Ray Kurzweil: Technology will let us fully realize our humanity
雷·库兹韦尔：技术将让我们充分实现人性

By the end of this decade, AI will likely surpass humans at all cognitive tasks, igniting the scientific revolution that futurists have long imagined. Digital scientists will have perfect memory of every research paper ever published and think a million times faster than we can. Our plodding progress in fields like robotics, nanotechnology, and genomics will become a sprint. Within the lifetimes of most people alive today, society will achieve radical material abundance, and medicine will conquer aging itself. But our destiny isn’t a hollow Jetsons future of gadgetry and pampered boredom. By freeing us from the struggle to meet the most basic needs, technology will serve our deepest human aspirations to learn, create, and connect.
到本世纪末，人工智能可能会在所有认知任务上超越人类，点燃未来学家长期想象的科学革命。数字科学家将拥有对每一篇已发表研究论文的完美记忆，并且思考速度比我们快一百万倍。我们在机器人技术、纳米技术和基因组学等领域的缓慢进展将变成冲刺。在今天大多数人有生之年，社会将实现极大的物质丰富，医学将征服衰老本身。但我们的命运并不是一个空洞的杰森一家未来，充满小玩意和被宠坏的无聊。通过将我们从满足最基本需求的斗争中解放出来，技术将服务于我们最深层次的人类愿望——学习、创造和连接。

This sounds fantastically utopian, but humans have made such a leap before. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived on a razor’s edge of precarity. Every winter was a battle with starvation. Violence or infection likely killed most people before age 30. The constant struggle to survive left little opportunity for invention or philosophy. But the discovery of agriculture afforded just enough stability to create a feedback loop. Material surplus meant some could develop skills that created even larger surpluses. In a blink of evolutionary time, civilization appeared—literature, law, science, engineering. While modern life can often feel like a rat race, to our paleolithic ancestors, we would seem to enjoy impossible abundance and freedom.
这听起来像是一个极其乌托邦的想法，但人类以前也曾有过这样的飞跃。我们的狩猎采集祖先生活在极度不稳定的边缘。每个冬天都是与饥饿的战斗。暴力或感染可能在 30 岁之前就杀死了大多数人。生存的不断斗争几乎没有留下发明或哲学的机会。但农业的发现提供了足够的稳定性来创造一个反馈循环。物质盈余意味着一些人可以发展技能，创造更大的盈余。在进化时间的一瞬间，文明出现了——文学、法律、科学、工程。虽然现代生活常常感觉像是一场老鼠赛跑，但对我们的旧石器时代祖先来说，我们似乎享受着不可能的丰富和自由。

What will the next leap look like? One of the first shifts will be in learning. From the ancient Greeks through the Enlightenment, education’s primary goal was to nourish the mind and cultivate virtue. But the Industrial Revolution reframed education as training for economic success in an increasingly technical society. Today, kids are told from an early age that they have to study for instrumental reasons—to get into a good college, to get into a good grad school, to get a good job. All too often, this deadens their natural curiosity and love of learning.
下一次飞跃会是什么样子？其中一个最早的变化将出现在学习上。从古希腊到启蒙时代，教育的主要目标是滋养心灵和培养美德。但工业革命将教育重新定义为在日益技术化的社会中为经济成功而进行的培训。今天，孩子们从小就被告知他们必须为了工具性原因而学习——为了进入一所好大学，为了进入一所好的研究生院，为了找到一份好工作。太多时候，这会扼杀他们的自然好奇心和对学习的热爱。

As superhuman AI makes most goods and services so abundant as to be almost free, the need to structure our lives around jobs will fade away. We’ll then be free to learn for its own sake—nurturing the knowledge and wisdom that define our humanity. And learning itself will become vastly richer. Instead of just reading about Rome in dry text, you’ll be able to explore the Forum in virtual reality and debate an AI Cicero trained on the original’s speeches. Instead of getting lost in a crowded lecture hall, you’ll work one on one with a supremely patient digital tutor that’s been trained by the greatest teachers on Earth and knows exactly how you learn best.
随着超人类人工智能使大多数商品和服务变得几乎免费，我们围绕工作的生活结构的需求将消失。我们将能够为了学习本身而学习——培养定义我们人性的知识和智慧。而学习本身将变得极其丰富。你不仅仅是通过枯燥的文字阅读罗马，而是能够在虚拟现实中探索论坛，并与一个根据原始演讲训练的 AI 西塞罗辩论。你不会在拥挤的讲堂里迷失，而是与一个由地球上最伟大的教师训练的、极其耐心的数字导师一对一地工作，它确切地知道你最好的学习方式。

AI tools will also supercharge your creativity. Today, expressing your artistic impulses requires both technical skill and resources—for films and games, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars. These bottlenecks keep countless brilliant ideas trapped in people’s heads, and we are all poorer for it. But systems like Midjourney and Sora let us glimpse a different future. You’ll be able to speak a painting into being like a muse in Rembrandt’s ear. Or you’ll hum a tune and then work with a digital Wagner to orchestrate it into a symphony.
人工智能工具也将极大地增强你的创造力。今天，表达你的艺术冲动需要技术技能和资源——对于电影和游戏，有时需要数亿美元。这些瓶颈使无数的精彩创意被困在人们的脑海中，我们因此变得更加贫穷。但像 Midjourney 和 Sora 这样的系统让我们瞥见了一个不同的未来。你将能够像缪斯在伦勃朗耳边低语一样，用语言创造一幅画。或者你哼唱一首曲调，然后与一个数字瓦格纳合作，将其编排成一部交响曲。

Thanks to this creative revolution, the coming medical breakthroughs won’t just offer longer lives but fuller ones, enriched by all the art, music, literature, film, and games created by humanity during those extra years. Most important, you’ll share all this with the people you love most. Imagine being healthy as you watch your great-grandchildren grow into adults! And material abundance will ease economic pressures and afford families the quality time together they’ve long yearned for.
感谢这场创造性的革命，未来的医学突破不仅会让我们的寿命更长，还会让我们的生活更充实，充满了人类在这些额外岁月里创造的所有艺术、音乐、文学、电影和游戏。最重要的是，你将与最爱的人分享这一切。想象一下，当你看着你的曾孙长大成人时，你是多么健康！物质的丰富将缓解经济压力，让家庭拥有他们长期渴望的高质量相处时间。

This is the profound leap that awaits us—a future where our technological wonders don’t diminish our humanity but allow it to flourish.
这就是等待我们的深刻飞跃——一个我们的技术奇迹不仅不会削弱我们的人性，反而让它蓬勃发展的未来。

Ray Kurzweil is a technologist and futurist and the author, most recently, of The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI. The views represented here are his own.
雷·库兹韦尔是一位技术专家和未来学家，最近出版了《奇点临近：当我们与 AI 融合时》。这里表达的观点是他个人的。