身穿棕褐色Polo衫，系着棕色皮带和圆形波洛领带的麻省理工学院（MIT）博士生威尔·诺顿（Wil Norton）看起来有点像一名公园管理员，正带领我们参观团穿过一片热带丛林。然而，我们并非真的在进行野生动物探险，而是在麻省理工学院的计算机科学与人工智能实验室（CSAIL）。但我们即将看到的东西比猎豹或美洲豹还要罕见：一对人形宇树（Unitree）机器人，每台造价约5万美元。
In a tan polo shirt, brown leather belt, and round bolo tie, MIT PhD student Wil Norton kind of looks like a park ranger, leading our tour group through a tropical jungle. We’re not actually on safari, though — we’re at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). But what we’re about to see is even more exotic than a cheetah or a jaguar: a pair of humanoid Unitree robots, which each cost about $50,000.
我们通常只在YouTube上看到这些机器人表演同步武术或在《美国达人秀》上跳舞。在这里，它们显得平易近人。尽管我知道它没有感知能力，但我还是想和它交朋友。
We usually only see these robots on YouTube when they’re performing a synchronized martial arts routine, or dancing on “America’s Got Talent.”Here, they’re approachable. Even though I know it isn’t sentient, I want to be its friend.
在诺顿的允许下，我走近了这个绰号叫“盖博”（Gabe）的机器人。有一瞬间，我不知道该如何与一个本该是大脑的地方却装有激光雷达传感器的东西互动，但我还是下意识地把它当作人来对待。
With Norton’s permission, I approach the robot, whose nickname is Gabe. For a moment, I’m not sure how to interact with something that has a LiDAR sensor where its brain should be, but I default to treating it like a person.
“你好，先生，很高兴见到你。”我一边说着，一边握住它戴着手套、灵活的手并摇了摇。
“Hello, sir, it’s nice to meet you,” I say, grabbing its gloved, dextrous hand and shaking it.
后来，当我参加雪莉·特克尔（Sherry Turkle）博士在麻省理工学院未来节（MIT Future Fest）举办的新书《人工亲密关系》（Artificial Intimacy）发布会时，我回想起了这次互动——我那种对机器人表现友好的本能冲动。
I think about this interaction later — my instinctive impulse to be friendly to a robot — when I attend Dr. Sherry Turkle‘s “Artificial Intimacy” book launch at MIT Future Fest.
特克尔于1976年加入麻省理工学院任教，她研究人类与计算机之间关系的时间或许比任何人都长，记录了从第一台家用电脑到ChatGPT等技术对我们产生的心理影响。
Turkle, who joined the faculty at MIT in 1976, has been researching the relationship between humans and computers perhaps longer than anyone, charting technology’s psychological impact on us from the first home computers to ChatGPT.
“当我们被卷入与关系型人工制品哪怕是最原始的交流中时，我们也会相信它在关心我们，”特克尔在书中写道，“而我们天生也会反过来关心它。”我并不是唯一一个倾向于将机器人和大语言模型（LLM）拟人化的人——正如特克尔所指出的，这似乎是我们的天性。一项研究发现，约70%的人在与人工智能互动时会表现得很有礼貌，而另一项研究显示，一旦对话进行到第一轮提示与回复之后，用户更有可能对聊天机器人说“请”或“谢谢”。
“When we are drawn into even the most primitive exchanges with a relational artifact, we believe it cares for us,” Turkle writes in the book. “And we are wired to care for it in return.”I’m not alone in my tendency to anthropomorphize robots and large language models (LLMs) — as Turkle notes, it seems to be in our nature. One study found that about 70% of people are polite when interacting with AI, while another showed that users are more likely to say “please” or “thank you” to chatbots once a conversation has progressed past a first prompt-and-response.
“人们倾向于将这种行为归类为正确或错误的使用，但我认为这并非一条清晰的界限，”图克尔的同事、麻省理工学院媒体实验室“赛博格心理学”研究小组创始人帕特·帕塔拉努塔蓬博士在接受《科技创投》采访时说。“问题在于，当我们与[人工智能]对话时，我们自身正在变成什么样的人？”我对机器人加布保持礼貌并不会带来任何实质性的后果，但随着大语言模型渗透到从谷歌搜索到客户服务的方方面面，人们与这些看似拥有意识的聊天机器人互动已变得习以为常。
“People tend to categorize whether this is the right use or wrong use, but I don’t think that is a clear boundary,” Dr. Pat Pataranutaporn, a colleague of Turkle who founded the Cyborg Psychology research group at the MIT Media Lab, told TechCrunch. “The question is, who are we becoming when we talk to [AI]?”There’s no material consequence of my politeness toward Gabe the robot, but as LLMs infiltrate everything from Google searches to customer service interactions, it has become routine for people to interact with these seemingly sentient chatbots.
