听力课堂TED音频栏目主要包括TED演讲的音频MP3及中英双语文稿，供各位英语爱好者学习使用。本文主要内容为演讲MP3+双语文稿:麻省理工教授：用机器人取代政府，一个取代政客的大胆想法，希望你会喜欢！

【演讲人及介绍】Cesar Hidalgo

塞萨尔·伊达尔戈，物理学家，研究团队、城市和国家如何学习

【演讲主题】一个取代政客的大胆想法

【演讲文稿-中英文】

翻译者 David Dai 校对人员Sajedah Al-Zuheiri

00:19

Is it just me, or are there other peoplehere that are a little bit disappointed with democracy?

这就我一个，还是在座的还有其他人对我们的民主有些小失望？

00:20

(Applause)

（掌声）

00:24

So let's look at a few numbers. If we lookacross the world, the median turnout in presidential elections over the last 30years has been just 67 percent. Now, if we go to Europe and we look at peoplethat participated in EU parliamentary elections, the median turnout in thoseelections is just 42 percent. Now let's go to New York, and let's see how manypeople voted in the last election for mayor. We will find that only 24 percentof people showed up to vote. What that means is that, if "Friends"was still running, Joey and maybe Phoebe would have shown up to vote.

我们来看一组数据。如果我们看整个世界，在过去三十年里参加总统选举投票的中位数只有百分之六十七。我们如果转向欧洲看看参与欧盟议会选举的人数，投票的中位数只有百分之四十二。我们如果转向纽约，看看多少人参加了上次市长选举投票我们发现只有百分之二十四的人出去投了票。这就意味着，如果“老友记”还在放的话，只有乔伊和或许菲比会去投。

01:07

(Laughter)

（笑声）

01:09

And you cannot blame them because peopleare tired of politicians. And people are tired of other people using the datathat they have generated to communicate with their friends and family, totarget political propaganda at them. But the thing about this is that this isnot new. Nowadays, people use likes to target propaganda at you before they useyour zip code or your gender or your age, because the idea of targeting peoplewith propaganda for political purposes is as old as politics. And the reasonwhy that idea is there is because democracy has a basic vulnerability. This isthe idea of a representative.

你没法怪他们因为人们已经对政客厌倦了。而且人们也很厌倦其他人用他们和他们的朋友和家人沟通时产生的数据针对他们做政治宣传。但这也不是什么新做法。现在，人们用你的点赞对你聚焦宣传以前他们是用你的邮编或者你的性别或者你的年龄，因为针对性政治宣传和政治本身一样历史悠久。这些做法之所以存在是因为民主有一个很基本的弱点。这就是代表这个概念。

01:46

In principle, democracy is the ability ofpeople to exert power. But in practice, we have to delegate that power to arepresentative that can exert that power for us. That representative is abottleneck, or a weak spot. It is the place that you want to target if you wantto attack democracy because you can capture democracy by either capturing thatrepresentative or capturing the way that people choose it. So the big questionis: Is this the end of history? Is this the best that we can do or, actually,are there alternatives?

原则上，民主是人民行使权力的能力。但事实上，我们不得不把这个权力交给一个代表来替我们行使那个权力。那个代表就是一个瓶颈，一个短板。如果你想攻击民主的话你就从那儿开始如果你能俘获那个代表，或是俘获人们选出代表的方式，你就可以俘获民主本身。所以关键问题是：这是历史的终点吗？我们已经没法做的更好，或者，实际上还有别的方法？

02:22

Some people have been thinking aboutalternatives, and one of the ideas that is out there is the idea of directdemocracy. This is the idea of bypassing politicians completely and havingpeople vote directly on issues, having people vote directly on bills. But thisidea is naive because there's too many things that we would need to choose. Ifyou look at the 114th US Congress, you will have seen that the House ofRepresentatives considered more than 6,000 bills, the Senate considered morethan 3,000 bills and they approved more than 300 laws. Those would be manydecisions that each person would have to make a week on topics that they knowlittle about. So there's a big cognitive bandwidth problem if we're going totry to think about direct democracy as a viable alternative.

很多人都在探索别的方法，现在有一个想法叫直接民主。这个想法主张完全跳过政客让人们直接对议题投票，对法案直接投票。但这个想法还是很天真，因为那样的话我们就有太多的东西要选择。如果你看美国114届议会，你就会发现众议院审议过6000多个法案，参议院审议过3000多个法案，他们通过了300个立法。这就意味着每个人一个星期里要对很多他们不了解的话题做决定。这就有个知识范围的问题，如果我们要把直接民主做为一种可能性的话。

03:08

So some people think about the idea ofliquid democracy, or fluid democracy, which is the idea that you endorse yourpolitical power to someone, who can endorse it to someone else, and,eventually, you create a large follower network in which, at the end, there's afew people that are making decisions on behalf of all of their followers andtheir followers. But this idea also doesn't solve the problem of the cognitivebandwidth and, to be honest, it's also quite similar to the idea of having arepresentative. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to be a little bitprovocative, and I'm going to ask you, well: What if, instead of trying tobypass politicians, we tried to automate them?

