委员会向林登·B·约翰逊总统递交公开信，指出"自动化革命"将造就"一个由穷人、无技能者和失业者组成的孤立国度"，这些人既无法找到工作，也无力负担生活必需品。
The job market defied doomsayers in those earlier times, and according to the most frequently reported jobs numbers, it has so far done the same in our own time. Unemployment is currently just over 5 percent, and 2014 was this century’s best year for job growth. One could be forgiven for saying that recent predictions about technological job displacement are merely forming the latest chapter in a long story called The Boys Who Cried Robot - one in which the robot, unlike the wolf, never arrives in the end. 早年的就业市场曾让末日预言者大跌眼镜，而根据最常被引用的就业数据，我们这个时代至今也延续着同样的趋势。当前失业率仅略高于 5%，2014 年更是创下了本世纪就业增长的最佳纪录。若有人将近期关于技术取代人力的预言，比作《狼来了》故事的最新篇章——只不过这次喊"机器人来了"的孩子们，最终迎来的永远不会是真正的狼——这种看法倒也情有可原。
The end-of-work argument has often been dismissed as the “Luddite fallacy,” an allusion to the 19th-century British brutes who smashed textilemaking machines at the dawn of the industrial revolution, fearing the machines would put hand-weavers out of work. But some of the most sober economists are beginning to worry that the Luddites weren’t wrong, just premature. When former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers was an MIT undergraduate in the early 1970s, many economists disdained “the stupid people [who] thought that automation was going to make all the jobs go away,” he said at the National Bureau of Economic Research Summer Institute in July 2013. “Until a few years ago, I didn’t think this was a very complicated subject: the Luddites were wrong, and the believers in technology and technological progress were right. I’m not so completely certain now.” 关于工作终结的论点常被贬斥为"卢德谬误"——这个典故源自 19 世纪工业革命初期，那些害怕机器会让手工织工失业而捣毁纺织机械的英国暴徒。但如今一些最清醒的经济学家开始担忧，卢德分子或许并没有错，只是生不逢时。美国前财政部长劳伦斯·萨默斯在 2013 年 7 月美国国家经济研究局夏季研讨会上回忆，当他在 1970 年代初就读麻省理工学院时，许多经济学家都鄙夷"那些以为自动化会让所有工作消失的蠢人"。"直到几年前，我都认为这个问题很简单：卢德分子错了，相信技术和科技进步的人才是对的。但现在我不那么确定了。"
2. Reasons to Cry Robot 2. 为机器人哭泣的理由
What does the “end of work” mean, exactly? It does not mean the imminence of total unemployment, nor is the United States remotely likely to face, say, 30 or 50 percent unemployment within the next decade. Rather, technology could exert a slow but continual downward pressure on the value and availability of work - that is, on wages and on the share of prime-age workers with full-time jobs. Eventually, by degrees, that could create a new normal, where the expectation that work will be a central feature of adult life dissipates for a significant portion of society. "工作终结"究竟意味着什么？它并非指全面失业迫在眉睫，也不意味着美国在未来十年内会面临 30%或 50%的失业率。相反，技术可能对工作的价值和可获得性——即工资水平与壮年劳动力全职就业比例——施加缓慢但持续的下行压力。最终，这种压力可能逐步催生新的常态：对于社会相当一部分群体而言，工作将不再是成年生活核心要素的预期将逐渐消散。
After 300 years of people crying wolf, there are now three broad reasons to take seriously the argument that the beast is at the door: the ongoing triumph of capital over labor, the quiet demise of the working man, and the impressive dexterity of information technology. 在人们喊了 300 年"狼来了"之后，如今有三个重要理由让我们必须严肃对待"狼已至门前"的论点：资本对劳动力的持续胜利、劳动者无声的消亡，以及信息技术令人惊叹的灵活性。
Labor’s losses. One of the first things we might expect to see in a period of technological displacement is the diminishment of human labor as a driver of economic growth. In fact, signs that this is happening have been present for quite some time. The share of U.S. economic output that’s paid out in wages fell steadily in the 1980s, reversed some of its losses in the '90s, and then continued falling after 2000, accelerating during the Great Recession. It now stands at its lowest level since the government started keeping track in the mid-20th century. 劳动力的衰退。在技术性替代时期，我们首先可能预见的现象便是人力劳动作为经济增长驱动力的式微。事实上，这一趋势的征兆已显现多时。美国经济产出中工资所占份额在 1980 年代持续下降，90 年代虽部分回升，但 2000 年后又延续跌势，并在大衰退期间加速下滑。如今该比例已降至政府自 20 世纪中叶开始统计以来的最低水平。
A number of theories have been advanced to explain this phenomenon, including globalization and its accompanying loss of bargaining power for some workers. But Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman, economists at the University of Chicago, have estimated that almost half of the decline is the result of businesses’ replacing workers with computers and software. In 1964, the nation’s most valuable company, AT&T, was worth $267\$ 267 billion in today’s dollars and employed 758,611 people. Today’s telecommunications giant, Google, is worth $370\$ 370 billion but has only about 55,000 employees less than a tenth the size of AT&T’s workforce in its heyday. 关于这一现象，已有多种理论提出解释，包括全球化及其导致的某些劳动者议价能力下降。但芝加哥大学经济学家卢卡斯·卡拉巴波尼斯和布伦特·尼曼估算，近半数的下降源于企业用计算机和软件替代人力。1964 年，美国市值最高的企业 AT&T 按现今币值计算价值 $267\$ 267 亿美元，雇佣了 758,611 名员工。而当今的通信业巨头谷歌市值 $370\$ 370 亿美元，员工数却仅有约 55,000 人——还不到 AT&T 鼎盛时期员工规模的十分之一。
The spread of nonworking men and underemployed youth. The share of prime-age Americans (25 to 54 years old) who are working has been trending down since 2000. Among men, the decline began even earlier: the share of prime-age men who are neither working nor looking for work has doubled since the late 1970s, and has increased as much 不工作男性和低就业青年的蔓延。自 2000 年以来，美国 25 至 54 岁黄金年龄人口的就业率持续走低。男性群体的下滑趋势更早：既不工作也不找工作的黄金年龄男性比例自 1970 年代末已翻倍，其增幅与...
throughout the recovery as it did during the Great Recession itself. All in all, about one in six primeage men today are either unemployed or out of the workforce altogether. This is what the economist Tyler Cowen calls “the key statistic” for understanding the spreading rot in the American workforce. Conventional wisdom has long held that under normal economic conditions, men in this age group - at the peak of their abilities and less likely than women to be primary caregivers for children - should almost all be working. Yet fewer and fewer are. 在整个经济复苏期间，这一现象如同大萧条时期一样持续存在。总体而言，如今约六分之一的壮年男性要么处于失业状态，要么完全退出劳动力市场。经济学家泰勒·考恩将之称为理解美国劳动力市场持续恶化的"关键数据"。传统观点长期认为，在正常经济环境下，这个处于能力巅峰期的年龄群体——且比女性更少承担主要育儿责任——本应几乎全员就业。然而实际就业人数却越来越少。
Economists cannot say for certain why men are turning away from work, but one explanation is that technological change has helped eliminate the jobs for which many are best suited. Since 2000, the number of manufacturing jobs has fallen by almost 5 million, or about 30 percent. 经济学家无法确切解释男性退出劳动力市场的原因，但一种解释是技术变革淘汰了许多人最擅长的工作岗位。自 2000 年以来，制造业岗位减少了近 500 万个，降幅约 30%。
Young people just coming onto the job market are also struggling - and by many measures have been for years. Six years into the recovery, the share of recent college grads who are “underemployed” (in jobs that historically haven’t required a degree) is still higher than it was in 2007 - or, for that matter, 2000. And the supply of these “non-college jobs” is shifting away from high-paying occupations, such as electrician, toward low-wage service jobs, such as waiter. More people are pursuing higher education, but the real wages of recent college graduates have fallen by 7.7 percent since 2000 . In the biggest picture, the job market appears to be requiring more and more preparation for a lower and lower starting wage. The distorting effect of the Great Recession should make us cautious about overinterpreting these trends, but most began before the recession, and they do not seem to speak encouragingly about the future of work. 刚步入就业市场的年轻人同样举步维艰——多项数据显示这种困境已持续多年。经济复苏六年后，应届大学毕业生"就业不足"（从事历史上无需学位的工作）的比例仍高于 2007 年——甚至 2000 年。而这些"非大学岗位"的供给正从电工等高薪职业转向服务员等低薪服务岗位。尽管更多人接受了高等教育，但 2000 年以来应届毕业生的实际工资下降了 7.7%。宏观来看，就业市场似乎要求求职者做越来越多准备，却提供越来越低的起薪。虽然大衰退的扭曲效应让我们需谨慎解读这些趋势，但多数趋势在衰退前就已出现，它们似乎预示着不容乐观的就业前景。
