Dr. Jill Lepore on why AI backlash is vital for the future
Dr. Jill Lepore on why AI backlash is vital for the future
吉尔·莱波雷博士：为何针对人工智能的抵制对未来至关重要
The Artificial State author explains how counting everything breaks society — and how college grads booing AI might save us all. 《人造国家》（The Artificial State）作者解释了“万物皆可量化”如何破坏社会，以及大学毕业生对人工智能的嘘声为何可能拯救我们所有人。
Today, I’m talking with Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Dr. Jill Lepore about her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, which comes out on August 25. 今天，我采访了哈佛大学教授、《纽约客》特约撰稿人吉尔·莱波雷（Dr. Jill Lepore）博士，聊聊她将于8月25日出版的新书《人造国家的兴衰》（The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State）。
Jill is one of the best writers there is at identifying institutional patterns in history, and Decoder is a show about systems, so this book could not possibly be more in our zone. 吉尔是当今最擅长识别历史中制度模式的作家之一，而《Decoder》是一档关注系统的节目，因此这本书的内容与我们的关注点高度契合。
You build systems by measuring things — gathering information, quantifying it as data, and taking action on it. And Jill’s big thesis in the book is that this kind of systemic measurement is really a dehumanizing act, one that flattens human concerns into something, well, artificial. 构建系统需要通过测量事物来实现——即收集信息、将其量化为数据，并据此采取行动。吉尔在书中的核心论点是，这种系统性的测量实际上是一种去人性化的行为，它将人类的关切扁平化为某种——嗯，人造的东西。
These artificial structures touch everything — not just in the more obvious places like in apps or AI, but all the way up to politics and governance itself, and Jill’s insights here are a telling portrait of the way Big Tech and its billionaire figureheads have managed to break the very idea of the state itself. 这些人工结构触及一切——不仅是在应用程序或人工智能等显而易见的领域，甚至延伸到了政治和治理本身。吉尔在此提出的见解，生动地描绘了大型科技公司及其亿万富翁领袖如何成功地瓦解了“国家”这一概念本身。
You’ll hear Jill tell me she wanted to write a “kind of grumpy book,” but in my reading, it’s a pretty dead-ahead look at the last century and a half of technological and social developments and how we got to a place where bots are maybe running everything. 你会听到吉尔告诉我，她想写一本“有点脾气”的书，但在我看来，这是一部对过去一个半世纪技术和社会发展的深刻审视，探讨了我们是如何走到今天这一步的——即机器人可能正在掌控一切。
Jill’s idea of the artificial state starts with the very idea of quantification, from the first stabs at taking a census thousands of years ago to the invention of modern political polling in the 1930s. But where she really sees a big pivot — and the era she and I talked about most — is in the 1980s, when we saw the emergence of the Silicon Valley culture we have today, when computers got personal, and when computer-aided targeting and microtargeting really truly became both possible and commonplace, both for ads and for political campaigns. 吉尔关于“人造国家”的构想始于量化这一概念本身，从几千年前首次尝试人口普查，到20世纪30年代现代政治民调的发明。但她认为真正的重大转折点——也是我们讨论最多的时代——出现在20世纪80年代。那时，我们今天所熟知的硅谷文化开始兴起，个人电脑普及，计算机辅助定位和微定位技术真正变得可行且普遍，无论是用于广告还是政治竞选。
What Jill and I did disagree about is some of her pessimism about the internet, because the internet is what made jobs and careers like mine — and businesses like The Verge, and shows like Decoder — even possible at all. There really was a great democratizing of access that happened in the late 20th century and into the 21st, as people got online, and not all of it was as illusory as maybe the great hopes for Twitter after the Arab Spring turned out to be. 我和吉尔的分歧在于她对互联网的一些悲观态度，因为正是互联网让像我这样的工作和职业——以及像《The Verge》这样的企业和《Decoder》这样的节目——成为可能。20世纪末到21世纪初，随着人们纷纷上网，确实发生了一场伟大的接入民主化运动，并非所有这些希望都像“阿拉伯之春”后对Twitter的期望那样最终化为泡影。
But as I said, Jill thinks in systems, and so her response, about the way systems of power keep adapting to how people use new technology, was as illuminating as ever. 但正如我所说，吉尔习惯从系统角度思考，因此她关于权力系统如何不断适应人们使用新技术方式的回应，一如既往地富有启发性。
Of course, we also talked about the future — including where she thinks she still sees hope for the future. And yes, that does include college kids booing the AI CEOs at graduation ceremonies. 当然，我们也谈到了未来——包括她认为未来仍存希望的地方。是的，这确实包括大学生在毕业典礼上对人工智能公司首席执行官发出嘘声。
