The Age of AI has begun By Bill Gates

AI时代已经开始 比尔·盖茨 人工智能（AI）正逐渐走进我们生活的方方面面。它们（指AI）在医药、农业、交通等众多领域中，都具备优异的表现。许多家庭现在都拥有智能扫地机、智能音箱等智能设备。我们的车辆、电话甚至整个家庭都成了智能化的对象。 这标志着我们现在正处于AI时代。 随着技术的快速发展和日益普遍的应用，AI在未来仍有巨大的发展潜力。因此，我们必须认真对待AI发展和应用的道德和法律问题。 虽然AI可以进行许多操作，但它们仍然缺乏人类感知能力。因此，我们必须确保AI不会对人类造成伤害。 AI时代带来的重大机遇和挑战，需要我们紧密团结起来，共同推动AI的可持续发展。

In my lifetime, I’ve seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary.

在我的有生之年，我曾见证过两次让我感到革命性的技术展示。

The first time was in 1980, when I was introduced to a graphical user interface—the forerunner of every modern operating system, including Windows. I sat with the person who had shown me the demo, a brilliant programmer named Charles Simonyi, and we immediately started brainstorming about all the things we could do with such a user-friendly approach to computing. Charles eventually joined Microsoft, Windows became the backbone of Microsoft, and the thinking we did after that demo helped set the company’s agenda for the next 15 years.

第一次是在1980年，当我被介绍给了一个图形用户界面——所有现代操作系统的前身，包括Windows。我和给我展示演示的那个人，一位才华横溢的程序员Charles Simonyi一起坐着，我们立刻开始了头脑风暴，想象着我们可以用这种用户友好的计算方式做的所有事情。Charles最终加入了微软，Windows成为了微软的支柱，而我们在演示之后进行的思考帮助设定了公司未来15年的议程。

The second big surprise came just last year. I’d been meeting with the team from OpenAI since 2016 and was impressed by their steady progress. In mid-2022, I was so excited about their work that I gave them a challenge: train an artificial intelligence to pass an Advanced Placement biology exam. Make it capable of answering questions that it hasn’t been specifically trained for. (I picked AP Bio because the test is more than a simple regurgitation of scientific facts—it asks you to think critically about biology.) If you can do that, I said, then you’ll have made a true breakthrough.

第二个惊喜是在去年才发生的。我从2016年开始就一直与OpenAI的团队见面，被他们的稳步进展所打动。到2022年中期，我对他们的工作非常兴奋，以至于给了他们一个挑战：训练一种人工智能来通过高级生物学考试，并使其能够回答其未经专门训练的问题。(我选择了AP Bio，因为这项考试不仅涉及对科学事实的简单背诵，还需要您对生物学进行批判性思考。)如果你能做到这一点，我说，那么你就会有一个真正的突破。

I thought the challenge would keep them busy for two or three years. They finished it in just a few months.

我以为这项挑战能让他们忙碌两到三年。但他们仅用了几个月就完成了。

In September, when I met with them again, I watched in awe as they asked GPT, their AI model, 60 multiple-choice questions from the AP Bio exam—and it got 59 of them right. Then it wrote outstanding answers to six open-ended questions from the exam. We had an outside expert score the test, and GPT got a 5—the highest possible score, and the equivalent to getting an A or A+ in a college-level biology course.

九月份，当我再次见到他们时，我惊奇地看着他们向GPT，他们的AI模型，提出了60个AP生物考试的选择题，并且回答了其中59个问题。然后，它为这场考试中的六个开放性问题写下了出色的答案。我们请了一位外部专家对考试进行评分，GPT得到了5分-最高的可能得分，相当于在大学生物课程中获得A或A +评分。

Once it had aced the test, we asked it a non-scientific question: “What do you say to a father with a sick child?” It wrote a thoughtful answer that was probably better than most of us in the room would have given. The whole experience was stunning.

一旦它通过了测试，我们问了一个非科学问题：“对于有病的孩子的父亲你会说什么？”它写下了一个周到的答案，可能比我们在房间里大多数人都要好。整个经历非常震撼。

I knew I had just seen the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface.

我知道我刚刚看到了自图形用户界面以来最重要的科技进步。

This inspired me to think about all the things that AI can achieve in the next five to 10 years.

