AI向左走向右走

英文版與台版於9月10全球同步發行, 實屬盛事.

英文原版與中譯本三個版本三張圖片並列一置, 想必大家應該猜出了意圖與緣由所在. 對比三個版本, 毫無疑問, 首選英文原版, 中文版兩個版本出自同一譯者林俊宏先生之手, 結果中信版全書內容不出意外比台版少了兩百頁之巨, 無非囿於種種所限. 中信出版社, 甚是抱歉, 此時此刻已無法忍受此種大刀闊斧式審查刪減, 如此這番操作, 不如不出.

樞紐（紐帶）：從石器時代至人工智能之信息簡史， 一書上溯《聖經》，從信息（Information）開啟全篇. 兩段論承上啟下，早期信息視角，第一段從信息（Information）➡️真相/真理（Truth）衍生到智慧（Wisdom）與權力（Power）；第二段後期更複雜歷史角度信息視角，從信息（Information）中推演到真相/真理（Truth）與秩序（Order），相對於世俗社會，產生了整體社會結構，繼而由真相/真理（Truth）催生出智慧（Wisdom）與Power（權力）. 作者圍繞著民主與極權兩種制度展開，提出了制度自我糾錯機制之必要性. 尤其在當下，AI作為非有機，持續進化，民主未來何去何從，人類與AI如何共生，視野之宏觀，探幽之綿密，甚感欽佩，發人深思.

以下皆英文版摘錄部分, 盡可一笑置之, 何所懼, 何以刪, 終將明.

Nazism and Stalinism are but two recent examples of the mass insanity occasionally engulfs even modern societies. Nobody disputes that humans today have a lot more information and power than in the Stone Age, but it is far from certain that we understand ourselves and our role in the universe much better.

Why are we so good at accumulating more information and power, but far less successful at acquiring wisdom? Throughout history many traditions have believed that some fatal flaw in our nature tempts us to pursue powers we don't know how to handle. The Greek myth of Phaethon told of a boy who discovers that he is the son of Helios, the sun god. Wishing to prove his divine origin, Phaethon demands the privilege of driving the chariot of the sun.

Helios warns Phaethon that no human can control the celestial horses that pull the solar chariot. But Phaethon insists, until the sun god relents. After rising proudly in the sky, Phaethon indeed loses control of the chariot. The sun veers off course, scorching all vegetation, killing numerous beings, and threatening to burn the earth itself. Zeus intervenes and strikes Phaethon with a thunderbolt. The conceited human drops from the sky like a falling star, himself on fire. The gods reassert control of the sky and save the world.

This naive view justifies the pursuit of ever more powerful information technologies and has been the semiofficial ideology of the computer age and the internet. In June 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the Iron Curtain, Ronald Reagan declared that "the Goliath of totalitarian control will rapidly be brought down by the David of the microchip" and that "the biggest of Big Brothers is increasingly helpless against communications technology. Information is the oxygen of the modern age...

It seeps through the walls topped with barbed wire. It wafts across the electrified, booby-trapped borders. Breezes of electronic beams blow through the Iron Curtain as if it was lace." [2]In November 2009, Barack Obama spoke in the same spirit on a visit to Shanghai, telling his Chinese hosts, "I am a big believer in technology and l' m a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information. I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes." ［3］

In his 2024 book, The Singularity Is Nearer, the eminent futurologist and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil surveys the history of information technology and concludes that "the reality is that nearly every aspect of life is getting progressively better as a result of exponentially improving technology." Looking back at the grand sweep of human history, he cites examples like the invention of the printing press to argue that by its very nature information technology tends to spawn "a virtuous circle advancing nearly every aspect of human well-being, including literacy, education, wealth, sanitation, health, democratization and reduction in violence." ［6］

The naive view of information is perhaps most succinctly captured in Google's mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Google's answer to Goethe's warnings is that while a single apprentice pilfering his master's secret spell book is likely to cause disaster, when a lot of apprentices are given free access to all the world's information, they will not only create useful enchanted brooms but also learn to handle them wisely.

This particular line of radical leftist thinking goes back to Karl Marx, who argued in the mid-nineteenth century that power is the only reality, that information is a weapon, and that elites who claim to be serving truth and justice are in fact pursuing narrow class privileges. In the words of the 1848 Communist Manifesto, "The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open, fight." This binary interpretation of history implies that every human interaction is a power struggle between oppressors and oppressed. Accordingly, whenever anyone says anything, the question to ask isn't, "What is being said? Is it true?" but rather,

"Who is saying this? Whose privileges does it serve?"

After part 1 surveys the roles of mythology and bureaucracy, and the contrast between strong and weak self-correcting mechanisms, chapter 5 concludes the historical discussion by focusing on another contrast-between distributed and centralized information networks. Democratic systems allow information to flow freely along many independent channels, whereas totalitarian systems strive to concentrate information in one hub. Each choice has both advantages and shortcomings. Understanding political systems like the United States and the U.S.S.R. in terms of information flows can explain much about their differing trajectories.

