The Intelligence Age 智能时代

In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.
在接下来的几十年里，我们将能够做到一些在我们祖父母看来如同魔法般的事情。

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.
这种现象并不新鲜，但它将被新的力量加速。随着时间的推移，人们的能力得到了显著提高；我们现在已经能够做到我们的前辈认为不可能做到的事情。

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.
我们之所以更有能力，不是因为基因的改变，而是因为我们受益于社会基础设施比我们任何一个人都更聪明、更有能力；在某种重要的意义上，社会本身就是一种高级智能。我们的祖父母——以及他们之前的几代人——建造并取得了伟大的成就。他们为我们所有人受益的人类进步的框架做出了贡献。人工智能将为人们提供解决难题的工具，并帮助我们为这个框架添加我们自己无法弄清楚的新支柱。进步的故事将继续下去，我们的孩子们将能够做到我们做不到的事情。

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.
这不会一蹴而就，但我们很快就能与人工智能合作，完成比以往任何时候都多的事情；最终我们每个人都可以拥有一个个人人工智能团队，由不同领域的虚拟专家组成，共同创造几乎任何我们可以想象的东西。我们的孩子将拥有虚拟导师，可以以任何语言、以他们需要的任何速度为他们提供任何科目的个性化指导。我们可以想象类似的想法，用于更好的医疗保健、创造任何人们可以想象的软件的能力等等。

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.
有了这些新能力，我们可以实现今天难以想象的共同繁荣；在未来，每个人的生活都可以比现在任何人的生活都要好。 仅仅繁荣并不一定会让人们快乐——有很多悲惨的富人——但它将有意义地改善全世界人民的生活。

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.
将人类历史视为漫长科学发现和技术进步的累积结果，我们经过数千年的努力，最终掌握了融化沙子，添加一些杂质，并以惊人的精度将其排列成极微小的计算机芯片，然后通电运行，最终创造出能够创造越来越强大的人工智能的系统。

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.
这可能是迄今为止历史上最重要的一个事实。我们有可能在几千天内 (!) 拥有超级智能；这可能需要更长时间，但我相信我们最终会实现。

How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity?
我们是如何走到下一个繁荣飞跃的门槛的？

In three words: deep learning worked.
三个字：深度学习成了。

In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it.
深度学习奏效，规模扩大后可预测地变得更好，我们投入了更多资源。

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.
就是这样；人类发现了一种算法，它能够真正地学习任何数据分布（或者说，产生任何数据分布的潜在“规则”）。精确度惊人，可用的计算能力和数据越多，它就越能帮助人们解决难题。我发现，无论我花多少时间思考这个问题，我都无法真正理解它的重要性。

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.
还有很多细节我们需要弄清楚，但如果被任何特定的挑战分散注意力，那就错了。深度学习是有效的，我们会解决剩下的问题。关于接下来可能发生的事情，我们可以说很多，但最重要的是，人工智能会随着规模的扩大而变得更好，这将为全世界人民的生活带来有意义的改善。

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.
人工智能模型很快将成为自主的个人助理，代表我们执行特定任务，例如代表您协调医疗保健。在未来的某个时候，人工智能系统将变得非常出色，可以帮助我们构建更好的下一代系统，并在各个领域取得科学进步。

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.
科技将我们从石器时代带到农业时代，再到工业时代。从现在开始，通往智能时代的道路将由算力、能源和人类意志铺就。

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.
如果我们想让尽可能多的人使用人工智能，我们需要降低计算成本并使其丰富（这需要大量的能源和芯片）。如果我们不构建足够的基础设施，人工智能将成为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。

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.
我们需要明智而坚定地行动。智能时代的到来是一个意义重大的发展，伴随着非常复杂且风险极高的挑战。它不会是一个完全积极的故事，但其积极意义是如此巨大，以至于我们有责任为我们自己和未来弄清楚如何应对眼前的风险。

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.
我相信未来将会无比光明，任何试图现在就描述它的人都无法做到公正；智能时代的决定性特征将是巨大的繁荣。

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.
虽然这将逐步发生，但惊人的成就——修复气候、建立太空殖民地以及发现所有物理学——最终将变得司空见惯。凭借近乎无限的智慧和丰富的能量——产生伟大想法的能力以及实现这些想法的能力——我们可以做很多事情。

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.
正如我们在其他技术中看到的那样，人工智能也会有负面影响，我们需要从现在开始努力，最大限度地发挥人工智能的优势，同时将其危害降到最低。例如，我们预计这项技术在未来几年内会对劳动力市场造成重大变化（好的和坏的），但大多数工作岗位的变化速度会比大多数人想象的要慢，而且我并不担心我们会无事可做（即使它们在我们今天看来不像“真正的工作”）。人们天生就有创造和互相帮助的愿望，而人工智能将使我们能够以前所未有的方式增强自身的能力。作为一个社会，我们将重新回到一个不断扩张的世界，我们可以再次专注于玩正和博弈。

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.
我们今天做的很多工作，在几百年前的人们看来都是浪费时间的琐事，但没有人会回顾过去，希望自己成为一名点灯人。如果一个点灯人能看到今天的世界，他会认为周围的繁荣是他无法想象的。如果我们能快进一百年，我们周围的繁荣也会让我们感到同样的不可思议。