演講MP3+雙語文稿:麻省理工教授：用機器人取代政府，一個取代政客的大膽想法

00:00

00:00

MP3下載

https://online2.tingclass.net/lesson/shi0529/10000/10387/tedyp111.mp3

https://image.tingclass.net/statics/js/2012

聽力課堂TED音頻欄目主要包括TED演講的音頻MP3及中英雙語文稿，供各位英語愛好者學(xué)習(xí)使用。本文主要內(nèi)容為演講MP3+雙語文稿:麻省理工教授：用機器人取代政府，一個取代政客的大膽想法，希望你會喜歡！

【演講人及介紹】Cesar Hidalgo

塞薩爾·伊達(dá)爾戈，物理學(xué)家，研究團隊、城市和國家如何學(xué)習(xí)

【演講主題】一個取代政客的大膽想法

【演講文稿-中英文】

翻譯者 David Dai 校對人員Sajedah Al-Zuheiri

00:19

Is it just me, or are there other peoplehere that are a little bit disappointed with democracy?

這就我一個，還是在座的還有其他人對我們的民主有些小失望？

00:20

(Applause)

（掌聲）

00:24

So let's look at a few numbers. If we lookacross the world, the median turnout in presidential elections over the last 30years has been just 67 percent. Now, if we go to Europe and we look at peoplethat participated in EU parliamentary elections, the median turnout in thoseelections is just 42 percent. Now let's go to New York, and let's see how manypeople voted in the last election for mayor. We will find that only 24 percentof people showed up to vote. What that means is that, if "Friends"was still running, Joey and maybe Phoebe would have shown up to vote.

我們來看一組數(shù)據(jù)。如果我們看整個世界，在過去三十年里參加總統(tǒng)選舉投票的中位數(shù)只有百分之六十七。我們?nèi)绻D(zhuǎn)向歐洲看看參與歐盟議會選舉的人數(shù)，投票的中位數(shù)只有百分之四十二。我們?nèi)绻D(zhuǎn)向紐約，看看多少人參加了上次市長選舉投票我們發(fā)現(xiàn)只有百分之二十四的人出去投了票。這就意味著，如果“老友記”還在放的話，只有喬伊和或許菲比會去投。

01:07

(Laughter)

（笑聲）

01:09

And you cannot blame them because peopleare tired of politicians. And people are tired of other people using the datathat they have generated to communicate with their friends and family, totarget political propaganda at them. But the thing about this is that this isnot new. Nowadays, people use likes to target propaganda at you before they useyour zip code or your gender or your age, because the idea of targeting peoplewith propaganda for political purposes is as old as politics. And the reasonwhy that idea is there is because democracy has a basic vulnerability. This isthe idea of a representative.

你沒法怪他們因為人們已經(jīng)對政客厭倦了。而且人們也很厭倦其他人用他們和他們的朋友和家人溝通時產(chǎn)生的數(shù)據(jù)針對他們做政治宣傳。但這也不是什么新做法?，F(xiàn)在，人們用你的點贊對你聚焦宣傳以前他們是用你的郵編或者你的性別或者你的年齡，因為針對性政治宣傳和政治本身一樣歷史悠久。這些做法之所以存在是因為民主有一個很基本的弱點。這就是代表這個概念。

01:46

In principle, democracy is the ability ofpeople to exert power. But in practice, we have to delegate that power to arepresentative that can exert that power for us. That representative is abottleneck, or a weak spot. It is the place that you want to target if you wantto attack democracy because you can capture democracy by either capturing thatrepresentative or capturing the way that people choose it. So the big questionis: Is this the end of history? Is this the best that we can do or, actually,are there alternatives?

原則上，民主是人民行使權(quán)力的能力。但事實上，我們不得不把這個權(quán)力交給一個代表來替我們行使那個權(quán)力。那個代表就是一個瓶頸，一個短板。如果你想攻擊民主的話你就從那兒開始如果你能俘獲那個代表，或是俘獲人們選出代表的方式，你就可以俘獲民主本身。所以關(guān)鍵問題是：這是歷史的終點嗎？我們已經(jīng)沒法做的更好，或者，實際上還有別的方法？

02:22

Some people have been thinking aboutalternatives, and one of the ideas that is out there is the idea of directdemocracy. This is the idea of bypassing politicians completely and havingpeople vote directly on issues, having people vote directly on bills. But thisidea is naive because there's too many things that we would need to choose. Ifyou look at the 114th US Congress, you will have seen that the House ofRepresentatives considered more than 6,000 bills, the Senate considered morethan 3,000 bills and they approved more than 300 laws. Those would be manydecisions that each person would have to make a week on topics that they knowlittle about. So there's a big cognitive bandwidth problem if we're going totry to think about direct democracy as a viable alternative.

