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

如果讓你設計一款在幼兒園協(xié)助發(fā)放飲水、清潔整理和關懷擦傷膝蓋的孩子的機器人，你會把它設計成什么樣子呢?一個笨重、發(fā)出巨大吼聲的大金屬塊?還是一個柔聲細語、像看護員一樣的人形機器人呢?

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

假如你不討厭孩子，你的答案可能是后者。假設將來機器人要在工作場所提供幫助，如果它們能夠融入周圍環(huán)境，它們也許就不會那么讓人震驚�？醋o員往往是女性，因此工程技術人員也許應該把金屬的機器人做成女性的形象：發(fā)出女性的語音，配有波波頭發(fā)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. Thevolunteers felt empathy for the human and the robot.

擬人化意味著人格化�！蹲匀弧�(Nature)雜志去發(fā)表了一項實驗，研究人員向參與者展示了一些照片，照片上是用刀子割一個人的手和一個機器人的手。這些志愿者對人和機器人都感到同情。

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

我在去年早些時候認識到這種賦予機器人格的傾向已經(jīng)到了何種程度。我走訪了倫敦金融城(City of London)的企業(yè)Xchanging，該公司提供業(yè)務流程服務、采購管理和IT外包。這家公司取代人力執(zhí)行單調繁瑣的數(shù)據(jù)錄入任務的機器不比一塊硬盤更像人，但是它們被稱為亨利(Henry)和波普伊(Poppy)。甚至連英法海底隧道中使用的法國鉆頭都被起了名字。

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

在一些案例中，機器的“性別”引起了麻煩。20世紀90年代有報道稱，寶馬公司(BMW)不得不召回安裝了語音導航系統(tǒng)的德國汽車，因為當時男性司機似乎不喜歡聽從女性的語音指令。

There is a danger that by assigning a gender to robots we reinforce stereotypes in theworkforce: 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 torobots when they were assigned a gender. In the experiment, they showed two robots to agroup of men and women. The robots looked the same except for their hairstyles and theshape of their lips. The one with longer hair and fuller lips was seen by the groups as “female”,the short-haired one was “male”.

給機器指定性別會造成一種危險，那就是加深我們對勞動者的成見：不僅女性，男性也會面臨這一問題。在德國，比勒費爾德大學(University of Bielefeld)在《應用社會心理學期刊》(Journal of Applied SocialPsychology)發(fā)表的研究調查了人們對指定性別的機器人的態(tài)度。在實驗中，研究人員向一組有男有女的參與者展示了兩個機器人。兩個機器人除了發(fā)型和嘴唇形狀以外一模一樣。參與者將頭發(fā)更長、嘴唇更厚的機器人視為“女性”，將短發(fā)的那個機器人視為“男性”。

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

結果是，他們認為男性機器人能夠干一些比較“陽剛”的工作——修理技術設備、保家護院。女性機器人被認為適合做家務、看護等人們的固有觀念中由女性承擔的工作。

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

雖然人形機器人不會很快接管我們的托兒所，但是這樣的研究還是提出了有關性別和科技的重要問題。英國南安普頓大學(University of Southampton)計算機科學教授溫迪霍爾(Wendy Hall)指出，人們傾向于把科學視為純粹和客觀的。然而即使是算法(一組應用于數(shù)據(jù)的指令)也會反映人類的設定。她告訴我，人們會無意識地在為客觀世界建模時注入一些偏見。比如，關于谷歌(Google)算法的一項研究突顯了這一點�？▋然�梅隆大學(Carnegie Mellon University)和國際計算機科學研究所(ICSI)的研究人員發(fā)現(xiàn)，比起女性求職者，搜索引擎更有可能向男性求職者展示高薪管理崗位的廣告。

When it comes to talking about the structure of work in the next machine age, gender haslargely 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 paperpublished in November, it stated: “What is missing from the debate is a gender lens.”

在人們探討下一個機器時代的工作結構時，性別在很大程度上被排除在外。世界經(jīng)濟論壇(WEF)有望在一定程度上糾正這一情況。世界經(jīng)濟論壇正在1月份達沃斯年度會議之前研究這一議題。在11月發(fā)表的一份文件中，該論壇寫道：“當前的辯論缺失性別視角。”

It is not yet clear how automation will affect men’s and women’s work. Martin Ford, the authorof 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.

目前尚不清楚自動化將如何影響男性和女性的工作。馬丁輠祹(Martin Ford)的《機器人的崛起》(The Rise ofthe Robots)榮獲英國《金融時報》和麥肯錫2015年度最佳商業(yè)圖書獎(2015 Financial Times andMcKinsey Business Book of the Year Award)。他相信，男性傾向于工作的產(chǎn)業(yè)——制造業(yè)、金融和倉儲業(yè)——尤其容易受到自動化的沖擊，或者是受到實體的機器和機器人影響，或者是受到軟件影響。“短期內，自動化可能給男性帶來更大沖擊，”他說。

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

漢娜圠魿(Hanna Rosin) 2012年的一本著作提出，女性將在未來的勞動大軍中占主導地位，借用這本書的標題，我懷疑這意味著“男性的終結”(The End of Men)。畢竟，由男性主導的科技業(yè)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.

但這的確強調了一點，人類工作的未來不應該只通過“男人與機器”的棱鏡來看待，還要加上女性。