In two weeks time, that's the ninth anniversary of the day I first stepped out onto that hallowed "Jeopardy" set. I mean, nine years is a long time. And given "Jeopardy's" average demographics, I think what that means is most of the people who saw me on that show are now dead. (Laughter) But not all, a few are still alive. Occasionally I still get recognized at the mall or whatever. And when I do, it's as a bit of a know-it-all. I think that ship has sailed, it's too late for me. For better or for worse, that's what I'm going to be known as, as the guy who knew a lot of weird stuff.
再過兩週,就是我首次踏上電視競賽節目 「危險邊緣」九週年了。 九年時間不短。 鑒於「危險邊緣」觀眾平均年歲, 我想這意味著 當初看我上節目的大部分觀眾都已離世了。 (笑聲) 不過,還有些健在的。 偶爾在商場等地方,我也會被人認出來。 人們認為我就是個「通天曉」 我想木已成舟,我已無力改變。 是好是壞,我就是人們心裡那個, 博識奇異怪事的人。
And I can't complain about this. I feel like that was always sort of my destiny, although I had for many years been pretty deeply in the trivia closet. If nothing else, you realize very quickly as a teenager, it is not a hit with girls to know Captain Kirk's middle name. (Laughter) And as a result, I was sort of the deeply closeted kind of know-it-all for many years. But if you go further back, if you look at it, it's all there. I was the kind of kid who was always bugging Mom and Dad with whatever great fact I had just read about -- Haley's comet or giant squids or the size of the world's biggest pumpkin pie or whatever it was. I now have a 10-year-old of my own who's exactly the same. And I know how deeply annoying it is, so karma does work. (Laughter)
對此我也沒有抱怨。 我常覺得那就是我的命運, 儘管多年來我一直隱藏對百科知識的著迷。 不難料想,少年時你很快會發現, 知道卻克船長的中間名對女生而言沒有任何吸引力。 (笑聲) 因此,許久我都算是個韜光養晦的「通天曉」 不過若你回顧更早些年,一切不言自明。 小時候,我就經常纏著爸媽 興緻勃勃告訴他們書本中讀到的世界奇事 哈雷彗星也好,巨烏賊也好 或是世上最大的南瓜派有多大,諸如此類。 我有個十歲的孩子,和我當年一模一樣。 因此我知道那多麼煩人,所以說是因果循環。 (笑聲)
And I loved game shows, fascinated with game shows. I remember crying on my first day of kindergarten back in 1979 because it had just hit me, as badly as I wanted to go to school, that I was also going to miss "Hollywood Squares" and "Family Feud." I was going to miss my game shows. And later, in the mid-'80s, when "Jeopardy" came back on the air, I remember running home from school every day to watch the show. It was my favorite show, even before it paid for my house. And we lived overseas, we lived in South Korea where my dad was working, where there was only one English language TV channel. There was Armed Forces TV, and if you didn't speak Korean, that's what you were watching. So me and all my friends would run home every day and watch "Jeopardy."
我喜愛遊戲節目,為此深深著迷。 我記得 1979 年我在上幼稚園的第一天哭了 因為我突然意識到,儘管我想去上學, 但我會因此錯過「好萊塢廣場」和「家庭問答」 我會錯過喜歡的遊戲節目。 後來,到了80年代中期, 當「危險邊緣」重回螢幕, 我每天放學後都會跑回家看。 它是我最喜歡的節目,當時我還沒有贏得獎金。 我們當時住在韓國,我父親在那兒工作, 那兒只有一個英語頻道。 叫做武裝力量臺, 如果你不懂韓文就只能看這個臺。 我和我的夥伴們每天都會跑回家看「危險邊緣」
I was always that kind of obsessed trivia kid. I remember being able to play Trivial Pursuit against my parents back in the '80s and holding my own, back when that was a fad. There's a weird sense of mastery you get when you know some bit of boomer trivia that Mom and Dad don't know. You know some Beatles factoid that Dad didn't know. And you think, ah hah, knowledge really is power -- the right fact deployed at exactly the right place.
