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.
在未来的几十年里，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.
我们的能力提高并不是因为基因的变化，而是因为我们受益于社会基础设施的智能和能力远远超过我们每一个人；从某种重要意义上说，社会本身就是一种高级智能。我们的祖父母——以及他们之前的几代人——建造并实现了伟大的成就。他们为我们所有人受益的人类进步的脚手架做出了贡献。人工智能将为人们提供解决难题的工具，并帮助我们添加新的支撑，这些支撑是我们自己无法想出的。进步的故事将继续，我们的孩子将能够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，帮助我们完成比没有人工智能时更多的事情；最终，我们每个人都可以拥有一个个人人工智能团队，充满了不同领域的虚拟专家，共同创造几乎我们能想象的任何东西。我们的孩子将拥有虚拟导师，可以在任何学科、任何语言、任何需要的速度下提供个性化的指导。我们可以想象类似的想法，用于更好的医疗保健、创造任何人能想象的软件等等。

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，我们可以实现一种今天看起来难以想象的共享繁荣；在未来，每个人的生活都可以比现在任何人的生活更好。单单繁荣并不一定能让人们幸福——有很多富有的痛苦人——但它会显著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.
这里有一种狭隘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复合，我们已经弄清楚如何融化沙子，添加一些杂质，以惊人的精度在极其微小的尺度上排列成计算机芯片，通过它运行能量，并最终得到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.
这可能是迄今为止所有历史中最重要的事实。我们可能在几千天内（！）拥有超级智能；可能需要更长时间，但我相信我们会实现的。

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

In three words: deep learning worked.
用三个字：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 个字来说：深度学习起作用了，随着规模的扩大，效果变得更好，我们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.
事实就是如此；人类发现了一种算法，能够真正学习任何数据分布（或者说，产生任何数据分布的“规则”）。在令人震惊的精度下，计算能力和数据越多，它在帮助人们解决难题方面的效果就越好。我发现无论我花多少时间思考这个问题，我都无法真正内化它的重要性。

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错误的。深度学习有效，我们将解决剩下的问题。我们可以对接下来可能发生的事情说很多，但主要的一点是，人工智能将随着规模的扩大而变得更好，这将为世界各地的人们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.
人工智能模型将很快成为自主的个人助理，代表我们执行特定任务，比如协调医疗护理。在未来的某个时刻，人工智能系统将变得如此出色，以至于它们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.
技术将我们从石器时代带到了农业时代，然后是工业时代。从这里开始，通往智能时代的道路是由计算能力、能源和人类意志铺就的。

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，人工智能将成为一种非常有限的资源，可能会引发战争，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.
我们需要明智但坚定地行动。智能时代的黎明是一个重要的发展，伴随着非常复杂和极高风险的挑战。它不会是一个完全积极的故事，但其巨大的好处使我们有责任弄清楚如何应对眼前的风险，为了我们自己和未来。

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，以至于没有人能通过现在的书写来公正地描述它；智能时代的一个定义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.
尽管这一切将逐步发生，但令人惊叹的成就——解决气候问题、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。凭借几乎无限的智能和充足的能源——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中看到的那样，也会有负面影响，我们需要现在开始努力，在最大化人工智能的好处的同时最小化其危害。举个例子，我们预计这种技术在未来几年会对劳动力市场产生重大变化（有好有坏），但大多数工作岗位的变化速度会比大多数人想象的要慢，我不担心我们会没有事情可做（即使它们在今天看起来不像“真正的工作”）。人们有一种与生俱来的愿望去创造和对彼此有用，人工智能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.
我们今天所做的许多工作在几百年前的人看来可能是微不足道的浪费时间，但没有人会回顾过去，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。而如果我们能快进到一百年后的今天，周围的繁荣也会让我们觉得同样难以想象。