所以有些人在考虑液体民主，或流体民主，这就是你把你的政治权利交给别人，那个人再转交给另外一个人，这样最后你就建立了一个很大的跟随网络，再到最后，一小群人开始代表他们的跟随者以及跟随者的跟随者做决定。但这个想法也没法解决知识范围的问题而且实话说，这跟有个代表也差不多。所以，我今天想大胆些，让我来问你：如果我们不试图跨越政客，而是试图把他们自动化会怎么样？

03:57

The idea of automation is not new. It wasstarted more than 300 years ago, when French weavers decided to automate theloom. The winner of that industrial war was Joseph-Marie Jacquard. He was aFrench weaver and merchant that married the loom with the steam engine tocreate autonomous looms. And in those autonomous looms, he gained control. Hecould now make fabrics that were more complex and more sophisticated than theones they were able to do by hand. But also, by winning that industrial war, helaid out what has become the blueprint of automation.

这个自动化的想法也不是刚出来的了。300年前就开始了，那时候法国织布工想要把织机自动化。那个工业战争的胜者叫约瑟夫·玛丽·雅卡尔。他是个法国织布工和商人他把织布机和蒸汽发动机联在一起来取得自动织机。在那些自动织机里他取得了控制。他可以做出比其他手工编织更复杂的布料。同时，通过赢得了那场工业战争，他也规划出了自动化的蓝图。

04:34

The way that we automate things for thelast 300 years has always been the same: we first identify a need, then wecreate a tool to satisfy that need, like the loom, in this case, and then westudy how people use that tool to automate that user. That's how we came fromthe mechanical loom to the autonomous loom, and that took us a thousand years.Now, it's taken us only a hundred years to use the same script to automate thecar. But the thing is that, this time around, automation is kind of for real.

我们自动化的方式过去300年里都是一样的：我们首先找到一个需求，然后我们制造一个工具满足那个需求，就象织布机，在这个例子里，然后我们研究人们是怎么用那个工具的然后把那个人的工作自动化。这就是我们从机械织机演化到了自动织机，这足足花了我们一千年时间。后来，我们只花了一百年时间用同一个套路自动化了汽车。不过这一回，自动化是动真格的了

05:09

This is a video that a colleague of minefrom Toshiba shared with me that shows the factory that manufactures solidstate drives. The entire factory is a robot. There are no humans in thatfactory. And the robots are soon to leave the factories and become part of ourworld, become part of our workforce. So what I do in my day job is actuallycreate tools that integrate data for entire countries so that we can ultimatelyhave the foundations that we need for a future in which we need to also managethose machines.

这个录像是我在东芝的一个同事发给我们的是制造固态硬盘的工厂。整个工厂就是一个机器人。工厂里没有工人。很快机器人就会走出工厂成为我们世界的一部分，成为劳动大军的一部分。我的本职工作实际上是创造为整个国家整合数据的工具最终建立起我们需要的基础在未来的日子里也可以管理这些机器。

05:41

But today, I'm not here to talk to youabout these tools that integrate data for countries. But I'm here to talk toyou about another idea that might help us think about how to use artificialintelligence in democracy. Because the tools that I build are designed forexecutive decisions. These are decisions that can be cast in some sort of termof objectivity -- public investment decisions. But there are decisions that arelegislative, and these decisions that are legislative require communicationamong people that have different points of view, require participation, requiredebate, require deliberation. And for a long time, we have thought that, well,what we need to improve democracy is actually more communication. So all of thetechnologies that we have advanced in the context of democracy, whether theyare newspapers or whether it is social media, have tried to provide us withmore communication. But we've been down that rabbit hole, and we know that'snot what's going to solve the problem. Because it's not a communicationproblem, it's a cognitive bandwidth problem. So if the problem is one ofcognitive bandwidth, well, adding more communication to people is not going tobe what's going to solve it. What we are going to need instead is to have othertechnologies that help us deal with some of the communication that we areoverloaded with. Think of, like, a little avatar, a software agent, a digitalJiminy Cricket --