我一直都是那種沉迷於百科知識的孩子。 我記得80年代和我父母玩棋盤遊戲 當時很流行,我玩得不錯。 當你知道一些父母不知道的百科知識時 會有一種很奇怪的優越感。 當你知道一些爸爸都不知道的有關披頭四的傳聞時, 你會想,啊哈,知識果然是力量, 準確的資訊落到了對的人手裡。
I never had a guidance counselor who thought this was a legitimate career path, that thought you could major in trivia or be a professional ex-game show contestant. And so I sold out way too young. I didn't try to figure out what one does with that. I studied computers because I heard that was the thing, and I became a computer programmer -- not an especially good one, not an especially happy one at the time when I was first on "Jeopardy" in 2004. But that's what I was doing.
沒有一個指導顧問 認為這是一個可以從事的職業, 認為你可以主修百科, 或成為一個職業的前遊戲競賽選手。 我太年輕,就放棄了。 沒有試著搞清楚如何發揮特長。 我隨主流,學了電機工程, 並成為了一名電腦程序員, 成就平平, 2004年上節目的時候工作也不是特別開心。 但當時那是我的生活。
And it made it doubly ironic -- my computer background -- a few years later, I think 2009 or so, when I got another phone call from "Jeopardy" saying, "It's early days yet, but IBM tells us they want to build a supercomputer to beat you at 'Jeopardy.' Are you up for this?" This was the first I'd heard of it. And of course I said yes, for several reasons. One, because playing "Jeopardy" is a great time. It's fun. It's the most fun you can have with your pants on. (Laughter) And I would do it for nothing. I don't think they know that, luckily, but I would go back and play for Arby's coupons. I just love "Jeopardy," and I always have. And second of all, because I'm a nerdy guy and this seemed like the future. People playing computers on game shows was the kind of thing I always imagined would happen in the future, and now I could be on the stage with it. I was not going to say no.
更加諷刺的是,我的電機背景, 在幾年後,大概2009年左右, 節目組打電話給我說, “現在為時尚早,但IBM告訴我們 他們想造一台超級電腦與你競賽。 你有興趣嗎?” 這是我第一次聽說這種事。 我當然一口答應了,原因有幾點: 其一,我喜歡參加「危險邊緣」。 它充滿樂趣,是你能穿著褲子做的最有樂趣的事。 (笑聲) 不用任何回報我都會參加。 幸好他們當時不知道, 但就算給我快餐券我也願意去。 我真心熱愛「危險邊緣」,一直都是。 其二,我是個書呆子,而電腦看似是未來趨勢。 遊戲節目上的人機大戰, 我一直認為會在未來某天發生。 而現在我能和它在臺上一決高下。 我肯定不會拒絕。
The third reason I said yes is because I was pretty confident that I was going to win. I had taken some artificial intelligence classes. I knew there were no computers that could do what you need to do to win on "Jeopardy." People don't realize how tough it is to write that kind of program that can read a "Jeopardy" clue in a natural language like English and understand all the double meanings, the puns, the red herrings, unpack the meaning of the clue. The kind of thing that a three- or four-year-old human, little kid could do, very hard for a computer. And I thought, well this is going to be child's play. Yes, I will come destroy the computer and defend my species. (Laughter)
其三,我一口答應 是因為我很有信心可以贏得比賽。 我上過一些人工智能的課程。 知道電腦不具備贏得「危險邊緣」的能力。 人們不知道要寫出那樣的程序有多難 可以聽懂英語這一種人類自然語言的遊戲提示 理解各種雙關和障眼法, 破解提示中的含義。 這種事三四歲的孩子可以做, 但對電腦來說很難。 我當時想,這將是輕而易舉。 沒錯,我會打敗電腦捍衛我人類的尊嚴。 (笑聲)
But as the years went on, as IBM started throwing money and manpower and processor speed at this, I started to get occasional updates from them, and I started to get a little more worried. I remember a journal article about this new question answering software that had a graph. It was a scatter chart showing performance on "Jeopardy," tens of thousands of dots representing "Jeopardy" champions up at the top with their performance plotted on number of -- I was going to say questions answered, but answers questioned, I guess, clues responded to -- versus the accuracy of those answers. So there's a certain performance level that the computer would need to get to. And at first, it was very low. There was no software that could compete at this kind of arena. But then you see the line start to go up. And it's getting very close to what they call the winner's cloud. And I noticed in the upper right of the scatter chart some darker dots, some black dots, that were a different color. And thought, what are these? "The black dots in the upper right represent 74-time 'Jeopardy' champion Ken Jennings." And I saw this line coming for me. And I realized, this is it. This is what it looks like when the future comes for you. (Laughter) It's not the Terminator's gun sight; it's a little line coming closer and closer to the thing you can do, the only thing that makes you special, the thing you're best at.