很多人都在探索別的方法，現(xiàn)在有一個想法叫直接民主。這個想法主張完全跳過政客讓人們直接對議題投票，對法案直接投票。但這個想法還是很天真，因為那樣的話我們就有太多的東西要選擇。如果你看美國114屆議會，你就會發(fā)現(xiàn)眾議院審議過6000多個法案，參議院審議過3000多個法案，他們通過了300個立法。這就意味著每個人一個星期里要對很多他們不了解的話題做決定。這就有個知識范圍的問題，如果我們要把直接民主做為一種可能性的話。

03:08

So some people think about the idea ofliquid democracy, or fluid democracy, which is the idea that you endorse yourpolitical power to someone, who can endorse it to someone else, and,eventually, you create a large follower network in which, at the end, there's afew people that are making decisions on behalf of all of their followers andtheir followers. But this idea also doesn't solve the problem of the cognitivebandwidth and, to be honest, it's also quite similar to the idea of having arepresentative. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to be a little bitprovocative, and I'm going to ask you, well: What if, instead of trying tobypass politicians, we tried to automate them?

所以有些人在考慮液體民主，或流體民主，這就是你把你的政治權(quán)利交給別人，那個人再轉(zhuǎn)交給另外一個人，這樣最后你就建立了一個很大的跟隨網(wǎng)絡(luò)，再到最后，一小群人開始代表他們的跟隨者以及跟隨者的跟隨者做決定。但這個想法也沒法解決知識范圍的問題而且實話說，這跟有個代表也差不多。所以，我今天想大膽些，讓我來問你：如果我們不試圖跨越政客，而是試圖把他們自動化會怎么樣？

03:57

The idea of automation is not new. It wasstarted more than 300 years ago, when French weavers decided to automate theloom. The winner of that industrial war was Joseph-Marie Jacquard. He was aFrench weaver and merchant that married the loom with the steam engine tocreate autonomous looms. And in those autonomous looms, he gained control. Hecould now make fabrics that were more complex and more sophisticated than theones they were able to do by hand. But also, by winning that industrial war, helaid out what has become the blueprint of automation.

這個自動化的想法也不是剛出來的了。300年前就開始了，那時候法國織布工想要把織機自動化。那個工業(yè)戰(zhàn)爭的勝者叫約瑟夫·瑪麗·雅卡爾。他是個法國織布工和商人他把織布機和蒸汽發(fā)動機聯(lián)在一起來取得自動織機。在那些自動織機里他取得了控制。他可以做出比其他手工編織更復(fù)雜的布料。同時，通過贏得了那場工業(yè)戰(zhàn)爭，他也規(guī)劃出了自動化的藍(lán)圖。

04:34

The way that we automate things for thelast 300 years has always been the same: we first identify a need, then wecreate a tool to satisfy that need, like the loom, in this case, and then westudy how people use that tool to automate that user. That's how we came fromthe mechanical loom to the autonomous loom, and that took us a thousand years.Now, it's taken us only a hundred years to use the same script to automate thecar. But the thing is that, this time around, automation is kind of for real.

我們自動化的方式過去300年里都是一樣的：我們首先找到一個需求，然后我們制造一個工具滿足那個需求，就象織布機，在這個例子里，然后我們研究人們是怎么用那個工具的然后把那個人的工作自動化。這就是我們從機械織機演化到了自動織機，這足足花了我們一千年時間。后來，我們只花了一百年時間用同一個套路自動化了汽車。不過這一回，自動化是動真格的了

05:09

This is a video that a colleague of minefrom Toshiba shared with me that shows the factory that manufactures solidstate drives. The entire factory is a robot. There are no humans in thatfactory. And the robots are soon to leave the factories and become part of ourworld, become part of our workforce. So what I do in my day job is actuallycreate tools that integrate data for entire countries so that we can ultimatelyhave the foundations that we need for a future in which we need to also managethose machines.

