新時代的“自動化妄想癥”

It is perhaps the delusion of every generation to exaggerate the novelty of their age and believe they face challenges and opportunities that no one has ever faced before. So it is today as we contemplate our automated future.

這或許是每一代人都有的通?。嚎浯笞约核帟r代的新奇之處，認為自己這一代人面臨的挑戰(zhàn)和機遇是前人從未經(jīng)歷過的。如今我們在思考人類的自動化未來時也犯了這樣的妄想癥。

The great service of Thomas Rid’s book — Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics — is to highlight how we have been grappling with the relationship between man and machine for longer than we might have imagined. It also shows how the debate has been coloured by the full spectrum of emotions.

托馬斯•里德(Thomas Rid)的著作《機器的崛起：控制論失落的歷史》(Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics)的重要貢獻在于，它強調我們很長時間以來—比我們自己所以為更長—一直在處理人與機器之間的關系。它還表明這場辯論籠罩在各種各樣的情緒之中。

According to Rid, the idea of playing God and creating mechanical life predates the invention of the computer by many centuries — at least in the world of mythology. Early Jewish folklore recounted the tale of the golem, a shapeless clay figure brought to life by humans. The Greeks invented Hephaestus, the divine blacksmith, who created automata out of bronze. The Czech playwright Karel ?apek gave us R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), a story about a factory manufacturing artificial workers that popularised the word “robot” when it was staged in the US in 1950.

里德認為，扮演上帝、創(chuàng)造機械生命的想法比電腦問世早了許多個世紀，至少在神話故事中是如此。早期的猶太民間傳說中有“魔像”(golem)的故事，它是一種沒有形狀的泥人，由人類賦予生命。希臘人創(chuàng)造了鐵匠保護神赫斐斯塔斯(Hephaestus)，他用銅造出了自動機(automata)。捷克劇作家卡雷爾•恰佩克(Karel ?apek)創(chuàng)作出了戲劇《羅薩姆萬能機器人制造公司》(Rossum's Universal Robots)，講述的是一家工廠制造人工勞動力的故事，該劇1950年在美國上演后，“機器人”這個詞流行起來。

Humans may have long obsessed about machines that could think and make decisions on their own. Then, in the 1940s, they began to become a reality as artillery shells equipped with radio fuses helped shoot down V-1 rockets during the second world war. “Never before had one autonomous weapon clashed with another autonomous weapon with so little human interference,” Rid writes.

人類可能長期執(zhí)迷于能夠自主思考和做決定的機器。上世紀40年代，這種想法開始成為現(xiàn)實，配備無線電雷管的炮彈在二戰(zhàn)期間幫助擊落了V-1火箭。里德寫道：“從來沒有一臺自動武器借助這么少的人為干預與另一臺自動武器發(fā)生碰撞。”

Norbert Wiener, a brilliant, eccentric MIT mathematician, coined the term cybernetics and emerged as its leading theoretician, publishing Cybernetics; or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine in 1948. As Rid puts it, Wiener and the early cyberneticists replaced the magic of mythology with science.

才華橫溢而性情古怪的麻省理工學院(MIT)數(shù)學家諾伯特•威納(Norbert Wiener)創(chuàng)造出了“控制論”(cybernetics)這個詞，并成為這一領域的領先理論家，他在1948年出版了《控制論》(Cybernetics)，也叫做《動物和機器內部的控制和通信》(Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine)。正如里德所言，威納和早期的控制論學者用科學取代了神話魔力。

Wiener was seen as the “prophet of the second industrial revolution”, veering from the wildly enthusiastic to the deeply pessimistic. In 1950 he wrote that automatic machines would be the economic equivalent of slave labour, producing an “unemployment situation in comparison with which . . . the depression of the thirties will seem like a pleasant joke”. That view has particular resonance today as we once again fret about the rise of the robots.