不过今天，我不是在这里跟你们谈这些为国家整合数据的工具的。我在这里是想跟大家谈另外一个想法，或许能帮助我们考虑在民主上如何利用人工智能。因为我的工具是为行政决策设计的。这些决策是基于一定程度的客观性的公共投资决定。但也有决定是立法有关的，这些和立法有关的决定就需要有各持己见的人们之间的沟通，需要参与，需要探讨，需要三思。很久以来我们一直认为我们要改善民主的话就要加强沟通。所以所有我们以民主为名开发的科技，无论是报纸还是社交媒体，都试图给我们提供更多的沟通。但我们以前陷进过这种无底洞，我们知道这是解决不了问题的。因为这不是一个沟通的问题，而是一个知识范围的问题。所以如果问题是知识范围，那么，给人们加上更多的沟通是解决不了问题的。我们需要的是不同的科技来帮助分摊一些我们已经超负荷的沟通。想象一下，比如，一个网络虚拟人，一个软件代理，一个电子杰明尼蟋蟀－

07:03

(Laughter)

（笑声）

07:05

that basically is able to answer things onyour behalf. And if we had that technology, we would be able to offload some ofthe communication and help, maybe, make better decisions or decisions at alarger scale. And the thing is that the idea of software agents is also notnew. We already use them all the time. We use software agents to choose the waythat we're going to drive to a certain location, the music that we're going tolisten to or to get suggestions for the next books that we should read.

基本上可以替你回答问题。如果我们有了那种科技，我们就可以卸下一些沟通的负担也许可以帮助我们做更好的决定或是范围更广的决定。而且软件代理的想法也不是新的。我们已经一直在使用它们了。我们用软件代理来选择我们开车去某地该怎么走，我们想听什么音乐或者建议我们接下来读什么书。

07:37

So there is an obvious idea in the 21stcentury that was as obvious as the idea of putting together a steam engine witha loom at the time of Jacquard. And that idea is combining direct democracywith software agents. Imagine, for a second, a world in which, instead of havinga representative that represents you and millions of other people, you can havea representative that represents only you, with your nuanced political views --that weird combination of libertarian and liberal and maybe a little bitconservative on some issues and maybe very progressive on others. Politiciansnowadays are packages, and they're full of compromises. But you might havesomeone that can represent only you, if you are willing to give up the ideathat that representative is a human. If that representative is a softwareagent, we could have a senate that has as many senators as we have citizens.And those senators are going to be able to read every bill and they're going tobe able to vote on each one of them.

所以在二十一世纪有个显而易见的想法就跟雅卡尔时代把蒸汽发动机和织布机结合在一起的想法一样显而易见。这个想法就是把直接民主和软件代理结合在一起。试想一下，在一个世界里没有一个代表来代表你和一百多万其他人，你可以有一个代表只代表你自己，带着你的细微详尽的政治看法——那些自由意志派和自由派的奇特结合或许对某些问题看法有点小保守，或许对其他问题看法又非常超前。现在的政客都是打包的，他们充满了妥协。但你可以有人只代表你一个人，如果你不坚持那个代表一定是个人的话。如果那个代表是个软件代理，我们的参议院里面的参议员可以和我们的公民一样多。那些参议员有能力读每个法案，他们可以对每个法案投票。

08:39

So there's an obvious idea that maybe wewant to consider. But I understand that in this day and age, this idea might bequite scary. In fact, thinking of a robot coming from the future to help us runour governments sounds terrifying. But we've been there before.

所以这是个很明显的想法我们可以考虑。但我明白在这个时代，这个想法可能会显得很恐怖。实际上，想想一个来自未来的机器人帮助我们管理政府听起来就很可怕。但其实我们已经领略过了。

08:57

(Laughter)

（笑声）

08:59

And actually he was quite a nice guy.

实际上他人还不错的。

09:03

So what would the Jacquard loom version ofthis idea look like? It would be a very simple system. Imagine a system thatyou log in and you create your avatar, and then you're going to start trainingyour avatar. So you can provide your avatar with your reading habits, orconnect it to your social media, or you can connect it to other data, forexample by taking psychological tests. And the nice thing about this is thatthere's no deception. You are not providing data to communicate with yourfriends and family that then gets used in a political system. You are providingdata to a system that is designed to be used to make political decisions onyour behalf. Then you take that data and you choose a training algorithm,because it's an open marketplace in which different people can submit differentalgorithms to predict how you're going to vote, based on the data you haveprovided. And the system is open, so nobody controls the algorithms; there arealgorithms that become more popular and others that become less popular.Eventually, you can audit the system. You can see how your avatar is working.If you like it, you can leave it on autopilot. If you want to be a little morecontrolling, you can actually choose that they ask you every time they're goingto make a decision, or you can be anywhere in between. One of the reasons whywe use democracy so little may be because democracy has a very bad userinterface. And if we improve the user interface of democracy, we might be ableto use it more.

