演講MP3+雙語(yǔ)文稿:麻省理工教授：用機(jī)器人取代政府，一個(gè)取代政客的大膽想法

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【演講人及介紹】Cesar Hidalgo

塞薩爾·伊達(dá)爾戈，物理學(xué)家，研究團(tuán)隊(duì)、城市和國(guó)家如何學(xué)習(xí)

【演講主題】一個(gè)取代政客的大膽想法

【演講文稿-中英文】

翻譯者 David Dai 校對(duì)人員Sajedah Al-Zuheiri

00:19

Is it just me, or are there other peoplehere that are a little bit disappointed with democracy?

這就我一個(gè)，還是在座的還有其他人對(duì)我們的民主有些小失望？

00:20

(Applause)

（掌聲）

00:24

So let's look at a few numbers. If we lookacross the world, the median turnout in presidential elections over the last 30years has been just 67 percent. Now, if we go to Europe and we look at peoplethat participated in EU parliamentary elections, the median turnout in thoseelections is just 42 percent. Now let's go to New York, and let's see how manypeople voted in the last election for mayor. We will find that only 24 percentof people showed up to vote. What that means is that, if "Friends"was still running, Joey and maybe Phoebe would have shown up to vote.

我們來(lái)看一組數(shù)據(jù)。如果我們看整個(gè)世界，在過(guò)去三十年里參加總統(tǒng)選舉投票的中位數(shù)只有百分之六十七。我們?nèi)绻D(zhuǎn)向歐洲看看參與歐盟議會(huì)選舉的人數(shù)，投票的中位數(shù)只有百分之四十二。我們?nèi)绻D(zhuǎn)向紐約，看看多少人參加了上次市長(zhǎng)選舉投票我們發(fā)現(xiàn)只有百分之二十四的人出去投了票。這就意味著，如果“老友記”還在放的話，只有喬伊和或許菲比會(huì)去投。

01:07

(Laughter)

（笑聲）

01:09

And you cannot blame them because peopleare tired of politicians. And people are tired of other people using the datathat they have generated to communicate with their friends and family, totarget political propaganda at them. But the thing about this is that this isnot new. Nowadays, people use likes to target propaganda at you before they useyour zip code or your gender or your age, because the idea of targeting peoplewith propaganda for political purposes is as old as politics. And the reasonwhy that idea is there is because democracy has a basic vulnerability. This isthe idea of a representative.

你沒法怪他們因?yàn)槿藗円呀?jīng)對(duì)政客厭倦了。而且人們也很厭倦其他人用他們和他們的朋友和家人溝通時(shí)產(chǎn)生的數(shù)據(jù)針對(duì)他們做政治宣傳。但這也不是什么新做法?，F(xiàn)在，人們用你的點(diǎn)贊對(duì)你聚焦宣傳以前他們是用你的郵編或者你的性別或者你的年齡，因?yàn)獒槍?duì)性政治宣傳和政治本身一樣歷史悠久。這些做法之所以存在是因?yàn)槊裰饔幸粋€(gè)很基本的弱點(diǎn)。這就是代表這個(gè)概念。

01:46

In principle, democracy is the ability ofpeople to exert power. But in practice, we have to delegate that power to arepresentative that can exert that power for us. That representative is abottleneck, or a weak spot. It is the place that you want to target if you wantto attack democracy because you can capture democracy by either capturing thatrepresentative or capturing the way that people choose it. So the big questionis: Is this the end of history? Is this the best that we can do or, actually,are there alternatives?

