科普：如何让人工智能造福人类（3）

How to make artificial intelligence benefit mankind（3）

As AI comes to influence more government and business decisions, the ramifications will be widespread.“How do we make sure the machines we ‘train’ don’t perpetuate and amplify the same human biases that plague society?” asks Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab.
随着人工智能影响更多政府和企业决策，影响将是广泛的。“我们如何确保我们‘培训’的机器不会固化和放大困扰社会的人类偏见？”麻省理工学院媒体实验室主任伊藤穰一(Joi Ito)问道。

Executives like Mr Nadella believe a mixture of government oversight— including, by implication, the regulation of algorithms — and industry action will be the answer. He plans to create an ethics board at Microsoft to deal with any difficult questions thrown up by AI.
纳德拉等高管认为，答案将是结合监督（言外之意，这包括对算法的管理）和行业行动。他计划在微软成立一个道德小组，以处理人工智能带来的任何棘手问题。

He says:“I want...an ethics board that says,‘If we are going to use AI in the context of anything that is doing prediction, that can actually have societal impact...that it doesn’t come with some bias that’s built in.’”
他说：“我希望有……一个道德小组，它会这样说，‘如果我们要在任何作出预测、可能具有实际社会影响的场合使用人工智能……那么它不带有内置的一些偏见’。”

Making sure AI systems benefit humans without unintended consequences is difficult. Human society is incapable of defining what it wants, says Prof Russell, so programming machines to maximise the happiness of the greatest number of people is problematic.
确保人工智能在不会带来一些意想不到的后果的情况下造福人类，是很困难的。拉塞尔教授说，人类社会无法界定自身想要什么，因此通过编程让机器为最多数量的人谋求最大幸福是存在问题的。

This is AI’s so-called “control problem”: the risk that smart machines will single-mindedly pursue arbitrary goals even when they are undesirable. “The machine has to allow for uncertainty about what it is the human really wants,” says Prof Russell.
这就是人工智能所谓的“控制问题”：智能机器将一心追逐武断的目标，甚至当这些目标并不可取的时候也是如此。“机器必须考虑到人类真正想要的东西具有不确定性，”拉塞尔教授说。

Ethics committees will not resolve concerns about AI taking jobs, however. Fears of a backlash were apparent at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos as executives agonised over how to present AI. The common response was to say machines will make many jobs more fulfilling though other jobs could be replaced.
然而，道德小组无法平息人们对人工智能夺走工作的担忧。在今年的达沃斯世界经济论坛(World Economic Forum)上，对反弹的担忧很明显，高管们对于如何采用人工智能并作出解释十分焦虑。普遍的回应是，声称机器在可能取代一些工作的同时，也将让许多工作更能带来成就感。

The profits from productivity gains for tech companies and their customers could be huge. How those should be distributed will become part of the AI debate.“Whenever someone cuts cost, that means, hopefully, a surplus is being created,” says Mr Nadella. “You can always tax surplus — you can always make sure that surplus gets distributed differently.”
对科技公司和它们的客户而言，生产率提高带来的利益可能是巨大的。如何分配这些利益将成为有关人工智能的辩论的一部分。“每当有人削减了成本，那就意味着有望创造出一些盈余，”纳德拉说，“你总可以对盈余课税——你总可以确保以不同的方式分配这些盈余。”

整理：2024年8月2日于普洱金融培训中心