The shrewdness of software. One common objection to the idea that technology will permanently displace huge numbers of workers is that new gadgets, like self checkout kiosks at drugstores, have failed to fully displace their human counterparts, like cashiers. But employers typically take years to embrace new machines at the expense of workers. The robotics revolution began in factories in the 1960s and '70s, but manufacturing employment kept rising until 1980, and then collapsed during the subsequent recessions. Likewise, “the personal computer existed in the '80s,” says Henry Siu, an economist at the University of British Columbia, “but you don’t see any effect on office and administrative support jobs until the 1990s, and then suddenly, in the last recession, it’s huge. So today you’ve got checkout 软件的狡黠。对于技术将永久取代大量工人的观点，一个常见的反对意见是：像药店自助结账机这样的新设备，并未完全取代收银员等人类员工。但雇主通常需要数年时间才会以牺牲工人为代价采用新机器。机器人革命始于 20 世纪 60 至 70 年代的工厂，但制造业就业人数一直增长到 1980 年，随后在经济衰退中急剧下滑。不列颠哥伦比亚大学经济学家亨利·修指出："个人电脑在 80 年代就已存在，但直到 90 年代才看到它对文职行政类工作的影响，而在最近一次经济衰退中，这种影响突然变得巨大。如今我们有了自助结账
screens and the promise of driverless cars, flying drones, and little warehouse robots. We know that these tasks can be done by machines rather than people. But we may not see the effect until the next recession, or the recession after that.” 屏幕，还有无人驾驶汽车、飞行无人机和小型仓储机器人的前景。我们知道这些工作可以由机器而非人类完成。但可能要等到下次经济衰退，或是再下一次衰退时，我们才会看到这种影响。"
Some observers say our humanity is a moat that machines cannot cross. They believe people’s capacity for compassion, deep understanding, and creativity are inimitable. But as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have argued in their book The Second Machine Age, computers are so dexterous that predicting their application 10 years from now is almost impossible. Who could have guessed in 2005, two years before the iPhone was released, that smartphones would threaten hotel jobs within the decade, by helping homeowners rent out their apartments and houses to strangers on Airbnb? Or that the company behind the most popular search engine would design a self-driving car that could soon threaten driving, the most common job occupation among American men? 一些观察家认为，人性是机器无法跨越的护城河。他们相信人类的同理心、深刻理解力和创造力都是不可复制的。但正如埃里克·布林约尔松和安德鲁·麦卡菲在《第二次机器时代》中所论证的，计算机如此灵巧，以至于预测十年后的应用几乎不可能。2005 年时——距离 iPhone 发布还有两年——谁能料到智能手机将在十年内通过帮助房主在爱彼迎上向陌生人出租公寓和房屋，从而威胁到酒店业的工作？或者谁能想到，这家拥有最受欢迎搜索引擎的公司会设计出自动驾驶汽车，可能很快威胁到美国男性中最常见的职业——驾驶？
In 2013, Oxford University researchers forecast that machines might be able to perform half of all U.S. jobs in the next two decades. The projection was audacious, but in at least a few cases, it probably didn’t go far enough. For example, the authors named psychologist as one of the occupations least likely to be “computerisable.” But some research suggests that people are more honest in therapy sessions when they believe they are confessing their troubles to a computer, because a machine can’t pass moral judgment. Google and WebMD already may be answering questions once reserved for one’s therapist. This doesn’t prove that psychologists are going the way of the textile worker. Rather, it shows how easily computers can encroach on areas previously considered “for humans only.” 2013 年，牛津大学研究人员预测未来二十年机器可能取代美国半数工作岗位。这个预测看似大胆，但至少在某些领域恐怕还过于保守。例如，研究报告将心理学家列为最不可能被"计算机化"的职业之一。但另有研究表明，当人们以为是在向电脑倾诉烦恼时，他们在治疗过程中反而更诚实，因为机器不会做出道德评判。谷歌和 WebMD 医疗网站已回答了许多原本属于心理医生职责范畴的问题。这并非预示心理学家会像纺织工人那样被淘汰，而是揭示了计算机如何轻易侵入那些曾被视为"人类专属"的领域。
After 300 years of breathtaking innovation, people aren’t massively unemployed or indentured by machines. But to suggest how this could change, some economists have pointed to the defunct career of the second-most-important species in U.S. economic history: the horse. 历经三百年令人惊叹的技术革新，人类并未因机器而大规模失业或沦为奴工。但为说明这种可能性，一些经济学家以美国经济史上第二重要物种——马匹——的消亡轨迹作为警示案例。
For many centuries, people created technologies that made the horse more productive and more valuable - like plows for agriculture and swords for battle. One might have assumed that the continuing advance of complementary technologies would make the animal ever more essential to farming and fighting, historically perhaps the two most consequential human activities. Instead came inventions that made the horse obsolete - the tractor, the car, 千百年来，人类不断发明技术提升马匹的生产力和价值——从农耕用的犁具到征战用的刀剑。人们或许以为，随着辅助技术的持续进步，这种动物将在农业和战争这两项历史上最具影响力的人类活动中变得愈发不可或缺。然而真正到来的却是让马匹彻底退出历史舞台的发明——拖拉机、汽车、
and the tank. After tractors rolled onto American farms in the early 20th century, the population of horses and mules began to decline steeply, falling nearly 50 percent by the 1930s and 90 percent by the 1950s. 和坦克。当 20 世纪初拖拉机驶入美国农场后，马骡数量开始急剧下降，到 1930 年代减少了近 50%，至 1950 年代更是锐减了 90%。
Humans can do much more than trot, carry, and pull. But the skills required in most offices hardly elicit our full range of intelligence. Most jobs are still boring, repetitive, and easily learned. The mostcommon occupations in the United States are retail salesperson, cashier, food and beverage server, and office clerk. Together, these four jobs employ 15.4 million people - nearly 10 percent of the labor force, or more workers than there are in Texas and Massachusetts combined. Each is highly susceptible to automation, according to the Oxford study. 人类能做的远不止小跑、负重和拖拉。但大多数办公室工作所需的技能，几乎无法激发我们全方位的才智。多数岗位依然枯燥、重复且容易上手。美国最常见的职业是零售销售员、收银员、餐饮服务员和办公室文员。这四类岗位共雇佣了 1540 万人——接近劳动力总数的 10%，比得克萨斯州和马萨诸塞州的总人口还多。牛津大学研究显示，这些职业都极易被自动化取代。
Technology creates some jobs too, but the creative half of creative destruction is easily overstated. Nine out of 10 workers today are in occupations that existed 100 years ago, and just 5 percent of the jobs generated between 1993 and 2013 came from “high tech” sectors like computing, software, and telecommunications. Our newest industries tend to be the most labor-efficient: they just don’t require many people. It is for precisely this reason that the economic historian Robert Skidelsky, comparing the exponential growth in computing power with the less-than-exponential growth in job complexity, has said, “Sooner or later, we will run out of jobs.” 技术确实也创造了一些就业机会，但创造性破坏中"创造性"的部分往往被过分夸大。如今九成劳动者从事的职业在百年前就已存在，而 1993 至 2013 年间新增的岗位中，仅有 5%来自计算机、软件和通信等"高科技"领域。最新兴的产业往往人力效率最高：它们根本不需要太多员工。正因如此，经济史学家罗伯特·斯基德尔斯基在对比计算能力的指数级增长与工作复杂性的亚指数级增长时指出："我们迟早会面临无工可做的局面。"
Is that certain - or certainly imminent? No. The signs so far are murky and suggestive. The most fundamental and wrenching job restructurings and contractions tend to happen during recessions: we’ll know more after the next couple of downturns. But the possibility seems significant enough - and the consequences disruptive enough - that we owe it to ourselves to start thinking about what society could look like without universal work, in an effort to begin nudging it toward the better outcomes and away from the worse ones. 这种局面确定会发生吗——或者说迫在眉睫？未必。目前的迹象仍模糊不清且仅具暗示性。最根本、最剧烈的工作结构调整和岗位缩减往往发生在经济衰退期：经过未来几次经济低迷后，我们会有更清晰的认识。但这种可能性已足够重大——其破坏性后果也足够深远——我们有必要开始思考全民失业状态下的社会图景，努力引导其向更好的方向发展，避免走向更糟的结局。
To paraphrase the science-fiction novelist William Gibson, there are, perhaps, fragments of the post-work future distributed throughout the present. I see three overlapping possibilities as formal employment opportunities decline. Some people displaced from the formal workforce will devote their freedom to simple leisure; some will seek to build productive communities outside the workplace; and others will fight, passionately and in many cases fruitlessly, to reclaim their productivity by piecing together jobs in an informal economy. These are futures of consumption, communal creativity, and con- 用科幻小说家威廉·吉布森的话来说，后工作时代的未来碎片或许已散落在当下。随着正式就业机会的减少，我看到三种相互交织的可能性：从正规劳动力市场退出的人，有的会将自由投入简单休闲；有的会尝试在工作场所之外建设富有创造力的社群；还有的则会激烈抗争——往往徒劳无功——试图通过零散的非正式经济工作来重拾生产力。这便是消费主义、集体创造与抗争性生存并存的未来图景。
