科技业的影响力中心转向中国？

Sometimes a shift in power happens so subtly that you don’t even notice it is occurring. Take the increasingly important field of artificial intelligence.

力量的转变有时会以非常微妙的方式发生，使得你根本注意不到。以重要性日益提高的人工智能领域为例。

For all the talk of autonomous vehicles and smart home appliances in Silicon Valley, some of the most innovative work in artificial intelligence is being done far away, in China.

人们总是把硅谷的自动驾驶汽车和智能家电挂在嘴上，但人工智能领域某些最具创造性的工作其实正在万里之外的中国展开。

Beijing is supporting A.I. research with vast sums of money and is helping to move those innovations into China’s private sector, Paul Mozur and John Markoff write. And China is spending more just as the United States appears to be ready to pull back on such investing. The Trump administration recently released a proposed budget that would drastically cut back on many of the federal programs that have traditionally funded artificial intelligence research.

孟宝勒(Paul Mozur)和约翰·马克夫(John Markoff)撰文称，北京正投入巨额资金支持人工智能研究，并帮助将这类创新推向私营部门。而美国在中国投入更多资金之际，似乎正准备收缩此项投资。特朗普政府最近公布的一个拟议中的预算方案显示，传统上为人工智能研究提供资金支持的联邦项目当中，有很多会被大幅削减预算。

“China’s ambitions mingle the most far-out sci-fi ideas with the needs of an authoritarian state: Philip K. Dick meets George Orwell,” Paul and John write. “There are plans to use it to predict crimes, lend money, track people on the country’s ubiquitous closed-circuit cameras, alleviate traffic jams, create self-guided missiles and censor the internet.”

“中国的野心将最遥不可及的科幻创意与一个威权国家的需求结合起来：菲利普·K·迪克(Philip K. Dick)遇到乔治·奥威尔(George Orwell)，”孟宝勒和马克夫写道。“他们计划利用这项技术预测犯罪行为、协助发放贷款、通过无所不在的闭路摄像头追寻人们的踪迹、缓解交通堵塞、制造自导导弹，以及审查互联网内容。”

What’s more, entrepreneurs from other countries who might have made their way to Silicon Valley in years past now consider China a legitimate option for their work.

此外，其他国家的创业者过去数十年间或许一直以打入硅谷为念，但现如今，他们考虑工作地点时会把中国当成一个合理的选项。

It may be that the United States is turning inward at exactly the wrong moment to capture the technology industry’s next big breakthrough.

想要取得科技行业下一个重大突破的美国，或许正在一个绝对错误的时机转向内敛。