Some days I think nobody knows me as well as Pandora. I create a new music channel around some band or song and Pandora feeds me a series of songs I like just as well. In fact, it often feeds me songs I’d already downloaded onto my phone from iTunes. Either my musical taste is extremely conventional or Pandora is really good at knowing what I like.有时候我实在，世上没有人比起Pandora更加理解我。我根据几支乐队和歌曲新建了一个音乐频道，它就不会获取一系列某种程度能让我讨厌的歌。

事实上，它常常给我一些早已从iTunesiTunes到手机上的歌。不是我的音乐品味太普通，就是Pandora知道很擅长于推敲我的爱好。In the current issue of Wired, the technology writer Kevin Kelly says that we had all better get used to this level of predictive prowess. Kelly argues that the age of artificial intelligence is finally at hand.在近期一期的《连线》杂志(Wired)里，科技作家凯文·凯利(Kevin Kelly)说道，我们大家要去适应环境这种高超的预测技能。

凯利指出，人工智能的时代再一近在眼前了。He writes that the smart machines of the future won’t be humanlike geniuses like HAL 9000 in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” They will be more modest machines that will drive your car, translate foreign languages, organize your photos, recommend entertainment options and maybe diagnose your illnesses. “Everything that we formerly electrified we will now cognitize,” Kelly writes. Even more than today, we’ll lead our lives enmeshed with machines that do some of our thinking tasks for us.他说道未来的智能机器会像《2001太空漫游》(2001: A Space Odyssey)中的HAL 9000那样，是个类人的天才。

它们将是一些较为不起眼的机器，老大你驾车，翻译成外语，整理你的照片，引荐娱乐选项，或许还能临床你的疾病。“所有我们之前电气化的东西，现在都要理解化，”凯利写到。我们的生活和机器的关系，要比今天更为纠缠不清，机器不会替换我们已完成一部分动脑子的工作。

This artificial intelligence breakthrough, he argues, is being driven by cheap parallel computation technologies, big data collection and better algorithms. The upshot is clear, “The business plans of the next 10,000 start-ups are easy to forecast: Take X and add A.I.”他指出，这种人工智能的突破进展，是由廉价的并行计算技术、大数据搜集和更佳的算法推展的。结果早已很明晰，“接下来10000家创业公司的商业计划很好预测：自由选择X，加到AI。

”Two big implications flow from this. The first is sociological. If knowledge is power, we’re about to see an even greater concentration of power.这不会产生两种极大的影响。首先是社会学上。如果说科学知识就是力量，那么我们将看见一股比以往更为集中于的力量。

The Internet is already heralding a new era of centralization. As Astra Taylor points out in her book, “The People’s Platform,” in 2001, the top 10 websites accounted for 31 percent of all U.S. page views, but, by 2010, they accounted for 75 percent of them. Gigantic companies like Google swallow up smaller ones. The Internet has created a long tail, but almost all the revenue and power is among the small elite at the head.互联网早已伴随了一个全新的中心化时代将要来临。正如阿斯特拉·泰勒(Astra Taylor)在《人民平台》(The People’s Platform)一书中所写出，在2001年，名列前10的网站占有了全美31%的页面浏览量，但是到2010年，这个比例早已超过75%。

像谷歌(Google)这样的巨无霸不会毁灭小公司。互联网建构了长尾，但完全所有的收益和力量都掌控在头部为数不多的精英手上。

Advances in artificial intelligence will accelerate this centralizing trend. That’s because A.I. companies will be able to reap the rewards of network effects. The bigger their network and the more data they collect, the more effective and attractive they become.人工智能的变革不会加快中心化的趋势。因为人工智能公司能从网络效应中受益。网络越大，搜集的数据就越多，就就越有效率，就越能更有人。