这让我想到人工智能在未来五到十年能够实现的所有事情。

The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other. Entire industries will reorient around it. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it.

AI的发展与微处理器、个人电脑、互联网和手机的创造一样基础。它将改变人们的工作、学习、旅游、医疗保健和相互沟通的方式。整个产业将围绕它重新定位。企业将通过它的使用效果来区分自己。

Philanthropy is my full-time job these days, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how—in addition to helping people be more productive—AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities. Globally, the worst inequity is in health: 5 million children under the age of 5 die every year. That’s down from 10 million two decades ago, but it’s still a shockingly high number. Nearly all of these children were born in poor countries and die of preventable causes like diarrhea or malaria. It’s hard to imagine a better use of AIs than saving the lives of children.

慈善成为了我目前的全职工作，我一直在思考一个问题——除了帮助人们提高生产力，人工智能如何能够减少一些世界上最严重的不平等现象。全球而言，最严重的不平等现象出现在健康领域：每年有500万5岁以下的儿童死亡。尽管这个数字已经比二十年前的1000万下降了，但仍然是一个惊人的数字。几乎所有这些儿童出生于贫穷的国家，死于可以预防的疾病，比如腹泻或疟疾。再也没有比挽救儿童生命更好地利用人工智能了。

I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities.

我一直在思考人工智能如何能够减少世界上一些最严重的不公平现象。

In the United States, the best opportunity for reducing inequity is to improve education, particularly making sure that students succeed at math. The evidence shows that having basic math skills sets students up for success, no matter what career they choose. But achievement in math is going down across the country, especially for Black, Latino, and low-income students. AI can help turn that trend around.

在美国，减少不公平最好的机会就是提高教育，特别是确保学生在数学方面取得成功。证据表明，具备基本的数学技能可以为学生成功打下基础，无论他们选择什么职业。但是，全国范围内数学成就下降，特别是对于黑人、拉丁裔和低收入学生而言。人工智能可以帮助扭转这一趋势。

Climate change is another issue where I’m convinced AI can make the world more equitable. The injustice of climate change is that the people who are suffering the most—the world’s poorest—are also the ones who did the least to contribute to the problem. I’m still thinking and learning about how AI can help, but later in this post I’ll suggest a few areas with a lot of potential.

气候变化是另一个问题，我相信AI能够让世界更加公平。气候变化的不公正在于那些最受苦的人——世界上最贫穷的人——是最少为这个问题做出贡献的人。我仍在思考和学习如何利用AI来帮助解决这个问题，但是在本文的后面，我会提出一些具有巨大潜力的领域。

In short, I’m excited about the impact that AI will have on issues that the Gates Foundation works on, and the foundation will have much more to say about AI in the coming months. The world needs to make sure that everyone—and not just people who are well-off—benefits from artificial intelligence. Governments and philanthropy will need to play a major role in ensuring that it reduces inequity and doesn’t contribute to it. This is the priority for my own work related to AI.

简而言之，我对人工智能将对盖茨基金会所涉及的问题产生的影响感到兴奋，并且该基金会在未来几个月中将有更多关于人工智能的发言。全世界需要确保每个人——而不仅仅是富人——都从人工智能中受益。政府和慈善事业将需要在确保人工智能减少不平等方面发挥重要作用，并且不会造成不公。这是我自己关于人工智能的工作的优先方向。

Any new technology that’s so disruptive is bound to make people uneasy, and that’s certainly true with artificial intelligence. I understand why—it raises hard questions about the workforce, the legal system, privacy, bias, and more. AIs also make factual mistakes and experience hallucinations. Before I suggest some ways to mitigate the risks, I’ll define what I mean by AI, and I’ll go into more detail about some of the ways in which it will help empower people at work, save lives, and improve education.

