I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” the villain played by Rutger Hauer reminisces at the end of the film Blade Runner after hauling Harrison Ford’s character on to a roof top and sparing his life. “People” is the operative word since Roy Batty is not a person but an android who escapes to earth from a space colony and takes revenge on the Tyrell Corporation, his creator.

“我见过的事，你们人不会相信。”在电影《银翼杀手》(Blade Runner)末尾，鲁特格尔樠尔(Rutger Hauer)饰演的反派将哈里森輠祹(Harrison Ford)饰演的角色拉回屋顶，饶了他一命，然后说出了这句话。在这句话里，“人”是最重要的字，因为罗伊巴蒂(Roy Batty)不是人类，他是个机器人。他从太空殖民地逃到地球，向自己的创造者“泰勒公司”(Tyrell Corporation)实施报复。

That is what I call a killer robot — a being that can hold an intelligent conversation with you before wiping you out. It was science fiction in 1982, when Blade Runner, based on Philip K Dick’s dystopian fantasy novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? came out. It is now faintly plausible — sufficiently for artificial intelligence researchers to warn this week of the dangers of an autonomous arms race.

这才是我认为的“杀手机器人”(killer robot)，一个在消灭你之前，能与你进行一场高智商谈话的存在。电影《银翼杀手》改编自菲利普迪克(Philip K. Dick)的反乌托邦奇幻小说《机器人会梦见电子羊吗？》(Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep)。影片上映于1982年，当时它还是一部科幻电影，如今却有点像真的，反正对于人工智能研究人员来说已经足以成真了，前不久他们警告要谨防出现自主式武器军备竞赛的危险。

The killer machines feared by those such as Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors, and Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist, are crude terminators by comparison with the Nexus replicants in Blade Runner. No one would fall in love with an armed quadcopter that blows up enemy soldiers, as the hero of Blade Runner does with Rachael, the female android who does not realise that she is a replicant.

包括特斯拉汽车(Tesla Motors)创始人埃伦穆斯克(Elon Musk)、理论物理学家斯蒂芬霍金(Stephen Hawking)在内，这些专家们所担心的杀人机器，与《银翼杀手》里的“连锁”（Nexus）复制人相比的话，只是原始级别的终结者。《银翼杀手》里的瑞秋(Rachael)开枪杀死哈里森輠祹葲敌人时，这位男主公爱上了她——瑞秋是个女机器人，她并不知道自己是复制人。但是当一台配备武器的四轴飞行器干掉敌方士兵时，没人会爱上它。

Robots can murder us but they cannot understand us. Autonomous killing machines are becoming reality — Israel already has its Harpy anti-radar drone, which loiters in the sky before choosing and destroying targets itself. A sentient, sophisticated machine with common sense and the capacity to grasp people’s moods and predict behaviour is still a distant prospect.

机器人可以杀死我们，但它们无法理解我们。自主式杀人机器正在成为现实，以色列已经拥有了哈比(Harpy)反雷达无人机，它可以在空中漫无目的地飞行，然后自主选择目标并加以摧毁。但是想创造出一架具备常识，能理解人类情绪，预测人类行为，拥有感知能力的复杂机器，仍是个遥远前景。

In theory, it will be created. Artificial intelligence researchers do not see the barrier in principle to robots developing higher reasoning powers, or the kind of physical dexterity that humans possess. The last remaining workers on car assembly lines are people who can attach screws nimbly and reach inside the body shells for electrical wiring in a way that has defeated robots to date.

理论上讲，这种机器人是能造出来的。人工智能研究人员看不到任何原则上的障碍，阻止机器人发展出更高水平的推理能力，或是人类那种灵活的身体。汽车装配线上目前仅剩下能够敏捷地拧螺丝的工人，以及一些能够到车身外壳里焊电线的工人，机器人暂时还无法胜过他们。

Machines also possess some advantages. They do not have to constrict their processing units to fit into skulls, and they do not need to supply them with oxygen, an energy-hogging technology. Nor are they limited by an evolutionary edict to reproduce, rather than purely to get cleverer.

机器还占有一定的优势。它们不必为了适合颅骨大小而压缩处理装置，它们也不需要氧气供应——这是个高度耗能的技术。它们的再造也不受进化法则限制，完全可以变得越来越聪明。

But despite rapid advances in machine learning, visual and voice recognition, neural network processing — all the elements that are now transforming the potential of artificial intelligence — androids are not with us. Computers can beat humans easily at chess, but poker at the highest level is beyond them — they would need to see through the other players’ bluffs.

