去年夏天，也就是70年前，一群科学家在达特茅斯学院开会，讨论了一个看似异想天开的设想——机器或许有朝一日能够形成类人的思维过程。其中一位科学家约翰·麦卡锡为这个新领域提出了一个名称：人工智能。这个名字沿用至今。在谷歌学术搜索中搜索“人工智能”，大约会出现742万条结果。这个术语几乎无处不在，人人都能理解。即便是那些鄙视人工智能的人，也最不担心的就是我们如何称呼它。
Seventy years ago last summer, a group of scientists met at Dartmouth College to discuss a wild idea—that machines might one day be capable of human-like thought processes. One of those scientists, John McCarthy, had suggested a name for the new field: artificial intelligence. It stuck. When you search Google Scholar for “artificial intelligence,” approximately 7,420,000 results appear. The term is utterly ubiquitous. Everyone understands it. Even for people who despise AI, the least of their worries is what we call it.
但并非所有人都如此。不知为何，唐纳德·J·特朗普总统对这个术语产生了反感，而每当他不喜欢某样东西时，他都会随心所欲地对其颁布禁令。在联合国9月23日的一次演讲中，他暗示自己可能想废除“人工智能”这一说法。他这番抨击听上去不过是在虚张声势，哪怕对于一个热衷于给海湾、湖泊和艺术中心改名的人来说也是如此。
Well, not everyone. Somehow, President Donald J. Trump developed a distaste for the term, and when he doesn’t like something, he feels free to issue an edict against it. In a September 23 speech at the United Nations, he hinted that he might want to do away with the term “artificial intelligence.”His rant seemed like bluster, even for someone with a penchant for renaming gulfs, lakes, and centers for the arts.
给整个学科以及美国最关键的产业改名？本周，在白宫与人工智能领域高层人士共进午餐时，他真的动手了，签署行政命令，宣布“人工智能”从此成为禁用词。取而代之的是，政府将使用“超级智能”一词。显然，总统expected私营部门跟进行动。
Renaming an entire field of study and America’s most pivotal industry? This week, at a White House lunch with top AI leaders, he actually pulled the trigger with an executive order declaring that “artificial intelligence” was now a verboten coinage. Instead, the government will call it “Super Intelligence.”Clearly the president expects the private sector to follow suit.
令人羞愧的是，人工智能界的大佬们温顺地接受了这一安排。从今以后，他们大概将被称为“超级智能”界的大佬。
To their shame, the lords of AI meekly acquiesced. From this point on, they will presumably be known as the lords of SI.
人们不禁会将这视为总统的终极弹性--对于所有高管的数万亿美元和他们所有的实际智力来说，房间里的阿尔法人物是那个橙色皮肤的家伙。与限制潜在灾难性技术的艰巨性相比，更改名称似乎是一件小事。但对于这群人来说，人工智能不仅仅是一堆串串在一起的字母。这是他们的基础。他们的身份。当他们还是孩子时，在 下阅读科幻小说书籍，这个词激发了他们的想象力。他们建立或改造了自己的公司以服务于人工智能，这几乎是他们过去四年谈论的全部内容。
One can’t help but see this as the ultimate presidential flex—for all the executives’ trillions of dollars and all their actual intelligence, the alpha in the room was the guy with the orange skin. Changing a name might seem like a minor matter compared to the enormity of constraining a potentially catastrophic technology. But to this crowd, artificial intelligence is much more than a bunch of letters strung together. It’s their foundation. Their identity. When they were kids reading science fiction books under the covers, the term ignited their imaginations. They built or transformed their companies in service of AI, and it's just about all they’ve talked about for the past four years.
然而，当总统利用午餐晚会赢得他们对他推翻70年历史的古怪想法的认可时，房间里显然没有一个人表示反对。不是杰夫·贝佐斯、黄詹森、达里奥·阿蒙蒂、马克·扎克伯格、桑达尔·皮查伊、格雷格·布罗克曼、亚历克斯·卡普或埃隆·马斯克。
Yet when the president used his lunch soiree to win their approval for his wacky idea to undo 70 years of history, apparently not a single person in the room expressed an objection. Not Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Greg Brockman, Alex Karp, or Elon Musk.