但幾年過去了, IBM在電腦上投入了大量的金錢、人力、高速處理器, 我開始偶爾聽到他們的進展, 開始有一點擔心。 我記得一篇帶圖文章專門討論過這種答題軟體。 那是一個散點圖描述 「危險邊緣」比賽成績, 成千上萬個點在頂部代表「危險邊緣」的冠軍們 他們的成績由 我本來想說的是所回答的問題,但我想應該說是被質疑的答案,標示 相應的線索- 來對比答案的準確性。 電腦必須達到某一特定的分數水準。 剛開始,分數很低。 沒有哪個軟體可以參加這樣的比賽。 但接著你看到線條開始上走。 開始接近所謂的優勝者區域。 我注意到點圖的右上方 有一些較深色的點,和其他黑點顏色不一樣。 我想,這是什麽? “右上方的黑點代表「危險邊緣」74次冠軍肯·詹寧斯。” 我看到代表電腦的線向我逼近。 我意識到,原來是這樣。 這就是未來到來時的樣子。 (笑聲) 不是終結者的槍戰場面; 是一條線在不斷地逼近你能做的事, 唯一讓你非凡的事,你最擅長的事。
And when the game eventually happened about a year later, it was very different than the "Jeopardy" games I'd been used to. We were not playing in L.A. on the regular "Jeopardy" set. Watson does not travel. Watson's actually huge. It's thousands of processors, a terabyte of memory, trillions of bytes of memory. We got to walk through his climate-controlled server room. The only other "Jeopardy" contestant to this day I've ever been inside. And so Watson does not travel. You must come to it; you must make the pilgrimage.
一年後,比賽終於舉行了, 那和我以前玩的「危險邊緣」很不一樣。 我們沒在洛杉磯的片場比賽。 電腦沃森不能移動。 實際上,沃森體積巨大。 有數以千計的處理器,一兆兆的記憶體容量, 數萬億字節的記憶體容量。 我們要走過它恒溫的服務器室。 那是到目前為止我唯一造訪過其內部的比賽選手。 因為沃森不能移動。 所以你得去找它,去朝聖。
So me and the other human player wound up at this secret IBM research lab in the middle of these snowy woods in Westchester County to play the computer. And we realized right away that the computer had a big home court advantage. There was a big Watson logo in the middle of the stage. Like you're going to play the Chicago Bulls, and there's the thing in the middle of their court. And the crowd was full of IBM V.P.s and programmers cheering on their little darling, having poured millions of dollars into this hoping against hope that the humans screw up, and holding up "Go Watson" signs and just applauding like pageant moms every time their little darling got one right. I think guys had "W-A-T-S-O-N" written on their bellies in grease paint. If you can imagine computer programmers with the letters "W-A-T-S-O-N" written on their gut, it's an unpleasant sight.
所以我和其他選手 聚集在這個秘密的IBM實驗室裡, 在威徹斯特郡的雪域森林中, 和電腦競賽。 我們立刻意識到 電腦有巨大的主場優勢, 舞臺中央有一個巨大的沃森圖標。 就好像你要對戰芝加哥公牛隊, 球場中央有個大圖標。 觀賽人群中都是IBM的副總和程序員們 為他們的小寶貝加油, 在花費了數百萬美元後, 盼望人類會輸這一令人絕望結果, 高舉“沃森加油”的標誌 像選美比賽候選人的媽媽一樣,每次寶貝答對一個問題就鼓掌。 我印象中有人用油脂漆在肚子上寫"沃森" 你想像一下程序員們的肚子上寫字 那可不是一幅美景。
But they were right. They were exactly right. I don't want to spoil it, if you still have this sitting on your DVR, but Watson won handily. And I remember standing there behind the podium as I could hear that little insectoid thumb clicking. It had a robot thumb that was clicking on the buzzer. And you could hear that little tick, tick, tick, tick. And I remember thinking, this is it. I felt obsolete. I felt like a Detroit factory worker of the '80s seeing a robot that could now do his job on the assembly line. I felt like quiz show contestant was now the first job that had become obsolete under this new regime of thinking computers. And it hasn't been the last.