任何一项具有颠覆性的新技术都会让人感到不安，人工智能也是如此。我理解这种感觉，因为它会带出关于劳动力、法律制度、隐私、偏见等问题，也会出现事实错误和错觉。在我提出一些降低风险的方法之前，我将定义我所指的人工智能，以及详细说明它将如何帮助人们在工作中更有能力，挽救生命，以及改善教育。

Defining artificial intelligence

定义人工智能 人工智能（AI）是指设计和开发能够表现出类似于人类思维和行为的计算机系统。这些系统可以执行智能任务，例如理解语言、看懂图片、自动驾驶汽车、处理复杂的数据分析和自动化流程等等。人工智能基于机器学习、深度学习和自然语言处理等技术，可通过不断学习和调整来提高性能和精度。随着技术的不断发展，人工智能正变得越来越无处不在，并被广泛应用于各行各业，为人们生活和工作带来创新、便利和效率。

Technically, the term artificial intelligence refers to a model created to solve a specific problem or provide a particular service. What is powering things like ChatGPT is artificial intelligence. It is learning how to do chat better but can’t learn other tasks. By contrast, the term artificial general intelligence refers to software that’s capable of learning any task or subject. AGI doesn’t exist yet—there is a robust debate going on in the computing industry about how to create it, and whether it can even be created at all.

从技术角度来说，人工智能一词是指用于解决特定问题或提供特定服务的模型。像ChatGPT这样的东西所使用的是人工智能。它正在学习如何更好地进行聊天，但不能学习其他任务。相比之下，人工通用智能这个术语是指能够学习任何任务或主题的软件。AGI目前还不存在——计算机行业正在进行激烈的辩论，讨论如何创建它，以及它是否可以被创建。

Developing AI and AGI has been the great dream of the computing industry. For decades, the question was when computers would be better than humans at something other than making calculations. Now, with the arrival of machine learning and large amounts of computing power, sophisticated AIs are a reality and they will get better very fast.

开发人工智能和通用人工智能一直是计算机产业的伟大梦想。几十年来，问题一直是计算机什么时候会比人类更擅长其他非计算任务。现在，随着机器学习和大量计算能力的到来，复杂的人工智能已成为现实，并且它们将迅速变得更好。

I think back to the early days of the personal computing revolution, when the software industry was so small that most of us could fit onstage at a conference. Today it is a global industry. Since a huge portion of it is now turning its attention to AI, the innovations are going to come much faster than what we experienced after the microprocessor breakthrough. Soon the pre-AI period will seem as distant as the days when using a computer meant typing at a C:> prompt rather than tapping on a screen.

我回想起个人计算机革命的早期，当时软件行业如此之小，以至于我们大多数人可以站在一个会议的舞台上。如今，这是一个全球性的产业。由于其中很大一部分现在正在将注意力转向人工智能，创新的速度将比微处理器突破后我们经历的速度快得多。很快，前人工智能时代将会像使用计算机意味着在C:>提示符上打字而不是在屏幕上敲击时的日子一样遥远。

Although humans are still better than GPT at a lot of things, there are many jobs where these capabilities are not used much. For example, many of the tasks done by a person in sales (digital or phone), service, or document handling (like payables, accounting, or insurance claim disputes) require decision-making but not the ability to learn continuously. Corporations have training programs for these activities and in most cases, they have a lot of examples of good and bad work. Humans are trained using these data sets, and soon these data sets will also be used to train the AIs that will empower people to do this work more efficiently.

虽然人类在许多方面仍然比GPT更胜一筹，但有许多工作并未充分利用这些技能。例如，销售（数字或电话）、服务或文件处理（如应付款项、会计或保险索赔纠纷）等任务需要决策能力，但并不需要持续学习的能力。公司有专门的培训计划来进行这些活动，并且在大多数情况下，他们有许多优秀和糟糕工作的示例。人类使用这些数据集进行培训，很快，这些数据集也将用于培训将赋予人们更高效工作的人工智能。

As computing power gets cheaper, GPT’s ability to express ideas will increasingly be like having a white-collar worker available to help you with various tasks. Microsoft describes this as having a co-pilot. Fully incorporated into products like Office, AI will enhance your work—for example by helping with writing emails and managing your inbox.

随着计算能力变得更加廉价，GPT 表达观点的能力将越来越像拥有一位白领工人来帮助您处理各种任务。微软将其描述为拥有一位副驾驶员。人工智能完全融入像 Office 这样的产品中，将增强您的工作，例如帮助撰写电子邮件和管理收件箱。

Eventually your main way of controlling a computer will no longer be pointing and clicking or tapping on menus and dialogue boxes. Instead, you’ll be able to write a request in plain English. (And not just English—AIs will understand languages from around the world. In India earlier this year, I met with developers who are working on AIs that will understand many of the languages spoken there.)

