第124章 ChatGPT的虚假承诺

Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT

语言学家诺姆·乔姆斯基：ChatGPT的虚假承诺

By Noam Chomsky， Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull

Today our supposedly revolutionary advancements in artificial intelligence are indeed cause for both concern and optimism. Optimism because intelligence is the means by which we solve problems. Concern because we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I.— machine learning— will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.

如今，我们在人工智能领域取得了所谓的革命性进展，着实让人喜忧参半。喜是因为，我们解决问题就要用到“智能”；忧是因为，作为当下最流行、最受欢迎的AI研究分支，“机器学习”会在我们的现行科技中融入一套对语言和知识有着根本缺陷的观念，从而降低我们的科学和道德标准。

The human mind is not， like ChatGPT and its ilk， a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching， gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary， the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.

人类大脑与ChatGPT一类的AI不同，后者是只能用于模式匹配的笨拙统计引擎，通过输入海量数据，来推断出对一场对话最合理的回应或对于一个科学问题最可能的答案。与之相反，人类大脑是一个具有惊人的效率、甚至可以说是精妙的系统，只需少量信息来保持运转；它所寻求的不是强行推断出数据点之间的联系，而是去做出解释。

Indeed， such programs are stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution. Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case， what was the case and what will be the case— that’s description and prediction— but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation， the mark of true intelligence.

其实，这类程序还停留在前人类或非人类的认知进化阶段。他们最大的缺陷是缺乏任何智能最关键的一种能力：不仅要能说明现状、过去和未来的情况，也就是具有描述和预测的能力，还要能说明现状不是什么以及本可能或本不会出现的情况。这些都是“解释”的重要组成部分，而“解释”才是形成真正智能的标志。