但他們是對的,完全正確。 如果你還沒看過比賽錄影,我不想透漏劇情, 但沃森輕而易舉地贏了。 我記得站在講臺後, 聽到機器人拇指敲擊聲。 它有一個機器拇指按應答鍵。 你可以聽到輕輕的咔嗒咔嗒咔嗒聲。 我記得當時想,這下完了。 我感覺被淘汰了。 像80年代底特律工廠的工人一樣 看著機器人在生產線上做著自己的工作。 我感覺智力競賽參賽者是第一個被 智能電腦所取代的崗位。 而它並不是最後一個。
If you watch the news, you'll see occasionally -- and I see this all the time -- that pharmacists now, there's a machine that can fill prescriptions automatically without actually needing a human pharmacist. And a lot of law firms are getting rid of paralegals because there's software that can sum up case laws and legal briefs and decisions. You don't need human assistants for that anymore. I read the other day about a program where you feed it a box score from a baseball or football game and it spits out a news article as if a human had watched the game and was commenting on it. And obviously these new technologies can't do as clever or creative a job as the humans they're replacing, but they're faster, and crucially, they're much, much cheaper. So it makes me wonder what the economic effects of this might be. I've read economists saying that, as a result of these new technologies, we'll enter a new golden age of leisure when we'll all have time for the things we really love because all these onerous tasks will be taken over by Watson and his digital brethren. I've heard other people say quite the opposite, that this is yet another tier of the middle class that's having the thing they can do taken away from them by a new technology and that this is actually something ominous, something that we should worry about.
如果你看新聞,就會偶爾看到 而我經常看到 比如藥劑師,現在有機器可以自動配藥 不需要任何藥劑師的指導。 許多律師事務所不需要雇傭法務助理 因為有一種軟體可以做案例法、摘要和判決的摘要。 你不需要人類助理了。 前幾天我讀到一篇文章說只要你輸入 棒球或足球比賽的成績 它就會自動導出一份報導 就好像是真人看過並做點評的一樣。 顯然這些技術與其所代替的人類相比 並不能做得一樣聰明和富有創造力, 但它們更快,關鍵是它們非常便宜。 因此我思考這其中的經濟效益。 我曾讀到有經濟學家說,這些技術產生的結果之一 是我們可以進入休閒的黃金時代 我們可以把時間花在我們喜歡的事物上 因為那些繁瑣的工作可以交給沃森和它的電子夥伴們。 我也聽過有些人持相反意見, 說這是另一層中產階級 他們所能做的事情被科技所取代 這是不幸的開始, 值得我們擔心。
I'm not an economist myself. All I know is how it felt to be the guy put out of work. And it was friggin' demoralizing. It was terrible. Here's the one thing that I was ever good at, and all it took was IBM pouring tens of millions of dollars and its smartest people and thousands of processors working in parallel and they could do the same thing. They could do it a little bit faster and a little better on national TV, and "I'm sorry, Ken. We don't need you anymore." And it made me think, what does this mean, if we're going to be able to start outsourcing, not just lower unimportant brain functions. I'm sure many of you remember a distant time when we had to know phone numbers, when we knew our friends' phone numbers. And suddenly there was a machine that did that, and now we don't need to remember that anymore. I have read that there's now actually evidence that the hippocampus, the part of our brain that handles spacial relationships, physically shrinks and atrophies in people who use tools like GPS, because we're not exercising our sense of direction anymore. We're just obeying a little talking voice on our dashboard. And as a result, a part of our brain that's supposed to do that kind of stuff gets smaller and dumber. And it made me think, what happens when computers are now better at knowing and remembering stuff than we are? Is all of our brain going to start to shrink and atrophy like that? Are we as a culture going to start to value knowledge less? As somebody who has always believed in the importance of the stuff that we know, this was a terrifying idea to me.
