学习提示

本文选自大西洋报，内容归大西洋报所有；外刊翻译理解部分归本人所有。

重点词汇和句式本人已经加粗，需要解释的部分也在一段结束后特别注明。

本文非常适合拿来做阅读理解。

比如把标题去掉，出一个主旨题或者问作者为什么不认为技术可以中立的原因等等。

Technology makes us more human

When techno-optimists use ChatGPT, they see Star Trek: a future in which opportunities for personal fulfillment are as large as the universe itself.

当技术乐观主义者使用 ChatGPT 时，他们看到了《星际迷航》：在这个未来，个人实现的机会就像宇宙本身一样大。

ChatGPT, a new AI system that sounds so human in conversations that it could host its own podcast, is a test of temperament. Reading between its instantly generated, flawlessly grammatical lines, people see wildly different visions of the future.

ChatGPT 是一个新的人工智能系统，它在对话中听起来非常人性化，可以主持自己的播客，是对气质的一种考验。从它即时生成的、无懈可击的语法字里行间，人们看到了截然不同的未来愿景。

For some, ChatGPT promises to revolutionize the way we search for information, draft articles, write software code, and create business plans. When they use ChatGPT, they see Star Trek: a future in which opportunities for personal fulfillment are as large as the universe itself.

对一些人来说，ChatGPT 有望彻底改变我们搜索信息、起草文章、编写软件代码和创建商业计划的方式。当他们使用 ChatGPT 时，他们看到的是《星际迷航》：在这个未来，个人成就的机会与宇宙本身一样大。

Others see only massive job displacement and a profound loss of agency, as we hand off creative processes that were once the domain of humans to machines. When they use ChatGPT, they see Black Mirror: a future in which technological innovation primarily exists to annoy, humiliate, terrify, and, most of all, dehumanize humanity.

其他人只看到了大量的工作转移和深刻的代理权丧失，因为我们把曾经属于人类的创造性过程交给了机器。当他们使用 ChatGPT 时，他们看到的是黑镜：在这个未来，技术创新主要是为了烦扰、羞辱、恐吓，最重要的是，使人类失去人性。

I’m firmly in the Star Trek camp, because although I fully acknowledge that the tech industry is imperfect, and always in need of thoughtful, responsive leadership, I still believe that improvement through technology is how humanity most effectively makes progress.

我坚定地站在《星际迷航》阵营中，因为尽管我完全承认科技行业是不完美的，而且总是需要深思熟虑、反应迅速的领导，但我仍然相信，通过技术改进是人类最有效的进步方式。

That’s why I switched from a planned career in academia to one in Silicon Valley in the first place. In the early 1990s, I saw how software, globally distributed on the internet, was creating new opportunities to empower people at scale, and that’s ultimately what led me to co-found LinkedIn. I wanted to use technology to help inpiduals improve their economic opportunities over the course of their entire career, and thus have more chances to pursue meaning in their lives.

这就是为什么我当初从计划中的学术界转到了硅谷的职业。在 20 世纪 90 年代初，我看到了在互联网上全球分布的软件是如何创造新的机会来大规模地赋予人们权力的，这也是最终导致我共同创立 LinkedIn 的原因。我想利用技术来帮助个人在整个职业生涯中改善他们的经济机会，从而有更多的机会来追求他们生活的意义。

Techno-humanism is typically conflated with transhumanism, referring to the idea that we are on a path to incorporating so much technology into our lives that eventually we will evolve into an entirely new species of post-humans or superhumans.

技术人文主义通常与超人文主义混为一谈，指的是我们正走在一条将大量技术融入我们生活的道路上，最终我们将进化成一种全新的后人类或超人类物种。

I interpret techno-humanism in a slightly different way. What defines humanity is not just our unusual level of intelligence, but also how we capitalize on that intelligence by developing technologies that amplify and complement our mental, physical, and social capacities. If we merely lived up to our scientific classification—_Homo sapiens_—and just sat around thinking all day, we’d be much different creatures than we actually are. A more accurate name for us is Homo techne: humans as toolmakers and tool users. The story of humanity is the story of technology.

我对技术-人文主义的解释略有不同。定义人类的不仅仅是我们不寻常的智力水平，还有我们如何通过开发技术，放大和补充我们的精神、身体和社会能力，来利用这种智力。如果我们只是活在我们的科学分类中--智人--并且只是整天坐在那里思考，我们将是与我们实际情况大不相同的生物。对我们来说，一个更准确的名字是Homo techne：人类是工具制造者和工具使用者。人类的故事就是技术的故事。

Technology is the thing that makes us us. Through the tools we create, we become neither less human nor superhuman, nor post-human. We become more human.

