“我们正在经历一生中见过的最大变革，甚至可能是很长一段时间以来最大的变革，”两度出任美国卫生部长的维韦克·穆尔西（Vivek Murthy）于10月28日在纽约市旗舰公立图书馆对听众表示，他将人工智能的出现比作核武器的出现，就精心制定安全标准的必要性而言二者相当。“我们正处于一个分岔点，”他补充道。“未来究竟该是什么样子，我们要保护和维护什么？”
“We are living through the greatest transformation that we have seen in our lifetimes, and likely for a significant time before that,” two-time Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told an audience at New York City’s flagship public library on Oct. 28, comparing the advent of artificial intelligence to the advent of nuclear weaponry in terms of the need for carefully thought out safety standards. “We're at a branch point,” he added. “What should the future really look like, what are we trying to protect and preserve?”
穆尔西并非唯一敲响警钟的人。“常识媒体”（Common Sense Media）创始人兼首席执行官吉姆·斯泰耶（Jim Steyer）作为会议主办方，告诉以支持者为主的听众，近期历史已证明，行业领袖——他称之为“科技兄弟寡头”——无法被依赖来创建对儿童安全、健康的数字信息系统。“我们没有及时在社交媒体问题上抢占先机，”他对与会者说。“这就是关键时刻。人工智能影响更大。它基本上是‘类固醇版’的社交媒体。”
Murthy was not alone in sounding the alarm. Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, the organizer of the conference, told the mostly supportive crowd that recent history had proved that the industry leaders or, as he called them “tech broligarchs,” could not be relied upon to create digital information systems that were safe or healthy for children. “We did not get out in front of social media in time,” he told the gathering. “This is the moment. AI is a bigger deal. It's basically social media on steroids.”
纽约州州长凯西·霍楚（Kathy Hochul）似乎也在强调这一点，她在为期一天的峰会上临时插队发言，宣布了关于聊天机器人与儿童互动的新法规。该法案旨在确保人工智能代理不冒充人类，也不以暗示其与儿童存在关系的方式进行交流。“变化发生得太快了，”霍楚谈及技术变革时说。“父母几乎不可能知情，民选官员也几乎不可能跟上节奏，我们当然已经吸取教训：不能指望公司推出负责任、以儿童为先的产品。”
New York’s governor Kathy Hochul seemed to underscore the point when she made an unscheduled stop at the daylong summit to announce new regulations around chatbots interactions with children. The bill was designed to ensure that AI agents do not impersonate humans or communicate in a way that suggests they have a relationship with a child. “It's happening so quickly,” said Hochul of the technological changes. “It's almost impossible for parents to know what's going on, for elected officials to stay ahead of it, and we certainly have learned the lesson that we can't count on the companies to put out products that are responsible and that put children first.”
具体而言，将于1月生效的新法律将禁止聊天机器人鼓励自杀、自残、保密或孤立，以及劝阻儿童向其他人类寻求帮助。
Specifically, the new law, which goes into effect in January, will ban chatbots from encouraging suicide, self-harm, secrecy, or isolation and from discouraging children to seek help from other humans.
他们还将被禁止进行涉及性露骨内容的互动，并被限制在后续对话中使用儿童过去的个人或健康信息。
They will also be banned from engaging in sexually explicit interactions and restricted from using a child’s past personal or health information in later conversations.
对于出席峰会的与会者和演讲者而言——他们包括切尔西·克林顿、哥伦比亚大学法学教授吴修铭（登台发言）以及乌玛·瑟曼（坐在观众席上）——这一宣布是一个良好的开端，尽管许多人抱怨联邦层面在人工智能和社交媒体方面均缺乏监管。“直到今天，2026年，我们的联邦政府和国会仍然——在社交媒体出现近四分之一世纪后——未能推出任何保护孩子的措施，”穆尔希说道，他目前担任“常识传媒”青少年人工智能安全研究所顾问委员会主席，该研究所负责研究、测试和评级面向儿童的人工智能平台。
For the attendees and speakers at the summit, who ranged from Chelsea Clinton and Columbia law professor Tim Wu (onstage) to Uma Thurman (in the audience), the announcement was a good start, although many bemoaned the lack of federal regulation, around both AI and social media. “To this day, 2026, our federal government and Congress has still—nearly a quarter century after the advent of social media—failed to announce anything to protect our kids,” said Murthy, who is now chair of the advisory board of Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute, which studies, tests, and rates AI platforms for children.
专家们呼吁采取一系列保护性和预防性补救措施，以应对他们所描述的即将到来的“AI海啸”，包括要求科技公司提供更多数据透明度，让监管机构和研究人员能更多地获取其掌握的信息；利用消费者保护法确保AI模型经过了严格测试，以排查潜在负面结果；采用欧洲模式，即在AI公司证明其平台安全之前，不允许其部署平台；甚至对释放不安全技术的AI公司实施刑事处罚。
Panelists called for a range of protective and preventative remedies for what they described as the coming tsunami of AI, including requiring more data transparency from tech companies by enabling regulatory agencies and researchers to get more access to the information they’re holding, using consumer-protection laws to ensure that AI models have been rigorously tested for potential negative outcomes, adopting the European model of not allowing AI companies to deploy their platforms until they have proved they are safe, or even instituting criminal penalties for AI companies who unleash unsafe technologies.