雅各布·韦斯伯格（Jacob Weisberg）是新书《懦弱的概况：特朗普时代合作的研究》的作者，他认为这一事件是典型的特朗普忠诚度测试，旨在评估否则有权势的人是否会贬低自己来讨好总统并避免他的愤怒。如果您通过了忠诚度测试，那么您就无法通过骨干测试。“抵制这种事情的唯一方法是集体行动，”韦斯伯格说。
Jacob Weisberg, author of the recent book Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era, views the episode as a classic Trump loyalty test, meant to assess if otherwise powerful people will demean themselves to curry the president’s favor and avoid his wrath. If you pass the loyalty test, you fail the backbone test. “The only way to resist this kind of thing is by acting collectively,” says Weisberg.
“如果所有这些人都说，‘我们会同意自我监管的条款，但我们不接受[更名]，他会怎么做？’”相反，由于亿万富翁们的沉默，特朗普可以声称这些领导人积极支持他的想法。当午餐后媒体闲聊中的一名记者提到人工智能代理时，他纠正了她，说：“这个名字已经被世界上最大、最聪明、最伟大的人改变了。”真的吗？
“If all of those guys had just said, ‘We'll agree to the terms of the self-regulation, but we don't accept [the name change], what would he have done?”Instead, because of the lamb-like silence of the billionaires, Trump could claim that those leaders actively blessed his idea. When a reporter in the post-lunch press gaggle mentioned AI agents, he corrected her, saying, “The name has been changed by the biggest, the, smartest, the greatest people anywhere in the world.”Really?
即使使用ChatGPT或Gemini等超级智能系统的魔力，我也找不到任何一位以前在政治上主张“人工智能”一词应该被搁置的伟人的例子。萨蒂亚·纳德拉（Satya Nadella）确实曾经说过，他更希望人工智能被称为“不同的智能”，但这并没有阻止他反复使用这个词。虽然马克·扎克伯格最近确实建立了超级智能实验室，但他的公司坚持不懈地向数十亿用户推广一款名为Meta AI的产品，并销售所谓的AI眼镜。
Even using the magic of, uh, superintelligent systems like ChatGPT or Gemini, I could not find a single instance of any one of those great people previously politicking that the term artificial intelligence should be put to rest. Satya Nadella did once say that he would have preferred that AI had been called “different intelligence,” but that hasn’t dissuaded him from repeatedly using the term. And while it’s true that Mark Zuckerberg recently established a Superintelligence Lab, his company persistently pushes a product called Meta AI to its billions of users and sells what it calls AI glasses.
我询问谷歌、微软、Anthropic、Meta、亚马逊、OpenAI和xAI是否会更改产品名称、研究论文和通信中的人工智能实例。我对后两者的询问是，他们是否会更改公司名称以与总统命令同步。当我写这篇文章时，他们都没有回复我。
I asked Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, and xAI whether they were going to change instances of AI in their product names, research papers, and communications. My query to the latter two was whether they were going to change their company names to get in sync with the presidential order. As I write this, none of them have gotten back to me.
我敢打赌，他们会尽最低限度地避免总统的愤怒，同时努力耗尽时间，直到下一届政府解决这个奇怪的想法。有人认为，高管们实际上欢迎对这个已经成为有毒术语的品牌进行重塑。我对此持怀疑态度，特别是因为总统指定的替代者“超级情报”比最初的术语可怕得多。
My bet is that they will do the minimum to avoid presidential ire, while trying to run out the clock until the next administration puts this bizarre idea out of its misery. It’s been suggested that the executives actually welcome a rebranding of what has become a toxic term. I’m skeptical of that, especially since the president’s mandated replacement, “super intelligence,” is a hell of a lot scarier than the original term.