原則上，民主是人民行使權(quán)力的能力。但事實(shí)上，我們不得不把這個(gè)權(quán)力交給一個(gè)代表來(lái)替我們行使那個(gè)權(quán)力。那個(gè)代表就是一個(gè)瓶頸，一個(gè)短板。如果你想攻擊民主的話你就從那兒開始如果你能俘獲那個(gè)代表，或是俘獲人們選出代表的方式，你就可以俘獲民主本身。所以關(guān)鍵問(wèn)題是：這是歷史的終點(diǎn)嗎？我們已經(jīng)沒法做的更好，或者，實(shí)際上還有別的方法？

02:22

Some people have been thinking aboutalternatives, and one of the ideas that is out there is the idea of directdemocracy. This is the idea of bypassing politicians completely and havingpeople vote directly on issues, having people vote directly on bills. But thisidea is naive because there's too many things that we would need to choose. Ifyou look at the 114th US Congress, you will have seen that the House ofRepresentatives considered more than 6,000 bills, the Senate considered morethan 3,000 bills and they approved more than 300 laws. Those would be manydecisions that each person would have to make a week on topics that they knowlittle about. So there's a big cognitive bandwidth problem if we're going totry to think about direct democracy as a viable alternative.

很多人都在探索別的方法，現(xiàn)在有一個(gè)想法叫直接民主。這個(gè)想法主張完全跳過(guò)政客讓人們直接對(duì)議題投票，對(duì)法案直接投票。但這個(gè)想法還是很天真，因?yàn)槟菢拥脑捨覀兙陀刑嗟臇|西要選擇。如果你看美國(guó)114屆議會(huì)，你就會(huì)發(fā)現(xiàn)眾議院審議過(guò)6000多個(gè)法案，參議院審議過(guò)3000多個(gè)法案，他們通過(guò)了300個(gè)立法。這就意味著每個(gè)人一個(gè)星期里要對(duì)很多他們不了解的話題做決定。這就有個(gè)知識(shí)范圍的問(wèn)題，如果我們要把直接民主做為一種可能性的話。

03:08

So some people think about the idea ofliquid democracy, or fluid democracy, which is the idea that you endorse yourpolitical power to someone, who can endorse it to someone else, and,eventually, you create a large follower network in which, at the end, there's afew people that are making decisions on behalf of all of their followers andtheir followers. But this idea also doesn't solve the problem of the cognitivebandwidth and, to be honest, it's also quite similar to the idea of having arepresentative. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to be a little bitprovocative, and I'm going to ask you, well: What if, instead of trying tobypass politicians, we tried to automate them?

所以有些人在考慮液體民主，或流體民主，這就是你把你的政治權(quán)利交給別人，那個(gè)人再轉(zhuǎn)交給另外一個(gè)人，這樣最后你就建立了一個(gè)很大的跟隨網(wǎng)絡(luò)，再到最后，一小群人開始代表他們的跟隨者以及跟隨者的跟隨者做決定。但這個(gè)想法也沒法解決知識(shí)范圍的問(wèn)題而且實(shí)話說(shuō)，這跟有個(gè)代表也差不多。所以，我今天想大膽些，讓我來(lái)問(wèn)你：如果我們不試圖跨越政客，而是試圖把他們自動(dòng)化會(huì)怎么樣？

03:57

The idea of automation is not new. It wasstarted more than 300 years ago, when French weavers decided to automate theloom. The winner of that industrial war was Joseph-Marie Jacquard. He was aFrench weaver and merchant that married the loom with the steam engine tocreate autonomous looms. And in those autonomous looms, he gained control. Hecould now make fabrics that were more complex and more sophisticated than theones they were able to do by hand. But also, by winning that industrial war, helaid out what has become the blueprint of automation.

這個(gè)自動(dòng)化的想法也不是剛出來(lái)的了。300年前就開始了，那時(shí)候法國(guó)織布工想要把織機(jī)自動(dòng)化。那個(gè)工業(yè)戰(zhàn)爭(zhēng)的勝者叫約瑟夫·瑪麗·雅卡爾。他是個(gè)法國(guó)織布工和商人他把織布機(jī)和蒸汽發(fā)動(dòng)機(jī)聯(lián)在一起來(lái)取得自動(dòng)織機(jī)。在那些自動(dòng)織機(jī)里他取得了控制。他可以做出比其他手工編織更復(fù)雜的布料。同時(shí)，通過(guò)贏得了那場(chǎng)工業(yè)戰(zhàn)爭(zhēng)，他也規(guī)劃出了自動(dòng)化的藍(lán)圖。

04:34

The way that we automate things for thelast 300 years has always been the same: we first identify a need, then wecreate a tool to satisfy that need, like the loom, in this case, and then westudy how people use that tool to automate that user. That's how we came fromthe mechanical loom to the autonomous loom, and that took us a thousand years.Now, it's taken us only a hundred years to use the same script to automate thecar. But the thing is that, this time around, automation is kind of for real.

