传统媒体已认定我们正面临人类的毁灭。“AI末日”这一说法出现在从路透社到《经济学人》等众多新闻网站上。其他媒体则采用了“AI审判日”或其他听起来像出自《启示录》的表述。
The legacy media have decided we are facing mankind’s doom. The phrase "AI apocalypse" crops up on numerous news sites, from Reuters to The Economist. Other outlets have gone with "AI doomsday" or other formulations that look like they come from Revelation.
记者们也不必完全背锅。问题在于，一种由人工智能（AI）行业专家、阴谋论者和中国赞助的社交媒体共同推波助澜的文化垃圾信息正轰炸着我们。打开CNN，它在问：“AI真的会杀光所有人吗？具体怎么杀？”与此同时，Axios写道：“AI如何可能杀光我们所有人（如果最坏的担忧成真）。”害怕了吗？这就是目的。
Journalists aren’t entirely to blame, either. The problem is being spammed into our culture by a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) industry experts, conspiracy theorists, and Chinese-sponsored social media. Turn to CNN, and it asks, "Will AI really kill everyone? How, exactly?" Meanwhile, Axios writes, "Here's how AI could kill us all (if the worst fears come true)."
CNN的一句话几乎概括了你在任何地方能读到的所有警告：“‘这真的是关乎地球上每一个人字面意义上的死亡，就像最后一个人类吸着最后一口气，’机器智能研究所（MIRI）所长、《如果有人构建它，所有人都会死：为什么超人类AI会杀光我们》合著者内特·索亚雷斯说道。” AI灭绝警告主导头条，源于前Anthropic员工的病毒式帖子 真含蓄。
Scared? That’s the goal.
但这也非常耳熟。它读起来像过去50年来我们经历的每一个末日警告。让我们回顾一下：杀人蜂（至少那给我们带来了《周六夜现场》约翰·贝鲁西的经典幽默），然后是杀人大黄蜂，这是更新版。超级火山或将加利福尼亚沉入大海的地震。水力压裂、陨石、大流行病（咳咳！）、经济崩溃、太空外星人，还有更多。
Here’s a sentence from CNN that sums up pretty much every warning you can read anywhere: "‘It really is about literally everyone on the planet dying, like the last human drawing the last breath,’ said Nate Soares, the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and the coauthor of ‘If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.’" AI EXTINCTION WARNINGS DOMINATE HEADLINES AFTER EX-ANTHROPIC EMPLOYEE'S VIRAL POST Subtle. But it’s also very familiar. It reads like every apocalyptic warning we’ve had in the past 50 years. Let’s recap: Killer bees (at least that got us some classic "Saturday Night Live" John Belushi humor), then murder hornets, the more recent version. Supervolcanoes or the earthquake that will sink California into the sea.
人工智能恐慌存在一个“千年虫”式的问题——而这一次的利害关系可能要大得多。媒体尤其喜欢与天气相关的报道，因为这类话题全年都能用。我们经历过全球变冷（20世纪70年代）、全球变暖，或者阿尔·戈尔启发下所谓的“气候变化”。无论发生什么，这套说法都管用。回溯到19世纪末，媒体曾警告全球变冷。然后在20世纪30年代的沙尘暴时期，又警告变暖。
Fracking, meteors, pandemics (ahem!), economic collapse, space aliens, and lots more. AI HYSTERIA HAS A Y2K PROBLEM — AND THE STAKES THIS TIME COULD BE FAR HIGHER The media especially love stories tied to weather because those are good year-round. We’ve had global cooling (1970s), global warming, or the Al Gore-inspired version called "climate change." That’s good no matter what happens. Go back to the late 1800s, and the press warned about global cooling. Then it warned about warming in the 1930s during the Dust Bowl.
接着冷战又带来了变冷，如此循环往复。1975年《纽约时报》的一篇文章警告说：“科学家思考世界气候为何变化：大范围变冷被普遍认为不可避免。”我猜它其实挺可避免的——没错，“可避免的”是个词。（谢谢你，苏西·登特。）我们甚至还经历过污染、滴滴涕和臭氧层空洞。如今这些都不怎么上新闻了，因为我们已经转向了其他应时的危机。
Then the Cold War brought us cooling, and so on. A 1975 New York Times piece cautioned, "Scientists Ponder Why World's Climate Is Changing: A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable." I guess it was pretty evitable, and, yes, that’s a word. (Thank you, Susie Dent.) We even had pollution, DDT, and the hole in the ozone layer, as well. None of those make the news much now because we have moved on to other timely crises. BROADCAST BIAS: NETWORKS EMBRACE THEIR LATEST FORM OF PANIC – THE AI APOCALYPSE Those of us who follow the media are used to all this.
广播偏见：电视网拥抱他们最新形式的恐慌——人工智能末日。我们这些关注媒体的人对这一切早已习以为常。这一切都来自“恐惧产业复合体”。那是政府、非政府组织、政客、活动人士、记者和商人的混合体，他们想让我们所有人都害怕。因为害怕的人不会做我们想做的事。他们会做他们想做的事。而且他们不想让我们在做这些事的时候提问。
It all comes from the Fear Industrial Complex. That’s a mixture of governments, NGOs, politicians, activists, journalists, and business people who want us all scared. Because scared people don’t do what we want. We do what they want. And they don’t want us to ask questions while we do it. Fund the cause! Support the issue!