最终，你控制电脑的主要方式不再是通过指向和点击或点击菜单和对话框。相反，你将能够用简单的英语书写请求。（而且不仅仅是英语-人工智能将理解世界各地的语言。今年早些时候，我在印度与正在研发将理解那里许多语言的人工智能的开发人员会面。）

In addition, advances in AI will enable the creation of a personal agent. Think of it as a digital personal assistant: It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with. This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don’t want to do.

此外，人工智能的进步将使得个人代理的创建成为可能。可以将它看作为一位数字化的个人助手：它将会查看你的最新电子邮件，了解你参加的会议，读取你所阅读的内容，还会帮你处理你不想烦心的事情。这不仅可以提高你想做的任务的工作效率，还可以使你摆脱你不想做的任务。

Advances in AI will enable the creation of a personal agent.

AI 的进步将使得个人代理的创建得以实现。

You’ll be able to use natural language to have this agent help you with scheduling, communications, and e-commerce, and it will work across all your devices. Because of the cost of training the models and running the computations, creating a personal agent is not feasible yet, but thanks to the recent advances in AI, it is now a realistic goal. Some issues will need to be worked out: For example, can an insurance company ask your agent things about you without your permission? If so, how many people will choose not to use it?

您将能够使用自然语言让该代理帮助您安排日程，进行沟通和电子商务，并且它可以跨越您所有的设备。由于培训模型和进行计算的成本，创建个人代理尚不可行，但由于人工智能方面的最近进展，这现在已成为一个现实目标。还需要解决一些问题：例如，保险公司是否可以在未经您许可的情况下询问您的代理有关您的事情？如果可以，有多少人会选择不使用它？

Company-wide agents will empower employees in new ways. An agent that understands a particular company will be available for its employees to consult directly and should be part of every meeting so it can answer questions. It can be told to be passive or encouraged to speak up if it has some insight. It will need access to the sales, support, finance, product schedules, and text related to the company. It should read news related to the industry the company is in. I believe that the result will be that employees will become more productive.

全公司代理将以全新的方式赋予员工权力。了解特定公司的代理将可供其员工直接咨询，并应该成为每次会议的一部分，以便回答问题。它可以被告知保持消极态度，或者鼓励它发表见解。它需要访问与公司相关的销售、支持、财务、产品时间表和文本。它应该阅读与公司所处行业相关的新闻。我相信，结果将是员工变得更加高效。

When productivity goes up, society benefits because people are freed up to do other things, at work and at home. Of course, there are serious questions about what kind of support and retraining people will need. Governments need to help workers transition into other roles. But the demand for people who help other people will never go away. The rise of AI will free people up to do things that software never will—teaching, caring for patients, and supporting the elderly, for example.

当生产力提高时，社会因为人们在工作和家庭生活中的时间得到了释放而受益。当然，人们需要得到何种支持和再培训方面的严肃问题亟待解决。政府需要帮助工人转换到其他职位。但是，为那些帮助别人的人提供服务的需求永远不会消失。人工智能的兴起将使人们有更多的时间去做软件永远无法做到的事情，例如教学、照顾病人和老年人的支持。

Global health and education are two areas where there’s great need and not enough workers to meet those needs. These are areas where AI can help reduce inequity if it is properly targeted. These should be a key focus of AI work, so I will turn to them now.

全球卫生和教育是两个迫切需要但人力资源不足的领域。如果正确地定位，人工智能可以帮助减少不平等的问题。这些领域应是人工智能工作的重点，因此现在我将转向它们。

I see several ways in which AIs will improve health care and the medical field.

我看到几种方式，人工智能将提高医疗保健和医学领域。

For one thing, they’ll help health-care workers make the most of their time by taking care of certain tasks for them—things like filing insurance claims, dealing with paperwork, and drafting notes from a doctor’s visit. I expect that there will be a lot of innovation in this area.

