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，我们将能够做到在我们的祖辈看来像魔术一样的事情。

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，但将会加速发展。随着时间的推移，人们的能力大幅提高；我们现在已经可以完成前人认为不可能完成的事情。

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的基础设施，这些基础设施比我们任何一个人都要聪明和有能力；从一个重要的意义上说，社会本身就是一种高级智能。我们的祖辈--以及他们的前辈--创造并成就了伟大的事业。他们为人类进步的脚手架做出了贡献，而我们所有人都从中受益。人工智能将为人们提供解决困难问题的工具，帮助我们在脚手架上添加新的支柱，而这些是我们自己无法解决的。人类进步的故事将继续下去，我们的后代将能做我们做不到的事情。

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，它能帮助我们完成比没有人工智能时更多的工作；最终，我们每个人都能拥有一个由不同领域的虚拟专家组成的个人人工智能团队，共同创造几乎任何我们能想象到的东西。我们的孩子将拥有虚拟家庭教师，他们可以用任何语言、以任何速度提供任何学科的个性化指导。我们还可以想象类似的想法，比如更好的医疗保健、创造人们所能想象的任何软件的能力等等。

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，我们就能实现今天看来难以想象的共同繁荣；在未来，每个人的生活都会比现在更好。繁荣本身并不一定会让人幸福--有很多悲惨的富人--但它会切实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.
我们可以从一个狭义的角度来看待人类历史：经过数千年的科学发现和技术进步，我们已经知道如何熔化沙子，加入一些杂质，以惊人的精度和超小的规模将其排列成计算机芯片，通过它运行能量，最终形成能够创造出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.
这可能是迄今为止所有历史中最重要的事实。我们有可能在几千天后（！）就拥有超级智能；也许需要更长的时间，但我相信我们一定会达到这个目标。

How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity?
我们是如何实现下一次繁荣飞跃的？

In three words: deep learning worked.
三个字：深度学习奏效了。

In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it.
用 15 个字来概括：深度学习行之有效，而且随着规模的扩大，效果可以预见会更好，我们为此投入了越来越多的资源。

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，它可以真正地、真正地学习任何数据分布（或者说，产生任何数据分布的基本 "规则"）。在令人震惊的精确度上，可用的计算和数据越多，它就越能帮助人们解决棘手的问题。我发现，无论我花多少时间思考这个问题，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.
我们还有很多细节问题需要解决，但被任何特定挑战所困扰都是错误的。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，但最主要的一点是，人工智能会随着规模的扩大而变得更好，这将给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.
人工智能模型很快就会成为自主的个人助理，代表我们执行特定任务，比如替你协调医疗服务。在未来的某一天，人工智能系统将变得如此出色，以至于能够帮助我们制造出更好的下一代系统，并在科学上取得全面进步。

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入农业时代，然后又带入工业时代。从这里开始，通往智能时代的道路由计算、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掌握人工智能，就必须降低计算成本，使其变得丰富（这需要大量能源和芯片）。如果我们不建设足够的基础设施，人工智能将成为一种非常有限的资源，人们会为了争夺这种资源而大打出手，而人工智能也将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重大的发展，面临着非常复杂和极其严峻的挑战。这将不会是一个完全积极的故事，但它所带来的好处是如此巨大，以至于我们应该为自己和未来着想，想出办法来应对我们面前的风险。

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，未来将是如此光明，以至于没有人能够在现在就对它进行描述；智能时代的一个显著特征将是大规模繁荣。

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.
尽管这一切都将逐步发生，但令人震惊的胜利--修复气候、建立太空殖民地和发现所有物理学--终将成为司空见惯的事情。凭借近乎无限的智慧和充沛的能量--产生伟大想法的能力和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，人工智能也会有弊端，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。举例来说，我们预计这项技术会在未来几年给劳动力市场带来重大变化（有好有坏），但大多数工作岗位的变化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（即使这些工作在今天看来并不像 "真正的工作"）。人与生俱来就有创造和相互利用的欲望，而人工智能将让我们前所未有地放大自己的能力。作为一个社会，我们将回到一个不断扩大的世界，我们可以再次专注于玩正和游戏。

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.
我们今天所做的许多工作，在几百年前的人们看来都是浪费时间的琐事，但没有人会在回顾过去时，希望自己是一名点灯人。如果一个点灯人能够看到今天的世界，他会觉得周围的繁荣是难以想象的。而如果我们能从今天开始快进一百年，我们周围的繁荣也会让人觉得难以想象。