第2717期:I'll probably lose my job to AI(2)

Very few people in this room have ever worried about how they were going to obtain food or shelter or heat, or how they were going to bury a child who died of diarrhea before its first birthday. Those worries are the normal condition of humanity. We escaped them only through massive chronological luck. That is a precious and totally unearned inheritance, and I think we have an obligation to pay that forward and leave an even bigger legacy for our descendants.在座的各位，很少有人曾经担心过如何获得食物、住所或取暖，或者如何安葬一个不到一岁就死于腹泻的孩子。这些担忧是人类的常态。我们之所以能逃脱这些担忧，完全是因为巨大的时间运气。这是一笔宝贵的、完全不劳而获的遗产，我认为我们有义务将其传承下去，为我们的后代留下更丰厚的遗产。To do otherwise, it's a kind of theft. It's stealing from the future. Picture what it would have looked like if the Luddites actually had managed to halt progress in its tracks. Effectively, they'd have been reaching forward in time and taking almost everything we have in order to enrich themselves.否则，就是一种偷窃。这是从未来窃取。想象一下，如果卢德分子真的成功阻止了进步，那会是什么样子。实际上，他们已经超越了时间，掠夺了我们几乎所有的东西，以充实自己。Now, obviously, that's not how they understood what they were doing. But it would have been true just the same. So picture that, really picture it. A spinner sells a few spools of thread and suddenly you don't have a car. A weaver sells a handloom cloak and whoops, there go your refrigerator, your central heating and your college education. A whole suit of clothes and thousands of kids just died of preventable disease.显然，他们并非如此理解自己在做什么。但这本来也无可厚非。想象一下，真的想象一下。一个纺纱工卖出几卷线，突然间你就没车了。一个织布工卖出一件手工织布斗篷，哎呀，你的冰箱、中央供暖和大学教育都泡汤了。整套衣服都没了，成千上万的孩子却死于可预防的疾病。So when you're tempted to halt the innovation that might compete for your job, you have to ask yourself, How much am I willing to steal from my grandkids? I mean, from everyone's grandkids.所以，当你想要停止那些可能抢走你饭碗的创新时，你必须问问自己，我愿意从我的孙辈那里偷走多少东西？我的意思是，从每个人的孙辈那里偷走多少东西。Now, I know some people in the audience are probably thinking, but that's different. We already have it really good, we've got airplanes and mRNA vaccines and HBO. But of course, a Luddite would have thought the same thing. They couldn't have imagined a future in which the average worker is literally leading a healthier and more comfortable life than 19-century royalty.我知道在座的有些人可能在想，但情况不一样。我们已经过得很好了，有飞机、mRNA疫苗和HBO。当然，卢德分子也会这么想。他们无法想象未来普通工人的生活会比19世纪的皇室贵族更健康、更舒适。Others might be asking, quite reasonably, but what about global warming and endangered species? I mean, is progress really all that great? Well, I'd ask you to remember your last trip to the dentist and then reimagine it without the Novocaine.其他人可能会问，这很有道理，但全球变暖和濒危物种怎么办？我的意思是，进步真的那么好吗？好吧，我建议你回想一下你上次去看牙医的情景，然后再想象一下没有使用奴佛卡因时的感受。Now I know the obvious retort. "That's a libertarian canard." You can want modern medicine without wanting us to have burned all that coal.现在我知道该如何反驳了。“那是自由意志主义的谎言。”你可以想要现代医学，但不必担心我们烧掉那么多煤。But my retort is that that doesn't work. The same Industrial Revolution that led to global warming has also made us so rich that we could afford to divert millions of workers from agriculture and weaving into science and medicine. It's also, as we've been hearing all week, giving us the tools to fight ecological disaster. But we couldn't have predicted any of that from the outset. We kind of had to live the change in order to understand what it meant.但我的反驳是，这根本行不通。导致全球变暖的工业革命也让我们变得如此富有，以至于我们有能力将数百万工人从农业和纺织业转移到科学和医学领域。正如我们这周一直在听到的，它也为我们提供了对抗生态灾难的工具。但我们从一开始就无法预测这一切。我们必须亲身经历这场变革才能理解它意味着什么。Now, actually, it's worse than that, because it's often quite easy to picture the near-term downsides. I mean, just read any article about AI. But the long-term upside is much harder to grasp because progress is cumulative, and the longer it accumulates, the weirder it gets.现在，实际上情况比这更糟，因为人们通常很容易想象短期的负面影响。我的意思是，随便读读任何一篇关于人工智能的文章就知道了。但长期的正面影响却难以把握，因为进步是累积的，积累的时间越长，就越奇怪。