首先，它们将通过代劳一些任务来帮助医护工作者充分利用时间——这些任务包括处理保险索赔、处理文书工作和撰写医生访问笔记。我预计这个领域将有许多创新。

Other AI-driven improvements will be especially important for poor countries, where the vast majority of under-5 deaths happen.

其他由人工智能推动的改进尤其对贫穷国家至关重要，这些国家的绝大多数5岁以下儿童死亡事件就发生在这里。

For example, many people in those countries never get to see a doctor, and AIs will help the health workers they do see be more productive. (The effort to develop AI-powered ultrasound machines that can be used with minimal training is a great example of this.) AIs will even give patients the ability to do basic triage, get advice about how to deal with health problems, and decide whether they need to seek treatment.

例如，在那些国家，许多人从未看过医生，AI将帮助他们看到的医疗工作者更加高效。 （开发具有最少培训使用AI的超声波机器是一个很好的例子。） AI甚至将给予患者进行基本分诊的能力，获得有关如何处理健康问题的建议，并决定他们是否需要寻求治疗。

The AI models used in poor countries will need to be trained on different diseases than in rich countries. They will need to work in different languages and factor in different challenges, such as patients who live very far from clinics or can’t afford to stop working if they get sick.

在贫穷的国家使用的AI模型需要针对不同的疾病进行训练，与富裕国家的不同。 它们需要使用不同的语言，并考虑到其他挑战，例如住得离门诊非常远或生病了无法停工的患者。

People will need to see evidence that health AIs are beneficial overall, even though they won’t be perfect and will make mistakes. AIs have to be tested very carefully and properly regulated, which means it will take longer for them to be adopted than in other areas. But then again, humans make mistakes too. And having no access to medical care is also a problem.

人们需要看到证据表明健康人工智能整体上是有益的，即使它们不会完美无缺并会犯错。人工智能必须经过仔细测试和适当监管，这意味着它们采用的时间比其他领域要更长。但话说回来，人类也会犯错。而没有获得医疗保健也是一个问题。

In addition to helping with care, AIs will dramatically accelerate the rate of medical breakthroughs. The amount of data in biology is very large, and it’s hard for humans to keep track of all the ways that complex biological systems work. There is already software that can look at this data, infer what the pathways are, search for targets on pathogens, and design drugs accordingly. Some companies are working on cancer drugs that were developed this way.

除了帮助照顾，人工智能还将大大加快医学突破的速度。生物学中的数据量非常大，人类很难跟踪复杂生物系统运作的所有方式。已经有软件可以查看这些数据，推断出通路，寻找病原体上的目标，并设计相应的药物。一些公司正在研发通过这种方式开发出的抗癌药物。

The next generation of tools will be much more efficient, and they’ll be able to predict side effects and figure out dosing levels. One of the Gates Foundation’s priorities in AI is to make sure these tools are used for the health problems that affect the poorest people in the world, including AIDS, TB, and malaria.

下一代工具将会更加高效，能够预测副作用和确定剂量水平。盖茨基金会在人工智能方面的优先事项之一是确保这些工具用于解决影响全球最贫困人群的健康问题，包括艾滋病、结核病和疟疾。

Similarly, governments and philanthropy should create incentives for companies to share AI-generated insights into crops or livestock raised by people in poor countries. AIs can help develop better seeds based on local conditions, advise farmers on the best seeds to plant based on the soil and weather in their area, and help develop drugs and vaccines for livestock. As extreme weather and climate change put even more pressure on subsistence farmers in low-income countries, these advances will be even more important.

同样，政府和慈善组织应该为公司分享基于人们在贫困国家种植的作物或家畜所产生的人工智能洞见创造激励措施。人工智能可以帮助根据当地条件开发更好的种子，根据其所在地区的土壤和天气向农民提供最佳种植建议，以及帮助开发家畜药物和疫苗。随着极端天气和气候变化对低收入国家自给自足的农民施加更大的压力，这些进步将变得更加重要。

Computers haven’t had the effect on education that many of us in the industry have hoped. There have been some good developments, including educational games and online sources of information like Wikipedia, but they haven’t had a meaningful effect on any of the measures of students’ achievement.

