How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots
How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots
如何戳破人工智能泡沫：从根源上进行打击
Last year, we featured a lengthy interview with tech journalist/science fiction author Cory Doctorow about his book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. The prolific Doctorow is back with a provocative new book that serves as a follow-up of sorts, focusing on AI and related issues: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.
去年，我们刊登了一篇对科技记者兼科幻作家科里·多克托罗（Cory Doctorow）的长篇专访，讨论了他的著作《互联网的崩塌：为什么一切突然变糟了以及我们该怎么办》（Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It）。多产的多克托罗带着一本极具挑衅性的新书回归了，这本书可以看作是前作的某种后续，重点关注人工智能及相关议题，书名为《后AI时代：反向半人马生存指南》（The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI）。
Doctorow doesn’t actually enjoy talking about AI, but he’s constantly being asked to comment on it. “I made the tactical error of being sick of talking about AI,” Doctorow told Ars. “So I wrote a book about why I think it’s a dumb thing to keep让人 keep asking people to talk about, and now I have to talk about it.”
多克托罗其实并不喜欢谈论人工智能，但他却不断被要求对此发表评论。“我犯了一个战术错误，那就是厌倦了谈论人工智能，”多克托罗告诉 Ars Technica，“所以我写了一本书，阐述为什么我认为人们一直要求谈论这个话题是很愚蠢的，结果现在我反而不得不一直谈论它。”
Reverse Centaur is Doctorow’s attempt to “sort out the bullshit from the material reality.” In automation theory, per Doctorow, a “centaur” describes a human augmented with a technology, like machine learning, or even just driving a car or using autocomplete. A reverse centaur “is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine,” Doctorow said in a speech last December.
《反向半人马》是多克托罗试图“将胡言乱语与物质现实区分开来”的尝试。据多克托罗所言，在自动化理论中，“半人马”（centaur）指的是被技术增强的人类，比如使用机器学习，甚至仅仅是开车或使用自动补全功能。而在去年十二月的一次演讲中，多克托罗表示，反向半人马“是长在人类身体上的机器头，是一个充当冷漠机器的软体肉质附属物的人”。
He gave the example of an Amazon delivery driver, surrounded by AI cameras monitoring their driving, who essentially serves as a peripheral to the delivery van. Being a centaur is generally viewed as a positive thing; few people relish being a reverse centaur. And yet the AI industry seems intent on using those tools to create more reverse centaurs.
他举了亚马逊快递员的例子：他们被监控驾驶行为的 AI 摄像头包围，本质上成了快递货车的周边设备。成为“半人马”通常被视为一件积极的事；但很少有人喜欢成为“反向半人马”。然而，人工智能行业似乎执意要利用这些工具制造更多的反向半人马。
It’s one thing to incorporate AI tools into the medical field to help radiologists process X-ray images and spot potential tumors they might otherwise miss. It’s quite another to fire nine out of 10 radiologists and let AI make the diagnoses, with the remaining radiologist solely responsible for checking the AI’s work—and, ultimately, taking the blame for any errors.
将人工智能工具引入医疗领域，帮助放射科医生处理 X 光片并发现可能遗漏的潜在肿瘤，这是一回事；而解雇十分之九的放射科医生，让 AI 进行诊断，只留下最后一名医生负责检查 AI 的工作——并最终为任何错误承担责任——则是完全另一回事。
Doctorow is not virulently anti-AI; he uses AI tools regularly and sees potential in many of those tools as useful plugins or cool new apps. But he is nonetheless alarmed at all the hype surrounding AI, the enormous capital expenditures, the unrealistic expectations and self-serving messaging, and the potentially catastrophic economic consequences when the AI bubble inevitably pops.