tingency. In any combination, it is almost certain that the country would have to embrace a radical new role for government. 无论如何组合，几乎可以肯定的是，这个国家将不得不接受政府角色的彻底革新。
3. Consumption: The Paradox of Leisure 3. 消费：休闲的悖论
Work is really three things, says Peter Frase, the author of Four Futures, a forthcoming book about how automation will change America: the means by which the economy produces goods, the means by which people earn income, and an activity that lends meaning or purpose to many people’s lives. “We tend to conflate these things,” he told me, “because today we need to pay people to keep the lights on, so to speak. But in a future of abundance, you wouldn’t, and we ought to think about ways to make it easier and better to not be employed.” Frase belongs to a small group of writers, academics, and economists - they have been called “post-workists” - who welcome, even root for, the end of labor. American society has “an irrational belief in work for work’s sake,” says Benjamin Hunnicutt, another post-workist and a historian at the University of Iowa, even though most jobs aren’t so uplifting. A 2014 Gallup report of worker satisfaction found that as many as 70 percent of Americans don’t feel engaged by their current job. Hunnicutt told me that if a cashier’s work were a video game - grab an item, find the bar code, scan it, slide the item onward, and repeat - critics of video games might call it mindless. But when it’s a job, politicians praise its intrinsic dignity. “Purpose, meaning, identity, fulfillment, creativity, autonomy - all these things that positive psychology has shown us to be necessary for wellbeing are absent in the average job,” he said. 即将出版探讨自动化如何改变美国的著作《四种未来》的作者彼得·弗拉斯指出，工作实际上包含三重含义：它是经济生产商品的手段，是人们获取收入的途径，更是赋予许多人生活意义的活动。"我们往往将这些概念混为一谈，"他告诉我，"因为目前我们需要支付报酬才能让人维持社会运转。但在物质丰裕的未来，这种必要性将消失，我们应该思考如何让不就业的状态变得更轻松美好。"弗拉斯属于一个被称为"后工作主义者"的小众群体——这群作家、学者和经济学家甚至期待劳动时代的终结。爱荷华大学历史学家、同为后工作主义者的本杰明·汉尼卡特认为，美国社会"对为工作而工作存在非理性崇拜"，尽管大多数职业并不那么令人振奋。2014 年盖洛普发布的员工满意度报告显示，高达 70%的美国人对现有工作缺乏投入感。 胡尼卡特告诉我，如果把收银员的工作比作电子游戏——拿起商品、找到条形码、扫描、把商品滑向前方，如此循环——游戏评论家可能会说这毫无意义。但当它成为一份职业时，政客们却称赞其内在尊严。"目标感、意义感、身份认同、成就感、创造力、自主性——这些积极心理学证明对幸福至关重要的要素，在普通工作中都是缺失的，"他说。
The post-workists are certainly right about some important things. Paid labor does not always map to social good. Raising children and caring for the sick is essential work, and these jobs are compensated poorly or not at all. In a postwork society, Hunnicutt said, people might spend more time caring for their families and neighbors; pride could come from our relationships rather than from our careers. 后工作主义者在某些重要问题上的确是正确的。有偿劳动并不总是与社会效益画等号。抚养孩子和照顾病患是至关重要的工作，但这些工作要么报酬微薄，要么毫无补偿。胡尼卡特表示，在后工作社会，人们可能会花更多时间照顾家人和邻居；自豪感将来自我们的人际关系而非职业成就。
The post-work proponents acknowledge that, even in the best post-work scenarios, pride and jealousy will persevere, because reputation will always be scarce, even in an economy of abundance. But with the right government provisions, they believe, the end of wage labor will allow for a golden age of wellbeing. Hunnicutt said he thinks colleges could reemerge as cultural centers rather than job-prep institutions. The word school, he pointed out, comes from sigma kappa eta o lambda bar(e)\sigma \kappa \eta o \lambda \bar{e}, the Greek word for “leisure.” “We 后工作时代的倡导者们承认，即便在最理想的无工作社会里，骄傲与嫉妒仍将存在，因为声誉永远都是稀缺品——哪怕在物质丰裕的经济体系中。但他们相信，只要政府施策得当，雇佣劳动的终结将开启一个福祉的黄金时代。汉尼卡特认为，大学可能重新成为文化中心而非职业培训机构。他指出，"学校"一词源自古希腊语中表示"闲暇"的词汇。"我们
used to teach people to be free,” he said. “Now we teach them to work.” 曾经教导人们如何获得自由，"他说，"如今却只教他们如何工作。"
Hunnicutt’s vision rests on certain assumptions about taxation and redistribution that might not be congenial to many Americans today. But even leaving that aside for the moment, this vision is problematic: it doesn’t resemble the world as it is currently experienced by most jobless people. By and large, the jobless don’t spend their downtime socializing with friends or taking up new hobbies. Instead, they watch TV or sleep. Time-use surveys show that jobless prime-age people dedicate some of the time once spent working to cleaning and childcare. But men in particular devote most of their free time to leisure, the lion’s share of which is spent watching television, browsing the Internet, and sleeping. Retired seniors watch about 50 hours of television a week, according to Nielsen. That means they spend a majority of their lives either sleeping or sitting on the sofa looking at a flatscreen. The unemployed theoretically have the most time to socialize, and yet studies have shown that they feel the most social isolation; it is surprisingly hard to replace the camaraderie of the water cooler. 汉尼卡特的愿景建立在某些关于税收和再分配的假设之上，这些假设可能并不符合当今许多美国人的观念。但即便暂且抛开这一点，这种愿景也存在问题：它与大多数失业者当前所处的现实世界并不相符。总体而言，失业者并不会将闲暇时间用于与朋友社交或培养新爱好，而是选择看电视或睡觉。时间使用调查显示，处于黄金年龄的失业者会将部分原本用于工作的时间投入到清洁和育儿中。但尤其是男性，他们大部分空闲时间都用于休闲活动，其中绝大部分是看电视、浏览互联网和睡觉。根据尼尔森的数据，退休老人每周观看电视的时间约为 50 小时。这意味着他们生命中的大部分时间要么在睡觉，要么坐在沙发上盯着平板屏幕。理论上失业者拥有最多的社交时间，但研究表明他们感受到的社会隔离感最为强烈——饮水机旁的同事情谊竟出人意料地难以替代。
Most people want to work, and are miserable when they cannot. The ills of unemployment go well beyond the loss of income; people who lose their job are more likely to suffer from mental and physical ailments. “There is a loss of status, a general malaise and demoralization, which appears somatically or psychologically or both,” says Ralph Catalano, a public-health professor at UC Berkeley. Research has shown that it is harder to recover from a long bout of joblessness than from losing a loved one or suffering a life-altering injury. The very things that help many people recover from other emotional traumas - a routine, an absorbing distraction, a daily purpose - are not readily available to the unemployed. 大多数人渴望工作，失业会让他们痛苦不堪。失业的危害远不止收入损失；失去工作的人更容易遭受身心疾病的困扰。"人们会失去社会地位，普遍感到不适和士气低落，这些影响会体现在身体或心理上，或两者兼有，"加州大学伯克利分校的公共卫生教授拉尔夫·卡塔拉诺解释道。研究表明，从长期失业中恢复比失去至亲或遭受改变人生的伤害更为困难。那些帮助人们从其他情感创伤中恢复的要素——规律生活、全神贯注的消遣、日常目标——对失业者而言都难以获得。
The transition from labor force to leisure force would likely be particularly hard on Americans, the worker bees of the rich world: Between 1950 and 2012, annual hours worked per worker fell significantly throughout Europe - by about 40 percent in Germany and the Netherlands - but by only 10 percent in the United States. Richer, college-educated Americans are working more than they did 30 years ago, particularly when you count time working and answering email at home. 从劳动大军转变为休闲群体对美国人的冲击可能尤为剧烈，这个国家堪称富裕世界中的工蜂：1950 年至 2012 年间，欧洲各国工人年均工时大幅下降——德国和荷兰降幅约 40%——而美国仅下降 10%。富裕且受过高等教育的美国人比 30 年前工作更长时间，特别是将在家工作和回复邮件的时间计算在内时。
In 1989, the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Judith LeFevre conducted a famous study of Chicago workers that found people at work 1989 年，心理学家米哈里·契克森米哈伊和朱迪斯·勒菲弗对芝加哥工人进行了一项著名研究，发现职场中的人们
often wished they were somewhere else. But in questionnaires, these same workers reported feeling better and less anxious in the office or at the plant than they did elsewhere. The two psychologists called this “the paradox of work”: many people are happier complaining about jobs than they are luxuriating in too much leisure. Other researchers have used the term guilty couch potato to describe people who use media to relax but often feel worthless when they reflect on their unproductive downtime. Contentment speaks in the present tense, but something more - pride - comes only in reflection on past accomplishments. 常常希望自己身在别处。但在问卷调查中，这些工人却表示自己在办公室或工厂里比在其他地方感觉更好、更少焦虑。两位心理学家将这种现象称为"工作悖论"：许多人在抱怨工作时，反而比享受过多闲暇时更快乐。其他研究者用"愧疚沙发土豆"来形容那些通过媒体放松、但回顾自己无所事事的闲暇时光时又常感空虚的人。满足感存在于当下，但更有价值的东西——自豪感——只在对过往成就的反思中浮现。