但尽管机器在学习、视觉及语音识别、神经网络处理（这些元素都在改变人工智能的潜力）方面发展迅速，机器人还是不能理解人类。计算机可以在国际象棋上轻松击败人类，但它们玩不了最高水平的扑克牌游戏，因为它们得看穿对手的虚张声势。

“Computers are becoming better and better at perception tasks,” says Fei-Fei Li, director of Stanford University’s artificial intelligence laboratory. “Algorithms can identify thousands of types of cars while I can only tell three of them. But at the cognitive, empathetic, and emotional level, machines are not even close to humans.”

斯坦福大学(Stanford University)人工智能实验室主任李飞飞说：“计算机在感知任务上正变得越来越好。它的算法已经能识别数千种汽车，而我只能认出三种。但在认知、同理心和情感层面，机器还无法接近人类。”

I have also experienced something you people would not believe — Google’s self-driving car. The thing that struck me as it toured Mountain View in California recently was that it felt human. It accelerated from junctions confidently, even assertively, closing the gaps with vehicles in front so others could not rush in. We would be safer if all drivers were equally calm and rational.

我也经历过一些事，你们这些人不会相信——谷歌的无人驾驶汽车。最近我坐着它游览了加州的山景城，震惊地发现它感觉上就像人类。它自信地，甚至是果断地从交叉路口加速，缩小与前方车辆的距离，让其他车辆无法插入。如果所有司机都能这样冷静和理性，我们的生命会更安全。

Inside the car, you can see what it perceives with its sensors and rooftop radar. The outlines of objects around, including pedestrians, buses and other cars, are displayed like hollow, moving shapes on the screen of a laptop held by a Google engineer. The objects are categorised by different colours, so the vehicle knows it should react to them and how far to steer clear.

在谷歌无人驾驶汽车里，你可以看到它如何用传感器和车顶雷达进行感知。一位谷歌工程师手持一台笔记本电脑，行人、公交车和其他车辆等周围物体的轮廓呈现为空心的、移动的图形显示在屏幕上。这些物体按照不同颜色分类，因此无人驾驶汽车知道该对它们作出反应，以及该从多远避开。

A self-driving vehicle would, in other words, be a perfectly capable killer robot if you attached a missile launcher to its roof, and machine guns to its sides (not that Google would do such a thing, of course). It could cruise through cities, scanning for warm, slow-moving, pink-coloured objects to destroy.

换言之，如果你在自动驾驶汽车的车顶安装一个导弹发射器，并且在车身两侧装上机枪（当然啦，这并不是说谷歌会干这种事），它完全能化身“杀手机器人”。它可以悠闲地穿越城市，扫描搜寻有热度的、缓慢移动的粉红色目标加以摧毁。

So it is not scaremongering for scientists to warn of artificial intelligence research being tainted by association with autonomous weapons. The internet itself emerged from research funded by the US Department of Defence in the 1960s, and military and space programmes have the deepest pockets and the keenest interest in developing cutting-edge technology. What would be foolish would be to think the advent of killer robots means that machines are ready to take over the world.

因此，科学家们警告人工智能研究领域存在与自主武器相结合的情况，并非是危言耸听。互联网本身就发源于美国国防部在上世纪60年代资助的研究课题，而且在开发尖端技术方面，军事和航天计划拥有最雄厚的财力和最强烈的兴趣。要有多蠢，才会认为“杀手机器人”的出现就意味着机器将接管全世界。

Destroying things is easier than understanding or creating them. Artificial intelligence — the ability to scan, process and analyse large data sets — is not the same as the capacity to perform most human tasks (known as artificial general intelligence).

破坏事物比理解或创造事物更容易。人工智能（扫描、处理和分析大型数据集的能力）并不等同于“强人工智能”(artificial general intelligence)，后者才具有执行大多数人类任务的能力。

Even those who warn of machines taking jobs that are now performed by humans accept that managerial, professional, and artistic jobs that demand high level reasoning, empathy and creativity are still safe. A robot that scans a set of features to identify a woman, but cannot grasp her mood, or use common sense to solve an unexpected puzzle, remains very limited.

一些人警告说机器将抢走目前由人类完成的工作，但就连他们也同意，管理、专业和艺术工作仍然是安全的，因为这些工作需要具备高水平的推理能力、同感能力以及创造能力。机器人的能力仍非常有限，它可以通过扫描一系列特征来识别一个女人，却无法体会她的情绪，也无法运用常理来解决意料之外的难题。

“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it’s like to be a slave,” Roy Batty remarks to the human bounty-hunter he has defeated in combat before reaching out and rescuing him from falling to his death. Let us not enslave ourselves yet.

罗伊巴蒂已经在对决中战胜了人类赏金猎人，却又在对手坠下屋顶时伸手救了他一命。接着他对赏金猎人说道：“活在恐惧里的滋味不好受吧？这就是当奴隶的感受。”我们千万不要让自己沦为奴隶。