TED演讲:下一次工业革命就在眼前(2)

搜索关注在线英语听力室公众号：tingroom，领取免费英语资料大礼包。

and that this change, surprisingly enough, is going to come from manufacturing, again. 这次改变，出乎意料的是，也再次会从制造业开始。

It will get us out of our growth slump² 它将使我们走出经济的萧条期，

and it will change radically³ the way globalization has been shaped over the last decade. 会从根本上改变过去十年全球化塑造的状况。

I'm here to tell you about the amazing fourth manufacturing revolution that is currently underway. 现在我要告诉大家，第四次工业革命已经在发生了。

It's not as if we've done nothing with manufacturing since the last revolution. 这并不意味着，自上次工业革命以来我们没有任何进步。

Actually, we've made some pretty lame⁴ attempts to try to revitalize it. 事实上，我们做了几次努力，试图重振工业经济。

But none of them have been the big overhaul⁵ we really need to get us growing again. 但成效甚微，不足以让经济恢复增长。

For example, we've tried to relocate our factories offshore⁶ in order to reduce cost and take advantage of cheap labor⁷. 比如说，我们曾试图将工厂迁至海外，利用当地廉价劳动力，从而降低成本。

Not only did this not inspire productivity, but it only saved money for a short period of time, 但这不仅没有提高生产力，还只是在短期内节省了成本，

because cheap labor didn't stay cheap for long. 因为廉价劳动力不会永远廉价。

Then, we've tried to make our factories larger and we specialized⁸ them by product. 之后，我们还试图把工厂做大，对每种产品进行专门化生产。

The idea was that we can make a lot of one product and stockpile it to be sold with demand. 这个想法是基于如果我们可以只做一种产品囤积起来以根据需求售卖。

This did help productivity for a while. 这个做法确实在一段时间内提高了生产力。

But it introduced a lot of rigidities in our supply chain. Let's take fashion retail¹⁰. 但它让我们的供应链非常死板。让我们以服饰时尚零售业为例。

Traditional clothing companies have built offshore, global, rigid⁹ supply chains. 传统的服装企业建立了位于海外的，全球化的，僵化的供应链。

分享到：