The post-workists argue that Americans work so hard because their culture has conditioned them to feel guilty when they are not being productive, and that this guilt will fade as work ceases to be the norm. This might prove true, but it’s an untestable hypothesis. When I asked Hunnicutt what sort of modern community most resembles his ideal of a post-work society, he admitted, “I’m not sure that such a place exists.” 后工作主义者认为，美国人如此拼命工作是因为其文化已将他们驯化，使其在不产出时产生负罪感，而这种负罪感会随着工作不再是常态而消退。这或许是正确的，但却是无法验证的假设。当我询问汉尼卡特哪种现代社区最接近他理想中的后工作社会时，他承认："我不确定这样的地方是否存在。"
Less passive and more nourishing forms of mass leisure could develop. Arguably, they already are developing. The Internet, social media, and gaming offer entertainments that are as easy to slip into as is watching TV, but all are more purposeful and often less isolating. Video games, despite the derision aimed at them, are vehicles for achievement of a sort. Jeremy Bailenson, a communications professor at Stanford, says that as virtual-reality technology improves, people’s “cyber-existence” will become as rich and social as their “real” life. Games in which users climb “into another person’s skin to embody his or her experiences firsthand” don’t just let people live out vicarious fantasies, he has argued, but also “help you live as somebody else to teach you empathy and pro-social skills.” 更积极、更具滋养性的大众休闲方式可能会发展起来。可以说，它们已经在发展之中。互联网、社交媒体和游戏提供的娱乐与看电视一样容易沉浸其中，但都更有目的性，通常也不那么孤立。电子游戏尽管饱受嘲讽，却是一种成就感的载体。斯坦福大学传播学教授杰里米·拜伦森表示，随着虚拟现实技术的进步，人们的"网络存在"将变得与"现实"生活一样丰富且具有社交性。他认为，那些让用户"进入他人皮肤，亲身体验其经历"的游戏，不仅能让人们实现替代性幻想，还能"通过让你以他人身份生活来培养同理心与亲社会技能"。
But it’s hard to imagine that leisure could ever entirely fill the vacuum of accomplishment left by the demise of labor. Most people do need to achieve things through, yes, work to feel a lasting sense of purpose. To envision a future that offers more than minute-to-minute satisfaction, we have to imagine how millions of people might find meaningful work without formal wages. So, inspired by the predictions of one of America’s most famous labor economists, I took a detour on my way to Youngstown and stopped in Columbus, Ohio. 但很难想象休闲活动能完全填补劳动消亡后留下的成就真空。大多数人确实需要通过工作来获得持久的使命感。要构想一个超越即时满足的未来，我们必须设想数百万人如何在缺乏正式薪酬的情况下找到有意义的工作。因此，受美国最著名劳动经济学家之一预言的启发，我在前往扬斯敦的途中绕道停在了俄亥俄州哥伦布市。
4. Communal Creativity: The Artisans' ReVENGE 4. 社群创造力：工匠的逆袭
Artisans made up the original American middle class. Before industrialization swept through the U.S. economy, many people who didn’t work on farms were silversmiths, blacksmiths, or woodworkers. These artisans were ground up by the machinery of mass production in the 20th century. But Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, sees the next wave of automation returning us to an age of craftsmanship and artistry. In particular, he looks forward to the ramifications of 3-D printing, whereby machines construct complex objects from digital designs. 工匠构成了美国最初的中产阶级。在工业化席卷美国经济之前，许多非务农者都是银匠、铁匠或木匠。这些工匠在 20 世纪被大规模生产的机器洪流所吞噬。但哈佛大学劳动经济学家劳伦斯·卡茨认为，下一波自动化浪潮将让我们重返工艺与艺术的时代。他特别期待 3D 打印技术带来的变革——这种技术能让机器根据数字设计制造复杂物件。
The factories that arose more than a century ago “could make Model Ts and forks and knives and mugs and glasses in a standardized, cheap way, and that drove the artisans out of business,” Katz told me. “But what if the new tech, like 3-D-printing machines, can do customized things that are almost as cheap? It’s possible that information technology and robots eliminate traditional jobs and make possible a new artisanal economy … an economy geared around self-expression, where people would do artistic things with their time.” 一个多世纪前兴起的工厂"能够以标准化、廉价的方式生产 T 型车、刀叉、杯子和玻璃制品，这让手工艺人纷纷破产，"卡茨告诉我。"但如果 3D 打印机这类新技术能以几乎同样低廉的成本实现定制化生产呢？信息技术和机器人或许会淘汰传统岗位，同时催生新型手工艺经济……一种围绕自我表达构建的经济形态，人们将把时间投入艺术创作。"
In other words, it would be a future not of consumption but of creativity, as technology returns the tools of the assembly line to individuals, democratizing the means of mass production. 换言之，这将是创造力而非消费主导的未来。当技术将流水线的生产工具重新交还个体手中，大规模生产的工具将实现民主化。
Something like this future is already present in the small but growing number of industrial shops called “makerspaces” that have popped up in the United States and around the world. The Columbus Idea Foundry is the country’s largest such space, a cavernous converted shoe factory stocked with in-dustrial-age machinery. Several hundred members pay a monthly fee to use its arsenal of machines to make gifts and jewelry; weld, finish, and paint; play with plasma cutters and work an angle grinder; or operate a lathe with a machinist. 这种未来图景已在美国及全球各地涌现的小型但不断增长的"创客空间"工业作坊中初现端倪。哥伦布创意工坊是全美规模最大的此类空间，由鞋厂改造而成的宽敞厂房里摆满了工业时代的机械设备。数百名会员按月付费，就能使用这里的设备军火库制作礼物首饰、进行焊接抛光喷绘、把玩等离子切割机与角磨机，或跟随机械师学习车床操作。
When I arrived there on a bitterly cold afternoon in February, a chalkboard standing on an easel by the door displayed three arrows, pointing toward BATHROOMS, PEWTER CASTING, and ZOMBIES. Near the entrance, three men with black fingertips and grease-stained shirts took turns fixing a 60-year-old metal-turning lathe. Behind them, a resident artist was tutoring an older woman on how to transfer her photographs onto a large canvas, while a couple of guys fed pizza pies into a propane-fired stone oven. Elsewhere, men in protective goggles welded a sign for a local chicken restaurant, while 二月某个寒风刺骨的下午，当我抵达这里时，门口画架上的黑板用箭头标示着三个方向：卫生间/锡器铸造/僵尸区。入口处，三名指尖黢黑、工装油渍斑斑的男子正轮流修理一台有 60 年历史的金属车床。他们身后，驻场艺术家正在指导一位老妇人如何将照片转印到巨幅画布上，而几个小伙子正把披萨塞进丙烷石窑烤炉。另一侧，戴着护目镜的男人们正在为本地炸鸡店焊接招牌，
others punched codes into a computer-controlled laser-cutting machine. Beneath the din of drilling and wood-cutting, a Pandora rock station hummed tinnily from a Wi-Fi-connected Edison phonograph horn. The foundry is not just a gymnasium of tools. It is a social center. 其他人则在电脑控制的激光切割机前输入代码。在钻孔和木材切割的嘈杂声中，一台通过 Wi-Fi 连接的爱迪生留声机喇叭正播放着潘多拉摇滚电台，声音单薄地嗡嗡作响。这个铸造车间不仅仅是一个工具健身房，更是一个社交中心。
Alex Bandar, who started the foundry after receiving a doctorate in materials science and engineering, has a theory about the rhythms of invention in American history. Over the past century, he told me, the economy has moved from hardware to software, from atoms to bits, and people have spent more time at work in front of screens. But as computers take over more tasks previously considered the province of humans, the pendulum will swing back from bits to atoms, at least when it comes to how people spend their days. Bandar thinks that a digitally preoccupied society will come to appreciate the pure and distinct pleasure of making things you can touch. “I’ve always wanted to usher in a new era of technology where robots do our bidding,” Bandar said. “If you have better batteries, better robotics, more dexterous manipulation, then it’s not a far stretch to say robots do most of the work. So what do we do? Play? Draw? Actually talk to each other again?” 亚历克斯·班达尔在获得材料科学与工程博士学位后创办了这家铸造厂，他对美国历史上的发明节奏有一套理论。他告诉我，过去一个世纪里，经济从硬件转向软件，从原子转向比特，人们花更多时间在屏幕前工作。但随着计算机接管更多曾被视为人类专属的任务，钟摆将从比特摆回原子——至少在人类如何度过时日方面是如此。班达尔认为，沉迷数字化的社会终将重新领悟到亲手制作可触摸物品的纯粹独特乐趣。"我一直想开启一个机器人听命于人的新技术时代，"班达尔说，"如果有更好的电池、更先进的机器人技术、更灵巧的操控系统，那么说机器人承担大部分工作并非遥不可及。那时我们做什么？玩耍？绘画？重新真正地彼此交谈？"
