If you ask people about what part of psychology do they think is hard, and you say, "Well, what about thinking and emotions?" Most people will say, "Emotions are terribly hard. They're incredibly complex. They can't -- I have no idea of how they work. But thinking is really very straightforward: it's just sort of some kind of logical reasoning, or something. But that's not the hard part."
如果你問別人,關於心理學,哪一部份是他們覺得最難理解的? 如果把思想和情感相比較又怎麼樣呢? 大部份的人會說:「情感相當難以理解, 它們非常地複雜,我完全不知道它們的運作方式。 但是思考卻很簡單、明確, 它僅僅只是某種邏輯解釋或是其他形式而已, 但那不是最難理解的部份。」
So here's a list of problems that come up. One nice problem is, what do we do about health? The other day, I was reading something, and the person said probably the largest single cause of disease is handshaking in the West. And there was a little study about people who don't handshake, and comparing them with ones who do handshake. And I haven't the foggiest idea of where you find the ones that don't handshake, because they must be hiding. And the people who avoid that have 30 percent less infectious disease or something. Or maybe it was 31 and a quarter percent. So if you really want to solve the problem of epidemics and so forth, let's start with that. And since I got that idea, I've had to shake hundreds of hands. And I think the only way to avoid it is to have some horrible visible disease, and then you don't have to explain.
這些是衍生出來的一些問題, 其中一個很棒的問題是:我們為健康做了甚麼? 有一天我在讀書的時候,有人說 或許在西方引發疾病的單一最大原因是握手。 有一些研究是將不握手的人 和握手的人做比較, 我其實並不知道要如何找到不握手的人, 我猜他們一定是躲起來了。 而那些避免握手的人, 感染疾病的機率會降低百分之30, 或是百分之31.25吧。 如果你真的想解決流行傳染病之類的問題, 可以先從不握手開始。自從我知道這個觀念後, 我已經握了好幾百人的手了。 我想唯一能避免握手的方法, 就是染上一種明顯可見的嚴重疾病, 那你就用不著解釋了。
Education: how do we improve education? Well, the single best way is to get them to understand that what they're being told is a whole lot of nonsense. And then, of course, you have to do something about how to moderate that, so that anybody can -- so they'll listen to you. Pollution, energy shortage, environmental diversity, poverty. How do we make stable societies? Longevity. Okay, there're lots of problems to worry about.
教育:我們該如何讓教育變得更好? 最好的辦法是讓他們了解, 他們在學的是一堆沒用的東西。 所以,當然,你得要做些甚麼, 你得走溫和路線,讓大部份的人都聽你的。 污染、能源短缺、環境多樣性、貧窮-- 我們如何讓社會穩定?延長壽命。 好的,現在有一堆的問題值得我們憂慮。
Anyway, the question I think people should talk about -- and it's absolutely taboo -- is, how many people should there be? And I think it should be about 100 million or maybe 500 million. And then notice that a great many of these problems disappear. If you had 100 million people properly spread out, then if there's some garbage, you throw it away, preferably where you can't see it, and it will rot. Or you throw it into the ocean and some fish will benefit from it. The problem is, how many people should there be? And it's a sort of choice we have to make.
我認為人們現在應該討論的問題, 絕對是一個禁忌話題---就是,世界上能容納多少人口? 我認為世界上的人口如果只有1億或是5億的話, 這些問題大部份都會消失。 假設世界上有一億的人口, 而且適當地分布在各個地方,即使產生一些垃圾, 你也可以把它丟掉,最好是丟在看不到的地方,然後它會自行腐爛掉。 即使你把垃圾丟進海洋裡,魚也可以從中獲得一些養份。 問題是,世界上能容納多少人口? 這是我們必須做出抉擇的事。
Most people are about 60 inches high or more, and there's these cube laws. So if you make them this big, by using nanotechnology, I suppose -- (Laughter) -- then you could have a thousand times as many. That would solve the problem, but I don't see anybody doing any research on making people smaller. Now, it's nice to reduce the population, but a lot of people want to have children. And there's one solution that's probably only a few years off. You know you have 46 chromosomes. If you're lucky, you've got 23 from each parent. Sometimes you get an extra one or drop one out, but -- so you can skip the grandparent and great-grandparent stage and go right to the great-great-grandparent. And you have 46 people and you give them a scanner, or whatever you need, and they look at their chromosomes and each of them says which one he likes best, or she -- no reason to have just two sexes any more, even. So each child has 46 parents, and I suppose you could let each group of 46 parents have 15 children. Wouldn't that be enough? And then the children would get plenty of support, and nurturing, and mentoring, and the world population would decline very rapidly and everybody would be totally happy.
