新时代的“自动化妄想症”

It is perhaps the delusion of every generation to exaggerate the novelty of their age and believe they face challenges and opportunities that no one has ever faced before. So it is today as we contemplate our automated future.

这或许是每一代人都有的通病：夸大自己所处时代的新奇之处，认为自己这一代人面临的挑战和机遇是前人从未经历过的。如今我们在思考人类的自动化未来时也犯了这样的妄想症。

The great service of Thomas Rid’s book — Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics — is to highlight how we have been grappling with the relationship between man and machine for longer than we might have imagined. It also shows how the debate has been coloured by the full spectrum of emotions.

托马斯•里德(Thomas Rid)的著作《机器的崛起：控制论失落的历史》(Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics)的重要贡献在于，它强调我们很长时间以来—比我们自己所以为更长—一直在处理人与机器之间的关系。它还表明这场辩论笼罩在各种各样的情绪之中。

According to Rid, the idea of playing God and creating mechanical life predates the invention of the computer by many centuries — at least in the world of mythology. Early Jewish folklore recounted the tale of the golem, a shapeless clay figure brought to life by humans. The Greeks invented Hephaestus, the divine blacksmith, who created automata out of bronze. The Czech playwright Karel Čapek gave us R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), a story about a factory manufacturing artificial workers that popularised the word “robot” when it was staged in the US in 1950.

里德认为，扮演上帝、创造机械生命的想法比电脑问世早了许多个世纪，至少在神话故事中是如此。早期的犹太民间传说中有“魔像”(golem)的故事，它是一种没有形状的泥人，由人类赋予生命。希腊人创造了铁匠保护神赫斐斯塔斯(Hephaestus)，他用铜造出了自动机(automata)。捷克剧作家卡雷尔•恰佩克(Karel Čapek)创作出了戏剧《罗萨姆万能机器人制造公司》(Rossum's Universal Robots)，讲述的是一家工厂制造人工劳动力的故事，该剧1950年在美国上演后，“机器人”这个词流行起来。

Humans may have long obsessed about machines that could think and make decisions on their own. Then, in the 1940s, they began to become a reality as artillery shells equipped with radio fuses helped shoot down V-1 rockets during the second world war. “Never before had one autonomous weapon clashed with another autonomous weapon with so little human interference,” Rid writes.

人类可能长期执迷于能够自主思考和做决定的机器。上世纪40年代，这种想法开始成为现实，配备无线电雷管的炮弹在二战期间帮助击落了V-1火箭。里德写道：“从来没有一台自动武器借助这么少的人为干预与另一台自动武器发生碰撞。”

Norbert Wiener, a brilliant, eccentric MIT mathematician, coined the term cybernetics and emerged as its leading theoretician, publishing Cybernetics; or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine in 1948. As Rid puts it, Wiener and the early cyberneticists replaced the magic of mythology with science.

才华横溢而性情古怪的麻省理工学院(MIT)数学家诺伯特•威纳(Norbert Wiener)创造出了“控制论”(cybernetics)这个词，并成为这一领域的领先理论家，他在1948年出版了《控制论》(Cybernetics)，也叫做《动物和机器内部的控制和通信》(Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine)。正如里德所言，威纳和早期的控制论学者用科学取代了神话魔力。

Wiener was seen as the “prophet of the second industrial revolution”, veering from the wildly enthusiastic to the deeply pessimistic. In 1950 he wrote that automatic machines would be the economic equivalent of slave labour, producing an “unemployment situation in comparison with which . . . the depression of the thirties will seem like a pleasant joke”. That view has particular resonance today as we once again fret about the rise of the robots.

威纳被视为“第二次工业革命的先知”，他从极度热情转向严重悲观。1950年，他写道，自动机器将变成经济中类似于奴隶劳动力的存在，造成“大量失业，与之相比……三十年代的萧条简直就是个愉快的玩笑”。这种观点在今天有特殊意义，我们再次担心机器人的崛起。

Rid, a professor in security studies at King’s College London, is a fine chronicler of the debate, deftly recounting the hope, hype, and fears that have accompanied our thinking on automation. “The machines were always a positive and a negative force at the same time, utopian and dystopian at once, although most of the time optimism dominated.”

作为伦敦大学国王学院(King's College London)安全研究方面的教授，里德是一位关于这场辩论的优秀记录者，他巧妙的记述了我们在思考自动化的过程中产生的希望、炒作和担忧。“机器总是既正面又负面，既有些乌托邦又反乌托邦，不过多数时间以乐观主义为主。”

Governments and the military dominated the early use of computers in the 1950s and 1960s, with the US army at one time even exploring the deployment in Vietnam of an 18ft, two-legged walking tank known as the Pedipulator.

上世纪五、六十年代，政府和军方控制着电脑的早期应用，美国军方甚至曾考虑在越南部署被称为“步行机”(Pedipulator)的18英尺高、用两条腿走路的坦克。

Radical and libertarian thinkers in the US remained suspicious about computers seeing them as a means of societal control. One described cyborgs as the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism”.

美国激进自由主义思想家当时仍对电脑持怀疑态度，他们把电脑视为社会控制的一种手段。有人把半机器人描述为“军国主义和父权资本主义的私生子”。

But as computers became more powerful and accessible, they were increasingly viewed by hippies on the US west coast as a mechanism for liberation, helping to stimulate the astonishing development of Silicon Valley. Timothy Leary, the US psychologist, compared computers with psychedelic drugs given their mind-enhancing properties.

但随着电脑变得更强大并被更多人使用，它们越来越被美国西海岸的嬉皮士视为通向自由的途径，它帮助刺激硅谷的惊人发展。由于电脑具有提升精神的特性，美国心理学家蒂莫西•利瑞(Timothy Leary)把电脑比作致幻药。

More harmonious visions of man and machine emerged, and by 1995 it was estimated that 10 per cent of the US population could be classified as cyborgs, given their bodies contained implants, such as electronic pacemakers or artificial joints. Richard Brautigan’s poetic vision of computers as “machines of loving grace” began to take shape.

人与机器更和谐的画面出现了，到1995年，据估计，美国10%的人口可以被列为半机器人，因为他们的体内植入了各种设备，例如电子心脏起搏器或人工关节。理查德•布劳蒂根(Richard Brautigan)把电脑视为“慈爱机器”的诗意画面开始成型。

Rise of the Machines is a fascinating if slightly frustrating book, dazzling in parts but never quite adding up to an integrated whole. One stark lesson is that we should remain wary of all those predicting the future impact of technology. “The futurists, of course, didn’t always get the future wrong, but almost always they got the speed, the scale, and the shape wrong,” Rid writes. “They continue to do so.”

《机器的崛起》一书引人入胜，虽说可能使人略感沮丧，部分章节非常出彩，但并未构成一个和谐统一的整体。一个严酷的教训是，我们仍应警惕所有那些对技术在未来的影响加以预测的人士。“当然，未来学家并非总是把未来搞错，但他们在速度、规模和形状方面几乎总是搞错，”里德写道，“他们将一如既往。”

The reviewer is the FT’s Innovation editor

本书评作者是英国《金融时报》创新编辑

Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics; Thomas Rid; Scribe Publications, £20 《机器的崛起：控制论失落的历史》(Rise Of Machines：The Lost History of Cybernetics);作者托马斯•里德(Thomas Rid);Scribe Publications出版社出版;售价20英镑