The Intelligence Age 智力时代

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，我们将能够做一些在我们祖父母看来像魔法一样的事情。

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，但它将被新加速。随着时间的推移，人们的能力显著提高；我们现在已经能够完成我们前辈认为不可能的事情。

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.
我们更有能力并不是因为基因的改变，而是因为我们受益于社会基础设施的高度智能性和强大性，这些都远超我们个人的能力；从某种重要意义上来说，社会本身是一种高级智能。我们的祖父母——以及他们之前的几代人——创造了伟大成就，他们为我们所有人奠定了人类进步的基础。人工智能将为人们提供解决难题的工具，帮助我们为这张支架添加新的支柱，这些是我们自己无法弄清楚的。进步的故事将继续，我们的孩子将能够完成我们做不到的事情。

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.
它不会一下子发生，但我们很快就能够与 AI 合作，帮助我们完成比没有 AI 时多得多的工作；最终，我们每个人都可以拥有一个个人 AI 团队，由不同领域的虚拟专家组成，共同努力创造我们能想象到的几乎所有东西。我们的孩子将拥有虚拟导师，可以以任何语言、在任何学科上、按他们需要的进度提供个性化教学。我们可以想象类似的想法来改善医疗、创造任何人能想象的软件以及更多。

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，我们可以实现今日难以想象的共享繁荣；在未来，每个人的生活可以比现在任何一个人的生活都要好。单单繁荣并不一定能让人们感到幸福——仍然有很多痛苦的富人——但这将切实改善世界各地人们的生活。

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.
这里有一种狭窄的方式来看待人类历史：经过数千年的科学发现和技术进步的积累，我们已经找到了如何融化沙子，添加一些杂质，以惊人的精度在极其微小的规模上将其排列成电脑芯片，通电后最终形成能够创造越来越强大人工智能的系统。

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.
这可能成为到目前为止整个历史中最重要的事实。我们可能在几千天内 (!) 就会拥有超级智能；可能需要更长时间，但我相信我们会实现这一目标。

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.
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：深度学习有效，规模增加后效果更好，我们向其投入了更多资源。

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.
事实就是如此；人类发现了一种算法，能够真正、切实地学习任何数据分布（或准确地说，是产生任何数据分布的“规律”）。随着计算和数据的增加，算法在帮助人类解决复杂问题方面的效果惊人地精确。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.
我们还有很多细节需要弄清楚，但被任何特定的挑战分散注意力是一个错误。深度学习是有效的，并且我们会解决剩下的问题。我们可以说很多关于接下来可能发生的事情，但主要的一点是，人工智能将随着规模的增长而变得更好，这将带来对世界各地人们生活的重大改善。

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.
AI 模型将很快成为自主的个人助理，为我们执行特定任务，例如代表您协调医疗护理。在未来的某个时候，AI 系统会变得非常优秀，能够帮助我们开发更好的下一代系统，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了农业时代，然后又带到了工业时代。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使用人工智能，我们需要降低计算成本并使其充足（这需要大量的能源和芯片）。如果我们不建立足够的基础设施，人工智能将成为战争争夺的非常有限的资源，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。智能时代的黎明是一项重大的发展，伴随非常复杂和极高风险的挑战。这不会是一个完全积极的故事，但其好处如此巨大，以至于我们有责任为了自己和未来，弄清楚如何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.
我相信未来将会是如此光明，以至于没有人能够通过现在的书写来公平描述它；智能时代的一个显著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.
尽管它将逐步发生，但惊人的胜利——解决气候问题、建立太空殖民地以及发现所有物理定律——最终将变得司空见惯。凭借近乎无限的智慧和丰富的能源——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上所见，这里也会有一些负面影响，我们需要现在就开始工作，以最大化 AI 的好处并尽量减少其危害。以一个例子为例，我们预期这项技术将在未来几年对劳动力市场产生显著变化（无论好坏），但大多数工作变化的速度会比大多数人预期的慢，而且我不担心我们会没有事可做（即使这些事情在我们今天看来不像“真正的工作”）。人们有一种与生俱来的愿望，希望创造并有所裨益于他人，AI 将使我们能够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展的世界，我们能够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.
许多我们今天从事的工作，在几百年前的人们看来简直是微不足道的浪费时间，但现在没有人会回顾过去，希望自己是个点灯人。如果一个点灯人能够看到今天的世界，他会认为周围的繁荣是难以想象的。而如果我们能快进到一百年后，我们周围的繁荣也会让人感觉同样难以想象。