As AI gets better, it reveals an empty promise
As AI gets better, it reveals an empty promise
随着人工智能的进步，它揭示了一个空洞的承诺
Your new assistant can schedule a meeting, but it can’t fix our broken world. 你的新助手可以帮你安排会议，但它无法修复我们这个破碎的世界。
This week we’ve got tandem hands-ons with Google’s new Gemini AI agent — Spark — from my colleagues David Pierce and Jay Peters. Their takeaways are similar: It’s so effective that it’s scary. Spark knew that David’s dog is named Frida and knew the first name of Jay’s wife, even though neither of them explicitly provided this information to Google. But what’s scary to me is how all of this stuff seems geared toward a future of “productivity” that completely misses what needs to be fixed in our world. 本周，我的同事 David Pierce 和 Jay Peters 对谷歌的新型 Gemini AI 智能体——Spark——进行了联合测评。他们的结论如出一辙：它高效得令人恐惧。Spark 知道 David 的狗叫 Frida，也知道 Jay 妻子的名字，尽管他们两人从未向谷歌明确提供过这些信息。但令我感到恐惧的是，所有这些技术似乎都指向了一个追求“生产力”的未来，却完全忽略了我们这个世界真正需要解决的问题。
“Productivity” is often pitched as a panacea for what befalls us in our personal lives, even going so far as to implicate our moral worthiness when we are less productive. Productivity lives somewhere in the space between hustle culture and proverb: After all, “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” I’m not suggesting we should all aspire to be bumps on a log, but we ought to see what we’re being sold for what it really is. “生产力”常被吹捧为解决个人生活困境的灵丹妙药，甚至将我们的生产力水平与道德价值挂钩。生产力介于“奋斗文化”与谚语之间：毕竟，“懒惰是万恶之源”。我并不是建议大家都去当无所事事的木头人，但我们应该看清被兜售给我们的东西本质上是什么。
Contemporary tasks on computers have a tendency to feel both important and urgent all of the time, even if they’re not. We’re living under the unholy alliance of the “busy” trap and “software brain.” And that makes AI assistance seem super valuable! But that’s because the companies in charge of all this stuff are now trying to solve a lot of problems that they created. Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others have spent decades blurring the line between office life and personal life. This slow march toward ubiquitous productivity once led the French government to declare a “right to disconnect” from work when leaving the office. (Shame my American sensibilities still convince me that’s a bridge too far.) 当代电脑任务往往让人感觉既重要又紧急，即便事实并非如此。我们生活在“忙碌”陷阱与“软件大脑”的邪恶联盟之下。这使得人工智能助手看起来价值连城！但那是因为掌控这一切的公司现在正试图解决他们自己制造的问题。谷歌、微软、苹果等公司几十年来一直在模糊办公生活与个人生活之间的界限。这种向无处不在的生产力迈进的缓慢步伐，曾促使法国政府宣布了下班后的“离线权”。（遗憾的是，我的美国式思维仍让我觉得那有点遥不可及。）
As I read about Gemini Spark making it easy for my colleagues to color-code calendars and perform other neat tricks on command, I couldn’t help but vividly remember witnessing as a child all of the hours my mom had to spend carefully cutting coupons so we could afford groceries. Sometimes it got to the point where our living room looked like a giant experiment in collage art. All of that time was stolen from her and our family — for what? Maybe having an AI assistant in the ’90s could have helped find and organize the best deals, but it could never fix an economic system that required them in the first place. 当我读到 Gemini Spark 如何轻松地帮助我的同事进行日历颜色编码并按指令执行其他巧妙技巧时，我不禁清晰地回忆起童年时，母亲为了让我们买得起杂货，不得不花费数小时仔细剪裁优惠券的情景。有时，我们的客厅看起来就像一个巨大的拼贴艺术实验场。所有这些时间都被从她和我们家庭中偷走了——为了什么？也许在 90 年代拥有一个人工智能助手可以帮助寻找和整理最优惠的交易，但它永远无法修复那个迫使人们不得不依赖优惠券的经济体系。