多克托罗并非激进的反 AI 人士；他经常使用 AI 工具，并认为其中许多工具作为实用的插件或酷炫的新应用具有潜力。但他对围绕 AI 的所有炒作、巨大的资本支出、不切实际的期望和自私的宣传，以及当 AI 泡沫不可避免地破裂时可能带来的灾难性经济后果感到担忧。
“The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things: big foundational models that lose billions of dollars every year. When the AI investment mania halts, most of the models are going to disappear, because it just won’t be economical to keep the data centers running. The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly.”
“泡沫并不想要廉价且有用的东西，”多克托罗说，“它想要昂贵的‘颠覆性’事物：那些每年亏损数十亿美元的大型基础模型。当人工智能投资狂热停止时，大多数模型都会消失，因为维持数据中心运行将不再经济。人工智能泡沫的破裂将会非常难看。”
“Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100 billion IOU. AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.”
“目前有七家人工智能公司占据了股市的三分之一以上，它们无休止地传递着同一张 1000 亿美元的欠条。人工智能是我们技术社会墙壁里的石棉，被疯狂的金融部门和科技垄断者肆无忌惮地塞了进去。我们将不得不花上一代人甚至更久的时间来清理它。”
Ars Technica: We touched briefly on AI last year when we chatted about your prior book. Reverse Centaur seems like a natural outgrowth of that.
Ars Technica：去年我们聊到你上一本书时，曾简要谈及人工智能。《反向半人马》似乎是那次讨论的自然延伸。
Cory Doctorow: Enshittification is primarily a thesis about how firms in the absence of constraint get tilted to the bad, but it’s also a thesis about how the constraint of competition, when it falls away, produces all kinds of perverse outcomes. One of those perverse outcomes is that firms that have saturated their markets can no longer grow, and they have to find other markets.
科里·多克托罗：《互联网的崩塌》主要论述了企业在缺乏约束的情况下如何走向堕落，但它也论述了当竞争的约束消失时，会产生各种反常的结果。其中一个反常结果是，那些市场已经饱和的企业无法再增长，它们必须寻找其他市场。
“The capital markets have the object permanence of a toddler, and they would lose a game of peekaboo if they were drafted to play in the league.”
“资本市场有着像幼儿一样的客体永久性（object permanence），如果让他们去参加捉迷藏比赛，他们肯定会输。”
That’s why those firms started promoting stories about how they were going to conquer imaginary markets. Imaginary markets have no agreed-upon valuation because you just made them up. Unless you can turn an imaginary market into a real market pretty quickly, you need to come up with another imaginary market and announce that this is the new imaginary market you’re going to conquer.
这就是为什么这些公司开始宣传他们将如何征服虚构市场的故事。虚构市场没有公认的估值，因为它们是你编造出来的。除非你能很快将虚构市场转化为真实市场，否则你就需要编造另一个虚构市场，并宣布这是你即将征服的新市场。
It’s easier than you’d think because the capital markets have the object permanence of a toddler, and they would lose a game of peekaboo if they were drafted to play in the league. So you can say, “Oh, actually, it’s not metaverse. It’s crypto. It’s not crypto. It’s Web3. It’s not Web3. It’s something else.” And the markets will forgive you, provided you do it quickly enough.
这比你想象的要容易，因为资本市场有着像幼儿一样的客体永久性，如果让他们去参加捉迷藏比赛，他们肯定会输。所以你可以说：“哦，其实不是元宇宙。是加密货币。不是加密货币。是 Web3。不是 Web3。是别的东西。”只要你动作够快，市场就会原谅你。
But something different happened with AI. It is much, much bigger in terms of capitalization than anything we’ve ever seen—not just bigger than other tech bubbles, bigger than other bubbles. When I wrote the book, capital expenditure (CapEx) globally was $700 billion, now it’s $1.4 trillion.
但人工智能的情况有所不同。就资本化规模而言，它比我们见过的任何东西都要大得多——不仅仅是比其他科技泡沫大，而是比其他任何泡沫都大。我写这本书时，全球资本支出（CapEx）为 7000 亿美元，现在已经达到 1.4 万亿美元。