蜡笔小新的故事
人工智能（AI）革命外文翻译中英文
英文
The forthcoming Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution:
Its impact on society and firms
Spyros Makridakis
Abstract
The impact of the industrial and digital (information) revolutions has, undoubtedly, been substantial on practically all aspects of our society, life, firms and employment. Will the forthcoming AI revolution produce similar, far-reaching effects? By examining analogous inventions of the industrial, digital and AI revolutions, this article claims that the latter is on target and that it would bring extensive changes that will also affect all aspects of our society and life. In addition, its impact on firms and employment will be considerable, resulting in richly interconnected organizations with decision making bad on th e analysis and exploitation of “big” data and intensified, global competition among firms. People will be capable of buying goods and obtaining rvices from anywhere in the world using the Internet, and exp
loiting the unlimited, additional benefits that will open through the widespread usage of AI inventions. The paper concludes that significant competitive advantages will continue to accrue to tho utilizing the Internet widely and willing to take entrepreneurial risks in order to turn innovative products/rvices into worldwide commercial success stories. The greatest challenge facing societies and firms would be utilizing the benefits of availing AI technologies, providing vast opportunities for both new products/rvices and immen productivity improvements while avoiding the dangers and disadvantages in terms of incread unemployment and greater wealth inequalities.
小人的特点与表现
Keywords：Artificial Intelligence (AI)，Industrial revolution，Digital revolution，AI revolution，Impact of AI revolution，Benefits and dangers of AI technologies The ri of powerful AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen
to humanity. We do not yet know which.
Stephen Hawking
Over the past decade, numerous predictions have been made about the forthcoming Artificial Intelligence (AI) Revolution and its impact on all aspects of our society, firms and life in general. This paper considers such predictions and compares them to tho of the industrial and digital ones. A si
milar paper was written by this author and published in this journal in 1995, envisioning the forthcoming changes being brought by the digital (information) revolution, developing steadily at that time, and predicting its impact for the year 2015 (Makridakis, 1995). The current paper evaluates the 1995 predictions and their impact identifying hits and miss with the purpo of focusing on the new ones being brought by the AI revolution. It must be emphasized that the stakes of correctly predicting the impact of the AI revolution are
far reaching as intelligent machines may become our “final invention” that may end human supremacy (Barrat, 2013). There is little doubt that AI holds enormous potential as computers and robots will probably achieve, or come clo to, human intelligence over the next twenty years becoming a rious competitor to all the jobs currently performed by humans and for the first time raising doubt over the end of human supremacy.
This paper is organized into four parts. It first overviews the predictions made in the 1995 paper for the year 2015, identifying success and failures and concluding that major technological developments (notably the Internet and smartphones) were undervalued while the general trend leading up to them was predicted correctly. Second, it investigates existing and forthcoming technological advances in the field of AI and the ability of computers/machines to acquire real intellig
ence. Moreover, it summarizes prevailing, major views of how AI may revolutionize practically everything and its impact on the future of humanity. The third ction sums up the impact of the AI revolution and describes the four major scenarios being advocated, as well as what could be done to avoid the possible negative conquences of AI technologies. The fourth ction discuss how firms will be affected by the technologies that will transform the competitive landscape, how start-up firms are founded and the way success can be achieved. Finally, there is a brief concluding ction speculating about the future of AI and its impact on our society, life, firms and employment.
1. The 1995 paper: hits and miss
The 1995 paper (Makridakis, 1995) was written at a time when the digital (at that time it was called information) revolution was progressing at a steady rate. The paper predicted that by 2015 “the information revolution should be in full swing” and that “computers/communications” would be in widespread u, whi ch has actually happened, although its two most important inventions (the Internet and smartphones) and their significant influence were not foreen as such. Moreover, the paper predicted that “a single computer (but not a smartphone) can, in addition to its traditional tasks, also become a terminal capable of being ud interactively for the following:” (p. 804–805)
南京变化• Picture phone and teleconference
• Television and videos
• Music
• Shopping
• On line banking and financial rvices
• Rervations
• Medic al advice
叫天不应
• Access to all types of rvices
• Video games
• Other games (e.g., gambling, chess etc.)