我不是經濟學家。 我只知道失去工作的感受, 那是沉重的打擊,非常糟糕。 「危險邊緣」是我至今為止擅長的事, 但只要IBM注以千萬美元投入人才 外加數以千計的處理器 就能將我取代。 在全國觀眾面前,他們能做的更快更好, “不好意思,肯,我們不需要你了。” 這讓我思考,這意味著什麽, 如果我們開始將工作外包, 不僅是低級的大腦功能, 我想許多人都記得很久以前 我們必須要記住朋友的電話號碼。 突然間,有一種機器可以做到, 現在用不著我們記了。 我讀到有報導說現在有證據表明 我們大腦中的海馬體(處理空間關係的組織) 在逐漸萎縮 比如使用GPS的人們, 因為我們不使用方向感了, 而是聽從儀錶盤上的語音指揮。 結果,大腦中具有該功能的那部份 變小變遲鈍了。 這也使得我思考,如果計算機 的理解和記憶功能比人類更強大會怎樣? 我們的大腦是否都會像那樣萎縮呢? 人類文明是否會開始輕視知識的價值? 作為一個堅信知識力量的人, 這對我來說太可怕了。
The more I thought about it, I realized, no, it's still important. The things we know are still important. I came to believe there were two advantages that those of us who have these things in our head have over somebody who says, "Oh, yeah. I can Google that. Hold on a second." There's an advantage of volume, and there's an advantage of time.
我越想就越發現,不,這依然重要。 我們的知識依然重要。 我相信有兩大優勢 是我們這些用腦記知識的人有 而那些只會說“哦對,我可以google,等我一下“的人沒有的。 一是資訊量的優勢,二是時間的優勢。
The advantage of volume, first, just has to do with the complexity of the world nowadays. There's so much information out there. Being a Renaissance man or woman, that's something that was only possible in the Renaissance. Now it's really not possible to be reasonably educated on every field of human endeavor. There's just too much. They say that the scope of human information is now doubling every 18 months or so, the sum total of human information. That means between now and late 2014, we will generate as much information, in terms of gigabytes, as all of humanity has in all the previous millenia put together. It's doubling every 18 months now. This is terrifying because a lot of the big decisions we make require the mastery of lots of different kinds of facts. A decision like where do I go to school? What should I major in? Who do I vote for? Do I take this job or that one? These are the decisions that require correct judgments about many different kinds of facts. If we have those facts at our mental fingertips, we're going to be able to make informed decisions. If, on the other hand, we need to look them all up, we may be in trouble. According to a National Geographic survey I just saw, somewhere along the lines of 80 percent of the people who vote in a U.S. presidential election about issues like foreign policy cannot find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map. If you can't do that first step, are you really going to look up the other thousand facts you're going to need to know to master your knowledge of U.S. foreign policy? Quite probably not. At some point you're just going to be like, "You know what? There's too much to know. Screw it." And you'll make a less informed decision.
首先,資訊量的優勢 與如今複雜的世界有關。 世界充斥著太多的資訊。 想要成為像是文藝復興時期所說的全人 那也只有那個時代才有可能做到。 現在要想掌握所有領域的基本知識 是完全不可能了。 資訊量實在太大了。 據說現在人類資訊範圍 大約每18個月 人類資訊總量就成長一倍左右。 這意味著從現在到2014年下旬, 人們所產出的資訊,以千兆來算,將等同於 人類歷史上產出的資訊的總和。 並且每18個月就會多一倍。 這很駭人因為我們許多重要的決定 都是基於多各種資訊的掌握之上。 比如我應該上哪所學校?應該選什麽專業? 我應該投票給誰? 我接受這份工作還是那份? 這些決定的做出 要基於對各種資訊的正確判斷。 如果我們的能把這些知識存在腦子裡, 我們就能做出明智的決定。 但是,如果我們需要去搜索這些資訊, 我們可能會有麻煩。 根據我剛讀到國家地理雜誌的調查顯示, 大約百分之八十左右 就外交政策選舉美國總統的選民 沒辦法在地圖上找到伊拉克和阿富汗。 如果你連第一步都做不到, 你真會去查其他幾千條你需要知道的資訊 來掌握美國外交政策嗎? 這不大可能。 某一刻,你會說 ”算了,要知道的實在太多了,管它的。“ 這樣你的決定就不那麼明智了。
The other issue is the advantage of time that you have if you have all these things at your fingertips. I always think of the story of a little girl named Tilly Smith. She was a 10-year-old girl from Surrey, England on vacation with her parents a few years ago in Phuket, Thailand. She runs up to them on the beach one morning and says, "Mom, Dad, we've got to get off the beach." And they say, "What do you mean? We just got here." And she said, "In Mr. Kearney's geography class last month, he told us that when the tide goes out abruptly out to sea and you see the waves churning way out there, that's the sign of a tsunami, and you need to clear the beach." What would you do if your 10-year-old daughter came up to you with this? Her parents thought about it, and they finally, to their credit, decided to believe her. They told the lifeguard, they went back to the hotel, and the lifeguard cleared over 100 people off the beach, luckily, because that was the day of the Boxing Day tsunami, the day after Christmas, 2004, that killed thousands of people in Southeast Asia and around the Indian Ocean. But not on that beach, not on Mai Khao Beach, because this little girl had remembered one fact from her geography teacher a month before.
