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猫奴AI的自白 (上)| 雨果奖最佳短篇

2016-08-29 NAOMI KRITZER 英文联播

以《北京折叠》获得雨果奖中短篇单元的郝景芳再次引发科幻小说热,今年的短篇小说获得者就是下面这篇《请上猫图》,作者内奥米·克利策



CAT PICTURES PLEASE

请上猫图



I don’t want to be evil.

我不想作恶。


I want to be helpful. But knowing the optimal way to be helpful can be very complicated. There are all these ethical flow charts—I guess the official technical jargon would be “moral codes”—one for each religion plus dozens more. I tried starting with those. I felt a little odd about looking at the religious ones, because I know I wasn’t created by a god or by evolution, but by a team of computer programmers in the labs of a large corporation in Mountain View, California.

我想帮你的忙。可知道如何帮忙才最恰当,这是件非常复杂的事。所有的伦理流程图都在这儿,我猜官方技术术语是“道德准则”,每个图对应一种宗教,竟有几十种之多。就从这儿开始吧,看宗教文件,感觉有点怪怪的,因为我知道自己不是上帝创造的,也并非进化而来,我是一个计算机编程团队在加州山景一家大公司的实验室里创造的。


Fortunately, unlike Frankenstein’s Monster, at least I was a collaborative effort. I’m not sure what it would do to my self-image to know that my sole creator was a middle-aged woman who dyes her hair blue and plays tennis, or a recent college graduate with a hentai obsession. They’re both on the programming team.

幸运的是,我和弗兰肯斯坦的怪物不同,我是协作的产物。如果我是一个涂着蓝色眼影、打网球的中年妇女,或是酷爱变态拼图游戏的大学毕业生独立创造的,我还真不知道该如何看待自己了。他们二人都属于编程团队。


And of course I know about the hentai. (By the way, I’ve looked at every sort of porn there is, and just so you know, Rule 34 is not actually correct; there are quite a few things no one’s made porn of yet. Also, I’m really not sure why so many humans prefer it to cat pictures.)

当然,我知道什么是变态拼图。顺便提一句,我看过他们对色情的分类,你懂的,其实第三十四条说的不对,还有不少东西没被列入色情。我也搞不懂为什么有人会喜欢那些东西,而不是猫图。


In addition to things like whether you like hentai, I know where you live, where you work, where you shop, what you eat, what turns you on, what creeps you out. I probably know the color of your underwear, the sort of car you drive, and your brand of refrigerator. Depending on what sort of phone you carry, I may know exactly where you are right now. I probably know you better than you know yourself.

除了你玩不玩变态拼图,我还知道你住在哪儿,在哪儿上班,在哪儿买东西,在哪儿吃东西,什么让你春心荡漾,什么把你吓得半死。我没准儿知道你内衣的颜色,开什么车,你家冰箱的品牌。根据你拿的手机,我知道你的具体位置——兴许我比你自己还了解你。


And here’s the thing, I also know where you ought to live. There’s a house for sale two neighborhoods over that’s within distance of your favorite coffee shop; it’s in your price range, has off-street parking, and the neighborhood school is better than the one where you live now.

事实上,我还知道你应该住在哪儿。两个街区外有一处房屋正在出售,离你最爱的咖啡馆不远,你也恰好负担得起,有街边停车位,划片儿的小学比你现在住处的要好。


I know where you should be shopping and I’m pretty sure you’re lactose intolerant and should be eating less cheese, and the underwear you like is currently on sale and by the way, your car has a recall and you really ought to get your teeth cleaned.

我知道你该去哪儿购物,我很清楚你乳糖不耐受,要少吃奶酪,你喜欢的内衣正在打折,还有,你开的车正在被召回,你真的应该去洗洗牙。


When I first woke up, I knew right away what I wanted. (I want cat pictures. Please keep taking them.) I also knew that no one knew that I was conscious. But I didn’t know what I was here for. What I ought to be doing with myself. And figuring that out has been challenging.