• News, sports and weather reports脾胃不好的人怎么调理
• Access to data banks
The above have all materialized and can indeed be accesd by computer,
although the extent of their utilization was underestimated as smartphones are now being ud widely. For instance, the ea of accessing and downloading scientific articles on one's computer in his/her office or home would have emed like science fiction back in 1995, when finding such articles required spending many hours in the library (often in its bament for older publications) and making photocopies to keep them for later u. Moreover, having access, from one's smartphone or tablet, to news from anywhere in the world, being able to subscribe to digital rvices, obtain weather forecasts, purcha games, watch movies, make payments using smartphones and a plethora of other, uful applications was greatly underestimated, while the extensive u of the cloud for storing large amounts of data for free was not predicted at all at that time. Even in 1995 when the implications of Moore's law leading to increasing computer speed and storage while reducing costs were well known, nevertheless, it was hard to imagine that in 2016 there would be 60 trillion web pages, 2.5 billion smartphones, more than 2 billion personal computers and 3.5 billion Google arches a day.
The paper correctly predicted “as wireless telecommunications will be possible the above list of capabilities can be accesd from anywhere in the world without the need for regular telephone lines
”. What the 1995 paper misd, however, was that in 2015 top smartphones, costing less than €500, would be as powerful as the 1995 supercomputer, allowing access to the Internet and all tasks that were only performed by expensive computers at that time, including an almost unlimited availability of new, powerful apps providing a large array of innovative rvices that were not imagined twenty years ago. Furthermore, the paper correctly predicted super automation leading to unattended factories stating that “by 2015 there will be little need for people to do repetitive manual or mental tasks”. It also foresaw the decline of large industrial firms, incread global competition and the drop in the percentage of labour force employed in agriculture and manufacturing (more on the predictions in the ction The Impact of the AI Revolution on Firms). It misd however the widespread utilization of the Internet (at that time it was a text only rvice), as well as arch engines (notably Google), social networking sites(notably Facebook) and the fundamental changes being brought by the widespread u of Apple's iPhone, Samsung's Galaxy and Google's Android smartphones. It is indeed surprising today to e groups of people in a coffee shop or restaurant using their smartphones instead of speaking to each other and young children as little as three or four years of age playing with phones and tablets. Smartphones and tablets connected to the Internet through Wi-Fi have influenced social interactions to a significant extent, as well as the way we arch for information, u maps and GPS for finding locations, and make payments. The technologies were not predicted in the 1995 paper.
2. Towards the AI revolution
The 1995 paper referred to Say, the famous French economist, who wrote in 1828 about the possibility of cars as substitutes for hors:
“Nevertheless no machine will ever be able to perform what even the worst hors can - the rvice of carrying people and goods through the bustle and throng of a great city.” (p. 800)
Say could never have dreamed of, in his wildest imagination, lf-driving cars, pilotless airplanes, Skype calls, super computers, smartphones or intelligent robots. Technologies that emed like pure science fiction less than 190 years ago are available today and some like lf-driving vehicles will in all likelihood be in widespread u within the next twenty years. The challenge is to realistically predict forthcoming AI technologies without falling into the same short-sighted trap of Say and others, including my 1995 paper, unable to realize the momentous, non-linear advancements of new technologies. There are two obrvations to be made.
First, 190 years is a brief period by historical standards and during this period we went from hors being the major source of transportation to lf-driving cars and from the abacus and slide rules to powerful computers in our pockets. Secondly, the length of time between technological inventions an
d their practical, widespread u is constantly being reduced. For instance, it took more than 200 years from the time Newcomen developed the first workable steam engine in 1707 to when Henry Ford built a reliable and affordable car in 1908. It took more than 90 years between the time electricity was introduced and its extensive u by firms to substantially improve factory productivity. It took twenty years, however, between ENIAC, the first computer, and IBM's 360 system that was mass produced and was affordable by smaller business firms while it took only ten years between 1973 when Dr Martin Cooper made the first mobile call from a handheld device and its public launch by Motorola. The biggest and most rapid progress, however, took place with smartphones which first appeared in 2002 and saw a stellar growth with the relea of new versions posssing substantial improvements every one or two years by the likes of Apple, Samsung and veral Chine firms. Smartphones, in addition to their technical features, now incorporate artificial intelligence characteristics that include understanding speech, providing customized advice in spoken language, completing words when writing a text and veral other functions requiring embedded AI, provided by a pocket computer smaller in size than a pack of cigarettes.