我們自動(dòng)化的方式過(guò)去300年里都是一樣的：我們首先找到一個(gè)需求，然后我們制造一個(gè)工具滿足那個(gè)需求，就象織布機(jī)，在這個(gè)例子里，然后我們研究人們是怎么用那個(gè)工具的然后把那個(gè)人的工作自動(dòng)化。這就是我們從機(jī)械織機(jī)演化到了自動(dòng)織機(jī)，這足足花了我們一千年時(shí)間。后來(lái)，我們只花了一百年時(shí)間用同一個(gè)套路自動(dòng)化了汽車。不過(guò)這一回，自動(dòng)化是動(dòng)真格的了

05:09

This is a video that a colleague of minefrom Toshiba shared with me that shows the factory that manufactures solidstate drives. The entire factory is a robot. There are no humans in thatfactory. And the robots are soon to leave the factories and become part of ourworld, become part of our workforce. So what I do in my day job is actuallycreate tools that integrate data for entire countries so that we can ultimatelyhave the foundations that we need for a future in which we need to also managethose machines.

這個(gè)錄像是我在東芝的一個(gè)同事發(fā)給我們的是制造固態(tài)硬盤的工廠。整個(gè)工廠就是一個(gè)機(jī)器人。工廠里沒有工人。很快機(jī)器人就會(huì)走出工廠成為我們世界的一部分，成為勞動(dòng)大軍的一部分。我的本職工作實(shí)際上是創(chuàng)造為整個(gè)國(guó)家整合數(shù)據(jù)的工具最終建立起我們需要的基礎(chǔ)在未來(lái)的日子里也可以管理這些機(jī)器。

05:41

But today, I'm not here to talk to youabout these tools that integrate data for countries. But I'm here to talk toyou about another idea that might help us think about how to use artificialintelligence in democracy. Because the tools that I build are designed forexecutive decisions. These are decisions that can be cast in some sort of termof objectivity -- public investment decisions. But there are decisions that arelegislative, and these decisions that are legislative require communicationamong people that have different points of view, require participation, requiredebate, require deliberation. And for a long time, we have thought that, well,what we need to improve democracy is actually more communication. So all of thetechnologies that we have advanced in the context of democracy, whether theyare newspapers or whether it is social media, have tried to provide us withmore communication. But we've been down that rabbit hole, and we know that'snot what's going to solve the problem. Because it's not a communicationproblem, it's a cognitive bandwidth problem. So if the problem is one ofcognitive bandwidth, well, adding more communication to people is not going tobe what's going to solve it. What we are going to need instead is to have othertechnologies that help us deal with some of the communication that we areoverloaded with. Think of, like, a little avatar, a software agent, a digitalJiminy Cricket --

不過(guò)今天，我不是在這里跟你們談這些為國(guó)家整合數(shù)據(jù)的工具的。我在這里是想跟大家談另外一個(gè)想法，或許能幫助我們考慮在民主上如何利用人工智能。因?yàn)槲业墓ぞ呤菫樾姓Q策設(shè)計(jì)的。這些決策是基于一定程度的客觀性的公共投資決定。但也有決定是立法有關(guān)的，這些和立法有關(guān)的決定就需要有各持己見的人們之間的溝通，需要參與，需要探討，需要三思。很久以來(lái)我們一直認(rèn)為我們要改善民主的話就要加強(qiáng)溝通。所以所有我們以民主為名開發(fā)的科技，無(wú)論是報(bào)紙還是社交媒體，都試圖給我們提供更多的溝通。但我們以前陷進(jìn)過(guò)這種無(wú)底洞，我們知道這是解決不了問(wèn)題的。因?yàn)檫@不是一個(gè)溝通的問(wèn)題，而是一個(gè)知識(shí)范圍的問(wèn)題。所以如果問(wèn)題是知識(shí)范圍，那么，給人們加上更多的溝通是解決不了問(wèn)題的。我們需要的是不同的科技來(lái)幫助分?jǐn)傄恍┪覀円呀?jīng)超負(fù)荷的溝通。想象一下，比如，一個(gè)網(wǎng)絡(luò)虛擬人，一個(gè)軟件代理，一個(gè)電子杰明尼蟋蟀－