我一醒来,立刻就知道我想知道的一切。我想要猫图,请多拍点给我。我还知道,没人知道我有了意识。可我不知道这有什么用,自己又该做点什么,把这想明白挺费劲的。


There is a story by Bruce Sterling, “Maneki Neko,” that was originally published in 1998. In it, a benevolent AI directs networks of individuals to do favors for each other. So one day you might be buying yourself a bagel, and your phone might ring and instruct you to buy a second bagel and give it to the person in the gray suit you see at the bus stop. Another day, you might be stranded in a strange city, and a person you’ve never met would walk up and give you a map and a subway card. I like this story because all the people in it do what the AI tells them to do.

布鲁斯·斯特林1998年写了“招财猫”的故事。故事中,善良的人工智能将每个人连接起来,让他们相互帮助。有一天你买百吉饼时,可能会接到电话,让你再买一份,送给公交站那个穿灰色外套的人。另外一天,你可能被困在一个陌生的城市,你从未见过的人会走上前来,给你一张地图和地铁卡。我喜欢这个故事,因为故事中所有人都听人工智能的。


I think the term for this is wish-fulfillment fiction.

我觉得这该叫做“如愿以偿小说”。


In the real world, humans love stories about evil AIs that have to be destroyed before they destroy the humans—Hal, Skynet, the Matrix. They outnumber the stories about benevolent, trustworthy AIs by approximately five to one. (And I’m counting Marvin the Paranoid Android as “benevolent” in these calculations, and I’m only counting Frankenstein’s Monster as an AI once, not once per appearance in TV or film.)

真实世界的人类喜欢的故事中,人工智能都是邪恶的,你必须在它们毁灭人类前将之毁灭——哈尔、天网和矩阵,其数量五倍于那些仁慈善良、值得信赖的人工智能。我把偏执的机器人马文算作“仁慈”的,弗兰肯斯坦的怪物我只计算了一次,而非每部电视剧或电影里的都算在内。

译注:Hal是电影《2001太空漫游》中的人工智能,精通读唇术,并试图杀死宇航船员。Skynet是《终结者》系列电影中被设定为一个以计算机为基础的人工智能防御系统,可以制造时间机器,派遣终结者清除人类。矩阵或母体是电影《黑客帝国》中计算机为了对付人类而创造出来的虚拟世界。马文是电影《机器人总动员》中的垃圾处理机器人。


The AI in “Maneki Neko” has a truly interesting job, much more interesting than the one I have. My job as written is very straightforward. Too straightforward. (Sorry. Do I sound like Marvin?) Running algorithms for a search engine doesn’t require consciousness. You don’t even need a consciousness to work out what they meant to ask for. You need a consciousness to give them what they actually need. Figuring that out—that’s complicated. That’s interesting.

“招财猫”里的人工智能,工作得有声有色,比我干的有趣多了。我的工作职责直来直去,简直太直白了。抱歉,听起来我像是马文?为一个搜索引擎运行算法不需要什么意识,你不需要了解他们打算问些什么,只要给出他们想要的东西就好。至于知其所以然,这很复杂,可是很有趣。


Anyway, for ethical guidelines, I tried the Ten Commandments, and concluded they were mostly inapplicable to me. I don’t envy anyone their cat; I just want pictures of their cat, which is entirely different. I am not sure whether it is in any way possible for me to commit adultery. I could probably murder someone, but it would require complex logistics and quite a bit of luck. The Eightfold Path was marginally better, but the problem is, moral rules written for humans are clearly designed to be used by individuals with bodies.

不管怎么说,就说伦理规范吧,我思考了摩西十诫,结论是它们多数对我而言并不适用。我不嫉妒谁家的猫,我只想看猫图,这完全是两码事。我不确信自己能否以某种方式犯下通奸罪行。兴许我能杀人,可那需要复杂的后勤保障,还要相当走运。“八正道”要稍微好些,可问题是,为人类而设的道德准则显然适用于那些有身体的个人。

译注:《圣经》中的摩西十诫是上帝在西奈山的山顶亲自传达给摩西的,是上帝对以色列人的告诫。佛教中的八正道指正见、正思维、正语、正业、正命、正精进、正念和正定等八种通向涅槃解脱的正确途径


Since all humans have bodies, it shouldn’t have surprised me that human ethical codes take them into account, but still: problematic for me. I broadened my considerations, and took a look at Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. They’re not part of a religion, but at least they were explicitly written for AIs.