为事业捐款！支持这个议题！你难道不关心______吗？你怎么敢？哦，等等，我知道我上次听到最后那句话是在哪里了。
Don’t you care about ______? How dare you? Oh, wait, I know where I heard that last line before. "Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg," as she is sometimes described, popularized it. No one embodies the flexible nature of the fear freakout better than she does.
有时被称为“瑞典青少年活动家格蕾塔·通贝里”的人将其推向了大众视野。没有人比她更能体现这种恐惧狂热的灵活性。她在家乡因抗议气候变化而崭露头角。她曾以那句著名的斥责“你们怎么敢？”（How dare you?）在联合国气候峰会上引发轰动。随后，当这一话题淡出新闻焦点时，她又转而投身“解放巴勒斯坦”运动，甚至出现在前往加沙的虚假船队中，抨击以色列以及任何不同意她观点的人。
She broke onto the scene in her native land protesting climate change. She famously rebuked the UN Climate Summit with the scolding quote, "How dare you?" Then, when that drifted from the news, she took up "Free Palestine," even appearing on one of the phony boat flotillas to Gaza and bashing Israel and anyone who doesn’t agree with her. Mark my words, she’ll be whining about AI soon enough. If you are a leftist activist, you need to keep your name in the news on whatever the protest du jour is. DAVID MARCUS: BIG TECH INVENTED AI DOOMSDAY TO DUCK REAL LIFE PROBLEMS It doesn’t even matter whether the cause of the day is real or not.
记住我的话，她很快就会开始抱怨人工智能了。如果你是一名左翼活动家，你就必须通过各种当下的抗议活动来保持自己的新闻热度。
Look at our ever-changing climate. The press is so convinced it is right about global warming that it doesn’t report when it is wrong.
大卫·马库斯：大型科技公司编造人工智能末日论以逃避现实问题。当下的议题是否真实甚至并不重要。看看我们不断变化的气候吧。媒体如此确信自己在全球变暖问题上是正确的，以至于当他们出错时也从不报道。前哥伦比亚广播公司新闻主播斯科特·佩利曾负责环境报道，他竟然将气候变化怀疑论者比作大屠杀否认者，并声称：“在新闻业中，追求平衡有时会变得不负责任。”
Former CBS News anchor Scott Pelley, who used to cover the environment, actually compared climate change skeptics to Holocaust deniers and claimed, "There comes a point in journalism where striving for balance becomes irresponsible." That’s from 2006, around the time of former Vice President Gore’s "An Inconvenient Truth." Twenty years later, we are still alive … inconveniently. For those in the Fear Industrial Complex, that lack of balance is an everyday occurrence, moving from one fear-inducing cataclysm to another. And if you don’t go along, you are, as Pelley put it, a "denier."
那是2006年的言论，大约是在前副总统戈尔的《难以忽视的真相》发布时期。二十年过去了，我们依然活着……这真是“难以忽视”。
Yet, back in May, even the New York Times ended up reporting, "Why Scientists Retired the Dire Climate Scenario Used for Over a Decade." Turns out, the claims were overblown.
对于那些身处“恐惧工业复合体”的人来说，这种缺乏平衡的情况每天都在发生，他们从一个引发恐惧的灾难转向下一个。如果你不随波逐流，正如佩利所言，你就是一名“否认者”。然而，早在今年五月，《纽约时报》最终也不得不报道称：“为什么科学家们放弃了使用了十多年的严峻气候情景？”事实证明，那些说法被夸大了。我对此并不感到惊讶。
I’m not surprised. All of this is reminiscent of the Michael Crichton book "State of Fear." I say "book" because it was politically incorrect, so it never got a movie treatment, even though adaptations of his works have brought in billions of dollars, including "Jurassic Park," "Westworld," and "The Andromeda Strain." In "State of Fear," environmental extremists cause disasters and blame them on climate change. CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINION One character in the book made a point I will never forget: "Industrialized nations provide their citizens with unprecedented safety, health, and comfort.
这一切让人联想到迈克尔·克莱顿的小说《恐惧状态》。我之所以说是“书”，是因为它在政治上不正确，所以从未被改编成电影，尽管他的其他作品改编后带来了数十亿美元的收入，包括《侏罗纪公园》、《西部世界》和《人间大浩劫》。在《恐惧状态》中，环境极端分子制造灾难，并将责任归咎于气候变化。
Average life spans increased fifty percent in the last century. Yet modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment.
书中的一个角色提出了一个我永远不会忘记的观点：“工业化国家为公民提供了前所未有的安全、健康和舒适。上个世纪，平均寿命延长了百分之五十。然而，现代人却生活在极度的恐惧中。他们害怕陌生人、疾病、犯罪和环境。他们害怕自己居住的房屋、食用的食物以及周围的科技。”当然，这部分可以归咎于媒体“如果流血，就是头条”的倾向。
They are afraid of the homes they live in, the food they eat, the technology that surrounds them." Sure, some of this can be blamed on a media tendency to go with, "If it bleeds, it leads."
但当我们的科学——关于人工智能、气候、机器人等等——被科幻小说所左右时，这绝非好事。作为一名科幻作家，我想说，把那个领域留给我们吧。你们购买我们的书，这样我们才能让你们感到兴奋、娱乐，甚至，是的，感到恐惧。那不是新闻业的工作。下次当你读到关于世界末日的报道时，请记住这一点。
But it’s a bad day when our science—on AI, climate, robots, and more—is being decided by science fiction. Speaking as a sci-fi author, leave that territory to us. You buy our books, so we can thrill, entertain, and, yes, even scare you. That’s not the job of journalism. Remember that the next time you read about the end of the world.