“作为一名前检察官，我可以告诉你们一件事，”新墨西哥州总检察长劳尔·托雷斯说，他本月早些时候刚赢得一项针对Meta的250亿美元判决。“当你亮出手铐时，一切都会改变。”
“As a former prosecutor, I can tell you one thing,” said New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who earlier this month won a $25 billion judgment against Meta. “When you bring out handcuffs, suddenly everything changes.”
然而，并非所有围绕AI的问题都能靠法律解决。一个令人担忧的问题是AI对幼童的社会化影响，包括通过Alexa等语音助手或非常顺从的AI赋能玩具。芝加哥大学幼儿专家、教授达娜·萨斯金德问道：“孩子们开始从社会实践中学到什么样的期待？他们是否期望别人总是同意他们？事情是否总是容易？是否总是像交易一样？”
Not all the issues around AI can be solved by the law, however. One concern is the socialization of very young children by AI, including via voice-activated assistants like Alexa or very agreeable AI-enabled toys. “What do kids start to learn to expect from social practice? Do they expect someone to always agree with them? Is it always easy? Is it always like a transaction?” asked Dana Suskind, an early-childhood expert and professor at the University of Chicago.
她指出，人际关系要复杂得多。“它们是混乱的，而这种混乱正是大量学习发生的地方。”她表示，家长们曾因社交媒体和数字设备的影响而措手不及，现在需要接受关于AI的教育，并要让他们明白，自己并不完美的养育方式，以及其他人际互动，对儿童的益处远胜于AI伴侣。
Human relationships are a lot messier, she noted. “They're chaotic, and that sort of mess is where a lot of learning happens.”Parents, who were caught off-guard by the influence of social media and digital devices, need to be educated about AI and encouraged that their imperfect parenting, as well as other human interaction, is vastly more beneficial to children than an AI companion, she said.
峰会还探讨了人工智能对教育以及学生工作和学习能力的巨大影响，因为答案现在触手可及。“麻省理工学院刚刚发布了一份报告，称麻省理工学院的每一项作业都可以由生成式人工智能完成，”前美国教育部长、现纽约州立大学校长约翰·金说。金正在考虑对学生评估进行重大改革。“我们必须确保看到学生亲自完成作业，并确保他们掌握那些基础技能，”他说。
The summit also touched on the enormous implications AI is having on education and students’ ability to work and learn, when answers are in such ready supply. “MIT just did a report saying every assignment at MIT could be done by generative AI,” said John King, a former U.S. Secretary of Education and current chancellor of State University in New York. King is considering major changes to student assessment. “We have to make sure we are seeing the students do the work, and we have to make sure they're getting those foundational skills,” he said.
“这实际上意味着每一位教职员工都要重新评估他们布置什么作业以及如何衡量学生的学习成果。”正如克林顿指出的，这也是一个公平性问题。“我们知道，在家庭年收入低于3万美元的家庭中，青少年主要或完全通过人工智能完成家庭作业的可能性，是年收入7.5万美元或以上家庭青少年的三倍，”她说。
“It literally means every faculty member reassessing what they assign and how they measure student learning.”And, as Clinton pointed out, this is an equity issue too. “We know that in families with less than $30,000 of household income, teenagers are three times more likely to either largely or entirely do their homework through artificial intelligence than those households with family incomes of $75,000 or more,” she said.
与此同时，学生需要做好准备，进入一个人工智能技能并非可有可无的职场。对于已经掌握这些技能的人来说，未来一片光明。“新入职的人员学习快得多，因为人工智能赋予了他们前所未有的能力，”高盛全球并购主席吉恩·赛克斯谈到这家银行巨头的新招聘人员时说。“所以某人在一个月内就能做出极具成效的工作。”如果优质的人工智能教育分配不均，一些毕业生将比其他人更有利地为职业生涯做好准备，进一步加剧财富不平等。
At the same time, students need to be prepared to enter a workforce in which AI skills are not optional. For those who have mastered them, the future is very bright. “The people coming in learn much more rapidly because AI gives them more capacity than they've had before,” said Gene Sykes, chairman of global mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs of the banking giant’s new recruits. “So somebody, within a month, can be doing incredibly productive work.”If good education in AI is distributed unevenly, some graduates will be vastly better prepared for a career than others, further exacerbating wealth inequities.
虽然对于人工智能到来时应立即采取什么措施鲜有共识，但大家一致认为，它将对儿童、家庭和子孙后代产生深远影响。“当我们步入这个变革时代，”穆尔蒂指出，“强加给我们的问题是：我们要不惜一切代价保护和保留人类存在的哪些方面？”
While there was little consensus on the immediate steps to take as AI arrives, there was no argument that it will be consequential for children, families, and generations to come. “As we go into this age of transformation,” Murthy noted, “the question forced upon us is the following: What aspects of human existence do we want to protect and preserve at all costs?”