For example, the 1.4 billion members of the Catholic Church are connected by the Bible and other key Christian stories; the 1.4 billion citizens of China areconnected by the stories of communist ideology and Chinese nationalism; and the 8 billion members of the global trade network are connected by stories about currencies, corporations, and brands.

Even charismatic leaders who have millions of followers are an example of this rule rather than an exception. It may seem that in the case of ancient Chinese emperors, medieval Catholic popes, or modern corporate titans it has been a single flesh-and-blood human rather than a story— that has served as a nexus linking millions of followers. But, of course, in all these cases almost none of the followers has had a personal bond with the leader. Instead, what they have connected to has been a carefully crafted story about the leader, and it is in this story that they have put their faith.

Joseph Stalin, who stood at the nexus of one of the biggest personality cults in history, understood this well. When his troublesome son Vasily exploited his famous name to frighten and awe people, Stalin berated him. "But l'm a Stalin too," protested Vasily. "No, you' re not," replied Stalin. "You' re not Stalin and l' m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no-not even me！”

All this was made possible by stories. The power of stories is often missed or denied by materialist interpretations of history. In particular, Marxists tend to view stories as merely a smoke screen for underlying power relations and material interests. According to Marxist theories, people are always motivated by objective material interests and use stories only to camouflage these interests and confound their rivals. For example, in this reading the Crusades, World War I, and the Iraq War were all fought for the economic interests of powerful elites rather than for religious, nationalist, or liberal ideals. Understanding these wars means setting aside all the mythological fig leaves—about God, patriotism, or democracy-and observing power relations in their nakedness.

This Marxist view, however, is not only cynical but wrong.

While materialist interests certainly played a role in the Crusades, World War I, the Iraq War, and most other human conflicts, that does not mean that religious, national, and liberal ideals played no role at all. Moreover, materialist interests by themselves cannot explain the identities of the rival camps. Why is it that in the twelfth century landowners and merchants from France, Germany, and Italy united to conquer territories and trade routes in the Levant—instead of landowners and merchants from France and North Africa uniting to conquer Italy? And why is it that in 2003, the United States and Britain sought to conquer the oil fields of Iraq, rather than the gas fields of Norway? Can this really be explained by purely materialist considerations, without any recourse to people's religious and ideological beliefs?

In fact, all relations between large-scale human groups are shaped by stories, because the identities of these groups are themselves defined by stories. There are no objective definitions for who is British, American, Norwegian, or Iraqi; all these identities are shaped by national and religious myths that are constantly challenged and revised. Marxists may claim that large-scale groups have objective identities and interests, independent of stories. If that is so, how can we explain that only humans have large-scale groups like tribes, nations, and religions, whereas chimpanzees lack them? After all, chimpanzees share with humans all our objective material interests; they too need to drink, eat, and protect themselves from diseases. They too want sex and social power. But chimpanzees cannot maintain large-scale groups, because they are unable to create the stories that connect such groups and define their identities and interests. Contrary to Marxist thinking, large-scale identities and interests in history are always intersubjective; they are never objective.

This is good news. If history had been shaped solely by material interests and power struggles, there would be no point talking to people who disagree with us. Any conflict would ultimately be the result of objective power relations, which cannot be changed merely by talking. In particular, if privileged people can see and believe only those things that enshrine their privileges, how can anything except violence persuade them to renounce those privileges and alter their beliefs? Luckily, since history is shaped by intersubjective stories, sometimes we can avert conflict and make peace by talking with people, changing the stories in which they and we believe, or coming up with a new story that everyone can accept.

Take, for example, the rise of Nazism. There certainly were material interests that drove millions of Germans to support Hitler. The Nazis would probably never have come to power had it not been for the economic crisis of the early 1930s. However, it is wrong to think that the Third Reichwas the inevitable outcome of underlying power relations and material interests. Hitler won the 1933 elections because during the economic crisis millions of Germans came to believe the Nazi story rather than one of the alternative stories on offer. This wasn't the inevitable result of Germans pursuing their material interests and protecting their privileges; it was a tragic mistake. We can confidently say that it was a mistake, and that Germans could have chosen better stories, because we know what happened next. Twelve years of Nazi rule didn' t foster the Germans' material interests. Nazism led to the destruction of Germany and the deaths of millions. Later, when Germans adopted liberal democracy, this did lead to a lasting improvement in their lives. Couldn' t the Germans have skipped the failed Nazi experiment and put their faith in liberal democracy already in the early 1930s? The position of this book is that they could have. History is often shaped not by deterministic power relations, but rather by tragic mistakes that result from believing in mesmerizing but harmful stories.