大部份的人的身高是60英吋,或更高, 我們佔滿了整個星球。所以如果我們能讓人變成這麼小-- 用奈米科技,我認為-- (笑聲) 這個世界就可以容納1000倍之多的人口。 這樣就可以解決問題了,但是我還沒有看過 有人從事可以讓人變小的相關研究。 減少人口是很棒的概念,但是很多人會想要生小孩, 這大概要在幾年後才會有解決的辦法。 大家都知道我們有46條染色體。如果你幸運的話,你會從父母親身上 分別得到23條染色體;有時候你會得到額外的一條,或是少了一條, 但是--你可以跳過祖父母和曾祖父母的階段, 直接跳到曾曾祖父母。現在總共有46個人, 然後給他們掃描器,或是其他你需要的東西, 讓他們看他們自己的染色體,然後要每個人決定 哪一條染色體是他或她最喜歡的--現在不能只說二種性別了吧... 所以,每個小孩有46個父母親, 你可以讓每46個父母親生15個小孩-- 這樣會覺得不夠嗎?然後小孩可以 得到大量的支持、養育及指導, 世界人口就會快速地減少, 每個人也都會很快樂。
Timesharing is a little further off in the future. And there's this great novel that Arthur Clarke wrote twice, called "Against the Fall of Night" and "The City and the Stars." They're both wonderful and largely the same, except that computers happened in between. And Arthur was looking at this old book, and he said, "Well, that was wrong. The future must have some computers." So in the second version of it, there are 100 billion or 1,000 billion people on Earth, but they're all stored on hard disks or floppies, or whatever they have in the future. And you let a few million of them out at a time. A person comes out, they live for a thousand years doing whatever they do, and then, when it's time to go back for a billion years -- or a million, I forget, the numbers don't matter -- but there really aren't very many people on Earth at a time. And you get to think about yourself and your memories, and before you go back into suspension, you edit your memories and you change your personality and so forth. The plot of the book is that there's not enough diversity, so that the people who designed the city make sure that every now and then an entirely new person is created. And in the novel, a particular one named Alvin is created. And he says, maybe this isn't the best way, and wrecks the whole system.
未來,我們或許可以更進一步用時間分享來解決人口問題。 有一本很棒的小說,作者Arthur Clarke總共寫了兩次, 叫做「對抗夜幕低垂、城市和星辰」(Against the Fall of Night and The City and the Stars), 二本都很棒,而且內容大致相同, 除了電腦在兩部小說之間發明出來。 然後Arthur看著這本他寫的書,他說,噢,這樣不對, 未來一定會有電腦啊... 所以在第二個版本裡,世界上的人口變成了一千億 或是一兆,但是他們都被存在硬碟或軟碟裡, 或是任何其他未來的儲存形式。 每次你只讓其中的幾百萬人出來, 每個人出來活個一百年, 做他們自己該做的事,等時候到了,就再回到裡面, 放個10億年--還是一百萬年,我忘記確切數字,反正那不重要-- 但是在某個時間內,地球上並沒有太多人同時存在。 然後你必須思考你本身和你的記憶, 在你回去被暫存之前,你可以編輯你的記憶, 並且可以選擇改變自己的個性之類的。 這本書的情節是描述世界上的人缺乏多樣的個性, 所以設計這個城市的人, 就得確保每隔一陣子要有一個全新的人誕生。 在這本小說裡,有一位很特別的人叫做Alvin被創造出來。 他認為這或許不是最好的方法,所以破壞了整個系統。
I don't think the solutions that I proposed are good enough or smart enough. I think the big problem is that we're not smart enough to understand which of the problems we're facing are good enough. Therefore, we have to build super intelligent machines like HAL. As you remember, at some point in the book for "2001," HAL realizes that the universe is too big, and grand, and profound for those really stupid astronauts. If you contrast HAL's behavior with the triviality of the people on the spaceship, you can see what's written between the lines. Well, what are we going to do about that? We could get smarter. I think that we're pretty smart, as compared to chimpanzees, but we're not smart enough to deal with the colossal problems that we face, either in abstract mathematics or in figuring out economies, or balancing the world around. So one thing we can do is live longer. And nobody knows how hard that is, but we'll probably find out in a few years. You see, there's two forks in the road. We know that people live twice as long as chimpanzees almost, and nobody lives more than 120 years, for reasons that aren't very well understood. But lots of people now live to 90 or 100, unless they shake hands too much or something like that. And so maybe if we lived 200 years, we could accumulate enough skills and knowledge to solve some problems. So that's one way of going about it. And as I said, we don't know how hard that is. It might be -- after all, most other mammals live half as long as the chimpanzee, so we're sort of three and a half or four times, have four times the longevity of most mammals. And in the case of the primates, we have almost the same genes. We only differ from chimpanzees, in the present state of knowledge, which is absolute hogwash, maybe by just a few hundred genes.
