AI巨头为何陷入“炸膛”困境：自身宣传的反噬
🏦 The problem with petards
The petard was a sixteenth-century explosive charge. An attacking engineer would carry it to a castle gate, attach it, light the fuse and scramble for cover.
爆破筒是一种十六世纪的爆炸装置。进攻工程师会将其携带至城堡大门，安装好，点燃引信，然后迅速寻找掩护。
It was a tricky business. The charges were temperamental, their fuses particularly so, and the installer might blow himself up. In Hamlet, the phrase earns its immortal meaning:
这是一项棘手的工作。这些炸药脾气古怪，其引信尤其如此，安装者可能会把自己炸死。在《哈姆雷特》中，这个短语获得了其不朽的含义：
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
此块内的文本在发布时将保持其原始间距
For ’tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard; and ’t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon. O, ’tis most sweet
When in one line two crafts directly meet.For ’tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard; and ’t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon. O, ’tis most sweet
When in one line two crafts directly meet.Today’s petardiers are not Rosencrantz and Guildenstern conspiring against the Prince of Denmark.
今天的“爆破筒”使用者并非罗森克兰茨和吉尔登斯特恩那样密谋反对丹麦王子的角色。
They are the titans of AI, the bosses of the labs, the investors behind them. For nearly a decade, these software coders had made promises: of reigniting economic growth, of making daily life easier and less risky, perhaps even of eliminating disease. To do this, they would need capital: to write their software and to build 21st-century infrastructure to run it. The gains will be so huge that they’d need to go quickly, very quickly.
他们是人工智能领域的巨头，是实验室的老板，是背后的投资者。近十年来，这些软件程序员许下了诸多承诺：重燃经济增长、让日常生活更轻松且风险更小，甚至可能消除疾病。要做到这一点，他们需要资本：用于编写软件并构建运行软件的21世纪基础设施。收益将极其巨大，因此他们必须快速行动，非常迅速地行动。
But they warned that this was no ordinary software. It was tricky and hard to understand, so much so that only a few should steward it. After all, this was a technology that would possibly take your job, maybe kill you, perhaps get out of control and kill all of us. Still, they needed to build it, all the while warning that they would eventually need to take control of it before things got out of hand. In the meantime, let them be.
但他们警告说，这不是普通的软件。它复杂难懂，以至于只有少数人应该掌管它。毕竟，这是一项可能夺走你工作、也许还会杀死你、甚至可能失控并杀死所有人的技术。尽管如此，他们仍需建造它，同时警告说，事态一旦失控，他们最终需要对其加以控制。在此期间，让他们放手去做吧。
This was the petard: AI is too important for America not to let us get on with it. They placed this claim on the gates of society, itching to get on with it. And it just exploded in their face.
这就是那个爆破筒：人工智能对美国来说太过重要，不能不让我们继续推进。他们将这一主张置于社会的大门之上，急于推进。结果却在他们自己脸上炸开了。
What to read
推荐阅读
This is a fiendishly complicated issue, and I’m not going to pretend to understand the whys and wherefores of American political decisions. My rough take, though, is that this is a Gordian knot. It cannot be disconnected from the hapless messaging from AI firms over the past decade, which now comes to life at the county level. Nor can we separate the idea that these concrete blocks, which might abstractly benefit the economy or healthcare or whatever, tangibly serve an out-group they don't much like.
这是一个极其复杂的问题，我不会假装理解美国政治决策背后的原因和细节。不过，我的粗略看法是，这是一个戈尔迪之结（无解的死结）。它无法与美国人工智能公司过去十年中糟糕的信息传达割裂开来，后者如今在县一级层面显现出来。我们也不能将这样一个观念分离出去：这些具体的实体设施，虽然可能在抽象层面上惠及经济或医疗或其他领域，但实际上却服务于一个他们并不怎么喜欢的群体。
The rest of the essay has further analysis on attitudes towards datacenters; whether they actually benefit local communities; and the commentary I have been reading to understand this.
文章其余部分进一步分析了人们对数据中心的看法；它们是否真正惠及当地社区；以及我为了理解这一问题所阅读的评论。
Read more
阅读全文
更进一步：量化金融体系
看懂新闻只是起点——沿量化金融路径，把它变成能交付的工程能力