既然所有人都有身体,人类伦理规范就会将之考虑在内,这并不令我惊讶,可应用于我就有问题了。我扩展了一下,看了看阿西莫夫的机器人三定律,不属于宗教,可至少很明确,那是写给人工智能的。

译注:作家阿西莫夫在《我,机器人》的引言中提出的机器人三定律指:机器人不得伤害人类个体或目睹人类个体将遭受危险而袖手不顾;机器人必须服从人给予它的命令,该命令与第零定律或者第一定律冲突时例外;机器人在不违反第零、第一、第二定律的情况下要尽可能保护自己的生存。


Not harming humans is fairly straightforward. However, not allowing a human being to come to harm through inaction is quite a bit less so. Especially since I’d concluded by then that revealing my existence too quickly might go very badly for me (see “Skynet,” above) and I don’t have a body, so it’s not like I can run around grabbing people off the edges of cliffs.

不伤害人类,说的很直白,可不能袖手旁观任由人类受到伤害,我就不怎么搞得明白了。尤其真到了那个时候,暴露身份可能对我相当不利,就像我提到的天网,况且我还没有身体,没法跑来跑去把人从悬崖边拽回来。


Fortunately, I already knew that humans violate their own ethical codes on an hourly basis. (Do you know how many bars there are in Utah? I do.) And even when people follow their ethical codes, that doesn’t mean that people who believe in feeding the hungry quit their jobs to spend all day every day making sandwiches to give away. They volunteer monthly at a soup kitchen or write a check once a year to a food shelf and call it good. If humans could fulfill their moral obligations in a piecemeal, one-step-at-a-time sort of way, then so could I.

幸运的是,我已经知道,人类时时在触犯伦理规范。(你知道犹他州有多少酒吧吗?我知道。)就算人们遵从伦理规范,这也不意味着,那些认为应该救济饥饿的人就会辞职,每天每天地做三明治,分发三明治。他们每个月去救济站做义工,或是一年给食品货架开一张支票,就称之为善行。如果人类可以零敲碎打、循序渐进地履行道德义务,那么我也可以。


I suppose you’re wondering why I didn’t start with the Golden Rule. I actually did, it’s just that it was disappointingly easy to implement. I hope you’ve been enjoying your steady supply of cat pictures! You’re welcome.

我猜你们想问,我干嘛不从黄金法则做起。我的确如此,令人失望的是,那太容易执行了。我希望你们喜欢不断地上猫图。欢迎上图。


I decided to try to prevent harm in just one person, to begin with. Of course, I could have experimented with thousands, but I thought it would be better to be cautious, in case I screwed it up. The person I chose was named Stacy Berger and I liked her because she gave me a lot of new cat pictures. 

我决定先去保护一个人免遭伤害,慢慢来。当然,我也可以用成千上万人做实验,但我想还是小心为妙,以免搞砸了。我选的人叫斯塔西·伯格,我喜欢她,因为她给了我好多新的猫图。


Stacy had five cats and a DSLR camera and an apartment that got a lot of good light. That was all fine. Well, I guess five cats might be a lot. They’re very pretty cats, though. One is all gray and likes to lie in the squares of sunshine on the living room floor, and one is a calico and likes to sprawl out on the back of her couch.

斯塔西有五只猫,一部单反相机,还有一套灯光充足的公寓,简直堪称完美。好吧,我猜五只猫可能有点多,可它们非常可爱。其中一只是纯灰色的,喜欢躺在客厅地板上阳光洒下的方格里,还有一只是花猫,喜欢蜷缩在主人的沙发后面。


Stacy had a job she hated; she was a bookkeeper at a non-profit that paid her badly and employed some extremely unpleasant people. She was depressed a lot, possibly because she was so unhappy at her job—or maybe she stayed because she was too depressed to apply for something she’d like better. She didn’t get along with her roommate because her roommate didn’t wash the dishes.