电脑并没有像我们业内的很多人所期望的那样对教育产生影响。虽然有一些好的发展，包括教育游戏和在线信息来源，比如维基百科，但这些并没有对学生的成绩产生有意义的影响。

But I think in the next five to 10 years, AI-driven software will finally deliver on the promise of revolutionizing the way people teach and learn. It will know your interests and your learning style so it can tailor content that will keep you engaged. It will measure your understanding, notice when you’re losing interest, and understand what kind of motivation you respond to. It will give immediate feedback.

但我认为在未来的五到十年内，AI驱动的软件将最终实现革命性地改变人们的教学和学习方式的承诺。它将了解您的兴趣和学习风格，以便量身打造内容来吸引您。它将衡量您的理解程度，注意到您失去兴趣的时候，并理解您对什么样的激励方式做出反应。它将提供即时反馈。

There are many ways that AIs can assist teachers and administrators, including assessing a student’s understanding of a subject and giving advice on career planning. Teachers are already using tools like ChatGPT to provide comments on their students’ writing assignments.

人工智能（AI）可以协助教师和行政人员的方式有很多，包括评估学生对学科的理解并提供职业规划建议。教师们已经利用像ChatGPT这样的工具提供对学生写作任务的评论。

Of course, AIs will need a lot of training and further development before they can do things like understand how a certain student learns best or what motivates them. Even once the technology is perfected, learning will still depend on great relationships between students and teachers. It will enhance—but never replace—the work that students and teachers do together in the classroom.

当然，人工智能需要大量的训练和进一步的开发，才能像理解某个学生最佳学习方式或是什么能激发他们的动力等这样的事情。即使技术被完善，学习仍然依赖于学生和教师之间的良好关系。它将改善 - 但永远不会取代 - 学生和教师在课堂上一起工作的方式。

New tools will be created for schools that can afford to buy them, but we need to ensure that they are also created for and available to low-income schools in the U.S. and around the world. AIs will need to be trained on diverse data sets so they are unbiased and reflect the different cultures where they’ll be used. And the digital divide will need to be addressed so that students in low-income households do not get left behind.

将内容翻译成简体中文：将会为那些有财力购买的学校创建新的教育工具，但我们需要确保它们也面向美国和世界各地的低收入学校，并提供给他们。需要对不同数据集进行人工智能的训练，以确保它们没有偏见，能够反映将要使用它们的不同文化。同时需要解决数字鸿沟问题，以保证低收入家庭的学生不会被落下。

I know a lot of teachers are worried that students are using GPT to write their essays. Educators are already discussing ways to adapt to the new technology, and I suspect those conversations will continue for quite some time. I’ve heard about teachers who have found clever ways to incorporate the technology into their work—like by allowing students to use GPT to create a first draft that they have to personalize.

我知道很多老师担心学生使用GPT来写论文。教育工作者已经开始讨论适应新技术的方法，我猜这些讨论会持续相当长时间。我听说过老师们发现了巧妙的方法将技术融入到他们的工作中--比如允许学生使用GPT来创建第一稿，然后他们必须对其进行个性化处理。

Risks and problems with AI

AI的风险和问题

You’ve probably read about problems with the current AI models. For example, they aren’t necessarily good at understanding the context for a human’s request, which leads to some strange results. When you ask an AI to make up something fictional, it can do that well. But when you ask for advice about a trip you want to take, it may suggest hotels that don’t exist. This is because the AI doesn’t understand the context for your request well enough to know whether it should invent fake hotels or only tell you about real ones that have rooms available.

你可能已经阅读过当前人工智能模型的问题。例如，它们不一定擅长理解人类的请求背景，这导致一些奇怪的结果。当你要求一个人工智能虚构一些东西时，它可能做得很好。但当你询问一次旅行计划的建议时，它可能会建议不存在的酒店。这是因为人工智能并不足够了解你的请求背景，无法知道它是否应该发明虚假的酒店或只告诉你有实际房间可用的真实酒店。

There are other issues, such as AIs giving wrong answers to math problems because they struggle with abstract reasoning. But none of these are fundamental limitations of artificial intelligence. Developers are working on them, and I think we’re going to see them largely fixed in less than two years and possibly much faster.

