双语畅销书《艾伦图灵传》第8章:水银延时线(79)
If, like the Second Front, the plans had been delayed again and again, no loss of confidence was betrayed when Alan gave a talk on 20 February to the London Mathematical Society.
This was when he elaborated in detail on the imagined operation of the ACE, and spoke as if its realisation was almost a formality:
他煞费苦心地演示了想象中的ACE操作，好像它几乎就要完成了，before long the terminals would be humming with activity, and the programmers would be busy with the work of converting the nation's problems into logical instructions.
用不了多久，终端就要开始运转了，大量的编程人员就可以投入工作了。
His talk, however, dwelt rather more upon the dream that lay behind the practicalities of an installation, bringing out in a public form the ideas that he had long been developing in Bletchley conversations.
然而，图灵的这番想象，其实是基于他长期在布莱切利的环境中看到的场面。In fact his discussion opened with the picture of 'masters' and 'servants' who would attend the ACE, very much as the high-level cryptanalysts and the 'girls' had worked to decipher naval Enigma.
他展望的这种围绕ACE的"老大"和"跟班"的工作关系，非常像密码专家和女勤人员的关系，The masters would attend to its logical programming, and the servants to its physical operation.
专家负责逻辑编程，助手负责操作机器。But, he said, 'as time goes on the calculator itself will take over the functions both of masters and of servants. The servants will be replaced by mechanical and electrical limbs and sense organs.
但是图灵还进一步说："随着时间发展，计算机本身将具有专家和助手的功能，助手将会被机器的电子四肢和电子感官取代。One might for instance provide curve followers to enable data to be taken direct from curves instead of having girls read off values and punch them on cards.'
比如说，可以通过曲线识别器，从曲线中直接读取数据，不需要助手们人工读数再制成打孔卡片。"This was not a new idea, for F.C. Williams had built just such a thing for the old Manchester differential analyser.
这并不是新思想，威廉姆斯已经为曼彻斯特差分机制造了这么一个东西。But the novelty lay in suggesting that:
但是这件事意味着：The masters are liable to get replaced because as soon as any technique becomes at all stereotyped it becomes possible to devise a system of instruction tables which will enable the electronic computer to do it for itself.
专家有被取代的趋势，因为任何技术一旦有了成熟方法，那么就可以设计一套指令表，由电子计算机自动完成。It may happen however that the masters will refuse to do this.
虽然这在技术上是有可能的，但是专家们可能不希望这样的事情发生，They may be unwilling to let their jobs be stolen from them in this way.
他们不愿意被这样抢走饭碗。In that case they would surround the whole of their work with mystery and make excuses, couched in well chosen gibberish, whenever any dangerous suggestions were made.
在这种情况下，他们就会故意为他们的工作制造一种神秘感，精心编造一些谎言，I think that a reaction of this kind is a very real danger.
我认为这种反应才是真正的危险。This topic naturally leads to the question as to how far it is in principle possible for a computing machine to simulate human activities.
这个话题自然地引出一个问题，即原则上计算机应该模仿人类活动到什么程度。