As Kelly puts it, “Once a company enters this virtuous cycle, it tends to grow so big, so fast, that it overwhelms any upstart competitors. As a result, our A.I. future is likely to be ruled by an oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences.”如凯利所说，“一旦公司转入这种良性循环，往往不会以迅速的速度，显得更加可观，把一切刚冒头的竞争者压过。其结果是，人工智能的未来，可能会被两三个可观的、多功能的、基于云计算的商业智能寡头所统治者。”To put it more menacingly, engineers at a few gigantic companies will have vast-though-hidden power to shape how data are collected and framed, to harvest huge amounts of information, to build the frameworks through which the rest of us make decisions and to steer our choices. If you think this power will be used for entirely benign ends, then you have not read enough history.说道得更加可怕一些，几家巨型公司的工程师不会享有极大却又不为人知的力量，他们能影响数据的搜集和建构方式，能搜集规模极大的信息，能修建一种框架，让我们这些人在框架中做到决策，引领我们的自由选择。

如果你指出这种力量全都会用在天道上，那你该再行多读书些历史。The second implication is philosophical. A.I. will redefine what it means to be human. Our identity as humans is shaped by what machines and other animals can’t do. For the last few centuries, reason was seen as the ultimate human faculty. But now machines are better at many of the tasks we associate with thinking — like playing chess, winning at Jeopardy, and doing math.第二个影响是哲学层面的。人工智能不会新的定义它对人类的意义。

我们作为人类的身份，各不相同机器和其他动物所无法做的东西。过去几百年来里，理性被指出是终极的人类官能。

但是现在有很多我们指出和思维有关的工作，机器可以已完成得比我们更佳——比如下象棋、在《危险性边缘》(Jeopardy)中获得胜利，或者做到数学运算。On the other hand, machines cannot beat us at the things we do without conscious thinking: developing tastes and affections, mimicking each other and building emotional attachments, experiencing imaginative breakthroughs, forming moral sentiments.另一方面，在一些不必须我们有意识地思维的事情上，机器是无法战胜我们的：培育品味和感情，互相仿效，创建情感连结，体验想象力的进步，构成道德情感。

In the age of smart machines, we’re not human because we have big brains. We’re human because we have social skills, emotional capacities and moral intuitions. I could paint two divergent A.I. futures, one deeply humanistic, and one soullessly utilitarian.在智能机器的时代，我们之为人类并非因为有颗得意的大脑，而是因为我们有社交技巧、情感能力和道德直觉。我能未来发展到两种截然不同的人工智能未来，一种具有内敛的人文主义，另一种是没什么灵魂的功利主义。

In the humanistic one, machines liberate us from mental drudgery so we can focus on higher and happier things. In this future, differences in innate I.Q. are less important. Everybody has Google on their phones so having a great memory or the ability to calculate with big numbers doesn’t help as much.在人文主义的未来里，机器让我们从心智的苦力中众生出来，把精力放到更高、更加快乐的事上。在这个未来里，先天的智商差距早已没有那么无非。每个人的手机上都有谷歌，有个好记性，或者可以展开简单的计算出来，用处早已没有那么大。In this future, there is increasing emphasis on personal and moral faculties: being likable, industrious, trustworthy and affectionate. People are evaluated more on these traits, which supplement machine thinking, and not the rote ones that duplicate it.在这个未来里，个人和道德官能更加最重要：要有亲和力、刻苦、可信、有爱心。

人的价值不会更好地各不相同这些特征，它们不会填补机器思维的严重不足。评价人的方式会再行是死记硬背的本事，因为那只是在拷贝机器的思维。In the cold, utilitarian future, on the other hand, people become less idiosyncratic. If the choice architecture behind many decisions is based on big data from vast crowds, everybody follows the prompts and chooses to be like each other. The machine prompts us to consume what is popular, the things that are easy and mentally undemanding.而在冰冷、功利的未来里，人会显得没有那么独有。如果许多决策背后的自由选择架构是基于来自普罗大众的大数据，所有人都会照着提醒行事，自由选择和其他人一样。

机器提醒我们消费风行的、更容易的、对心智拒绝不高的东西。I’m happy Pandora can help me find what I like. I’m a little nervous if it so pervasively shapes my listening that it ends up determining what I like. I think we all want to master these machines, not have them master us.我乐意看见Pandora老大我寻找我讨厌的东西。

但我有点担忧，它如此事无巨细地影响着我的倾听体验，不会会有一天变为由它来要求我讨厌什么。我想要我们都期望能掌控这些机器，而不是被机器掌控。

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