另外,如果這些資訊對你而言是信手拈來 你就有一個時間優勢。 我常想到一個叫媞麗史密斯的女孩的故事。 她來自英國薩利郡 幾年前在泰國普吉島和父母度假。 一天早晨在沙灘上,她跑到父母那兒, 說,”爸爸媽媽,我們必須離開海灘。“ 他們說,”你說什麽?我們才來啊。“ 她說,”科尼先生上個月在地理課上說, 當潮汐突然退向海面 波浪在海面上翻滾, 那是海嘯的預警,就得離開海灘。“ 如果你10歲的女兒跑來說這些你會怎麼做? 她的父母想了想, 幸運的是,決定相信她。 他們告訴了救生員,回到酒店, 救生員讓100多人撤離了海灘,很幸運, 因為那就是南亞大海嘯, 2004年聖誕節後的那次, 東南亞和印度洋數以千計的人遇難。 但在那個麥考海灘上無一傷亡, 因為這個小女孩記得一個月前地理老師教的知識。
Now when facts come in handy like that -- I love that story because it shows you the power of one fact, one remembered fact in exactly the right place at the right time -- normally something that's easier to see on game shows than in real life. But in this case it happened in real life. And it happens in real life all the time. It's not always a tsunami, often it's a social situation. It's a meeting or job interview or first date or some relationship that gets lubricated because two people realize they share some common piece of knowledge. You say where you're from, and I say, "Oh, yeah." Or your alma mater or your job, and I know just a little something about it, enough to get the ball rolling. People love that shared connection that gets created when somebody knows something about you. It's like they took the time to get to know you before you even met. That's often the advantage of time. And it's not effective if you say, "Well, hold on. You're from Fargo, North Dakota. Let me see what comes up. Oh, yeah. Roger Maris was from Fargo." That doesn't work. That's just annoying. (Laughter)
當資訊發揮這樣的作用- 我喜歡這個故事因為它顯示了一個資訊的力量, 一個記住的資訊在對的時間和地點發揮了作用- 比起在現實生活裡,有時這更容易反映在遊戲節目中。 但在這個案例裡,則是實際發生在現實生活中。 這樣的事情在現實生活中常常發生。 不會總是海嘯,通常只是一個社交場合。 可能是一個會議或面試或初次約會 或者是一段關係 因為兩個人意識到他們有共同的知識而升溫。 你說你來自哪裡,我說,“哦,對。” 或者是你的母校或你的工作, 我只知道一點相關的資訊, 卻足以讓談話進行下去。 人們喜歡和其他人的共鳴 當別人知道一些關於你的資訊就會產生連結。 就好像你們還沒見過面對方就已經花時間瞭解你了。 那就是時間的優勢。 如果你這麼說就不管用了,“哦,等等。 你來自北達科塔的法戈。我查查看 哦,對。羅傑·馬裡斯也來自法戈。” 那根本沒用。反而很令人生厭。 (笑聲)
The great 18th-century British theologian and thinker, friend of Dr. Johnson, Samuel Parr once said, "It's always better to know a thing than not to know it." And if I have lived my life by any kind of creed, it's probably that. I have always believed that the things we know -- that knowledge is an absolute good, that the things we have learned and carry with us in our heads are what make us who we are, as individuals and as a species. I don't know if I want to live in a world where knowledge is obsolete. I don't want to live in a world where cultural literacy has been replaced by these little bubbles of specialty, so that none of us know about the common associations that used to bind our civilization together. I don't want to be the last trivia know-it-all sitting on a mountain somewhere, reciting to himself the state capitals and the names of "Simpsons" episodes and the lyrics of Abba songs. I feel like our civilization works when this is a vast cultural heritage that we all share and that we know without having to outsource it to our devices, to our search engines and our smartphones.
