The Intelligence Age 智能时代 (译文)
原文链接：https://ia.samaltman.com/
The Intelligence Age - Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
September 23, 2024
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的祖父母辈看起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，但它将会得到新的加速。随着时间的推移，人们变得更加有能力；我们现在已经能够完成一些我们的前人认为不可能的事情。
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.
我们之所以更有能力，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比我们任何一个人都更聪明、更有能力；在某种重要意义上，社会本身就是一种先进的智慧形式。我们的祖父母——以及他们之前的几代人——建立并取得了伟大的成就。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，并帮助我们为这个脚手架增加新的支柱，这是我们自己无法想出来的。进步的故事将继续下去，我们的孩子将能够做我们无法做到的事情。
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.
它不会一蹴而就，但我们很快就能够与人工智能合作，帮助我们完成比以往任何时候都更多的事情；最终，我们每个人都可以拥有一个个人的人工智能团队，里面有不同领域的虚拟专家，共同创造我们几乎可以想象到的任何东西。我们的孩子将拥有虚拟导师，可以提供任何科目、任何语言的个性化教学，以及他们需要的任何学习速度。我们可以想象类似的想法用于改善医疗保健，创造任何人可以想象到的任何软件，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.
有了这些新的能力，我们可以实现共享繁荣，这在今天似乎是难以想象的；未来，每个人的生活都可以比现在任何人的生活更好。繁荣本身并不能一定让人们感到幸福 - 有很多不幸的富人 - 但它将有意义地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.
这是一种狭窄的视角来看待人类历史：经过数千年的科学发现和技术进步，我们已经弄清楚了如何熔化沙子，加入一些杂质，以惊人的精度在极微小的尺度上排列成计算机芯片，通过它传递能量，最终得到能够创造日益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。可能在几千天内我们就会拥有超级智能(!); 可能需要更长时间，但我确信我们会实现这一目标。
How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity?
我们是如何走到繁荣的下一个飞跃的门槛的？
In three words: deep learning worked.
用三个词概括：深度学习奏效。
In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it.
在 15 个字中：深度学习发挥作用，随着规模的扩大变得更加可预测，我们不断增加资源投入。
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.
这实在是太神奇了; 人类发现了一种算法，能够真正地学习任何数据分布（或者说是学习产生任何数据分布的基本“规则”）。随着计算和数据的不断增加，它在帮助人们解决困难问题方面变得越来越好。我发现无论我花多少时间思考这个问题，都无法真正领会它的重要性。
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.
我们仍然有很多细节需要弄清楚，但被任何特定挑战分散注意力是一个错误。深度学习有效，我们将解决剩下的问题。关于接下来可能发生的事情，我们可以说很多，但最重要的是人工智能将随着规模的扩大变得更加优秀，这将带来全球人民生活的有意义改善。
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.
人工智能模型很快将成为自主个人助手，代表我们执行特定任务，例如代表您协调医疗护理。在未来的某个时候，人工智能系统将变得如此出色，以至于它们将帮助我们打造更好的下一代系统，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农业时代，再到工业时代。从这里开始，通往智能时代的道路上铺满了计算、能源和人类意志。
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.
如果我们希望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丰富（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，人们会为此而争斗，它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.
我们需要明智行事，但也要坚定信念。智能时代的曙光是一个重大的发展，带来了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，但好处如此巨大，我们应该为自己和未来设法应对眼前的风险。
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.
我相信未来会变得如此光明，以至于现在试图用文字描述都无法完全表达；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.
尽管这将是逐步发生的，但惊人的胜利 - 解决气候问题，建立太空殖民地，以及发现所有物理学 - 最终将变得司空见惯。凭借几乎无限的智慧和丰富的能量 - 产生伟大的想法的能力，以及使它们变为现实的能力 - 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.
正如我们已经看到的其他技术一样，人工智能也会有其不利之处，我们需要立即开始努力，最大限度地发挥人工智能的好处，同时最小化其危害。例如，我们预计这项技术将在未来几年对劳动力市场造成重大变化（好坏皆有），但大多数工作的变化速度会比大多数人想象的要慢，我并不担心我们会用尽事情做（即使它们在今天对我们来说看起来不像“真正的工作”）。人们天生渴望创造并对彼此有用，人工智能将使我们能够前所未有地增强自己的能力。作为一个社会，我们将重新回到一个不断扩大的世界，我们可以再次专注于进行正和游戏。
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.
如今我们所从事的许多工作，在几百年前看来可能是微不足道的浪费时间，但如今没有人会回首往事，希望自己成为一名点灯人。如果一个点灯人能看到当今世界，他会觉得周围的繁荣是难以想象的。而如果我们能快进一百年，那时的繁荣对我们来说也将是难以想象的。