警惕人工智能的美丽新世界

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.

有时候我觉得，世上没有人能比Pandora更了解我。我根据几支乐队和歌曲新建了一个音乐频道，它就会提供一系列同样能让我喜欢的歌。事实上，它经常给我一些已经从iTunes下载到手机上的歌。不是我的音乐品味太普通，就是Pandora真的很擅长揣摩我的喜好。

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.

在最新一期的《连线》杂志(Wired)里，科技作家凯文·凯利(Kevin Kelly)说，我们大家要去适应这种高超的预测技能。凯利认为，人工智能的时代终于近在眼前了。

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.

他说未来的智能机器不会像《2001太空漫游》(2001: A Space Odyssey)中的HAL 9000那样，是个类人的天才。它们将是一些比较不起眼的机器，帮你开车，翻译外语，整理你的照片，推荐娱乐选项，也许还能诊断你的疾病。“所有我们之前电气化的东西，现在都要认知化，”凯利写道。我们的生活和机器的关系，要比今天更加纠缠不清，机器会代替我们完成一部分动脑子的工作。

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.”

他认为，这种人工智能的突破进展，是由廉价的并行计算技术、大数据收集和更好的算法推动的。结果已经很清晰，“接下来10000家创业公司的商业计划很好预测：选择X，添加AI。”

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集中的力量。

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(Astra Taylor)在《人民平台》(The People’s Platform)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(Google)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.

说得更吓人一些，几家巨型公司的工程师会拥有巨大却又不为人知的力量，他们能影响数据的收集和构建方式，能收集规模巨大的信息，能建起一种框架，让我们这些人在框架中做决策，引导我们的选择。如果你认为这种力量全都会用在正道上，那你该再多读些历史。

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.

第二个影响是哲学层面的。人工智能会重新定义它对人类的意义。我们作为人类的身份，取决于机器和其他动物所不能做到的东西。过去几百年来里，理性被认为是终极的人类官能。但是现在有很多我们认为和思考有关的工作，机器可以完成得比我们更好——比如下象棋、在《危险边缘》(Jeopardy)中获胜，或者做数学运算。

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.

在智能机器的时代，我们之为人类并非因为有颗厉害的大脑，而是因为我们有社交技巧、情感能力和道德直觉。我能展望到两种截然不同的人工智能未来，一种有着深沉的人文主义，另一种是毫无灵魂的功利主义。

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.

在人文主义的未来里，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.

而在冰冷、功利的未来里，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.

我乐于看到Pandora帮我找到我喜欢的东西。但我有点担心，它如此事无巨细地影响着我的聆听体验，会不会有一天变成由它来决定我喜欢什么。我想我们都希望能控制这些机器，而不是被机器控制。