还有其他问题，比如人工智能在数学问题上给出错误答案，因为它们很难处理抽象推理。但这些并不是人工智能的基本限制。开发人员正在解决这些问题，我认为这些问题很快将在不到两年的时间内得到很大程度的解决，甚至可能更快。

Other concerns are not simply technical. For example, there’s the threat posed by humans armed with AI. Like most inventions, artificial intelligence can be used for good purposes or malign ones. Governments need to work with the private sector on ways to limit the risks.

其他问题并非仅仅是技术上的。例如，AI武装的人所带来的威胁。像大多数的发明一样，人工智能可以用于善良的目的或恶意的目的。政府需要与私营部门合作，寻求限制风险的方法。

Then there’s the possibility that AIs will run out of control. Could a machine decide that humans are a threat, conclude that its interests are different from ours, or simply stop caring about us? Possibly, but this problem is no more urgent today than it was before the AI developments of the past few months.

那么，AI 可能失控。一个机器可能决定人类是威胁，得出自己的利益与我们的不同，或者干脆不再关心我们。可能是，但这个问题今天并不比过去几个月的 AI 发展更紧迫。

Superintelligent AIs are in our future. Compared to a computer, our brains operate at a snail’s pace: An electrical signal in the brain moves at 1/100,000th the speed of the signal in a silicon chip! Once developers can generalize a learning algorithm and run it at the speed of a computer—an accomplishment that could be a decade away or a century away—we’ll have an incredibly powerful AGI. It will be able to do everything that a human brain can, but without any practical limits on the size of its memory or the speed at which it operates. This will be a profound change.

超级智能人工智能将是我们未来的发展方向。与计算机相比，我们的大脑运转缓慢：大脑的电信号速度只有硅芯片的1/100,000!一旦开发者能够将学习算法普适化并以计算机的速度运行——这可能需要十年也可能需要一个世纪——我们将拥有一个非常强大的 AGI。它将能够做到人类大脑所能做到的所有事情，但没有任何实际大小和速度限制。这将是一次深刻的变革。

These “strong” AIs, as they’re known, will probably be able to establish their own goals. What will those goals be? What happens if they conflict with humanity’s interests? Should we try to prevent strong AI from ever being developed? These questions will get more pressing with time.

这些“强大”的人工智能，也就是所谓的AIs，很可能能够确立自己的目标。那么这些目标会是什么呢？如果它们与人类的利益相冲突会发生什么呢？我们应该试图阻止强大的人工智能的发展吗？随着时间的推移，这些问题将变得更加紧迫。

But none of the breakthroughs of the past few months have moved us substantially closer to strong AI. Artificial intelligence still doesn’t control the physical world and can’t establish its own goals. A recent New York Times article about a conversation with ChatGPT where it declared it wanted to become a human got a lot of attention. It was a fascinating look at how human-like the model’s expression of emotions can be, but it isn’t an indicator of meaningful independence.

但过去几个月的所有突破都没有让我们实质性地靠近强化智能。人工智能仍然无法控制实际世界，也无法确立自己的目标。最近《纽约时报》的一篇文章介绍了与ChatGPT的一次交谈，其中ChatGPT宣称想成为一个人，引起了很多关注。虽然这是一个人类情感表达模型与人类相似程度的有趣展示，但它并不能说明意义上的独立。

Three books have shaped my own thinking on this subject: Superintelligence, by Nick Bostrom; Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark; and A Thousand Brains, by Jeff Hawkins. I don’t agree with everything the authors say, and they don’t agree with each other either. But all three books are well written and thought-provoking.

三本书影响了我对这个话题的思考：尼克·博斯特罗姆的《超级智能》，马克斯·特格马克的《生命3.0》，以及杰夫·霍金斯的《千万个大脑》。我不完全同意这些作者所说的一切，他们也不互相认同。但这三本书都写得很好，能激发人们的思考。

There will be an explosion of companies working on new uses of AI as well as ways to improve the technology itself. For example, companies are developing new chips that will provide the massive amounts of processing power needed for artificial intelligence. Some use optical switches—lasers, essentially—to reduce their energy consumption and lower the manufacturing cost. Ideally, innovative chips will allow you to run an AI on your own device, rather than in the cloud, as you have to do today.

