【纽约客 20150528】如果一个时间旅行者遇到一部智能手机

满仓

【中文标题】如果一个时间旅行者遇到一部智能手机
【原文标题】If a Time Traveller Saw a Smartphone
【登载媒体】纽约客
【原文作者】Tim Wu
【原文链接】http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/if-a-time-traveller-saw-a-smartphone




我们变得越来越聪明还是越来越愚蠢？在2010年的一本书《浅滩：互联网对大脑的影响》中，尼古拉斯•卡尔认为互联网是目前越来越多人类认知问题的罪魁祸首。而克里夫•汤普森在最近一本书《你比自己想象中更聪明：科技让我们的思想更发达》中，认为科技提升了我们的能力。为了分辨出是非，不妨看看以下这个假想中的试验。

一位来自1914年受过高等教育的时间旅行者进入一个房间，房间中央有一幅幕布，把房间分成两半。一位科学家告诉他，他的任务是搞清楚幕布另一面究竟是个什么人，方法是他可以提出任何他认为有必要的问题。

回答时间旅行者问题的声音有些古怪，他无法识别这种腔调（21世纪的美式英语）。幕布另一边的女人有超强的记忆力，她可以背诵圣经和莎士比亚的任何篇章。她的数学能力令人吃惊，几秒钟就可以解决极难的问题。她还会说很多种语言，尽管发音听起来不那么标准。或许最令人印象深刻的是，她可以详细描述地球任何一个角落的状况，就好像她是站在空中俯瞰大地。她还可以把看似无关的现象熟练整合在一起，当时间旅行者问她“为什么说上帝既善良又全能？”她可以给出复杂的理论解释。

在这种改良版的图灵测试之后，我们的时间旅行者或许会得出结论，在未来这个世纪里，人类已经进化出超级智力能力。用1914年还没有出现的一个术语来说（约翰•冯•诺依曼首先提出了这个词），他或许认为人类已经到达了一个“奇点”——也就是获得了超出1914年人类认知范围的智力水平。

幕布后面的女人，当然，就是我们中的一员。也就是说，她是一个利用两个工具来提升了脑力的普通人类：她的移动电话和互联网服务，当然包括了维基百科、谷歌地图和Quora等服务。在我们看来，她没有丝毫的特别之处，但是在时间旅行者看来，绝对是不可思议的。借助了机器，我们是超级人类和准上帝，尽管我们对此已经习以为常。离开了这些工具，神奇的光环随之消失，我们似乎要比20世纪初的朋友更加愚蠢，因为他可能花费了更多的时间钻研知识，或许他懂得拉丁文，做算数也比较快。

时间旅行者的假想试验表明，如何回答我们是否变得更聪明这个问题，取决于如何定义“我们”这个概念。这就是为什么汤普森和卡尔得到了不同的答案：汤普森对“我们”的定义是“半机器人”，卡尔的定义就是纯粹的“人类”。

提升人类能力的项目在过去五十年里一直在进行。它最早在60年代早期起始于五角大楼，心理学家J•C•R•利克莱德负责为前沿科技提供资金，他开始构想所谓的人机共生理念。（利克莱德还建议国防部资助一个项目，后来成为互联网的前身。）利克莱德认为，计算机最核心的意义在于提升人类的能力，于是他资助了道格拉斯•恩格尔巴特的一项研究。恩格尔巴特是《强化人类智力》一书的作者，他提出了“一种新的、系统化的方法来提升人类认知效率”。恩格尔巴特创办了强化研究中心，在60年代发展出基于屏幕的人机交互图形界面、键盘和鼠标（在“所有演示之母”中得到了展示）。研究中心的很多研究员后来在著名的Xerox PARC实验室中工作，PARC的交互创意被苹果公司借鉴，成就了历史。

之后，计算机的发展方向并不是朝向创造独立的高智商个体（比如HAL），而是弥补人类大脑的弱点。最成功，也是最有利可图的产品就是那些帮助我们无法独立完成的工作的工具。我们可利用的记忆空间比较有限，数学计算并不灵光，所以没有人再使用长除法了。我们的记忆力并不可靠，所以我们用电子存储空间来弥补。与电脑相比，人类的大脑不善于和其它大脑互动，所以我们发明了维基百科和谷歌搜索等互动工具。

