殺手機器人會成爲終結者嗎 Robots can kill but they do not

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” the villain played by Rutger Hauer reminisces at the end of the film Blade Runner after hauling Harrison Ford’s character on to a roof top and sparing his life. “People” is the operative word since Roy Batty is not a person but an android who escapes to earth from a space colony and takes revenge on the Tyrell Corporation, his creator.

“我見過的事，你們人不會相信。”在電影《銀翼殺手》(Blade Runner)末尾，魯特格爾樠爾(Rutger Hauer)飾演的反派將哈里森輠祹(Harrison Ford)飾演的角色拉回屋頂，饒了他一命，然後說出了這句話。在這句話裏，“人”是最重要的字，因爲羅伊巴蒂(Roy Batty)不是人類，他是個機器人。他從太空殖民地逃到地球，向自己的創造者“泰勒公司”(Tyrell Corporation)實施報復。

That is what I call a killer robot — a being that can hold an intelligent conversation with you before wiping you out. It was science fiction in 1982, when Blade Runner, based on Philip K Dick’s dystopian fantasy novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? came out. It is now faintly plausible — sufficiently for artificial intelligence researchers to warn this week of the dangers of an autonomous arms race.

這纔是我認爲的“殺手機器人”(killer robot)，一個在消滅你之前，能與你進行一場高智商談話的存在。電影《銀翼殺手》改編自菲利普迪克(Philip K. Dick)的反烏托邦奇幻小說《機器人會夢見電子羊嗎？》(Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep)。影片上映於1982年，當時它還是一部科幻電影，如今卻有點像真的，反正對於人工智能研究人員來說已經足以成真了，前不久他們警告要謹防出現自主式武器軍備競賽的危險。

The killer machines feared by those such as Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors, and Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist, are crude terminators by comparison with the Nexus replicants in Blade Runner. No one would fall in love with an armed quadcopter that blows up enemy soldiers, as the hero of Blade Runner does with Rachael, the female android who does not realise that she is a replicant.

包括特斯拉汽車(Tesla Motors)創始人埃倫穆斯克(Elon Musk)、理論物理學家斯蒂芬霍金(Stephen Hawking)在內，這些專家們所擔心的殺人機器，與《銀翼殺手》裏的“連鎖”（Nexus）複製人相比的話，只是原始級別的終結者。《銀翼殺手》裏的瑞秋(Rachael)開槍殺死哈里森輠祹葲敵人時，這位男主公愛上了她——瑞秋是個女機器人，她並不知道自己是複製人。但是當一臺配備武器的四軸飛行器幹掉敵方士兵時，沒人會愛上它。

Robots can murder us but they cannot understand us. Autonomous killing machines are becoming reality — Israel already has its Harpy anti-radar drone, which loiters in the sky before choosing and destroying targets itself. A sentient, sophisticated machine with common sense and the capacity to grasp people’s moods and predict behaviour is still a distant prospect.

機器人可以殺死我們，但它們無法理解我們。自主式殺人機器正在成爲現實，以色列已經擁有了哈比(Harpy)反雷達無人機，它可以在空中漫無目的地飛行，然後自主選擇目標並加以摧毀。但是想創造出一架具備常識，能理解人類情緒，預測人類行爲，擁有感知能力的複雜機器，仍是個遙遠前景。

In theory, it will be created. Artificial intelligence researchers do not see the barrier in principle to robots developing higher reasoning powers, or the kind of physical dexterity that humans possess. The last remaining workers on car assembly lines are people who can attach screws nimbly and reach inside the body shells for electrical wiring in a way that has defeated robots to date.

理論上講，這種機器人是能造出來的。人工智能研究人員看不到任何原則上的障礙，阻止機器人發展出更高水平的推理能力，或是人類那種靈活的身體。汽車裝配線上目前僅剩下能夠敏捷地擰螺絲的工人，以及一些能夠到車身外殼裏焊電線的工人，機器人暫時還無法勝過他們。

Machines also possess some advantages. They do not have to constrict their processing units to fit into skulls, and they do not need to supply them with oxygen, an energy-hogging technology. Nor are they limited by an evolutionary edict to reproduce, rather than purely to get cleverer.

機器還佔有一定的優勢。它們不必爲了適合顱骨大小而壓縮處理裝置，它們也不需要氧氣供應——這是個高度耗能的技術。它們的再造也不受進化法則限制，完全可以變得越來越聰明。

But despite rapid advances in machine learning, visual and voice recognition, neural network processing — all the elements that are now transforming the potential of artificial intelligence — androids are not with us. Computers can beat humans easily at chess, but poker at the highest level is beyond them — they would need to see through the other players’ bluffs.