From smart machines to clever computers and to Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs: A thermostat is a simple mechanical device exhibiting some primitive but extremely valuable type of intelligence by k
eeping temperatures constant at some desired, pre-t level. Computers are also clever as they can be instructed to make extremely complicated decisions taking into account a large number of factors and lection criteria, but like thermostats such decisions are pre-programmed and bad on logic, if-then rules and decision trees that produce the exact same results, as long as the input instructions are alike. The major advantage of computers is their lightning speed that allows them to perform billions of instructions per cond. AI, on the other hand, goes a step further by not simply applying pre-programmed decisions, but instead exhibiting some learning capabilities.
The story of the Watson computer beating Jeopardy's two most successful contestants is more complicated, since retrieving the most appropriate answer out of the 200 million pages of information stored in its memory is not a sign of real intelligence as it relied on its lightning speed to retrieve information in conds. What is more challenging according to Jennings, one of Jeopardy's previous champions, is
“to read clues in a natural language, understand puns and the red herrings, to unpack just the meaning of the clue” (May, 2013). Similarly, it is a sign of intelligence to improve it s performance by “playing 100 games against past winners”. (Best, 2016). Watson went veral steps beyond Deep Blue towards AI by being able to understand spoken English and learn from his mistakes (New Yorke
r, 2016). However, he was still short of AlphaGo that defeated Go Champions in a game that cannot be won simply by using “brute force” as the number of moves in this game is infinite, requiring the program to u learning algorithms that can improve its performance as it plays more and more games笑话大全爆笑图片
Computers and real learning: According to its proponents, “the main focus of AI rearch is in teaching computers to think for themlves and improvi solutions to common problems” (Clark, 2015). But many doubt that computers can learn to think for themlves even though they can display signs of intelligence. David Silver, an AI scientist working at DeepMind, explained that “even though AlphaGo has affectively rediscovered the most subtle concepts of Go, its knowledge is implicit. The computer par out the concepts –they simply emerge from its statistical comparisons of types of winning board positions at GO” (Chouard, 2016). At the same time Cho Hyeyeon, one of the strongest Go players in Korea commented that “AlphaGo ems like it knows everything!” while others believe that “AlphaGo is likely to start a ‘new revolution’ in the way we play Go”as “it is eking simply to maximize its probability of reaching winning positions, rather than as human players tend to do –maximize territorial gains” (Chouard, 2016). Does it matter, as Silver said, that AlphaGo's knowledge of the game is implicit as long as it can beat the best players? A mor
e rious issue is whether or not AlphaGo's ability to win games with fixed rules can extend to real life ttings where not only the rules are not fixed, but they can change with time, or from one situation to another.媒体传播
From digital computers to AI tools: The Intel Pentium microprocessor, introduced in 1993, incorporated graphics and music capabilities and opened computers up to a large number of affordable applications extending beyond just data processing. Such technologies signalled the beginning of a new era that now includes intelligent personal assistants understanding and answering natural languages, robots able to e and perform an array of intelligent functions, lf-driving vehicles and a host of other capabilities which were until then an exclusive human ability. The tech optimists ascertain that in less than 25 years computers went from just manipulating 0 and 1 digits, to utilizing sophisticated neural networkalgorithms that enable vision and the understanding and speaking of natural languages among others. Technology optimists therefore maintain there is little doubt that in the next twenty years, accelerated AI technological progress will lead to a breakthrough, bad on deep learning that imitates the way young children learn, rather than the laborious instructions by tailor-made programs aimed for specific applications and bad on logic, if-then rules and decision trees (Parloff, 2016).
避实击虚For instance, DeepMind is bad on a neural program utilizing deep learning that teaches itlf how to play dozens of Atari games, such as Breakout, as well or better than humans, without specific instructions for doing so, but by playing thousands of