技术是使我们成为 "我们 "的东西。通过我们创造的工具，我们既不会变得不那么像人，也不会变成超人，更不会变成后人类。我们变得更加人性化。

This doesn’t mean that all technological innovations automatically produce good outcomes—far from it. New technologies can create new problems or exacerbate old ones, such as when AI systems end up reproducing biases (against racial minorities, for instance) that exist in their training data. We in the tech industry should be vigilant in our efforts to mitigate and correct such problems.

这并不意味着所有的技术创新都会自动产生好的结果--远非如此。新技术可能会产生新的问题或加剧旧的问题，例如，当人工智能系统最终重现其训练数据中存在的偏见（例如，针对少数民族的偏见）。我们科技行业应保持警惕，努力减轻和纠正此类问题。

Nor would I ever suggest that technologies are neutral, equally capable of being used for good or bad. The values, assumptions, and aspirations we build into the technologies we create shape how they can be used, and thus what kinds of outcomes they can produce. That’s why techno-humanism should strive for outcomes that broadly benefit humanity.

我也不会建议技术是中立的，同样能够被用来做好事或做坏事。我们创造的技术中所包含的价值观、假设和愿望，决定了它们如何被使用，从而决定了它们能产生什么样的结果。这就是为什么技术人文主义应该努力争取使人类广泛受益的结果。

At the same time, a techno-humanist perspective also orients to the future, dynamism, and change. This means it inevitably clashes with desires for security, predictability, and the familiar. In moments of accelerating innovation—like the one we’re living through right now, as robotics, virtual reality, synthetic biology, and especially AI all evolve quickly—the urge to entrench the status quo against the uncertain terrain of new realities accelerates too.

同时，技术人文主义的观点也面向未来，面向活力，面向变化。这意味着它不可避免地与对安全、可预测性和熟悉事物的渴望相冲突。在创新加速的时刻--就像我们现在所经历的一样，随着机器人、虚拟现实、合成生物学，特别是人工智能的快速发展，巩固现状、对抗新现实的不确定地形的冲动也在加速。

Just so, New York City’s public-school system has already blocked students and teachers from accessing ChatGPT in its classrooms. Multiple online art communities have banned users from uploading images they created using AI image-generators such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion.

就这样，纽约市的公立学校系统已经阻止了学生和教师在教室里使用 ChatGPT。多个在线艺术社区已经禁止用户上传他们使用人工智能图像生成器（如 DALL-E、Midjourney 和 Stable Diffusion）创作的图像。

I get it. Learning to write an essay from scratch is a time-honored way to develop critical thinking, organizational skills, and a facility for personal expression. Creating vivid and beautiful imagery one painstaking brushstroke at a time is perhaps the epitome of human creativity.

我明白了。从头开始学习写文章是培养批判性思维、组织能力和个人表达能力的一种历史悠久的方式。一次次艰苦的笔触创造出生动而美丽的图像，也许是人类创造力的缩影。

But what if teachers used ChatGPT to instantly personalize lesson plans for each student in their class—wouldn’t that be humanizing in a way that the industrialized approaches of traditional classroom teaching are not? Aren’t tools that allow millions of people to visually express their ideas and communicate with one another in new ways a step forward for humanity?

但是，如果老师们用 ChatGPT 为班上的每个学生即时定制个性化的课程计划，这难道不是传统课堂教学的工业化方法所不具备的人性化的方式吗？允许数以百万计的人以新的方式直观地表达他们的想法和相互交流的工具，难道不是人类的进步吗？

If it’s detrimental to society to simply claim that “technology is neutral” and avoid any responsibility for negative outcomes—and I believe it is—so is rejecting a technology just because it has a capacity to produce negative outcomes along with positive ones.

如果简单地声称 "技术是中性的 "并避免对负面结果的任何责任是对社会有害的--我相信是这样--那么仅仅因为一项技术有能力产生负面结果和正面结果而拒绝它也是有害的。

Is there a future where the massive proliferation of robots ushers in a new era of human flourishing, not human marginalization? Where AI-driven research helps us safely harness the power of nuclear fusion in time to help avert the worst consequences of climate change? It’s only natural to peer into the dark unknown and ask what could possibly go wrong. It’s equally necessary—and more essentially human—to do so and envision what could possibly go right.

是否有这样一个未来：机器人的大规模扩散带来了一个人类繁荣而不是人类边缘化的新时代？在那里，人工智能驱动的研究帮助我们及时安全地利用核聚变的力量，以帮助避免气候变化的最坏后果？窥视黑暗的未知世界并询问可能出现的问题是很自然的。同样有必要--更本质的是人类--这样做并设想什么可能是正确的。

harness：完美替换 use；apply，意思为 to control something, usually in order to use its power

eg: There is a great deal of interest in harnessing wind and waves as new sources of power. 人们对开发利用风和波浪这些新能源非常感兴趣。