程阳：如果机器控制了我们人类

 

 

A robot delivers an order of fresh towels to a room at the Aloft Hotel in Cupertino, Calif

加利福尼亚州库比提诺的雅乐轩酒店，一台机器人把新毛巾送到客房。

 

Our Machine Masters

By DAVID BROOKS February 04, 2015

 

如果机器控制了我们人类

戴维·布鲁克斯 2015年02月04日

 

Some days I think nobody knows me as well as Pandora. I create a new music channel around some band or song and Pandora feeds me a series of songs I like just as well. In fact, it often feeds me songs I’d already downloaded onto my phone from iTunes. Either my musical taste is extremely conventional or Pandora is really good at knowing what I like.

 

有些日子，我觉得没人能比“潘多拉”更能理解我，我新建了一个音乐频道，指定了一类乐队和歌曲，潘多拉就会帮我完成剩下的添加一堆歌曲的事儿。事实上，这既不是我的音乐品味过于平常让它容易满足，也不是潘多拉真的牛逼到可以知道我之所爱，而是它给我添加的仅仅是我在手机上下载过这些。

 

In the current issue of Wired, the technology writer Kevin Kelly says that we had all better get used to this level of predictive prowess. Kelly argues that the age of artificial intelligence is finally at hand.

 

在这期的《连线》杂志里，科技作家凯文·凯利说，我们大家最好习惯于这类水平的预测技巧，按他的说法“人工智能的年代已经将近眼前”。

 

 He writes that the smart machines of the future won’t be humanlike geniuses like HAL 9000 in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” They will be more modest machines that will drive your car, translate foreign languages, organize your photos, recommend entertainment options and maybe diagnose your illnesses. “Everything that we formerly electrified we will now cognitize,” Kelly writes. Even more than today, we’ll lead our lives enmeshed with machines that do some of our thinking tasks for us.

 

按他的描述，未来的智慧机器，不会像《2001太空漫游》说的那样，是人模人样的天才。这些智慧机器将十分温顺，帮助我们开车、翻译、整理相册，也可以给我们娱乐建议，或者帮我们诊断一些疾病。他认为“之前我们电气化的所有东西，现在我们都将使之认知化。”机器将更多地介入我们的生活，帮助我们进行一些思考，我们应该适应这些变化。

 

 This artificial intelligence breakthrough, he argues, is being driven by cheap parallel computation technologies, big data collection and better algorithms. The upshot is clear, “The business plans of the next 10,000 start-ups are easy to forecast: Take X and add A.I.”

 

他重申，人工智能的革命性突破，仰仗于并行计算技术、大数据收集与更好的算法。他认为结果已经明晰：接下来成千上万的新型商业计划，也很好预测，那就是“把所有未知都添加上人工智能”。

 

 Two big implications flow from this. The first is sociological. If knowledge is power, we’re about to see an even greater concentration of power.

 

这会产生两种巨大的影响。首先是社会学上。如果说“知识就是力量”，那么我们将看到一股比以往更加强大聚集的力量。

 

 The Internet is already heralding a new era of centralization. As Astra Taylor points out in her book, “The People’s Platform,” in 2001, the top 10 websites accounted for 31 percent of all U.S. page views, but, by 2010, they accounted for 75 percent of them. Gigantic companies like Google swallow up smaller ones. The Internet has created a long tail, but almost all the revenue and power is among the small elite at the head.

 

互联网已经预示了一个全新的中心化时代即将到来。正如阿斯特拉·泰勒在《人民平台》一书中所写，在2001年，排名前10的网站占据了全美31%的页面浏览量，但是到2010年，这个比例已经达到75%。像谷歌这样的巨无霸会吞噬小公司。互联网创造了长尾，但几乎所有的收入和力量都掌握在头部为数不多的精英手上。

 

 Advances in artificial intelligence will accelerate this centralizing trend. That’s because A.I. companies will be able to reap the rewards of network effects. The bigger their network and the more data they collect, the more effective and attractive they become.

 

人工智能的进步会加速中心化的趋势。因为人工智能公司能从网络效应中获益。网络越大，收集的数据越多，就越有效率，越能吸引人。

 

 As Kelly puts it, “Once a company enters this virtuous cycle, it tends to grow so big, so fast, that it overwhelms any upstart competitors. As a result, our A.I. future is likely to be ruled by an oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences.”