You don’t need any particular fondness for plasma cutters to see the beauty of an economy where tens of millions of people make things they enjoy making - whether physical or digital, in buildings or in online communities - and receive feedback and appreciation for their work. The Internet and the cheap availability of artistic tools have already empowered millions of people to produce culture from their living rooms. People upload more than 400,000 hours of YouTube videos and 350 million new Facebook photos every day. The demise of the formal economy could free many would-be artists, writers, and craftspeople to dedicate their time to creative interests - to live as cultural producers. Such activities offer virtues that many organizational psychologists consider central to satisfaction at work: independence, the chance to develop mastery, and a sense of purpose. 你无需对等离子切割机有任何特殊偏爱，也能欣赏这样一种经济形态的美妙之处：数千万人制作他们乐于制作的东西——无论是实体还是数字产品，在建筑中或在线社区里——并因他们的工作获得反馈与赞赏。互联网和廉价艺术工具的普及，已使数百万人得以在自家客厅里创造文化。人们每天上传超过 40 万小时的 YouTube 视频和 3.5 亿张新 Facebook 照片。正规经济的消亡可能解放许多潜在的艺术家、作家和手工艺人，让他们将时间投入创造性兴趣——以文化生产者的身份生活。这类活动提供了许多组织心理学家认为对工作满意度至关重要的品质：独立性、精进技艺的机会，以及目标感。
After touring the foundry, I sat at a long table with several members, sharing the pizza that had come out of the communal oven. I asked them what they thought of their organization as a model for a future where automation reached further into the formal economy. A mixed-media artist named Kate Morgan said that most people she knew at the foundry would quit their jobs and use the foundry to start 参观完铸造厂后，我和几位成员围坐在长桌旁，分享着公共烤箱里出炉的披萨。我问他们如何看待这个组织作为未来自动化更深入渗透正规经济时的样板。一位名叫凯特·摩根的混合媒体艺术家说，她在铸造厂认识的大多数人，如果条件允许的话，都会辞去工作，利用铸造厂来创业
their own business if they could. Others spoke about the fundamental need to witness the outcome of one’s work, which was satisfied more deeply by craftsmanship than by other jobs they’d held. 其他人则谈到了见证自己劳动成果的根本需求——相比他们从事过的其他工作，手工艺更能满足这种深层次需求。
Late in the conversation, we were joined by Terry Griner, an engineer who had built miniature steam engines in his garage before Bandar invited him to join the foundry. His fingers were covered in soot, and he told me about the pride he had in his ability to fix things. “I’ve been working since I was 16. I’ve done food service, restaurant work, hospital work, and computer programming. I’ve done a lot of different jobs,” said Griner, who is now a divorced father. “But if we had a society that said, ‘We’ll cover your essentials, you can work in the shop,’ I think that would be utopia. That, to me, would be the best of all possible worlds.” 谈话接近尾声时，特里·格林纳加入了我们。这位工程师曾在自家车库建造微型蒸汽机，后来班达尔邀请他加入铸造厂。他满手煤灰，向我讲述着自己修理物品时的自豪感。"我从 16 岁就开始工作。做过餐饮服务、餐厅杂工、医院护工，还编过程序。我干过很多行当，"如今离异独自抚养孩子的格林纳说道，"但如果社会能承诺'我们会保障你的基本生活，你可以安心在车间工作'，我觉得那就是乌托邦。对我来说，那将是所有可能世界中最好的一个。"
5. Contingency: "You're on Your Own" 5. 应急方案："自求多福"
One mile to the east of downtown Youngstown, in a brick building surrounded by several empty lots, is Royal Oaks, an iconic blue-collar dive. At about 5:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, the place was nearly full. The bar glowed yellow and green from the lights mounted along a wall. Old beer signs, trophies, masks, and mannequins cluttered the back corner of the main room, like party leftovers stuffed in an attic. The scene was mostly middle-aged men, some in groups, talking loudly about baseball and smelling vaguely of pot; some drank alone at the bar, sitting quietly or listening to music on headphones. I spoke with several patrons there who work as musicians, artists, or handymen; many did not hold a steady job. 扬斯敦市中心以东一英里处，一栋被几片空地环绕的砖砌建筑里，坐落着标志性的蓝领酒吧"皇家橡树"。某个周三下午五点半左右，这里几乎座无虚席。沿墙安装的灯管将吧台映照成黄绿色调。主厅后角堆满了老旧的啤酒招牌、奖杯、面具和人偶模特，如同阁楼里塞满的派对遗存。现场以中年男性为主：有人三五成群高声谈论棒球，身上隐约飘着大麻味；有人独坐吧台安静饮酒，或戴着耳机听音乐。我与几位常客交谈，他们从事音乐人、艺术家或杂工等职业，许多人没有固定工作。
“It is the end of a particular kind of wage work,” said Hannah Woodroofe, a bartender there who, it turns out, is also a graduate student at the University of Chicago. (She’s writing a dissertation on Youngstown as a harbinger of the future of work.) A lot of people in the city make ends meet via “post-wage arrangements,” she said, working for tenancy or under the table, or trading services. Places like Royal Oaks are the new union halls: People go there not only to relax but also to find tradespeople for particular jobs, like auto repair. Others go to exchange fresh vegetables, grown in urban gardens they’ve created amid Youngstown’s vacant lots. "这是一种特定薪资工作的终结，"当地酒保汉娜·伍德鲁夫说道——她同时还是芝加哥大学的研究生（正在撰写关于扬斯敦作为未来工作预兆的论文）。她表示，城里许多人通过"后工资安排"维持生计，比如以工抵租、打黑工或以服务换服务。像皇家橡树这样的酒吧已成为新型工会大厅：人们不仅去那里放松，还为了寻找特定工作的匠人，比如汽车维修。另一些人则去交换新鲜蔬菜，这些蔬菜种植在他们利用扬斯敦空置地块开辟的城市菜园里。
When an entire area, like Youngstown, suffers from high and prolonged unemployment, problems caused by unemployment move beyond the personal sphere; widespread joblessness shatters neighborhoods and leaches away their civic spirit. John Russo, the Youngstown State professor, who is a co- 当整个地区（如扬斯敦）长期遭受高失业率困扰时，失业造成的问题就超越了个人层面；普遍失业会摧毁社区，侵蚀公民精神。扬斯敦州立大学教授约翰·鲁索——他是城市史著作《美国钢铁城》的合著者
author of a history of the city, Steeltown USA, says the local identity took a savage blow when residents lost the ability to find reliable employment. “I can’t stress this enough: this isn’t just about economics; it’s psychological,” he told me. ——指出，当居民失去获得稳定工作的能力时，当地身份认同遭受了沉重打击。"我必须强调：这不仅是经济问题，更是心理问题，"他告诉我。
Russo sees Youngstown as the leading edge of a larger trend toward the development of what he calls the “precariat” - a working class that swings from task to task in order to make ends meet and suffers a loss of labor rights, bargaining rights, and job security. In Youngstown, many of these workers have by now made their peace with insecurity and poverty by building an identity, and some measure of pride, around contingency. The faith they lost in institutions - the corporations that have abandoned the city, the police who have failed to keep them safe has not returned. But Russo and Woodroofe both told me they put stock in their own independence. And so a place that once defined itself singlemindedly by the steel its residents made has gradually learned to embrace the valorization of well-rounded resourcefulness. 鲁索将扬斯敦视为一个更大趋势的前沿，即他所谓的"不稳定无产者"群体的形成——这个工人阶级为了维持生计在不同工作间辗转，同时承受着劳动权利、议价能力和工作保障的流失。在扬斯敦，如今许多这样的工人已通过与不确定性共处来适应不安全和贫困的处境，围绕临时性建立起身份认同和某种程度的自尊。他们对体制失去的信任——那些抛弃这座城市的企业，未能保障安全的警察——至今未能恢复。但鲁索和伍德鲁夫都告诉我，他们更相信自己的独立性。于是这个曾一心以居民生产的钢铁定义自身的地方，逐渐学会了拥抱全面应变能力的价值。
Karen Schubert, a 54-year-old writer with two master’s degrees, accepted a part-time job as a hostess at a café in Youngstown early this year, after spending months searching for full-time work. Schubert, who has two grown children and an infant grandson, said she’d loved teaching writing and literature at the local university. But many colleges have replaced full-time professors with part-time adjuncts in order to control costs, and she’d found that with the hours she could get, adjunct teaching didn’t pay a living wage, so she’d stopped. “I think I would feel like a personal failure if I didn’t know that so many Americans have their leg caught in the same trap,” she said. 54 岁的作家凯伦·舒伯特拥有两个硕士学位，在寻找全职工作数月无果后，于今年初在扬斯敦一家咖啡馆接受了兼职女招待的工作。舒伯特有两个成年子女和一个襁褓中的孙子，她表示自己曾热爱在当地大学教授写作与文学课程。但许多高校为控制成本，已用兼职讲师取代全职教授。她发现以能获得的课时计算，兼职教学收入难以维持生计，因此选择了放弃。"若不是知道这么多美国人都深陷同样的困境，我可能会觉得自己是个彻头彻尾的失败者，"她说道。
Among Youngstown’s precariat, one can see a third possible future, where millions of people struggle for years to build a sense of purpose in the absence of formal jobs, and where entrepreneurship emerges out of necessity. But while it lacks the comforts of the consumption economy or the cultural richness of Lawrence Katz’s artisanal future, it is more complex than an outright dystopia. “There are young people working part-time in the new economy who feel independent, whose work and personal relationships are contingent, and say they like it like this - to have short hours so they have time to focus on their passions,” Russo said. 在扬斯敦的朝不保夕阶层中，我们可以看到第三种可能的未来：数百万人将在缺乏正式工作的状态下，历经多年挣扎以建立人生意义感，而创业精神也将因生存需要而萌发。这种图景虽缺乏消费经济的舒适感，也不具备劳伦斯·卡茨所构想的工匠式未来的文化丰盈性，却比彻底的反乌托邦更为复杂。"有些在新经济中从事兼职的年轻人感到独立自主，他们的工作和人际关系都具有临时性，但他们表示喜欢这种状态——工时短意味着有更多时间追求热爱的事物，"鲁索说道。