但儘管機器在學習、視覺及語音識別、神經網絡處理（這些元素都在改變人工智能的潛力）方面發展迅速，機器人還是不能理解人類。計算機可以在國際象棋上輕鬆擊敗人類，但它們玩不了最高水平的撲克牌遊戲，因爲它們得看穿對手的虛張聲勢。

“Computers are becoming better and better at perception tasks,” says Fei-Fei Li, director of Stanford University’s artificial intelligence laboratory. “Algorithms can identify thousands of types of cars while I can only tell three of them. But at the cognitive, empathetic, and emotional level, machines are not even close to humans.”

斯坦福大學(Stanford University)人工智能實驗室主任李飛飛說：“計算機在感知任務上正變得越來越好。它的算法已經能識別數千種汽車，而我只能認出三種。但在認知、同理心和情感層面，機器還無法接近人類。”

I have also experienced something you people would not believe — Google’s self-driving car. The thing that struck me as it toured Mountain View in California recently was that it felt human. It accelerated from junctions confidently, even assertively, closing the gaps with vehicles in front so others could not rush in. We would be safer if all drivers were equally calm and rational.

我也經歷過一些事，你們這些人不會相信——谷歌的無人駕駛汽車。最近我坐着它遊覽了加州的山景城，震驚地發現它感覺上就像人類。它自信地，甚至是果斷地從交叉路口加速，縮小與前方車輛的距離，讓其他車輛無法插入。如果所有司機都能這樣冷靜和理性，我們的生命會更安全。

Inside the car, you can see what it perceives with its sensors and rooftop radar. The outlines of objects around, including pedestrians, buses and other cars, are displayed like hollow, moving shapes on the screen of a laptop held by a Google engineer. The objects are categorised by different colours, so the vehicle knows it should react to them and how far to steer clear.

在谷歌無人駕駛汽車裏，你可以看到它如何用傳感器和車頂雷達進行感知。一位谷歌工程師手持一臺筆記本電腦，行人、公交車和其他車輛等周圍物體的輪廓呈現爲空心的、移動的圖形顯示在屏幕上。這些物體按照不同顏色分類，因此無人駕駛汽車知道該對它們作出反應，以及該從多遠避開。

A self-driving vehicle would, in other words, be a perfectly capable killer robot if you attached a missile launcher to its roof, and machine guns to its sides (not that Google would do such a thing, of course). It could cruise through cities, scanning for warm, slow-moving, pink-coloured objects to destroy.

換言之，如果你在自動駕駛汽車的車頂安裝一個導彈發射器，並且在車身兩側裝上機槍（當然啦，這並不是說谷歌會幹這種事），它完全能化身“殺手機器人”。它可以悠閒地穿越城市，掃描搜尋有熱度的、緩慢移動的粉紅色目標加以摧毀。

So it is not scaremongering for scientists to warn of artificial intelligence research being tainted by association with autonomous weapons. The internet itself emerged from research funded by the US Department of Defence in the 1960s, and military and space programmes have the deepest pockets and the keenest interest in developing cutting-edge technology. What would be foolish would be to think the advent of killer robots means that machines are ready to take over the world.

因此，科學家們警告人工智能研究領域存在與自主武器相結合的情況，並非是危言聳聽。互聯網本身就發源於美國國防部在上世紀60年代資助的研究課題，而且在開發尖端技術方面，軍事和航天計劃擁有最雄厚的財力和最強烈的興趣。要有多蠢，纔會認爲“殺手機器人”的出現就意味着機器將接管全世界。

Destroying things is easier than understanding or creating them. Artificial intelligence — the ability to scan, process and analyse large data sets — is not the same as the capacity to perform most human tasks (known as artificial general intelligence).

破壞事物比理解或創造事物更容易。人工智能（掃描、處理和分析大型數據集的能力）並不等同於“強人工智能”(artificial general intelligence)，後者才具有執行大多數人類任務的能力。

Even those who warn of machines taking jobs that are now performed by humans accept that managerial, professional, and artistic jobs that demand high level reasoning, empathy and creativity are still safe. A robot that scans a set of features to identify a woman, but cannot grasp her mood, or use common sense to solve an unexpected puzzle, remains very limited.

一些人警告說機器將搶走目前由人類完成的工作，但就連他們也同意，管理、專業和藝術工作仍然是安全的，因爲這些工作需要具備高水平的推理能力、同感能力以及創造能力。機器人的能力仍非常有限，它可以通過掃描一系列特徵來識別一個女人，卻無法體會她的情緒，也無法運用常理來解決意料之外的難題。

“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it’s like to be a slave,” Roy Batty remarks to the human bounty-hunter he has defeated in combat before reaching out and rescuing him from falling to his death. Let us not enslave ourselves yet.

羅伊巴蒂已經在對決中戰勝了人類賞金獵人，卻又在對手墜下屋頂時伸手救了他一命。接着他對賞金獵人說道：“活在恐懼裏的滋味不好受吧？這就是當奴隸的感受。”我們千萬不要讓自己淪爲奴隸。