AI enthusiasts wave off the notion that the technology will lead to mass unemployment. A lot of people once drove horse-drawn carts and made buggy whips, they say. Losing those jobs to automobiles didn’t lead to breadlines; on the contrary.Doomers respond that, in the case of AI, we’re not the drivers; we’re the horses. The optimists’ retort, that horses’ lives got better as they went from work animals to luxury items, is no help. Have a look at what happened to the equine population in the first half of the 20th century.
人工智能爱好者驳斥了这项技术会导致大规模失业的说法。他们说，过去曾有很多人的工作是驾驭马车、制作马鞭。汽车让这些工作消失，并没有导致人们排起长队领救济；恰恰相反。
Whatever AI’s ultimate impact on unemployment, this back-and-forth highlights the idea that AI is unlike all the technologies that went before, with greater complexity, greater upsides and greater risks — for labour, cyber security, national defence, mental health and so on. So those controlling it have special responsibilities. Everyone in the AI industry acknowledges this. It is expressed in OpenAI’s “Model Spec” guidelines and papers on the topic by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, which lay down guidelines about what AI companies will allow their models to do.
悲观主义者则反驳说，就人工智能而言，我们不是马车夫，而是马。乐观主义者的反驳——马从役畜变成奢侈品后，生活水平提高了——毫无安慰。看看20世纪上半叶马匹数量的减少就知道了。
But AI companies and their models will follow one rule before all others: they will seek to maximise returns for their shareholders, up to the limits set by law. When the law of profit conflicts with the company’s internal principles, profit will win every time.
无论人工智能最终对失业率产生何种影响，这种争论凸显了一个观点：人工智能与以往所有技术都截然不同，它更加复杂，潜力更大，风险也更大——对劳动力、网络安全、国防、心理健康等等都是如此。因此，掌握人工智能的人肩负着特殊的责任。人工智能行业的每个人都认同这一点。OpenAI的“模型规范”(Model Spec)指南以及Anthropic首席执行官达里奥•阿莫迪(Dario Amodei)的相关论文都阐述了这一点，并提供了人工智能公司可以允许其模型做什么的指南。