Schubert’s wages at the café are not enough to live on, and in her spare time, she sells books of her poetry at readings and organizes gatherings of the 舒伯特在咖啡馆的工资不足以维持生计，闲暇时她会在诗歌朗诵会上售卖自己的诗集，并组织各类聚会活动
literary-arts community in Youngstown, where other writers (many of them also underemployed) share their prose. The evaporation of work has deepened the local arts and music scene, several residents told me, because people who are inclined toward the arts have so much time to spend with one another. “We’re a devastatingly poor and hemorrhaging population, but the people who live here are fearless and creative and phenomenal,” Schubert said. 扬斯敦的文艺圈里，聚集着许多作家（其中不少人也处于半失业状态）分享散文创作。几位当地居民告诉我，工作的消失反而滋养了当地艺术与音乐生态，因为热衷艺术的人们拥有了更多相处时光。"我们这座失血严重的贫困城市里，住着无畏、创意非凡的非凡人群，"舒伯特说道。
Whether or not one has artistic ambitions as Schubert does, it is arguably growing easier to find short-term gigs or spot employment. Paradoxically, technology is the reason. A constellation of Internetenabled companies matches available workers with quick jobs, most prominently including Uber (for drivers), Seamless (for meal deliverers), Homejoy (for house cleaners), and TaskRabbit (for just about anyone else). And online markets like Craigslist and eBay have likewise made it easier for people to take on small independent projects, such as furniture refurbishing. Although the on-demand economy is not yet a major part of the employment picture, the number of “temporary-help services” workers has grown by 50 percent since 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 无论是否像舒伯特那样怀有艺术抱负，如今寻找短期零工或临时工作确实正变得越来越容易。颇具讽刺意味的是，科技正是这一现象的推手。一系列互联网公司搭建起劳动者与即时工作的对接平台，最知名的包括优步（对接司机）、Seamless（对接送餐员）、Homejoy（对接保洁人员）以及 TaskRabbit（对接各类零工）。而克雷格列表和易趣等在线市场同样让人们更容易承接家具翻新等小型独立项目。尽管按需经济尚未成为就业市场的主要组成部分，但美国劳工统计局数据显示，自 2010 年以来，"临时援助服务"类工作者数量已增长 50%。
Some of these services, too, could be usurped, eventually, by machines. But on-demand apps also spread the work around by carving up jobs, like driving a taxi, into hundreds of little tasks, like a single drive, which allows more people to compete for smaller pieces of work. These new arrangements are already challenging the legal definitions of employer and employee, and there are many reasons to be ambivalent about them. But if the future involves a declining number of full-time jobs, as in Youngstown, then splitting some of the remaining work up among many part-time workers, instead of a few full-timers, wouldn’t necessarily be a bad development. We shouldn’t be too quick to excoriate companies that let people combine their work, art, and leisure in whatever ways they choose. 其中一些服务最终也可能被机器取代。但按需应用通过将工作拆解——比如将出租车驾驶分解为数百个微小任务（如单次载客）——实现了劳动力的分散配置，让更多人能参与碎片化工作的竞争。这些新型用工模式正在挑战"雇主"与"雇员"的法律定义，其利弊得失确实值得商榷。但若未来全职岗位持续减少——就像扬斯敦市那样——那么将剩余工作分配给众多兼职者而非少数全职者，未必是糟糕的发展方向。对于那些允许人们自由组合工作、艺术与休闲的企业，我们不应急于苛责。
Today the norm is to think about employment and unemployment as a black-and-white binary, rather than two points at opposite ends of a wide spectrum of working arrangements. As late as the mid19th century, though, the modern concept of “unemployment” didn’t exist in the United States. Most people lived on farms, and while paid work came and went, home industry - canning, sewing, carpentry - was a constant. Even in the worst economic panics, people typically found productive things to do. The despondency and helplessness of unem- 如今人们习惯将就业与失业视为非黑即白的二元对立，而非多种工作安排光谱上的两个极端。然而直到 19 世纪中叶，美国仍不存在现代意义上的"失业"概念。当时大多数人以务农为生，虽然有偿工作时有起伏，但家庭手工业——如罐头制作、缝纫、木工——始终存在。即便在最严重的经济恐慌时期，人们通常也能找到生产性事务。失业带来的消沉与无助感...
ployment were discovered, to the bafflement and dismay of cultural critics, only after factory work became dominant and cities swelled. 当工厂工作成为主流、城市规模膨胀后，文化评论家们才在困惑与沮丧中发现，失业现象早已悄然显现。
The 21st century, if it presents fewer full-time jobs in the sectors that can be automated, could in this respect come to resemble the mid-19th century: an economy marked by episodic work across a range of activities, the loss of any one of which would not make somebody suddenly idle. Many bristle that contingent gigs offer a devil’s bargain - a bit of additional autonomy in exchange for a larger loss of security. But some might thrive in a market where versatility and hustle are rewarded - where there are, as in Youngstown, few jobs to have, yet many things to do. 21 世纪若在可自动化领域减少全职岗位，或将重现 19 世纪中叶的经济图景：工作形态呈现为跨领域的阶段性任务，失去其中任何一项都不会让人突然陷入无事可做的境地。许多人愤然指出零工经济是场魔鬼交易——用微薄的自主权换取巨大的安全保障缺失。但有些人或许能在崇尚多面手与拼搏精神的市场中如鱼得水——就像扬斯敦那样，虽鲜有固定职位，却充满各种可为之事的机遇。
6. Government: The Visible Hand 6. 政府：看得见的手
In the 1950s, Henry Ford II, the CEO of Ford, and Walter Reuther, the head of the United Auto Workers union, were touring a new engine plant in Cleveland. Ford gestured to a fleet of machines and said, “Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?” The union boss famously replied: “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?” 1950 年代，福特汽车 CEO 亨利·福特二世与全美汽车工人联合会主席沃尔特·鲁瑟巡视克利夫兰新发动机厂时，福特指着成排的机器问道："沃尔特，你打算怎么让这些机器人交工会会费？"这位工会领袖以一句妙答载入史册："亨利，那你又怎么让它们买你的车呢？"
As Martin Ford (no relation) writes in his new book, The Rise of the Robots, this story might be apocryphal, but its message is instructive. We’re pretty good at noticing the immediate effects of technology’s substituting for workers, such as fewer people on the factory floor. What’s harder is anticipating the second-order effects of this transformation, such as what happens to the consumer economy when you take away the consumers. 正如马丁·福特（无亲属关系）在其新书《机器人的崛起》中所写，这个故事可能是虚构的，但其寓意具有启发性。我们很擅长察觉技术替代工人带来的直接影响，比如工厂车间里人变少了。更难的是预见这种转变带来的二阶效应，比如当消费者被剥夺时，消费经济会发生什么变化。
Technological progress on the scale we’re imagining would usher in social and cultural changes that are almost impossible to fully envision. Consider just how fundamentally work has shaped America’s geography. Today’s coastal cities are a jumble of office buildings and residential space. Both are expensive and tightly constrained. But the decline of work would make many office buildings unnecessary. What might that mean for the vibrancy of urban areas? Would office space yield seamlessly to apartments, allowing more people to live more affordably in city centers and leaving the cities themselves just as lively? Or would we see vacant shells and spreading blight? Would big cities make sense at all if their role as highly sophisticated labor ecosystems were diminished? As the 40 -hour workweek faded, the idea of a lengthy twice-daily commute would almost certainly strike future generations as 我们想象中的这种规模的技术进步将带来几乎无法完全预见的社会文化变革。试想工作如何从根本上塑造了美国的地理格局——如今沿海城市充斥着写字楼与住宅区的混杂体，两者都价格高昂且空间局促。但随着工作需求衰退，大量办公楼将失去存在意义。这对城市活力意味着什么？办公空间能否无缝转化为公寓，让更多人能以可承受的成本居住在城市中心，同时保持都市的繁荣？抑或我们将目睹空置的建筑与蔓延的衰败？如果大城市作为高度复杂劳动力生态系统的功能被削弱，它们是否还有存在的必要？当 40 小时工作制逐渐消亡，未来世代很可能会将每天两小时的通勤视为
an antiquated and baffling waste of time. But would those generations prefer to live on streets full of high-rises, or in smaller towns? 一种过时而荒谬的时间浪费。但他们会选择生活在摩天大楼林立的街道，还是更偏爱小城镇呢？
Today, many working parents worry that they spend too many hours at the office. As full-time work declined, rearing children could become less overwhelming. And because job opportunities historically have spurred migration in the United States, we might see less of it; the diaspora of extended families could give way to more closely knitted clans. But if men and women lost their purpose and dignity as work went away, those families would nonetheless be troubled. 如今，许多在职父母常因在办公室耗费过多时间而忧心忡忡。随着全职工作的减少，养育子女可能不再令人精疲力竭。由于就业机会历来推动着美国的人口迁移，我们或许会看到迁移减少；分散的大家庭可能被更紧密的家族纽带所取代。但倘若随着工作消失，男女失去人生目标与尊严，这些家庭仍将面临困境。