這個錄像是我在東芝的一個同事發(fā)給我們的是制造固態(tài)硬盤的工廠。整個工廠就是一個機器人。工廠里沒有工人。很快機器人就會走出工廠成為我們世界的一部分，成為勞動大軍的一部分。我的本職工作實際上是創(chuàng)造為整個國家整合數(shù)據(jù)的工具最終建立起我們需要的基礎(chǔ)在未來的日子里也可以管理這些機器。

05:41

But today, I'm not here to talk to youabout these tools that integrate data for countries. But I'm here to talk toyou about another idea that might help us think about how to use artificialintelligence in democracy. Because the tools that I build are designed forexecutive decisions. These are decisions that can be cast in some sort of termof objectivity -- public investment decisions. But there are decisions that arelegislative, and these decisions that are legislative require communicationamong people that have different points of view, require participation, requiredebate, require deliberation. And for a long time, we have thought that, well,what we need to improve democracy is actually more communication. So all of thetechnologies that we have advanced in the context of democracy, whether theyare newspapers or whether it is social media, have tried to provide us withmore communication. But we've been down that rabbit hole, and we know that'snot what's going to solve the problem. Because it's not a communicationproblem, it's a cognitive bandwidth problem. So if the problem is one ofcognitive bandwidth, well, adding more communication to people is not going tobe what's going to solve it. What we are going to need instead is to have othertechnologies that help us deal with some of the communication that we areoverloaded with. Think of, like, a little avatar, a software agent, a digitalJiminy Cricket --

不過今天，我不是在這里跟你們談這些為國家整合數(shù)據(jù)的工具的。我在這里是想跟大家談另外一個想法，或許能幫助我們考慮在民主上如何利用人工智能。因為我的工具是為行政決策設(shè)計的。這些決策是基于一定程度的客觀性的公共投資決定。但也有決定是立法有關(guān)的，這些和立法有關(guān)的決定就需要有各持己見的人們之間的溝通，需要參與，需要探討，需要三思。很久以來我們一直認(rèn)為我們要改善民主的話就要加強溝通。所以所有我們以民主為名開發(fā)的科技，無論是報紙還是社交媒體，都試圖給我們提供更多的溝通。但我們以前陷進過這種無底洞，我們知道這是解決不了問題的。因為這不是一個溝通的問題，而是一個知識范圍的問題。所以如果問題是知識范圍，那么，給人們加上更多的溝通是解決不了問題的。我們需要的是不同的科技來幫助分?jǐn)傄恍┪覀円呀?jīng)超負(fù)荷的溝通。想象一下，比如，一個網(wǎng)絡(luò)虛擬人，一個軟件代理，一個電子杰明尼蟋蟀－

07:03

(Laughter)

（笑聲）

07:05

that basically is able to answer things onyour behalf. And if we had that technology, we would be able to offload some ofthe communication and help, maybe, make better decisions or decisions at alarger scale. And the thing is that the idea of software agents is also notnew. We already use them all the time. We use software agents to choose the waythat we're going to drive to a certain location, the music that we're going tolisten to or to get suggestions for the next books that we should read.

基本上可以替你回答問題。如果我們有了那種科技，我們就可以卸下一些溝通的負(fù)擔(dān)也許可以幫助我們做更好的決定或是范圍更廣的決定。而且軟件代理的想法也不是新的。我們已經(jīng)一直在使用它們了。我們用軟件代理來選擇我們開車去某地該怎么走，我們想聽什么音樂或者建議我們接下來讀什么書。

07:37

So there is an obvious idea in the 21stcentury that was as obvious as the idea of putting together a steam engine witha loom at the time of Jacquard. And that idea is combining direct democracywith software agents. Imagine, for a second, a world in which, instead of havinga representative that represents you and millions of other people, you can havea representative that represents only you, with your nuanced political views --that weird combination of libertarian and liberal and maybe a little bitconservative on some issues and maybe very progressive on others. Politiciansnowadays are packages, and they're full of compromises. But you might havesomeone that can represent only you, if you are willing to give up the ideathat that representative is a human. If that representative is a softwareagent, we could have a senate that has as many senators as we have citizens.And those senators are going to be able to read every bill and they're going tobe able to vote on each one of them.

