Public conversations, driven by media, research institutes and professional services firms, typically predict the future of work in one of two rather polarising ways. On one hand, techno-positivist utopian accounts predict ever-increasing productivity, efficiency and work quality as a direct and deterministic outcome of technologies and automation with artificial intelligence (AI) (e.g. Deloitte, 2019; Manyika, 2017). On the other hand, dystopian accounts paint an equally deterministic picture of automation destroying jobs and ‘the robots coming for us’ (Schiller, 2015; Wolf, 2019), with impacts on skills displacement and skills shortages that will cripple businesses (Gasca, 2019). What unites most accounts is that they foreground technology and focus on, and extrapolate, applications and their likely effects, making assumptions about technological progress that, with hindsight, time and again turn out to be too simplistic. It has been argued that, although predictable in their development, most digital technologies we invented in recent times ‘have had consequences wildly different from those anticipated’ (Lepore, 2018), and we have ‘[fallen] short in identifying and contesting the most crucial and unprecedented facts’ of their existence (Zuboff, 2019).

中文翻译：

---

机器人启示录的表现在于质量，而不是工作量

由媒体、研究机构和专业服务公司推动的公共对话通常以两种相当两极分化的方式之一预测工作的未来。一方面，技术实证主义乌托邦式的观点将不断提高的生产力、效率和工作质量预测为技术和人工智能 (AI) 自动化的直接和确定性结果（例如德勤，2019 年；Manyika，2017 年）。另一方面，反乌托邦的描述描绘了一幅同样确定性的图景，即自动化破坏工作和“机器人来找我们”（席勒，2015 年；沃尔夫，2019 年），对技能替代和技能短缺的影响将削弱企业（加斯卡，2019 年） ）。大多数帐户的统一之处在于，他们将技术放在首位，并专注于并推断应用程序及其可能的影响，对技术进步做出的假设，事后一再证明过于简单化。有人认为，尽管在其发展过程中是可以预测的，但我们最近发明的大多数数字技术“产生的后果与预期的大不相同”（Lepore，2018 年），而且我们“在识别和竞争最他们存在的关键和前所未有的事实（Zuboff，2019）。