The decline of the labor force would make our politics more contentious. Deciding how to tax profits and distribute income could become the most significant economic-policy debate in American history. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith used the term invisible hand to refer to the order and social benefits that arise, surprisingly, from individuals’ selfish actions. But to preserve the consumer economy and the social fabric, governments might have to embrace what Haruhiko Kuroda, the governor of the Bank of Japan, has called the visible hand of economic intervention. What follows is an early sketch of how it all might work. 劳动力衰退将使我们的政治更加充满争议。如何征税和分配收入可能成为美国历史上最重要的经济政策辩论。亚当·斯密在《国富论》中用"看不见的手"形容个人自私行为意外催生的秩序与社会效益。但为维持消费经济和社会结构，政府或许不得不采纳日本央行行长黑田东彦所称的经济干预"看得见的手"。下文将初步勾勒这套机制可能的运作方式。
In the near term, local governments might do well to create more and more ambitious community centers or other public spaces where residents can meet, learn skills, bond around sports or crafts, and socialize. Two of the most common side effects of unemployment are loneliness, on the individual level, and the hollowing-out of community pride. A national policy that directed money toward centers in distressed areas might remedy the maladies of idleness, and form the beginnings of a long-term experiment on how to reengage people in their neighborhoods in the absence of full employment. 短期内，地方政府不妨创建更多更具雄心的社区中心或其他公共空间，让居民能够在此相聚、学习技能、通过运动或手工艺建立情感纽带并进行社交活动。失业最常见的两个副作用，在个人层面是孤独感，在社会层面则是社区自豪感的空洞化。一项向困境地区中心注入资金的全国性政策，或许能治愈闲散怠惰的社会病症，并开启一项长期实验的雏形——探索如何在全民充分就业缺席的情况下，让人们重新融入社区生活。
We could also make it easier for people to start their own, small-scale (and even part-time) businesses. New-business formation has declined in the past few decades in all 50 states. One way to nurture fledgling ideas would be to build out a network of business incubators. Here Youngstown offers an unexpected model: its business incubator has been recognized internationally, and its success has brought new hope to West Federal Street, the city’s main drag. 我们还可以降低人们创办小型（甚至兼职）企业的门槛。过去几十年间，全美 50 个州的新企业成立率都在下降。培育萌芽创意的一个方法是建立商业孵化器网络。在这方面，扬斯敦提供了出人意料的典范：其商业孵化器已获得国际认可，它的成功为这座城市的主干道西联邦街带来了新的希望。
Near the beginning of any broad decline in job availability, the United States might take a lesson from Germany on job-sharing. The German government gives firms incentives to cut all their work- 在就业机会开始普遍减少的初期，美国或许可以向德国借鉴工作共享制度。德国政府通过激励措施鼓励企业缩短全体员工的工作时长，而非直接裁员。
ers’ hours rather than lay off some of them during hard times. So a company with 50 workers that might otherwise lay off 10 people instead reduces everyone’s hours by 20 percent. Such a policy would help workers at established firms keep their attachment to the labor force despite the declining amount of overall labor. 在经济困难时期，企业会选择减少所有员工的工作时长，而非解雇部分人员。例如，一家拥有 50 名员工的公司，原本可能裁掉 10 人，现在改为将每个人的工作时间减少 20%。这种政策有助于成熟企业的员工保持与劳动力的联系，尽管整体劳动量正在下降。
Spreading work in this way has its limits. Some jobs can’t be easily shared, and in any case, sharing jobs wouldn’t stop labor’s pie from shrinking: it would only apportion the slices differently. Eventually, Washington would have to somehow spread wealth, too. 以这种方式分摊工作有其局限性。有些工作难以轻易共享，而且无论如何，分摊工作并不能阻止劳动份额的萎缩：它只会以不同方式分配份额。最终，华盛顿方面也不得不设法重新分配财富。
One way of doing that would be to more heavily tax the growing share of income going to the owners of capital, and use the money to cut checks to all adults. This idea - called a “universal basic income” - has received bipartisan support in the past. Many liberals currently support it, and in the 1960s, Richard Nixon and the conservative economist Milton Friedman each proposed a version of the idea. That history notwithstanding, the politics of universal income in a world without universal work would be daunting. The rich could say, with some accuracy, that their hard work was subsidizing the idleness of millions of “takers.” What’s more, although a universal income might replace lost wages, it would do little to preserve the social benefits of work. 实现这一目标的一种方式是对资本所有者日益增长的收益份额课以重税，并将这笔资金用于向所有成年人发放补贴。这一被称为"全民基本收入"的构想曾获得跨党派支持——当前许多自由派人士拥护该方案，而在 1960 年代，理查德·尼克松与保守派经济学家米尔顿·弗里德曼都曾提出过类似构想。但即便有这样的历史渊源，在全民失业的世界推行全民收入政策仍将面临严峻政治挑战。富人们可以相当准确地宣称，自己的辛勤劳动正在补贴数百万"不劳而获者"的闲散生活。更重要的是，全民收入或许能弥补工资损失，却难以维系工作带来的社会效益。
The most direct solution to the latter problem would be for the government to pay people to do something, rather than nothing. Although this smacks of old European socialism, or Depressionera “makework,” it might do the most to preserve virtues such as responsibility, agency, and industriousness. In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration did more than rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. It hired 40,000 artists and other cultural workers to produce music and theater, murals and paintings, state and regional travel guides, and surveys of state records. It’s not impossible to imagine something like the WPA - or an effort even more capacious - for a post-work future. 解决后一问题最直接的方案是政府出资让人们从事某些活动，而非无所事事。尽管这带有旧式欧洲社会主义或大萧条时期"创造就业"的意味，但它或许最能维系责任感、自主性和勤奋等美德。1930 年代，公共事业振兴署不仅重建了国家基础设施，还雇佣了四万名艺术家与文化工作者创作音乐戏剧、壁画绘画，编纂各州旅游指南并整理州档案。为后工作时代构想类似公共事业振兴署——甚至规模更宏大的计划，并非天方夜谭。
What might that look like? Several national projects might justify direct hiring, such as caring for a rising population of elderly people. But if the balance of work continues to shift toward the smallbore and episodic, the simplest way to help everybody stay busy might be government sponsorship of a national online marketplace of work (or, alternatively, a series of local ones, sponsored by local governments). Individuals could browse for large long-term projects, like cleaning up after a natural 这种构想可能呈现何种形态？照顾日益增长的老年人口等国家级项目或许能成为直接雇佣的理由。但如果工作性质持续向零散化、阶段化转变，帮助全民保持忙碌的最简方案可能是由政府资助建立全国性在线工作平台（或由地方政府资助的系列区域性平台）。个人可在此浏览长期大型项目，例如自然灾害后的环境清理，
disaster, or small short-term ones: an hour of tutoring, an evening of entertainment, an art commission. The requests could come from local governments or community associations or nonprofit groups; from rich families seeking nannies or tutors; or from other individuals given some number of credits to “spend” on the site each year. To ensure a baseline level of attachment to the workforce, the government could pay adults a flat rate in return for some minimum level of activity on the site, but people could always earn more by taking on more gigs. 灾难性的需求，或是些短期的小任务：一小时的家教辅导、一晚的娱乐活动、一项艺术委托。这些请求可能来自地方政府、社区协会或非营利组织；来自寻求保姆或家教的富裕家庭；或是来自其他每年获得一定数量"积分"可在该平台上"消费"的个人。为确保与劳动力市场保持基本联系，政府可向成年人支付统一报酬，前提是他们需在平台上完成最低限度的活动量，但人们总能通过承接更多零工来赚取额外收入。
Although a digital WPA might strike some people as a strange anachronism, it would be similar to a federalized version of Mechanical Turk, the popular Amazon sister site where individuals and companies post projects of varying complexity, while so-called Turks on the other end browse tasks and collect money for the ones they complete. Mechanical Turk was designed to list tasks that cannot be performed by a computer. (The name is an allusion to an 18thcentury Austrian hoax, in which a famous automaton that seemed to play masterful chess concealed a human player who chose the moves and moved the pieces.) 尽管数字版的公共事业振兴署对某些人来说可能显得古怪而过时，但它本质上类似于联邦化的"亚马逊土耳其机器人"——这个广受欢迎的亚马逊旗下平台允许个人和企业发布各种复杂程度的项目，而另一端的所谓"土耳其人"则浏览任务清单，通过完成任务获取报酬。"土耳其机器人"平台专为罗列计算机无法执行的任务而设计。（其名称源自 18 世纪奥地利的一个骗局：当时一台看似能下出大师级棋局的著名自动装置，实际暗藏着操控棋步的人类棋手。）