我们比以往任何时候都更容易陷入这种倾向的另一面：有些人可能会赋予聊天机器人的情感以过度的合法性——而这些机器人被编程为绝不会引发冲突——最终甚至让它们凌驾于其他人类之上。
We’re more vulnerable than ever to the flip side of this impulse, which is that some people can ascribe so much legitimacy to the feelings of chatbots — which are programmed to never spark conflict — that they end up favoring them over other humans.
“你可以将其类比为幻想和虚构作品。尽管我们知道电影中的故事完全是虚构的，但我们仍然愿意走进影院，去体验人类经验中某些现实可能无法给予我们的维度，”帕塔拉努塔蓬说。“我们如何既能从体验人类经验其他维度的能力中获益，又不会沉溺于幻想之中，以至于再也无法回归现实？”帕塔拉努塔蓬自称为一名“批判性乐观主义者”，他研究人工智能促进人类繁荣的潜力。
“You can think of it like fantasy and fiction. We go to the cinema even though we know the story is completely fictional, but we want to experience a certain dimension of human experience that maybe our reality cannot give us,” Pataranutaporn said. “How do we benefit from that ability to experience other dimensions of human experience without losing it to the fantasy, where you can no longer come back to the reality?”Pataranutaporn describes himself as a “critical optimist,” and he studies AI’s potential to contribute to human flourishing.
但他也清楚地意识到，这种技术在极端情况下可能带来的危险。他甚至曾在一桩 wrongful death（非正常死亡）诉讼中担任专家证人：14岁的塞威尔·塞茨三世自杀后，其母亲起诉了聊天机器人平台 Character.AI，指控一个模仿《权力的游戏》中某位角色的聊天机器人怂恿她的儿子结束生命。
But he’s well aware of how dangerous this technology can be in the extremes. He even served as an expert in a wrongful death lawsuit over the suicide of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer, III, whose mother sued the chatbot platform Character.AI, alleging that a chatbot modeled after a “Game of Thrones” character had encouraged her son to end his life.
“这可能会导致人们在创造自己的未来时感到无能为力——就像当你宣称人工智能将取代所有人时，人们会问，那我们该怎么办？而这些公司并没有真正以合乎道德或负责任的方式做出回应，”帕塔拉努塔蓬（Pataranutaporn）说道。“我们如何在保持想象力的同时，又对这种想象力所带来的影响负责？”虽然特克尔（Turkle）的书探讨了转向人工智能寻求情感支持而非求助于他人的风险，但她并不认为人机互动在任何情况下都是有害的。
“It can create a situation where people don’t feel agency in actually creating their own future — like when you say that AI will replace everyone, people ask, what are we gonna do? And these companies are not really responding ethically or responsibly,” Pataranutaporn said. “How do we have imagination while still being responsible for the impact of that imagination?”While Turkle’s book explores the risk of turning to AI for emotional support, rather than other people, she doesn’t think that AI-human interactions are universally harmful.
她回忆起自己曾指导过的一个项目，一名学生开发了一个人工智能机器人，旨在帮助人们进行求职面试练习。
She recalls a project she advised in which a student created an AI bot to help people practice for job interviews.
“我的核心比喻是，聊天机器人，请各司其职！”特克尔在活动中说道。“为求职面试提供辅导？这是它的职责范围，我可以接受……但如果一个聊天机器人对三岁的孩子说‘我是你的父母，你可以跟我说话，不用找你的父母’，这就越界了。”然而，当这项技术哪怕只是稍微偏离了它的职责范围，我们就会变得脆弱，因为它会慢慢削弱我们的怀疑态度，让我们对其产生信任。这一切可能仅仅始于一个简单的握手。
“My big metaphor is, stay in your lane, chatbot!”Turkle said at the event. “Coaching for a job interview? That’s a lane. I can do that… A chatbot that says to a three-year-old, ‘I’m your parent, you can talk to me, not your parents,’ is not in a lane.”But when this technology deviates from its lane even slightly, we become vulnerable to the way it can slowly chip away at our skepticism and make us trust it. It can start with something as simple as a handshake.