我不認為我舉出來的方法 有多好,多聰明。 我認為最大的問題是我們沒有足夠的聰明才智, 去了解我們現在所面對的問題,到底哪一個是比較好的。 因此,我們必須建造超級人工智慧的機器,像HAL。 還記得嗎?書上說在2001年的某個時刻, HAL發現對那些愚蠢的太空人來說, 宇宙是如此深遠且無邊無際。如果你將HAL的行為 和那些只在乎枝微末節的太空人相比, 你就可以瞭解作者想要表達的涵意。 那麼我們現在應該要怎麼做?我們應該要變得更聰明。 我認為跟黑猩猩比起來,我們的確聰明很多, 但是我們還是沒有能力去處理現在所面對的龐大問題, 不管是去解答數學問題、 或是去了解經濟的本質,又或是讓世界處於均衡狀態。 所以我們唯一能做得是活得更久一點, 但沒有人知道那有多困難, 但是過幾年後我們可能會找到解答。 有二種可能的解釋方式。我們知道大部份人類的 壽命是黑猩猩的兩倍, 而且沒有人活超過120年, 我們還不是很瞭解這其中的原因。 但是現在有很多人活到90或100歲, 除非他們握太多的手之類的。 假如我們可以活到200歲,我們就能累積足夠的技術 和知識去解決問題。 所以這是其中一種方式。 我們不知道要活得更久有多困難, 畢竟,其他哺乳類動物的壽命也只有黑猩猩的一半, 所以我們的壽命大概是其他哺乳類動物的 3.5倍或4倍。而就靈長類動物來說, 我們幾乎有著相同的基因。我們跟黑猩猩的差別, 以我們現有乏善可陳的智慧來說, 或許只是幾百個基因的差別而已。
What I think is that the gene counters don't know what they're doing yet. And whatever you do, don't read anything about genetics that's published within your lifetime, or something. (Laughter) The stuff has a very short half-life, same with brain science. And so it might be that if we just fix four or five genes, we can live 200 years. Or it might be that it's just 30 or 40, and I doubt that it's several hundred. So this is something that people will be discussing and lots of ethicists -- you know, an ethicist is somebody who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind. (Laughter) And it's very hard to find an ethicist who considers any change worth making, because he says, what about the consequences? And, of course, we're not responsible for the consequences of what we're doing now, are we? Like all this complaint about clones. And yet two random people will mate and have this child, and both of them have some pretty rotten genes, and the child is likely to come out to be average. Which, by chimpanzee standards, is very good indeed.
而我認為,基因計數器實際上不知道它自己計算到哪裡了。 不管如何,在你有生之年,千萬不要閱讀 任何有關基因學的書籍。 (笑聲) 目前人類對於基因學的研究才剛起步,就跟我們對大腦的研究一樣, 所以有可能我們只要改善其中四條、五條基因, 我們就可以活到200歲, 或是有可能變成只活30或40年, 我想也有可能人類可以活好幾百年。 所以這是人們會討論的話題, 而且會有很多道德倫理家會講話--你知道,道德倫理家就是那種 會看到你早就已經知道的錯誤的人。 (笑聲) 要找到一個認同改變的道德倫理家是很困難的, 因為他們會說,那後果由誰負責? 當然,我們並不需要對我們目前 所做的事情負責,對吧?就像大家都在抱怨複製動物一樣。 任由兩個隨機選取的人結婚、生小孩, 若這二人都有相當差的基因, 他們生出來的小孩可能會很普通。 如果是根據黑猩猩的標準,那個小孩已經算是很好了。
If we do have longevity, then we'll have to face the population growth problem anyway. Because if people live 200 or 1,000 years, then we can't let them have a child more than about once every 200 or 1,000 years. And so there won't be any workforce. And one of the things Laurie Garrett pointed out, and others have, is that a society that doesn't have people of working age is in real trouble. And things are going to get worse, because there's nobody to educate the children or to feed the old. And when I'm talking about a long lifetime, of course, I don't want somebody who's 200 years old to be like our image of what a 200-year-old is -- which is dead, actually.