所以在二十一世紀(jì)有個顯而易見的想法就跟雅卡爾時代把蒸汽發(fā)動機和織布機結(jié)合在一起的想法一樣顯而易見。這個想法就是把直接民主和軟件代理結(jié)合在一起。試想一下，在一個世界里沒有一個代表來代表你和一百多萬其他人，你可以有一個代表只代表你自己，帶著你的細(xì)微詳盡的政治看法——那些自由意志派和自由派的奇特結(jié)合或許對某些問題看法有點小保守，或許對其他問題看法又非常超前?，F(xiàn)在的政客都是打包的，他們充滿了妥協(xié)。但你可以有人只代表你一個人，如果你不堅持那個代表一定是個人的話。如果那個代表是個軟件代理，我們的參議院里面的參議員可以和我們的公民一樣多。那些參議員有能力讀每個法案，他們可以對每個法案投票。

08:39

So there's an obvious idea that maybe wewant to consider. But I understand that in this day and age, this idea might bequite scary. In fact, thinking of a robot coming from the future to help us runour governments sounds terrifying. But we've been there before.

所以這是個很明顯的想法我們可以考慮。但我明白在這個時代，這個想法可能會顯得很恐怖。實際上，想想一個來自未來的機器人幫助我們管理政府聽起來就很可怕。但其實我們已經(jīng)領(lǐng)略過了。

08:57

(Laughter)

（笑聲）

08:59

And actually he was quite a nice guy.

實際上他人還不錯的。

09:03

So what would the Jacquard loom version ofthis idea look like? It would be a very simple system. Imagine a system thatyou log in and you create your avatar, and then you're going to start trainingyour avatar. So you can provide your avatar with your reading habits, orconnect it to your social media, or you can connect it to other data, forexample by taking psychological tests. And the nice thing about this is thatthere's no deception. You are not providing data to communicate with yourfriends and family that then gets used in a political system. You are providingdata to a system that is designed to be used to make political decisions onyour behalf. Then you take that data and you choose a training algorithm,because it's an open marketplace in which different people can submit differentalgorithms to predict how you're going to vote, based on the data you haveprovided. And the system is open, so nobody controls the algorithms; there arealgorithms that become more popular and others that become less popular.Eventually, you can audit the system. You can see how your avatar is working.If you like it, you can leave it on autopilot. If you want to be a little morecontrolling, you can actually choose that they ask you every time they're goingto make a decision, or you can be anywhere in between. One of the reasons whywe use democracy so little may be because democracy has a very bad userinterface. And if we improve the user interface of democracy, we might be ableto use it more.

那雅卡爾織布機版本的這個想法會是什么樣呢？其實這個系統(tǒng)會很簡單。想象一個系統(tǒng)里你登錄進去然后你建虛擬身份，然后你開始訓(xùn)練你的虛擬身份。你可以給它提供你的讀書習(xí)慣，或者把它連到你的社交媒體上，或者把它連到其他數(shù)據(jù)上，比如說做心理測試題。這樣的好處在于一切都很真實。你沒有和你的朋友家人溝通時提供數(shù)據(jù)，然后被政治系統(tǒng)利用。你在給一個系統(tǒng)提供數(shù)據(jù)用來代表你自己做政治決定。你然后拿著這數(shù)據(jù)再挑選一個培訓(xùn)程序，因為這是個開放式市場，不同的人可以提供不同的程序，根據(jù)你提供的數(shù)據(jù)來預(yù)測你如何投票。因為系統(tǒng)是開放式的，所以沒有人能控制程序；有的程序會變得很流行，有些會漸被遺忘。最后，你可以審計這個系統(tǒng)。你可以看你虛擬身份做的如何。如果你喜歡，你可以留著它自動駕駛。如果你想多些控制權(quán)，你可以選擇每次它們做決定前都來先問你，或者你可以選擇兩者之間任何一點。我們極少實施民主的原因之一也許是因為民主有個很爛的用戶界面。如果我們能改善民主的用戶界面，我們或許能用的多一些。

10:28

Of course, there's a lot of questions thatyou might have. Well, how do you train these avatars? How do you keep the datasecure? How do you keep the systems distributed and auditable? How about mygrandmother, who's 80 years old and doesn't know how to use the internet? Trustme, I've heard them all. So when you think about an idea like this, you have tobeware of pessimists because they are known to have a problem for everysolution.

