人工智能一定会超过人类智能吗?我们应该为使用人工智能增强人类思维感到兴奋吗?还是我们应该害怕机器人霸主的崛起?这就是我们在本周节目中要问的问题。

Since the 1950s, AI cheerleaders have been breathlessly shouting: The Robots are Coming! They will be conscious and free and they will be much smarter than us. But we’re still waiting, so excuse me if don’t buy into the latest hype.

Of course, I admit that it is not the 1950s anymore. It’s not even 1996 anymore. That was year IBM’s chess playing supercomputer Deep Blue first beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Though this was heralded by some a giant leap for computer kind and a giant step back for humankind, it turned out to be another bit of excessive AI hype. IBM shut Deep Blue down when Kasparov demanded to know how it worked. They didn’t want to reveal that the decisive move that sealed Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov wasn’t the result of superior intelligence, as Kasparov feared, but of a bug in the software. That was not the finest moment for AI, to say the least.

Since then, of course, AI has come of age, at least in one sense: it’s everywhere—in your car, on your phone, helping doctors diagnose diseases, helping judges make sentencing decisions. And it’s getting more and more powerful and pervasive every single day. But this does not mean that an AI apocalypse is about to arrive. For one thing, last time I looked, humans were still in charge. For another thing, many people can’t wait for the day when AI finally frees us all from dirt, drudgery, and danger. That wouldn’t be an AI dystopia, but an AI utopia.

But it would be naïve if we confidently expected that AI would necessarily usher in a utopia. Indeed, AI just might make us humans completely obsolete. There are already things that AI can do faster, cheaper, safer and more reliably than any human. Indeed, that is precisely why it has become so ubiquitous. But that raises a troubling question. What if for anything we can do, they can do it better? Wouldn’t that mean that we humans should just give way to the machines?

当然，这引出了一个至关重要的问题。人工智能是一种工具。它不是我们的主人，所以即使我们能创造一个机器人霸主种族，我们为什么要创造呢?最后一个问题的答案一点也不明显。也许不受约束的科学好奇心，或者不受约束的经济贪婪，或者纯粹的愚蠢会把我们引向那条路。无论如何，这是一条我们选择的相当愚蠢的道路，正如约翰·斯图亚特·密尔在19世纪警告过的那样，当时人工智能甚至还不是科幻小说里的东西，更不用说科学事实了。As Mill put it on hisOn Liberty:

Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery—by automatons in human form—it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilized parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

Mill has a very deep point. The only question worthy of our consideration in contemplating whether to deploy the sort of AI that might supplant the human being is what we humans become in a world dominated by such AI. Does the deployment of AI enhance human life and the human being or does it diminish human life and the human being?

Fortunately for us, the robots aren’t about to take over any time soon. The robot apocalypse still remains the stuff of science fiction! And some people might believe that that is where it will always remain. In in reality, they say, AI will never be able to do philosophy, make scientific discoveries, write stories—at least not better than humans can! Read one of those computer-generated stories and you will quickly come to appreciate that the human brain is better at spinning a narrative than any computer could.

Clearly there is something special about the human brain. And you don’t have to be a dualist who believes that the immaterial soul is the seat of consciousness to think that. Our brains are the biological product of millions of years of evolution, and they’re finely tuned to do distinctively human things. So why think that we can replicate all that in mere machines?

问题是人脑本身只是一大块花哨的肉。如果一大块漂亮的肉是有意识的，为什么否认一堆漂亮的电脑芯片也是有意识的呢?虽然我不相信人工智能的过度炒作，但我对人工智能的潜力一点也不怀疑。我认为它的潜力是无限的。但我们离挖掘人工智能的潜力还差得远。事实上，我们距离弄清楚大脑如何产生意识、创造力或同情心还有很长的路要走。如果我们不能弄清楚我们自己的“湿件”是如何做到这一点的，为什么认为我们能够通过编程软件来做到这一点呢?

The bottom line is that at the very least, it’s way too soon to say the robot revolution has finally arrived. But that doesn’t mean that artificial intelligence isn’t a big deal. Even if it falls short of replicating full human consciousness, it still has the potential to disrupt our world, for better or worse, on a massive scale. And that alone means we need to do some hard thinking about whether to welcome or resist that disruption.

Photo byAlessio FerrettionUnsplash