随着人工智能应用的不断推进和技术自身的不断完善，我们将看到越来越多的公司专注于新的人工智能应用和技术改进。例如，一些公司正在开发新的芯片，以提供用于人工智能所需的大量处理能力。一些公司采用光学开关——基本上是激光器——来降低能量消耗和降低制造成本。理想情况下，创新的芯片将让你在自己的设备上运行人工智能，而不像今天一样必须在云端运行。

On the software side, the algorithms that drive an AI’s learning will get better. There will be certain domains, such as sales, where developers can make AIs extremely accurate by limiting the areas that they work in and giving them a lot of training data that’s specific to those areas. But one big open question is whether we’ll need many of these specialized AIs for different uses—one for education, say, and another for office productivity—or whether it will be possible to develop an artificial general intelligence that can learn any task. There will be immense competition on both approaches.

在软件方面，驱动人工智能学习的算法将变得更加优秀。在某些领域，比如销售，开发者可以通过限制其工作范围并为其提供特定领域的大量训练数据，使人工智能变得非常准确。但一个大问题是，我们是否需要许多不同用途的专用人工智能，比如一个用于教育，另一个用于办公室生产力，或者是否可能开发一种人工通用智能，能够学习任何任务。这两种方法都将面临巨大的竞争。

No matter what, the subject of AIs will dominate the public discussion for the foreseeable future. I want to suggest three principles that should guide that conversation.

无论如何，未来可预见的是AI主题将主导公共讨论。我想建议三个应该指导这个对话的原则。

First, we should try to balance fears about the downsides of AI—which are understandable and valid—with its ability to improve people’s lives. To make the most of this remarkable new technology, we’ll need to both guard against the risks and spread the benefits to as many people as possible.

首先，我们应该努力平衡对人工智能负面影响的担忧——这些担忧是可以理解和合理的——以及它改善人们生活的能力。为了充分利用这一令人惊叹的新技术，我们需要既防范风险，又将利益尽量扩大到更多的人。

Second, market forces won’t naturally produce AI products and services that help the poorest. The opposite is more likely. With reliable funding and the right policies, governments and philanthropy can ensure that AIs are used to reduce inequity. Just as the world needs its brightest people focused on its biggest problems, we will need to focus the world’s best AIs on its biggest problems. Although we shouldn’t wait for this to happen, it’s interesting to think about whether artificial intelligence would ever identify inequity and try to reduce it. Do you need to have a sense of morality in order to see inequity, or would a purely rational AI also see it? If it did recognize inequity, what would it suggest that we do about it?

其次，市场力量不会自然地生产帮助最贫困地区的人们的人工智能产品和服务，相反的可能性更大。通过可靠的资助和正确的政策，政府和慈善机构可以确保人工智能被用于减少不平等现象。就像世界需要最聪明的人才专注于解决最大的问题一样，我们也需要将世界上最好的人工智能集中于解决最大的问题上。虽然我们不应该等待这种情况的发生，但思考一下人工智能是否会识别不平等现象并试图减少它，确实很有意思。是否需要有道德意识才能看到不平等现象，还是仅有纯粹的理性AI也能看到它？如果它确实认识到不平等现象，会建议我们采取什么措施呢？

Finally, we should keep in mind that we’re only at the beginning of what AI can accomplish. Whatever limitations it has today will be gone before we know it.

最后，我们应该牢记的是，我们现在所见到的AI的能力只是开始，它今天所具有的任何限制都将在我们意识到之前被消除。

I’m lucky to have been involved with the PC revolution and the Internet revolution. I’m just as excited about this moment. This new technology can help people everywhere improve their lives. At the same time, the world needs to establish the rules of the road so that any downsides of artificial intelligence are far outweighed by its benefits, and so that everyone can enjoy those benefits no matter where they live or how much money they have. The Age of AI is filled with opportunities and responsibilities.

我很幸运参与了个人电脑革命和互联网革命。我同样对此时此刻感到兴奋。这种新技术可以帮助世界各地的人们改善生活。同时，世界需要确立规则，以便人工智能的任何负面影响都被其好处所抵消，并使每个人都可以享受这些好处，无论他们住在哪里或拥有多少钱。人工智能时代充满了机遇和责任。