智能时代

概述 Overview

在接下来的几十年里，我们将能够做到在我们祖父母看来如同魔法般的事情。

In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.

这种现象并不新鲜，但它的速度将前所未有地加快。随着时间的推移，人类的能力已经显著增强；我们现在已经能够完成我们的前辈认为不可能的事情。

This phenomenon is not new, but it will be newly accelerated. People have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible.

我们之所以更有能力，并非因为基因改变，而是因为我们受益于社会基础设施，它比我们任何一个人都更聪明、更有能力；从重要意义上说，社会本身就是一种高级智能。我们的祖父母——以及他们之前的世代——建造并取得了伟大的成就。他们为人类进步的脚手架做出了贡献，我们所有人都从中受益。人工智能将为人们提供解决难题的工具，并帮助我们为那个脚手架添加我们自己无法想出的新支柱。进步的故事将继续，我们的孩子将能够做到我们做不到的事情。

We are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of us; in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence. Our grandparents – and the generations that came before them – built and achieved great things. They contributed to the scaffolding of human progress that we all benefit from. AI will give people tools to solve hard problems and help us add new struts to that scaffolding that we couldn’t have figured out on our own. The story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to do things we can’t.

这一切不会一蹴而就，但我们将很快能够与人工智能合作，帮助我们完成比没有人工智能时多得多的任务；最终，我们每个人都可以拥有一个人工智能团队，由不同领域的虚拟专家组成，共同创造我们能想象的几乎任何东西。我们的孩子将拥有虚拟导师，能够以任何语言、任何速度提供任何学科的个性化教学。我们可以想象类似的想法用于更好的医疗保健、创造任何人能想象到的任何软件的能力，以及更多。

It won’t happen all at once, but we’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine. Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more.

有了这些新能力，我们可以实现今天看来难以想象的共同繁荣；在未来，每个人的生活都可能比现在任何人的生活更好。繁荣本身不一定让人快乐——有很多不快乐的富人——但它将有意义地改善世界各地人们的生活。

With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now. Prosperity alone doesn’t necessarily make people happy – there are plenty of miserable rich people – but it would meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world.

这里有一个看待人类历史的狭隘方式：经过数千年的科学发现和技术进步的积累，我们已经学会了如何熔化沙子，添加一些杂质，以惊人的精度在极小的尺度上将其排列成计算机芯片，通过它运行能量，最终得到能够创造越来越强大的人工智能的系统。

Here is one narrow way to look at human history: after thousands of years of compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision at extraordinarily tiny scale into computer chips, run energy through it, and end up with systems capable of creating increasingly capable artificial intelligence.

这可能是迄今为止整个历史中最重要的事实。我们有可能在几千天内拥有超级智能（！）；也可能需要更长时间，但我相信我们终将实现。

This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.

我们是如何走到下一次繁荣飞跃的门槛上的？

How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity?

用 15 个字概括：深度学习奏效了，随着规模扩大可预测地变得更好，并且我们投入了越来越多的资源。

In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it.

就是这样；人类发现了一种算法，能够真正、真实地学习任何数据分布（或者更确切地说，是产生任何数据分布的底层“规则”）。令人震惊的是，算力和数据越多，它在帮助人们解决难题方面就越好。我发现，无论我花多少时间思考这一点，我都无法真正内化它的重要性。

That’s really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data). To a shocking degree of precision, the more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never really internalize how consequential it is.

我们还有很多细节需要解决，但被任何特定挑战分散注意力都是错误的。深度学习是有效的，我们将解决剩余的问题。关于接下来可能发生的事情，我们可以说很多，但主要的一点是，人工智能将随着规模扩大而变得更好，这将导致世界各地人们生活的有意义改善。

There are a lot of details we still have to figure out, but it’s a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge. Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale, and that will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world.

人工智能模型很快将充当自主的个人助理，代表我们执行特定任务，比如协调医疗护理。在未来的某个时候，人工智能系统将变得如此出色，以至于它们能帮助我们制造更好的下一代系统，并在各个领域取得科学进步。

AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf. At some point further down the road, AI systems are going to get so good that they help us make better next-generation systems and make scientific progress across the board.

技术将我们从石器时代带到农业时代，再到工业时代。从这里，通往智能时代的道路由算力、能源和人类意志铺就。

Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will.

如果我们想让尽可能多的人使用人工智能，我们需要降低算力成本并使其丰富（这需要大量的能源和芯片）。如果我们不建设足够的基础设施，人工智能将是一种非常有限的资源，会引发战争，并且主要成为富人的工具。

If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people.

我们需要明智而坚定地行动。智能时代的黎明是一个重大的发展，伴随着非常复杂且风险极高的挑战。这不会是一个完全正面的故事，但好处如此巨大，以至于我们有责任为自己和未来找出如何应对面前的风险。

We need to act wisely but with conviction. The dawn of the Intelligence Age is a momentous development with very complex and extremely high-stakes challenges. It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous that we owe it to ourselves, and the future, to figure out how to navigate the risks in front of us.

我相信未来将如此光明，以至于现在任何试图描述它的文字都无法公正地呈现；智能时代的一个决定性特征将是巨大的繁荣。

I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity.

尽管这将逐步发生，但惊人的胜利——解决气候问题、建立太空殖民地、发现所有物理学定律——最终将变得司空见惯。拥有近乎无限的智能和丰富的能源——产生伟大想法的能力，以及实现它们的能力——我们可以做很多事情。

Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot.

正如我们在其他技术中看到的那样，也会有负面影响，我们需要现在就开始努力，最大化人工智能的好处，同时最小化其危害。例如，我们预计这项技术在未来几年内会导致劳动力市场的重大变化（有好有坏），但大多数工作的变化会比大多数人想象的要慢，而且我不担心我们会无事可做（即使它们今天看起来不像“真正的工作”）。人们天生就有创造和互相帮助的欲望，人工智能将使我们以前所未有的方式放大自己的能力。作为一个社会，我们将回到一个不断扩张的世界，我们可以再次专注于玩正和游戏。

As we have seen with other technologies, there will also be downsides, and we need to start working now to maximize AI’s benefits while minimizing its harms. As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us today). People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we will be back in an expanding world, and we can again focus on playing positive-sum games.

我们今天做的许多工作在几百年前的人看来可能是琐碎浪费时间的事情，但没有人回顾过去，希望自己是一个点灯人。如果一个点灯人能看到今天的世界，他会觉得周围的繁荣是难以想象的。如果我们能快进到今天的一百年后，我们周围的繁荣也会同样难以想象。

Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.