07:03

(Laughter)

（笑聲）

07:05

that basically is able to answer things onyour behalf. And if we had that technology, we would be able to offload some ofthe communication and help, maybe, make better decisions or decisions at alarger scale. And the thing is that the idea of software agents is also notnew. We already use them all the time. We use software agents to choose the waythat we're going to drive to a certain location, the music that we're going tolisten to or to get suggestions for the next books that we should read.

基本上可以替你回答問(wèn)題。如果我們有了那種科技，我們就可以卸下一些溝通的負(fù)擔(dān)也許可以幫助我們做更好的決定或是范圍更廣的決定。而且軟件代理的想法也不是新的。我們已經(jīng)一直在使用它們了。我們用軟件代理來(lái)選擇我們開車去某地該怎么走，我們想聽什么音樂(lè)或者建議我們接下來(lái)讀什么書。

07:37

So there is an obvious idea in the 21stcentury that was as obvious as the idea of putting together a steam engine witha loom at the time of Jacquard. And that idea is combining direct democracywith software agents. Imagine, for a second, a world in which, instead of havinga representative that represents you and millions of other people, you can havea representative that represents only you, with your nuanced political views --that weird combination of libertarian and liberal and maybe a little bitconservative on some issues and maybe very progressive on others. Politiciansnowadays are packages, and they're full of compromises. But you might havesomeone that can represent only you, if you are willing to give up the ideathat that representative is a human. If that representative is a softwareagent, we could have a senate that has as many senators as we have citizens.And those senators are going to be able to read every bill and they're going tobe able to vote on each one of them.

所以在二十一世紀(jì)有個(gè)顯而易見的想法就跟雅卡爾時(shí)代把蒸汽發(fā)動(dòng)機(jī)和織布機(jī)結(jié)合在一起的想法一樣顯而易見。這個(gè)想法就是把直接民主和軟件代理結(jié)合在一起。試想一下，在一個(gè)世界里沒有一個(gè)代表來(lái)代表你和一百多萬(wàn)其他人，你可以有一個(gè)代表只代表你自己，帶著你的細(xì)微詳盡的政治看法——那些自由意志派和自由派的奇特結(jié)合或許對(duì)某些問(wèn)題看法有點(diǎn)小保守，或許對(duì)其他問(wèn)題看法又非常超前。現(xiàn)在的政客都是打包的，他們充滿了妥協(xié)。但你可以有人只代表你一個(gè)人，如果你不堅(jiān)持那個(gè)代表一定是個(gè)人的話。如果那個(gè)代表是個(gè)軟件代理，我們的參議院里面的參議員可以和我們的公民一樣多。那些參議員有能力讀每個(gè)法案，他們可以對(duì)每個(gè)法案投票。

08:39

So there's an obvious idea that maybe wewant to consider. But I understand that in this day and age, this idea might bequite scary. In fact, thinking of a robot coming from the future to help us runour governments sounds terrifying. But we've been there before.

所以這是個(gè)很明顯的想法我們可以考慮。但我明白在這個(gè)時(shí)代，這個(gè)想法可能會(huì)顯得很恐怖。實(shí)際上，想想一個(gè)來(lái)自未來(lái)的機(jī)器人幫助我們管理政府聽起來(lái)就很可怕。但其實(shí)我們已經(jīng)領(lǐng)略過(guò)了。

08:57

(Laughter)

（笑聲）

08:59

And actually he was quite a nice guy.