Dr. Jill Lepore, you’re a staff writer at The New Yorker, you’re a professor of history and law at Harvard University, and most importantly, you’re the author of a new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. Welcome to Decoder. 吉尔·莱波雷博士，您是《纽约客》的特约撰稿人，哈佛大学历史与法学教授，最重要的是，您是新书《人造国家的兴衰》的作者。欢迎来到《Decoder》。
Hey, thanks for having me. 嘿，谢谢邀请我。
I am really excited to talk to you. I’m a big fan of your work over the years. And I have to say, this book is one of the most Decoder-y, Verge-y, Nilay-Patel-strike-zone books of all time. 我非常兴奋能与您交谈。多年来我一直是您作品的忠实粉丝。我必须说，这本书是有史以来最符合《Decoder》风格、最符合《The Verge》调性、最戳中我（Nilay Patel）兴趣点的书之一。
[Laughs] Wow. I’m not sure how to take that, but I guess that’s good. （笑）哇。我不知道该怎么理解这句话，但我猜这是好事。
The producers and I just had a thrill ride reading this book. It is essentially about how computers and measurement flatten us and then systems can take advantage of that flattening. Like I said, it’s in the strike zone. 我和制作人们在阅读这本书时感到非常过瘾。它本质上讲述了计算机和测量如何将我们扁平化，然后系统又如何利用这种扁平化。正如我所说，这完全击中了我的关注点。
So let’s just start at the very beginning for folks. The book is called The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. Tell us what the “artificial state” is. Define it so we can start from that foundation. 那么，让我们从最基础的部分开始。这本书叫《人造国家的兴衰》。请告诉我们什么是“人造国家”。请定义它，以便我们能从这个基础开始讨论。
What I mean by the artificial state is a successor to the liberal nation-state, the constitutional democracy under which our freedom of speech, free discourse, and constitutional rights are central to our experience as citizens within a nation-state. 我所说的“人造国家”是自由民族国家的继任者，即那种以言论自由、自由讨论和宪法权利为核心的宪政民主制度，这些是我们作为民族国家公民体验的核心。
We talk a lot about democratic decay and democratic backsliding, and there’s a whole public discussion of what’s happening with democracy, but I don’t think we talk about the nation-state as much as we might. And that is to say the state itself. 我们经常谈论民主的衰落和倒退，公众也在广泛讨论民主正在发生什么，但我认为我们对“民族国家”本身的讨论还不够。也就是说，对“国家”这一概念本身的讨论还不够。
And so what I mean by the ‘artificial state’ is a state in which more and more of the functions of the nation-state have been taken over by private multinational corporations. The easiest example of that to think about is what is euphemistically called the public square, which is where people get information about how to vote, what’s going on in the world, how to make decisions, and how to exercise their rights and duties as citizens. 因此，我所说的“人造国家”是指民族国家的职能越来越多地被私营跨国公司所接管的国家。最容易想到的例子就是所谓的“公共广场”（这是一个委婉的说法），人们在那里获取关于如何投票、世界上正在发生什么、如何做决定以及如何行使公民权利和义务的信息。
Our public discourse is almost entirely privatized and owned by corporations. As many, many people have demonstrated — it’s not news to your listeners or to anyone — the priority of public discourse is not the free expression of ideas and democratic deliberation, it is the monetization of attention and of outrage. 我们的公共话语几乎完全被私有化，并由企业所拥有。正如许多人所证明的那样——这对您的听众或任何人来说都不是新闻——公共话语的优先事项不是思想的自由表达和民主审议，而是对注意力和愤怒的货币化。
More than that, a fairly recent vintage is the fact that public platforms in which we exchange ideas as citizens and democracies are dominated by bots. All of them have been inverted for several years now, or different numbers of years, from X to Facebook to TikTok. There are far more bots than humans on those platforms. 不仅如此，一个相当新的现象是，我们作为公民和民主社会交换思想的公共平台正被机器人所主导。从X到Facebook再到TikTok，所有这些平台在过去几年里都发生了倒置。在这些平台上，机器人的数量远多于人类。
Many of those bots are owned by corporations and have particular acts, their own kind of financial interests, but they’re owned by state actors, non-state actors, criminals, and terrorists. What we’re at risk of is losing the liberal constitutional democracy and having it become su 许多机器人由企业拥有，并有特定的行为和各自的经济利益，但它们也由国家行为体、非国家行为体、犯罪分子和恐怖分子所拥有。我们面临的风险是失去自由宪政民主，并使其变成……