Where does the productivity march end? The people making more money than God right now have professed a vision of a post-work future where robots do everything for us so we can enjoy life without toiling away in the mines. (Well, except for the content mines.) If you’ve seen Elon Musk’s failure bot, you’ll know this is all actually less Battlestar Galactica and more John Adams in his letter to Abigail: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy,” and so-on and so-on until the grandchildren can enjoy painting and poetry. So, ideally, after we slog through pre-transcendence, AI will make us all theater kids. 生产力的狂奔何时才能终结？那些富可敌国的人宣扬着一种“后工作时代”的愿景，即机器人为我们做一切事情，这样我们就可以享受生活，而不必在矿井里辛苦劳作。（好吧，除了内容矿井。）如果你看过埃隆·马斯克的失败机器人，你就会知道，这一切与其说是《太空堡垒卡拉狄加》，不如说是约翰·亚当斯写给阿比盖尔的信：“我必须学习政治和战争，以便我的儿子们有自由去学习数学和哲学，”如此循环往复，直到孙辈们能够享受绘画和诗歌。所以，理想情况下，在我们熬过技术超越前的艰苦岁月后，人工智能将把我们都变成热爱戏剧的孩子。
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is posting up his 387-foot yacht in a city where he just laid off a meaningful part of his workforce to offset his investments in AI. At least AI has freed up the time of these fired workers? I’d say good luck to them in Hollywood, especially because they’re trying to replace newly minted theater kids with AI-generated actors. 与此同时，马克·扎克伯格正在一座城市里展示他那 387 英尺长的游艇，而就在这座城市，他刚刚解雇了大量员工以抵消他在人工智能上的投资。至少人工智能解放了这些被解雇员工的时间？我只能祝他们在好莱坞好运，尤其是因为他们正试图用人工智能生成的演员来取代那些新晋的“戏剧孩子”。
There’s a sinister tone lurking beneath some of these advancements in productivity, because the response to increased productivity has been one of the biggest scams of the past century. Well before consumer AI entered the scene, productivity exploded while wages failed to keep pace. Nobody is working less, they’re just earning less. And as more AI-related companies reap trillions in valuation, the current US regime is looting the social safety net — the kind that must exist if we’re all going to become out-of-work theater kids. You simply can’t look at these things separately. If the end result of private companies optimizing the workforce means nobody has to work, then we have to live in a society where people can still have a roof and a meal. Is anyone confident that will happen while leaders are cutting SNAP benefits while building taxpayer-funded ballrooms? 在这些生产力进步的背后潜藏着一种阴险的基调，因为对生产力提高的应对方式是过去一个世纪以来最大的骗局之一。早在消费级人工智能出现之前，生产力就已爆炸式增长，而工资却未能跟上。没有人工作得更少，他们只是赚得更少。随着越来越多的 AI 相关公司获得数万亿美元的估值，当前的美国政府正在掠夺社会安全网——如果我们都要成为失业的“戏剧孩子”，这种安全网是必须存在的。你不能将这些事情孤立地看待。如果私营公司优化劳动力的最终结果意味着没有人需要工作，那么我们必须生活在一个人们仍然有房住、有饭吃的社会里。当领导者们在削减食品券福利（SNAP）的同时却在建造纳税人资助的宴会厅时，有人相信这种情况会发生吗？
What good is an AI assistant that can help you plan a fun day if you can’t actually afford any free time in your life? 如果你的生活中根本负担不起任何闲暇时间，那么一个能帮你规划快乐一天的人工智能助手又有什么用呢？
There has always been resistance to new advancements — so much so that the term “luddite” is still potent 200 years after English textile workers revolted against automation in their industry. The AI backlash is genuine, well-informed, and well-argued. Nonetheless, some of those new neat tricks are fun and maybe even pretty useful in our personal lives. But I can’t imagine that paying $99 a month to send emails, make calendar appointments, and create spreadsheets is a promising vision of the future or even a good return on investment. Especially if the broader cost is squandering the splendor of our lands while subjecting us to corporate omniscience. 人们对新技术的抵制由来已久——以至于在英国纺织工人反抗行业自动化 200 年后，“卢德分子”一词依然具有影响力。对人工智能的抵制是真实、知情且论据充分的。尽管如此，其中一些新奇的技巧确实很有趣，甚至在我们的个人生活中也相当有用。但我无法想象，每月支付 99 美元来发送电子邮件、安排日历预约和创建电子表格，会是一个充满希望的未来愿景，甚至是一个好的投资回报。尤其是当更广泛的代价是挥霍我们土地的壮丽，同时让我们屈从于企业的全知全能时。