實(shí)際上他人還不錯(cuò)的。

09:03

So what would the Jacquard loom version ofthis idea look like? It would be a very simple system. Imagine a system thatyou log in and you create your avatar, and then you're going to start trainingyour avatar. So you can provide your avatar with your reading habits, orconnect it to your social media, or you can connect it to other data, forexample by taking psychological tests. And the nice thing about this is thatthere's no deception. You are not providing data to communicate with yourfriends and family that then gets used in a political system. You are providingdata to a system that is designed to be used to make political decisions onyour behalf. Then you take that data and you choose a training algorithm,because it's an open marketplace in which different people can submit differentalgorithms to predict how you're going to vote, based on the data you haveprovided. And the system is open, so nobody controls the algorithms; there arealgorithms that become more popular and others that become less popular.Eventually, you can audit the system. You can see how your avatar is working.If you like it, you can leave it on autopilot. If you want to be a little morecontrolling, you can actually choose that they ask you every time they're goingto make a decision, or you can be anywhere in between. One of the reasons whywe use democracy so little may be because democracy has a very bad userinterface. And if we improve the user interface of democracy, we might be ableto use it more.

那雅卡爾織布機(jī)版本的這個(gè)想法會(huì)是什么樣呢？其實(shí)這個(gè)系統(tǒng)會(huì)很簡(jiǎn)單。想象一個(gè)系統(tǒng)里你登錄進(jìn)去然后你建虛擬身份，然后你開始訓(xùn)練你的虛擬身份。你可以給它提供你的讀書習(xí)慣，或者把它連到你的社交媒體上，或者把它連到其他數(shù)據(jù)上，比如說(shuō)做心理測(cè)試題。這樣的好處在于一切都很真實(shí)。你沒有和你的朋友家人溝通時(shí)提供數(shù)據(jù)，然后被政治系統(tǒng)利用。你在給一個(gè)系統(tǒng)提供數(shù)據(jù)用來(lái)代表你自己做政治決定。你然后拿著這數(shù)據(jù)再挑選一個(gè)培訓(xùn)程序，因?yàn)檫@是個(gè)開放式市場(chǎng)，不同的人可以提供不同的程序，根據(jù)你提供的數(shù)據(jù)來(lái)預(yù)測(cè)你如何投票。因?yàn)橄到y(tǒng)是開放式的，所以沒有人能控制程序；有的程序會(huì)變得很流行，有些會(huì)漸被遺忘。最后，你可以審計(jì)這個(gè)系統(tǒng)。你可以看你虛擬身份做的如何。如果你喜歡，你可以留著它自動(dòng)駕駛。如果你想多些控制權(quán)，你可以選擇每次它們做決定前都來(lái)先問(wèn)你，或者你可以選擇兩者之間任何一點(diǎn)。我們極少實(shí)施民主的原因之一也許是因?yàn)槊裰饔袀€(gè)很爛的用戶界面。如果我們能改善民主的用戶界面，我們或許能用的多一些。

10:28

Of course, there's a lot of questions thatyou might have. Well, how do you train these avatars? How do you keep the datasecure? How do you keep the systems distributed and auditable? How about mygrandmother, who's 80 years old and doesn't know how to use the internet? Trustme, I've heard them all. So when you think about an idea like this, you have tobeware of pessimists because they are known to have a problem for everysolution.

當(dāng)然，你可能會(huì)有很多問(wèn)題。嗯，你怎么培訓(xùn)這些虛擬身份？你如何保護(hù)數(shù)據(jù)？你如何讓系統(tǒng)保持分散并且可以審計(jì)？還有我的八十歲的外婆她不會(huì)上網(wǎng)怎么辦？相信我，這些問(wèn)題我全聽到過(guò)。所以當(dāng)你考慮這樣的想法，你得小心那些悲觀者因?yàn)樗麄兂隽嗣臎]有問(wèn)題創(chuàng)造問(wèn)題。

10:55

(Laughter)

（笑聲）

10:57

So I want to invite you to think about thebigger ideas. The questions I just showed you are little ideas because they arequestions about how this would not work. The big ideas are ideas of: What elsecan you do with this if this would happen to work? And one of those ideas is,well, who writes the laws? In the beginning, we could have the avatars that wealready have, voting on laws that are written by the senators or politiciansthat we already have. But if this were to work, you could write an algorithmthat could try to write a law that would get a certain percentage of approval,and you could reverse the process. Now, you might think that this idea isludicrous and we should not do it, but you cannot deny that it's an idea thatis only possible in a world in which direct democracy and software agents are aviable form of participation.