偉大的18世紀英國神學家和思想家,也是約翰遜博士的朋友, 薩繆爾帕爾曾經說道,“知道總比不知道強。” 如果我要選一個人生信條,可能就是這個。 我始終相信我們知道的事(知識絕對是好的) 我們學到的記住的東西, 造就了我們, 不論是個人還是群種。 我不知道我是否想生活在一個知識被淘汰的世界裡。 我不想生活在一個文化素養被 專業泡沫所取代的世界, 沒有人知道 把人類文明串聯起來的鏈結。 我不想成為最後一個「通天曉」 在山上的某一處, 自言自語各州首府和辛普森一家的集名 和Abba的歌詞。 我認為我們的文明必須有一個共同的文化傳承 是我們大家共曉的,無需任何儀器幫助, 不需要搜索引擎或智慧型手機。
In the movies, when computers like Watson start to think, things don't always end well. Those movies are never about beautiful utopias. It's always a terminator or a matrix or an astronaut getting sucked out an airlock in "2001." Things always go terribly wrong. And I feel like we're sort of at the point now where we need to make that choice of what kind of future we want to be living in. This is a question of leadership, because it becomes a question of who leads the future. On the one hand, we can choose between a new golden age where information is more universally available than it's ever been in human history, where we all have the answers to our questions at our fingertips. And on the other hand, we have the potential to be living in some gloomy dystopia where the machines have taken over and we've all decided it's not important what we know anymore, that knowledge isn't valuable because it's all out there in the cloud, and why would we ever bother learning anything new.
在影片裡,當和沃森一樣的電腦開始思考, 並非總是美好的結果。 那些電影沒有一部是關於美好的烏托邦的。 總是關於終結者或駭客帝國 或“2001”裡宇航員被吸出密倉外。 事情總是變得非常糟糕。 我覺得我們現在面臨著 必須選擇我們想要生活在怎樣的未來裡。 這是關於領導力的問題, 因為這是關於誰能主宰未來。 一方面,我們可以選擇是要黃金時代裡, 資訊比人類歷史的任何時候 在全球更容易取得, 我們要的答案就在指尖, 還是, 我們可能要生活在陰暗的地獄 那裡機器主宰一切 我們決定了知識已不再重要, 知識沒有價值因為一切都在雲端, 我們爲什麽還要費心去學新知識呢。
Those are the two choices we have. I know which future I would rather be living in. And we can all make that choice. We make that choice by being curious, inquisitive people who like to learn, who don't just say, "Well, as soon as the bell has rung and the class is over, I don't have to learn anymore," or "Thank goodness I have my diploma. I'm done learning for a lifetime. I don't have to learn new things anymore." No, every day we should be striving to learn something new. We should have this unquenchable curiosity for the world around us. That's where the people you see on "Jeopardy" come from. These know-it-alls, they're not Rainman-style savants sitting at home memorizing the phone book. I've met a lot of them. For the most part, they are just normal folks who are universally interested in the world around them, curious about everything, thirsty for this knowledge about whatever subject.
那是給我們的兩個選擇。我知道我想選哪個。 我們都可以做這樣的選擇。 我們選擇做有好奇心愛學習的人, 而不是會說“只要鈴一響一下課, 我就不用再學了。" 或是“感謝上天我終於拿到了學位。我這輩子不用再學習了。 不用再學新知識了。” 不,每一天我們都應該努力學新知識。 我們對周遭世界應該懷著無盡的好奇心。 「危險邊緣」上的選手就是這樣的。 那些「通天曉」們,他們不是雨人般的學者 待在家裡背電話本。 我見過很多這些通天曉。 基本上,他們就是普通人 對世界充滿了興趣,對一切都好奇, 對各種知識求知若渴。
We can live in one of these two worlds. We can live in a world where our brains, the things that we know, continue to be the thing that makes us special, or a world in which we've outsourced all of that to evil supercomputers from the future like Watson. Ladies and gentlemen, the choice is yours.
我們可以在這兩種世界中擇其一。 我們可以生活在一個我們的頭腦、知識 繼續造就與眾不同的我們的世界, 或者是把一切外包給沃森這樣的超級電腦的未來。 女士們,先生們,選擇權在你們手上。
Thank you very much.
非常感謝大家。