那雅卡尔织布机版本的这个想法会是什么样呢？其实这个系统会很简单。想象一个系统里你登录进去然后你建虚拟身份，然后你开始训练你的虚拟身份。你可以给它提供你的读书习惯，或者把它连到你的社交媒体上，或者把它连到其他数据上，比如说做心理测试题。这样的好处在于一切都很真实。你没有和你的朋友家人沟通时提供数据，然后被政治系统利用。你在给一个系统提供数据用来代表你自己做政治决定。你然后拿着这数据再挑选一个培训程序，因为这是个开放式市场，不同的人可以提供不同的程序，根据你提供的数据来预测你如何投票。因为系统是开放式的，所以没有人能控制程序；有的程序会变得很流行，有些会渐被遗忘。最后，你可以审计这个系统。你可以看你虚拟身份做的如何。如果你喜欢，你可以留着它自动驾驶。如果你想多些控制权，你可以选择每次它们做决定前都来先问你，或者你可以选择两者之间任何一点。我们极少实施民主的原因之一也许是因为民主有个很烂的用户界面。如果我们能改善民主的用户界面，我们或许能用的多一些。

10:28

Of course, there's a lot of questions thatyou might have. Well, how do you train these avatars? How do you keep the datasecure? How do you keep the systems distributed and auditable? How about mygrandmother, who's 80 years old and doesn't know how to use the internet? Trustme, I've heard them all. So when you think about an idea like this, you have tobeware of pessimists because they are known to have a problem for everysolution.

当然，你可能会有很多问题。嗯，你怎么培训这些虚拟身份？你如何保护数据？你如何让系统保持分散并且可以审计？还有我的八十岁的外婆她不会上网怎么办？相信我，这些问题我全听到过。所以当你考虑这样的想法，你得小心那些悲观者因为他们出了名的没有问题创造问题。

10:55

(Laughter)

（笑声）

10:57

So I want to invite you to think about thebigger ideas. The questions I just showed you are little ideas because they arequestions about how this would not work. The big ideas are ideas of: What elsecan you do with this if this would happen to work? And one of those ideas is,well, who writes the laws? In the beginning, we could have the avatars that wealready have, voting on laws that are written by the senators or politiciansthat we already have. But if this were to work, you could write an algorithmthat could try to write a law that would get a certain percentage of approval,and you could reverse the process. Now, you might think that this idea isludicrous and we should not do it, but you cannot deny that it's an idea thatis only possible in a world in which direct democracy and software agents are aviable form of participation.

所以我鼓励你们思考更大的想法。我刚刚提的那些问题都是小想法，因为它们都是关于这个想法怎么会砸锅。真正的大想法是：这个想法如果成功了的话，还适合做别的什么？还有一个大想法是，嗯，谁来负责立法？一开始的时候，我们可以用我们已经有了的虚拟身份，来投选现有的由参议员或政客写的法案。但如果这个想法成功了的话，你可以写个程序来撰写一个法案然后得到一定百分比的批准，你可以翻转这个流程。你可能在想这个主意太荒谬了，我们不该去做，但你不能否认当直接民主和软件代理成为一个可行的参与方式的时候，这个想法就变得可能。

11:52

So how do we start the revolution? We don'tstart this revolution with picket fences or protests or by demanding our currentpoliticians to be changed into robots. That's not going to work. This is muchmore simple, much slower and much more humble. We start this revolution bycreating simple systems like this in grad schools, in libraries, in nonprofits.And we try to figure out all of those little questions and those littleproblems that we're going to have to figure out to make this idea somethingviable, to make this idea something that we can trust. And as we create thosesystems that have a hundred people, a thousand people, a hundred thousandpeople voting in ways that are not politically binding, we're going to developtrust in this idea, the world is going to change, and those that are as littleas my daughter is right now are going to grow up. And by the time my daughteris my age, maybe this idea, that I know today is very crazy, might not be crazyto her and to her friends. And at that point, we will be at the end of ourhistory, but they will be at the beginning of theirs.

那我们怎样才能开始这场革命呢？我们不能从篱栅桩和游行开始，或者强求用机器人替代现在的政客。那是没法成功的。这是更简单，更缓慢也更加谦逊。我们通过在研究生院，在图书馆，在非盈利组织建立象这样的简单的系统，来开始这场革命。然后我们想办法解决那些小问题，和那些小挑战，我们需要克服它们，好让这个想法成为现实，好让这个想法变得可信。当我们建立起这些系统供几百人，几千人，以及几十万人不以政治挂钩的形式投票的时候，我们就会对这个想法产生信任，这个世界会变化，那些现在象我女儿一样小的会慢慢长大。当我的女儿长到我现在的年纪时，也许这个想法，我知道今天听起来是很疯狂，也许对她和她的朋友们就不一定很疯狂。到了那个时候，我们会到达我们历史的终点，但她们才开始她们的。

13:01

Thank you.

（谢谢大家）

13:02

(Applause)

（掌声）