所以我鼓勵(lì)你們思考更大的想法。我剛剛提的那些問(wèn)題都是小想法，因?yàn)樗鼈兌际顷P(guān)于這個(gè)想法怎么會(huì)砸鍋。真正的大想法是：這個(gè)想法如果成功了的話，還適合做別的什么？還有一個(gè)大想法是，嗯，誰(shuí)來(lái)負(fù)責(zé)立法？一開始的時(shí)候，我們可以用我們已經(jīng)有了的虛擬身份，來(lái)投選現(xiàn)有的由參議員或政客寫的法案。但如果這個(gè)想法成功了的話，你可以寫個(gè)程序來(lái)撰寫一個(gè)法案然后得到一定百分比的批準(zhǔn)，你可以翻轉(zhuǎn)這個(gè)流程。你可能在想這個(gè)主意太荒謬了，我們不該去做，但你不能否認(rèn)當(dāng)直接民主和軟件代理成為一個(gè)可行的參與方式的時(shí)候，這個(gè)想法就變得可能。

11:52

So how do we start the revolution? We don'tstart this revolution with picket fences or protests or by demanding our currentpoliticians to be changed into robots. That's not going to work. This is muchmore simple, much slower and much more humble. We start this revolution bycreating simple systems like this in grad schools, in libraries, in nonprofits.And we try to figure out all of those little questions and those littleproblems that we're going to have to figure out to make this idea somethingviable, to make this idea something that we can trust. And as we create thosesystems that have a hundred people, a thousand people, a hundred thousandpeople voting in ways that are not politically binding, we're going to developtrust in this idea, the world is going to change, and those that are as littleas my daughter is right now are going to grow up. And by the time my daughteris my age, maybe this idea, that I know today is very crazy, might not be crazyto her and to her friends. And at that point, we will be at the end of ourhistory, but they will be at the beginning of theirs.

那我們?cè)鯓硬拍荛_始這場(chǎng)革命呢？我們不能從籬柵樁和游行開始，或者強(qiáng)求用機(jī)器人替代現(xiàn)在的政客。那是沒法成功的。這是更簡(jiǎn)單，更緩慢也更加謙遜。我們通過(guò)在研究生院，在圖書館，在非盈利組織建立象這樣的簡(jiǎn)單的系統(tǒng)，來(lái)開始這場(chǎng)革命。然后我們想辦法解決那些小問(wèn)題，和那些小挑戰(zhàn)，我們需要克服它們，好讓這個(gè)想法成為現(xiàn)實(shí)，好讓這個(gè)想法變得可信。當(dāng)我們建立起這些系統(tǒng)供幾百人，幾千人，以及幾十萬(wàn)人不以政治掛鉤的形式投票的時(shí)候，我們就會(huì)對(duì)這個(gè)想法產(chǎn)生信任，這個(gè)世界會(huì)變化，那些現(xiàn)在象我女兒一樣小的會(huì)慢慢長(zhǎng)大。當(dāng)我的女兒長(zhǎng)到我現(xiàn)在的年紀(jì)時(shí)，也許這個(gè)想法，我知道今天聽起來(lái)是很瘋狂，也許對(duì)她和她的朋友們就不一定很瘋狂。到了那個(gè)時(shí)候，我們會(huì)到達(dá)我們歷史的終點(diǎn)，但她們才開始她們的。

13:01

Thank you.

（謝謝大家）

13:02

(Applause)

（掌聲）