从科学的角度来看，这种变化也没有意义。尼克·博斯特罗姆（Nick Bostrom）是一位专家，他是在一本同名书中普及了超级智能一词的哲学家，他似乎对这个想法感到困惑。他在一封电子邮件中向我解释说，超级智能“专门指的是大大超越所有最好人类大脑的系统。“人工智能”指的是更广泛的系统类别，其中包括例如电子邮件垃圾过滤器、拼写检查器、简单的导航系统、早期的LLM以及尚未与最好的人类国际象棋玩家相匹配的70年代国际象棋引擎。将这些称为‘超级智能’似乎很尴尬。”
From a scientific perspective the change also makes no sense. No less an expert than Nick Bostrom, the philosopher who popularized the term superintelligence in an eponymous book, seems baffled by the idea. Superintelligence, he explained to me in an email, “refers specifically to systems that greatly surpass all the best human brains. ‘AI’ has referred to a much broader category of systems, which includes, for example, email spam filters, spell checkers, simple navigation systems, early LLMs, and the chess engines of the ’70s that didn’t yet match the best human chess players. It seems awkward to refer to these as ‘superintelligent.’”
那么除了因为他可以之外，总统要求改变的原因还有什么呢？他在联合国演讲中表示，他不喜欢这个词，因为“‘人工’这个词让情报变得虚假。而且它不是假的。”他在白宫午餐后表示，假的是“人工智能”一词。“这是一个假词，不好，一个不恰当的术语。”你不需要成为心理学家就能看出这种冲动与他将CNN、Politico和MSNow赶出白宫的决定有何联系，因为他认为他们的新闻是“假的”。
So what is the president’s reason for demanding the change, besides because he can? In his UN speech, he said he didn’t like the term because “the word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence fake. And it is not fake.”What is fake, he said after the White House lunch, is the term “artificial intelligence.”“It’s a fake word, it’s not good, an inappropriate term.”You don’t need to be a psychologist to see how this impulse might be associated with his decision to bounce CNN, Politico, and MSNow from the White House, because he perceives their news as “fake.”
尽管如此，将人造与假等同起来的飞跃并没有跟上。1956年，麦卡锡用它来区分人类智能和机器版本的智能。问题不在于这个术语导致人们将人工智能的输出视为假的--事实上，它是如此真实，以至于我们人类常常无法分辨我们面对的是人工智能模型还是人类。强制明确区分，并带有水印和标签，应该是白宫似乎过敏的人工智能监管要素之一。
Still, the leap that equates artificial with fake doesn’t track. In 1956, McCarthy used it to distinguish between human intelligence and the machine version of intelligence. The problem isn’t that the term leads people to regard AI’s output as fake—in fact, it’s so real that we human beings often can’t tell whether we’re dealing with an AI model or a human. Mandating that the distinction be explicit, with watermarks and labels, should be one element of the AI regulation that the White House seems allergic to.
正如韦斯伯格指出的那样，制定这样的疯狂法令是特朗普的性格。令人不安的是，那些没有反击的高管明显缺乏品格。他们离开时带着自我监管而不是严格监督，但没有带着尊严。
As Weisberg notes, it’s very much in character for Trump to make a crazy edict like this one. What’s disturbing is the glaring lack of character from the executives who didn’t push back. They left with the prize of self-regulation instead of strict oversight, but not with their dignity.
但未能捍卫将人工智能称为人工智能的自由（正如加州州长加文·纽瑟姆在他自己的恶搞特朗普的行政命令中所颁布的那样）甚至让人对这项协议产生了怀疑。使自愿标准有效需要相当大的毅力，因为优先考虑安全可能与财务和竞争因素不一致。然而，我们被要求信任这些所谓的独立企业巨头，他们像摇头娃娃一样点头，而一个没有受过技术教育的偏执狂却要求他们放弃生活和生计中心的术语。不合适，而且是假的。
But failure to defend the freedom to refer to artificial intelligence as artificial intelligence (as California governor Gavin Newsom decreed in his own Trump-trolling executive order) casts doubt on even that agreement. Making voluntary standards effective requires considerable fortitude, as prioritizing safety can be at odds with financial and competitive factors. Yet we are being asked to trust these supposedly independent corporate giants who nodded like bobbleheads while a technologically unschooled crank-in-chief demanded they abandon the term at the center of their lives and livelihoods. Inappropriate, and fake.
这是史蒂文·利维和劳伦·古德的《反向渠道》时事通讯的一个版本。
This is an edition of Steven Levy’s and Lauren Goode's Backchannel newsletter.