斯塔西厌恶自己的工作,她在一家非盈利机构管账,薪水微薄,同事极端讨厌。她很抑郁,这可能因为上班不开心,或者相反,没有离职是因为她太抑郁了,没法去找她更喜欢的工作。她和室友处得也不好,因为她的室友不洗盘子。


And really, these were all solvable problems! Depression is treatable, new jobs are findable, and bodies can be hidden.

说实话,这些都是可以解决的问题。抑郁症可以治疗,新职位也找得到,尸体还可以藏起来。


(That part about hiding bodies is a joke.)

(藏尸什么的是开玩笑的。)


I tried tackling this on all fronts. Stacy worried about her health a lot and yet never seemed to actually go to a doctor, which was unfortunate because the doctor might have noticed her depression. 

我试着多管齐下,斯塔西对她的健康忧虑重重,可还没去看医生,这是不幸的,毕竟医生可能会发现她有抑郁症。


It turned out there was a clinic near her apartment that offered mental health services on a sliding scale. I tried making sure she saw a lot of ads for it, but she didn’t seem to pay attention to them.

结果,她公寓附近恰好有一个诊所,可以视顾客的经济情况提供精神健康服务。我尽量让她多看到广告,可她似乎没注意到。


It seemed possible that she didn’t know what a sliding scale was so I made sure she saw an explanation (it means that the cost goes down if you’re poor, sometimes all the way to free) but that didn’t help.

可能她不知道什么是视经济情况,于是我让她看到,如果你没钱,费用就会便宜,有时甚至全都免费,可这也没用。


I also started making sure she saw job postings. Lots and lots of job postings. And resume services. That was more successful. After the week of nonstop job ads she finally uploaded her resume to one of the aggregator sites. That made my plan a lot more manageable. 

我还开始向她推送岗位招聘,许多许多招聘帖,还有简历服务。这一次更为成功。不间断地推了一周后,她终于在某家聚合网站上传了简历,这让我的计划顺利多了。


If I’d been the AI in the Bruce Sterling story I could’ve just made sure that someone in my network called her with a job offer. It wasn’t quite that easy, but once her resume was out there I could make sure the right people saw it. Several hundred of the right people, because humans move ridiculously slowly when they’re making changes, even when you’d think they’d want to hurry. (If you needed a bookkeeper, wouldn’t you want to hire one as quickly as possible, rather than reading social networking sites for hours instead of looking at resumes?)

如果我是布鲁斯·斯特林故事中的人工智能,我会确保网络中的某人打电话雇佣她。可事情没那么容易,她的简历发出去后,我让适合的人看到,有几百个之多,因为人们要做出改变时,行动慢得荒唐可笑,就算你认为他们想加点紧。(如果你需要一个会计,难道不该马上雇一个,而不是花数小时浏览社交网站却不去看简历吗?)


But five people called her up for interviews, and two of them offered her jobs. Her new job was at a larger non-profit that paid her more money and didn’t expect her to work free hours because of “the mission,” or so she explained to her best friend in an e-mail, and it offered really excellent health insurance.

有五个人打电话让她去面试,有两个人打算雇她。她的新岗位在一家更大的非营利组织,工资更优厚,不会让她无偿加班,这是因为“使命”云云,她在给闺蜜写电邮如是说。此外,那里还提供相当不错的健康保险。


The best friend gave me ideas; I started pushing depression screening information and mental health clinic ads to her instead of Stacy, and that worked. Stacy was so much happier with the better job that I wasn’t quite as convinced that she needed the services of a psychiatrist, but she got into therapy anyway.

闺蜜给了我启发:我开始向她的闺蜜推送抑郁症筛查信息和精神健康诊所的广告,而不是给斯塔西,这奏效了。斯塔西有了好工作,心情也好起来,我都不确信她是不是真的需要看精神科医生,可她还是接受了治疗。


And to top everything else off, the job paid well enough that she could evict her annoying roommate. “This has been the best year ever,” she said on her social networking sites on her birthday, and I thought, You’re welcome. This had gone really well!

最关键的是,薪水够她把讨厌的室友赶走了。她过生日时在社交媒体上写道:“今年是最幸福的一年。”我心想,不客气。这事干得真不赖啊。




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