vol.8 | 读外刊，看世界

纠正：“这间房间是那间的三倍大”是“This room is three times as big as that one”，口误口误～ P7 As a result, the connection between robots and ageing is a powerful one. Mr Acemoglu reckons that ageing is the biggest single influence upon how many robots a country has. He estimates it explains close to 40% of the variation in the numbers of robots countries introduce. P8 The influence will grow. This year, there will be more people over 65 than under five for the first time in human history. By 2060, the number of Americans over 65 will double, to 98m, while in Japan, 40% of the population will be 65 or older. There will not be enough younger people to look after so many, unless robots help (and probably an influx of migrants is permitted, too). P9 Shrinking and ageing workforces matter as much. China is now the world’s largest robot maker, producing 137,900 industrial robots (typically, machines used in assembly lines) in 2017. Between 2015 and 2040, according to the UN, China’s working-age population (aged 20 to 64) will fall by a staggering 124m, or over 13%. Applying Mr Acemoglu’s rule of thumb to this decline, China would by the end of the period need to install roughly 2m more robots. That is more than four years’ worth of all the industrial robots produced in the world in 2018 and six times as many as the increase in worldwide production over the past nine years.