我们的时间旅行朋友证明，尽管人类强化项目取得了成功，但我们不能否认付出了代价。生理萎缩这个概念值得警惕，另外，我们的附属大脑其实不能完全算是“我们”也是个讨厌的说法。但是别搞错了，我们和历史上的人类已经不是同一种生物，我们在技术层面上，而不是在生理层面上进化了。我们希望这个方向是最好的选择。


原文：

Are we getting smarter or stupider? In “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” from 2010, Nicholas Carr blames the Web for growing cognitive problems, while Clive Thompson, in his recent book, “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better,” argues that our technologies are boosting our abilities. To settle the matter, consider the following hypothetical experiment:

A well-educated time traveller from 1914 enters a room divided in half by a curtain. A scientist tells him that his task is to ascertain the intelligence of whoever is on the other side of the curtain by asking whatever questions he pleases.

The traveller’s queries are answered by a voice with an accent that he does not recognize (twenty-first-century American English). The woman on the other side of the curtain has an extraordinary memory. She can, without much delay, recite any passage from the Bible or Shakespeare. Her arithmetic skills are astonishing—difficult problems are solved in seconds. She is also able to speak many foreign languages, though her pronunciation is odd. Most impressive, perhaps, is her ability to describe almost any part of the Earth in great detail, as though she is viewing it from the sky. She is also proficient at connecting seemingly random concepts, and when the traveller asks her a question like “How can God be both good and omnipotent?” she can provide complex theoretical answers.

Based on this modified Turing test, our time traveller would conclude that, in the past century, the human race achieved a new level of superintelligence. Using lingo unavailable in 1914, (it was coined later by John von Neumann) he might conclude that the human race had reached a “singularity”—a point where it had gained an intelligence beyond the understanding of the 1914 mind.

The woman behind the curtain, is, of course, just one of us. That is to say, she is a regular human who has augmented her brain using two tools: her mobile phone and a connection to the Internet and, thus, to Web sites like Wikipedia, Google Maps, and Quora. To us, she is unremarkable, but to the man she is astonishing. With our machines, we are augmented humans and prosthetic gods, though we’re remarkably blasé about that fact, like anything we’re used to. Take away our tools, the argument goes, and we’re likely stupider than our friend from the early twentieth century, who has a longer attention span, may read and write Latin, and does arithmetic faster.

The time-traveller scenario demonstrates that how you answer the question of whether we are getting smarter depends on how you classify “we.” This is why Thompson and Carr reach different results: Thompson is judging the cyborg, while Carr is judging the man underneath.

The project of human augmentation has been under way for the past fifty years. It began in the Pentagon, in the early nineteen-sixties, when the psychologist J. C. R. Licklider, who was in charge of the funding of advanced research, began to contemplate what he called man-computer symbiosis. (Licklider also proposed that the Defense Department fund a project which became, essentially, the Internet). Licklider believed that the great importance of computers would lie in how they improved human capabilities, and so he funded the research of, among others, Douglas Engelbart, the author of “Augmenting Human Intellect,” who proposed “a new and systematic approach to improving the intellectual effectiveness of the individual human being.” Engelbart founded the Augmentation Research Center, which, in the nineteen-sixties, developed the idea of a graphical user interface based on a screen, a keyboard, and a mouse (demonstrated in “The Mother of all Demos”). Many of the researchers at A.R.C. went on to work in the famous Xerox PARC laboratories. PARC’s interface ideas were borrowed by Apple, and the rest is history.

Since then, the real project of computing has not been the creation of independently intelligent entities (HAL, for example) but, instead, augmenting our brains where they are weak. The most successful, and the most lucrative, products are those that help us with tasks which we would otherwise be unable to complete. Our limited working memory means we’re bad at arithmetic, and so no one does long division anymore. Our memories are unreliable, so we have supplemented them with electronic storage. The human brain, compared with a computer, is bad at networking with other brains, so we have invented tools, like Wikipedia and Google search, that aid that kind of interfacing.

Our time-travelling friend proves that, though the human-augmentation project has been a success, we cannot deny that it has come at some cost. The idea of biological atrophy is alarming, and there is always a nagging sense that our auxiliary brains don’t quite count as “us.” But make no mistake: we are now different creatures than we once were, evolving technologically rather than biologically, in directions we must hope are for the best.

每天的晨吟

只有部手机可不行，不论它是否智能的，都离不了服务运营商！

fshysh

尽管人类强化项目取得了成功，但我们不能否认付出了代价。