威納被視為“第二次工業(yè)革命的先知”，他從極度熱情轉向嚴重悲觀。1950年，他寫道，自動機器將變成經(jīng)濟中類似于奴隸勞動力的存在，造成“大量失業(yè)，與之相比……三十年代的蕭條簡直就是個愉快的玩笑”。這種觀點在今天有特殊意義，我們再次擔心機器人的崛起。

Rid, a professor in security studies at King’s College London, is a fine chronicler of the debate, deftly recounting the hope, hype, and fears that have accompanied our thinking on automation. “The machines were always a positive and a negative force at the same time, utopian and dystopian at once, although most of the time optimism dominated.”

作為倫敦大學國王學院(King's College London)安全研究方面的教授，里德是一位關于這場辯論的優(yōu)秀記錄者，他巧妙的記述了我們在思考自動化的過程中產(chǎn)生的希望、炒作和擔憂。“機器總是既正面又負面，既有些烏托邦又反烏托邦，不過多數(shù)時間以樂觀主義為主。”

Governments and the military dominated the early use of computers in the 1950s and 1960s, with the US army at one time even exploring the deployment in Vietnam of an 18ft, two-legged walking tank known as the Pedipulator.

上世紀五、六十年代，政府和軍方控制著電腦的早期應用，美國軍方甚至曾考慮在越南部署被稱為“步行機”(Pedipulator)的18英尺高、用兩條腿走路的坦克。

Radical and libertarian thinkers in the US remained suspicious about computers seeing them as a means of societal control. One described cyborgs as the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism”.

美國激進自由主義思想家當時仍對電腦持懷疑態(tài)度，他們把電腦視為社會控制的一種手段。有人把半機器人描述為“軍國主義和父權資本主義的私生子”。

But as computers became more powerful and accessible, they were increasingly viewed by hippies on the US west coast as a mechanism for liberation, helping to stimulate the astonishing development of Silicon Valley. Timothy Leary, the US psychologist, compared computers with psychedelic drugs given their mind-enhancing properties.

但隨著電腦變得更強大并被更多人使用，它們越來越被美國西海岸的嬉皮士視為通向自由的途徑，它幫助刺激硅谷的驚人發(fā)展。由于電腦具有提升精神的特性，美國心理學家蒂莫西•利瑞(Timothy Leary)把電腦比作致幻藥。

More harmonious visions of man and machine emerged, and by 1995 it was estimated that 10 per cent of the US population could be classified as cyborgs, given their bodies contained implants, such as electronic pacemakers or artificial joints. Richard Brautigan’s poetic vision of computers as “machines of loving grace” began to take shape.

人與機器更和諧的畫面出現(xiàn)了，到1995年，據(jù)估計，美國10%的人口可以被列為半機器人，因為他們的體內植入了各種設備，例如電子心臟起搏器或人工關節(jié)。理查德•布勞蒂根(Richard Brautigan)把電腦視為“慈愛機器”的詩意畫面開始成型。

Rise of the Machines is a fascinating if slightly frustrating book, dazzling in parts but never quite adding up to an integrated whole. One stark lesson is that we should remain wary of all those predicting the future impact of technology. “The futurists, of course, didn’t always get the future wrong, but almost always they got the speed, the scale, and the shape wrong,” Rid writes. “They continue to do so.”

《機器的崛起》一書引人入勝，雖說可能使人略感沮喪，部分章節(jié)非常出彩，但并未構成一個和諧統(tǒng)一的整體。一個嚴酷的教訓是，我們仍應警惕所有那些對技術在未來的影響加以預測的人士。“當然，未來學家并非總是把未來搞錯，但他們在速度、規(guī)模和形狀方面幾乎總是搞錯，”里德寫道，“他們將一如既往。”

The reviewer is the FT’s Innovation editor

本書評作者是英國《金融時報》創(chuàng)新編輯

Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics; Thomas Rid; Scribe Publications, £20 《機器的崛起：控制論失落的歷史》(Rise Of Machines：The Lost History of Cybernetics);作者托馬斯•里德(Thomas Rid);Scribe Publications出版社出版;售價20英鎊