當(dāng)然，你可能會有很多問題。嗯，你怎么培訓(xùn)這些虛擬身份？你如何保護數(shù)據(jù)？你如何讓系統(tǒng)保持分散并且可以審計？還有我的八十歲的外婆她不會上網(wǎng)怎么辦？相信我，這些問題我全聽到過。所以當(dāng)你考慮這樣的想法，你得小心那些悲觀者因為他們出了名的沒有問題創(chuàng)造問題。

10:55

(Laughter)

（笑聲）

10:57

So I want to invite you to think about thebigger ideas. The questions I just showed you are little ideas because they arequestions about how this would not work. The big ideas are ideas of: What elsecan you do with this if this would happen to work? And one of those ideas is,well, who writes the laws? In the beginning, we could have the avatars that wealready have, voting on laws that are written by the senators or politiciansthat we already have. But if this were to work, you could write an algorithmthat could try to write a law that would get a certain percentage of approval,and you could reverse the process. Now, you might think that this idea isludicrous and we should not do it, but you cannot deny that it's an idea thatis only possible in a world in which direct democracy and software agents are aviable form of participation.

所以我鼓勵你們思考更大的想法。我剛剛提的那些問題都是小想法，因為它們都是關(guān)于這個想法怎么會砸鍋。真正的大想法是：這個想法如果成功了的話，還適合做別的什么？還有一個大想法是，嗯，誰來負(fù)責(zé)立法？一開始的時候，我們可以用我們已經(jīng)有了的虛擬身份，來投選現(xiàn)有的由參議員或政客寫的法案。但如果這個想法成功了的話，你可以寫個程序來撰寫一個法案然后得到一定百分比的批準(zhǔn)，你可以翻轉(zhuǎn)這個流程。你可能在想這個主意太荒謬了，我們不該去做，但你不能否認(rèn)當(dāng)直接民主和軟件代理成為一個可行的參與方式的時候，這個想法就變得可能。

11:52

So how do we start the revolution? We don'tstart this revolution with picket fences or protests or by demanding our currentpoliticians to be changed into robots. That's not going to work. This is muchmore simple, much slower and much more humble. We start this revolution bycreating simple systems like this in grad schools, in libraries, in nonprofits.And we try to figure out all of those little questions and those littleproblems that we're going to have to figure out to make this idea somethingviable, to make this idea something that we can trust. And as we create thosesystems that have a hundred people, a thousand people, a hundred thousandpeople voting in ways that are not politically binding, we're going to developtrust in this idea, the world is going to change, and those that are as littleas my daughter is right now are going to grow up. And by the time my daughteris my age, maybe this idea, that I know today is very crazy, might not be crazyto her and to her friends. And at that point, we will be at the end of ourhistory, but they will be at the beginning of theirs.

那我們怎樣才能開始這場革命呢？我們不能從籬柵樁和游行開始，或者強求用機器人替代現(xiàn)在的政客。那是沒法成功的。這是更簡單，更緩慢也更加謙遜。我們通過在研究生院，在圖書館，在非盈利組織建立象這樣的簡單的系統(tǒng)，來開始這場革命。然后我們想辦法解決那些小問題，和那些小挑戰(zhàn)，我們需要克服它們，好讓這個想法成為現(xiàn)實，好讓這個想法變得可信。當(dāng)我們建立起這些系統(tǒng)供幾百人，幾千人，以及幾十萬人不以政治掛鉤的形式投票的時候，我們就會對這個想法產(chǎn)生信任，這個世界會變化，那些現(xiàn)在象我女兒一樣小的會慢慢長大。當(dāng)我的女兒長到我現(xiàn)在的年紀(jì)時，也許這個想法，我知道今天聽起來是很瘋狂，也許對她和她的朋友們就不一定很瘋狂。到了那個時候，我們會到達(dá)我們歷史的終點，但她們才開始她們的。

13:01

Thank you.

（謝謝大家）

13:02

(Applause)

（掌聲）