The fact that the Financial Times special series on robots has been framed around the question “Robots: friend or foe?” is fascinating to me. I understand that change is scary, and that the cyborg from The Terminator is really scary. But my reading of the evidence is that the rapid changes we are seeing in artificial intelligence, sensor development and many other fields are not sending us hurtling towards a future in which the machines become self-aware and take over. Worrying about that future is so misplaced that, as the AI pioneer Andrew Ng puts it, it is like worrying about overpopulation . . . on Mars.
英国《金融时报》关于机器人的特别系列报道一直围绕着这样一个问题：机器人是敌是友？这让我很感兴趣。我知道变化是可怕的，我也知道《终结者》(Terminator)中的半机器人确实可怕。但我读到的证据表明，我们在人工智能(AI)、传感器开发以及其他很多领域看到的快速变化，并没有在把我们快速推向一个机器产生自我意识并接管一切的未来。担心这种未来毫无意义，就像人工智能先驱吴恩达(Andrew Ng)所说的那样，这就好像担心……火星上人口过多。