如果人人都很長壽,我們就必須要面對人口 增加的問題。因為如果我們活個200年或1000年, 每一代小孩出生的間隔就不能短於200年或是1000年。 在那種情況下,也不會有勞動人口。 Laurie Garrett點名的其中一件事,其他人也曾指出相同問題, 那就是如果一個社會沒有人 屬於勞動人口的話,那就麻煩大了。而且事情還會變得更糟, 因為沒有人會去教育小孩或是撫養老人。 所以當我談論到延長壽命時, 我當然不希望一個活到200歲的人, 會像我們現在所想的200歲一樣---那其實已經算是死掉了。
You know, there's about 400 different parts of the brain which seem to have different functions. Nobody knows how most of them work in detail, but we do know that there're lots of different things in there. And they don't always work together. I like Freud's theory that most of them are cancelling each other out. And so if you think of yourself as a sort of city with a hundred resources, then, when you're afraid, for example, you may discard your long-range goals, but you may think deeply and focus on exactly how to achieve that particular goal. You throw everything else away. You become a monomaniac -- all you care about is not stepping out on that platform. And when you're hungry, food becomes more attractive, and so forth. So I see emotions as highly evolved subsets of your capability. Emotion is not something added to thought. An emotional state is what you get when you remove 100 or 200 of your normally available resources.
你知道,人腦大概有400個不同的部位, 它們彼此有不同的功能。 沒有人確切知道他們實際上的運作方式, 我們只知道大腦裡面有很多的東西, 而他們不會同時一起運作。我喜歡Freud的理論, 他認為大腦裡大部分的工作是去抵消彼此的作用。 如果你把自己想像成是一座城市, 你很多的資源。比如說,當你害怕的時候, 你就會拋棄你的大範圍目標,專注深入地 思考如何達到某個特定的目標。 你把所有的東西都丟掉,變成了一個偏執狂-- 你在乎的只是不要離開這個平台。 當你很餓的時候,食物變得更加迷人之類的。 我認為情感是高度演化下的附屬功能, 情感不是思想的附屬品。 情感是當你移除100個或200個正常有用的資源後, 你所會得到的東西。
So thinking of emotions as the opposite of -- as something less than thinking is immensely productive. And I hope, in the next few years, to show that this will lead to smart machines. And I guess I better skip all the rest of this, which are some details on how we might make those smart machines and -- (Laughter) -- and the main idea is in fact that the core of a really smart machine is one that recognizes that a certain kind of problem is facing you. This is a problem of such and such a type, and therefore there's a certain way or ways of thinking that are good for that problem. So I think the future, main problem of psychology is to classify types of predicaments, types of situations, types of obstacles and also to classify available and possible ways to think and pair them up. So you see, it's almost like a Pavlovian -- we lost the first hundred years of psychology by really trivial theories, where you say, how do people learn how to react to a situation? What I'm saying is, after we go through a lot of levels, including designing a huge, messy system with thousands of ports, we'll end up again with the central problem of psychology. Saying, not what are the situations, but what are the kinds of problems and what are the kinds of strategies, how do you learn them, how do you connect them up, how does a really creative person invent a new way of thinking out of the available resources and so forth.
所以,情感並不亞於思想, 同時我希望, 在接下來的幾年內,這些東西能引導智慧機器的誕生。 我想我最好跳過這些關於如何 建造這些智慧機器的細節-- (笑聲) 超級智慧機器最重要的核心, 是去清楚定義自己所面對的是哪種問題。 這些是這一類的問題, 這些是解決這些問題 可能的思考方向。 所以我認為未來心理學的主要問題, 是去區分出各種困境型態、各種情境及各種障礙, 同時也要去區分出與之相對應的可能思考方向。 所以你看,這幾乎就像是巴夫洛夫的古典制約學習-- 我們因為一些無用的理論, 而捨棄了心理學最初一百年的研究,你會問: 人們如何學習對某種情境做出適當回應?我要說的是, 在我們經歷過各種階段, 包括用數千個零組件設計出一個的龐大的系統之後, 我們還是得面對心理學最核心的問題, 那就是情境不重要, 問題才是最重要的、 策略及學習的方法才是重要的、 怎麼把各種事情聯結在一起才是重要的、如何讓一個真正有創意的人 從有限的資源裡,發展出新的思考模式才是重要的。
So, I think in the next 20 years, if we can get rid of all of the traditional approaches to artificial intelligence, like neural nets and genetic algorithms and rule-based systems, and just turn our sights a little bit higher to say, can we make a system that can use all those things for the right kind of problem? Some problems are good for neural nets; we know that others, neural nets are hopeless on them. Genetic algorithms are great for certain things; I suspect I know what they're bad at, and I won't tell you. (Laughter)
所以我想在接下來的20年中, 如果我們能擺脫傳統發展人工智慧的方法, 像是神經網路、遺傳基因演算法 和規則式系統等,然後把我們的視野提高一點點說: 我們能否用以上所有的方法,創造出一個 可以解決某種問題的系統?有些問題可以用神經網路去解決; 但我知道,在某些方面神經網路是沒有用處的。 遺傳基因演算法,對某些事情來說是很有用的; 我猜我知道它們有一些不好的地方,但我不會告訴你。 (笑聲)
Thank you. (Applause)
謝謝 (掌聲)