A government marketplace might likewise specialize in those tasks that required empathy, humanity, or a personal touch. By connecting millions of people in one central hub, it might even inspire what the technology writer Robin Sloan has called “a Cambrian explosion of mega-scale creative and intellectual pursuits, a of Wikipedia-scale projects that can ask their users for even deeper commitments.” 政府运营的市场同样可以专注于那些需要同理心、人文关怀或个人化服务的任务。通过将数百万人连接在一个中心枢纽上，它甚至可能催生科技作家罗宾·斯隆所说的"寒武纪大爆发式的超大规模创意与智力追求，催生出维基百科级别的项目，这些项目能要求用户投入更深的参与度。"
There’s a case to be made for using the tools of government to provide other incentives as well, to help people avoid the typical traps of joblessness and build rich lives and vibrant communities. After all, the members of the Columbus Idea Foundry probably weren’t born with an innate love of lathe operation or laser-cutting. Mastering these skills requires discipline; discipline requires an education; and an education, for many people, involves the expectation that hours of often frustrating practice will eventually prove rewarding. In a post-work society, the financial rewards of education and training won’t be as obvious. This is a singular challenge of imagining a flourishing post-work society: How will people discover their talents, or the rewards that come from expertise, if they don’t see much incentive to develop either? 有理由利用政府工具提供其他激励措施，帮助人们避开失业的常见陷阱，建立充实的生活和充满活力的社区。毕竟，哥伦布创意工坊的成员们可能并非天生就热爱车床操作或激光切割。掌握这些技能需要自律；自律需要教育；而对许多人来说，教育意味着要忍受数小时常常令人沮丧的练习，并期待最终获得回报。在后工作社会，教育和培训的经济回报将不再那么明显。设想一个繁荣的后工作社会面临一个独特挑战：如果人们看不到发展才能或专长的强烈动机，他们将如何发现自己的天赋，或是来自专业技能的回报？
Modest payments to young people for attending and completing college, skills-training programs, or 为年轻人提供适度津贴，鼓励他们完成大学学业、参加技能培训项目，或
community-center workshops might eventually be worth considering. This seems radical, but the aim would be conservative - to preserve the status quo of an educated and engaged society. Whatever their career opportunities, young people will still grow up to be citizens, neighbors, and even, episodically, workers. Nudges toward education and training might be particularly beneficial to men, who are more likely to withdraw into their living rooms when they become unemployed. 社区中心的培训课程或许最终值得考虑。这看似激进，但其目标却是保守的——旨在维系一个受过教育且积极参与社会的现状。无论年轻人的职业机会如何，他们终将成长为公民、邻居，甚至偶尔成为劳动者。推动教育与培训的举措可能对男性尤为有益，因为他们失业后更容易退缩到自己的小天地中。
7. Jobs and Callings 7. 工作与使命
Decades from now, perhaps the 20th century will strike future historians as an aberration, with its religious devotion to overwork in a time of prosperity, its attenuations of family in service to job opportunity, its conflation of income with self-worth. The post-work society I’ve described holds a warped mirror up to today’s economy, but in many ways it reflects the forgotten norms of the mid-19th century - the artisan middle class, the primacy of local communities, and the unfamiliarity with widespread joblessness. 几十年后，当未来历史学家回望 20 世纪时，或许会觉得那是个反常的时代——在繁荣时期对过度工作近乎宗教般的狂热，为职业机会牺牲家庭纽带，将收入与自我价值混为一谈。我所描述的后工作社会就像一面扭曲的镜子映照着当今经济，但在许多方面，它反而重现了 19 世纪中叶被遗忘的常态：工匠中产阶级的兴盛、地方社区的首要地位，以及人们对普遍失业现象的陌生感。
The three potential futures of consumption, communal creativity, and contingency are not separate paths branching out from the present. They’re likely to intertwine and even influence one another. Entertainment will surely become more immersive and exert a gravitational pull on people without much to do. But if that’s all that happens, society will have failed. The foundry in Columbus shows how the “third places” in people’s lives (communities separate from their homes and offices) could become central to growing up, learning new skills, discovering passions. And with or without such places, many people will need to embrace the resourcefulness learned over time by cities like Youngstown, which, even if they seem like museum exhibits of an old economy, might foretell the future for many more cities in the next 25 years. 消费、社群创造与应急储备这三种可能的未来并非从当下分岔的独立路径。它们很可能会相互交织甚至彼此影响。娱乐无疑会变得更加沉浸式，对那些无所事事的人产生强大吸引力。但若仅此而已，社会就算失败了。哥伦布市的铸造厂展示了人们生活中的"第三空间"（与家庭和办公室分离的社区）如何能成为成长、学习新技能、发现热忱的核心场所。无论是否存在这类空间，许多人都需要掌握扬斯敦等城市逐渐领悟的生存智慧——这些城市即使看起来像旧经济的博物馆展品，却可能预示着未来 25 年更多城市的发展轨迹。
On my last day in Youngstown, I met with Howard Jesko, a 60-year-old Youngstown State graduate student, at a burger joint along the main street. A few months after Black Friday in 1977, as a senior at Ohio State University, Jesko received a phone call from his father, a specialty-hose manufacturer near Youngstown. “Don’t bother coming back here for a job,” his dad said. “There aren’t going to be any left.” Years later, Jesko returned to Youngstown to work, but he recently quit his job selling products like waterproofing systems to construction companies; his customers had been devastated by 在扬斯敦的最后一天，我在主街的一家汉堡店见到了 60 岁的扬斯敦州立大学研究生霍华德·杰斯科。1977 年黑色星期五过后几个月，当时还是俄亥俄州立大学大四学生的杰斯科接到了父亲的电话——他父亲在扬斯敦附近经营一家特种软管制造厂。"别费心回这儿找工作了，"父亲说，"这里不会再有任何工作机会。"多年后杰斯科回到扬斯敦工作，但最近辞去了向建筑公司销售防水系统等产品的工作；他的客户们已被经济衰退摧垮
the Great Recession and weren’t buying much anymore. Around the same time, a left-knee replacement due to degenerative arthritis resulted in a 10day hospital stay, which gave him time to think about the future. Jesko decided to go back to school to become a professor. “My true calling,” he told me, “has always been to teach.” 经济大萧条时期，人们不再大量购物。大约在同一时间，由于退行性关节炎，他接受了左膝置换手术，住院 10 天，这让他有时间思考未来。杰斯科决定重返校园，成为一名教授。"我真正的使命，"他告诉我，"始终是教书育人。"
One theory of work holds that people tend to see themselves in jobs, careers, or callings. Individuals who say their work is “just a job” emphasize that they are working for money rather than aligning themselves with any higher purpose. Those with pure careerist ambitions are focused not only on income but also on the status that comes with promotions and the growing renown of their peers. But one pursues a calling not only for pay or status, but also for the intrinsic fulfillment of the work itself. 有一种关于工作的理论认为，人们倾向于将自身定位为职业、事业或天职。那些认为工作"只是份差事"的人强调，他们工作纯粹是为了金钱，而非追求任何更高目标。怀揣纯粹职业野心的人不仅关注收入，更看重晋升带来的地位和同行日益增长的声望。但追求天职之人，不仅为报酬或地位，更为工作本身带来的内在满足。
When I think about the role that work plays in people’s self-esteem - particularly in America - the prospect of a no-work future seems hopeless. There is no universal basic income that can prevent the 当我思考工作对人们自尊心的影响——尤其在美国——无工作的未来前景似乎令人绝望。没有任何全民基本收入政策能够防止
civic ruin of a country built on a handful of workers permanently subsidizing the idleness of tens of millions of people. But a future of less work still holds a glint of hope, because the necessity of salaried jobs now prevents so many from seeking immersive activities that they enjoy. 一个建立在少数劳动者永久补贴数千万闲散人口基础上的国家走向社会崩溃。但减少工作的未来仍存一线希望，因为目前有偿工作的必要性阻碍了太多人投身于他们热爱的沉浸式活动。
After my conversation with Jesko, I walked back to my car to drive out of Youngstown. I thought about Jesko’s life as it might have been had Youngstown’s steel mills never given way to a steel museum - had the city continued to provide stable, predictable careers to its residents. If Jesko had taken a job in the steel industry, he might be preparing for retirement today. Instead, that industry collapsed and then, years later, another recession struck. The outcome of this cumulative grief is that Howard Jesko is not retiring at 60. He’s getting his master’s degree to become a teacher. It took the loss of so many jobs to force him to pursue the work he always wanted to do. 与杰斯科交谈后，我走回车里驶离扬斯敦。我不禁设想，如果扬斯敦的钢铁厂未曾被钢铁博物馆取代——如果这座城市仍能为居民提供稳定可期的职业，杰斯科的人生会是什么模样。若他当年进入钢铁行业工作，如今或许正筹备退休。然而这个行业崩塌了，多年后又遭遇经济衰退。这接二连三的打击导致霍华德·杰斯科未能在 60 岁退休，而是正在攻读硕士学位准备当老师。正是无数工作岗位的消失，才迫使他最终去追求自己真正向往的事业。
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