 

如凯利所说，“一旦公司进入这种良性循环，往往会以很快的速度，变得越来越庞大，把一切刚刚冒头的竞争者压倒。其结果是，人工智能的未来，可能会被两三个庞大的、多功能的、基于云计算的商业智能寡头所统治。”

 

 To put it more menacingly, engineers at a few gigantic companies will have vast-though-hidden power to shape how data are collected and framed, to harvest huge amounts of information, to build the frameworks through which the rest of us make decisions and to steer our choices. If you think this power will be used for entirely benign ends, then you have not read enough history.

 

往最坏处想，几家巨型公司的工程师会拥有巨大儿隐秘的力量，他们塑造了世间数据的搜集与构架，他们获取海量的信息，他们建立起了信息的篱笆影响着我们的决策和选择。如果人们还会以为，所有这些力量都会用于正义与善良，那真的枉费了历史学家给我们的告诫。

 

 The second implication is philosophical. A.I. will redefine what it means to be human. Our identity as humans is shaped by what machines and other animals can’t do. For the last few centuries, reason was seen as the ultimate human faculty. But now machines are better at many of the tasks we associate with thinking — like playing chess, winning at Jeopardy, and doing math.

 

第二层面的影响在哲学意义上，也就是说人工智能将重新定义“人类”本身。我们之前关于“人类”的定义，总是基于机器与其它动物不能做什么，去过几个世纪我们一直认为理性是人类的终极特征，但是现如今机器却在很多需要思考推理的方面强于人类，例如国际象棋、智慧游戏和做数学题方面。

 

 On the other hand, machines cannot beat us at the things we do without conscious thinking: developing tastes and affections, mimicking each other and building emotional attachments, experiencing imaginative breakthroughs, forming moral sentiments.

 

另一方面，在一些不需要我们有意识地思考的事情上，机器是无法战胜我们的：培养品味和感情，相互模仿，建立情感联结，体验想象力的飞跃，形成道德情感。

 

 In the age of smart machines, we’re not human because we have big brains. We’re human because we have social skills, emotional capacities and moral intuitions. I could paint two divergent A.I. futures, one deeply humanistic, and one soullessly utilitarian.

 

在智慧机器的时代，之所以为人类，并非因为有颗大脑袋，而是因为人类有社交技巧、感性世界和道德感官。因此对人工智能的未来，也就有了两个截然不同的描述——其一温馨的人文关怀，其二冰冷的唯利是图。

 

 In the humanistic one, machines liberate us from mental drudgery so we can focus on higher and happier things. In this future, differences in innate I.Q. are less important. Everybody has Google on their phones so having a great memory or the ability to calculate with big numbers doesn’t help as much.

 

人文关怀方面，机器让我们从心智的苦力中解脱出来，把精力放在更高、更幸福的事上。在这个未来里，先天的智商差距已经没那么要紧。每个人的手机上都有谷歌，有个好记性，或者可以进行复杂的计算，用处已经没那么大。

 

 In this future, there is increasing emphasis on personal and moral faculties: being likable, industrious, trustworthy and affectionate. People are evaluated more on these traits, which supplement machine thinking, and not the rote ones that duplicate it.

 

在这个未来里，个人和道德官能越来越重要：要有亲和力、勤奋、可靠、有爱心。人的价值会更多地取决于这些特征，它们会弥补机器思考的不足。评价人的方式不会再是死记硬背的本事，因为那只是在复制机器的思考。

 

 In the cold, utilitarian future, on the other hand, people become less idiosyncratic. If the choice architecture behind many decisions is based on big data from vast crowds, everybody follows the prompts and chooses to be like each other. The machine prompts us to consume what is popular, the things that are easy and mentally undemanding.

 

在冰冷的唯利是图角度，人会变得没那么独特。如果许多决策背后的选择架构是基于来自普罗大众的大数据，所有人都会照着提示行事，选择和其他人一样。机器提示我们消费流行的、容易的、对心智要求不高的东西。

 

I’m happy Pandora can help me find what I like. I’m a little nervous if it so pervasively shapes my listening that it ends up determining what I like. I think we all want to master these machines, not have them master us.

 

对于“潘多拉”所作所为，我享受其中。但我也心存介意，他是否塑造了我的听觉，并因此最终决定了我的喜好？我想我们大家想的都是，我们应该驾驭机器，而不是反过来让机器控制我们。