在研究人机交互影响的四十年里，谢里·特克尔因以严谨的学术态度和一定的批判性开展社会科学研究而声名鹊起。
During four decades of studying the effects of interaction with computers, Sherry Turkle has developed a reputation as a careful if critical social scientist who approaches her work with academic rigor and distance.
她的新书《人工亲密：我们与机器对话时会成为什么样的人》打破了这一模式。书中警告，我们已陷入紧急状态，人类正因过度依赖假装成我们导师、导师、朋友、同事和恋人的无灵魂机器而面临风险。特克尔希望这本书能达到《寂静的春天》《丛林》《任何速度都是不安全的》那样的高度——唤醒公众对即将到来的危机的认识。
Her new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, breaks this mold. It is a polemic warning that we have reached a state of emergency where our humanity is at risk from overreliance on soulless machines who pose as our tutors, mentors, friends, colleagues, and lovers. Turkle is aiming for the high bar of books —Silent Spring, The Jungle, Unsafe at Any Speed—that awaken the public to impending crises.
实际上，这位身材矮小的麻省理工学院教授正在挑战一个由政府支持的万亿美元产业，该政府急切地希望将人工智能渗透到我们个人和职业生活的每一个角落。
Essentially, this diminutive MIT professor is taking on a multitrillion-dollar industry backed by a government eager to accelerate AI into every corner of our personal and professional lives.
斯蒂文·利维：你之前的书籍报道了你作为社会科学家的研究结果，常常得出令人担忧的结论——人们，尤其是儿童，如何与计算机互动。但这本书读起来像是你在打破玻璃并拉响火警。为什么会有这样的转变？
STEVEN LEVY: Your previous books reported results of your research as a social scientist, often leading to troubling conclusions about how people, especially children, interact with computers. But this book reads like you’re breaking the glass and pulling the fire alarm. Why the shift?
谢里·特克尔：就像我对待所有著作一样，我带着好奇心进入这次研究。但在疫情期间进行的十几次访谈之后，中性的好奇心已经不再是我的状态。这太可怕了！在这些疫情期间的人们身上，他们的家庭正在受苦，他们伸出援手，却告诉我他们真的只想和聊天机器人待在一起。当我能够面对面采访人们时，我并不高兴。人们不想参与政治，因为他们只想生活在聊天机器人的世界里。于是，这本书的脉络最终变成了——现实需要你。放弃现实此刻绝非良机。你写道，社交媒体为这种状况埋下了伏笔。
SHERRY TURKLE: Like I do with all my books, I went in curious. But after 10 or so interviews, conducted during the pandemic, neutral-curious was no longer my state of mind. This was terrible! Here are these people during the pandemic, their families are suffering, reaching out to them, and they're talking to me about how they really want to just hang with their chatbot. When I was able to interview people face to face, I was not happy. People don't want to do anything in politics because they just want to live in chatbot-land. So the arc of the book ended up as—reality needs you. It couldn't be a worse time to give up on reality. You write that social media set us up for this.
社交媒体通过让我们习惯于“如果你感到悲伤或沮丧，就打开电脑”这一想法来软化我们。随后它让我们愤怒，并让我们只与同类相处。但现在我们有了这项新技术，它没有理由必须以第一人称出现。你认为我们应该禁止聊天机器人使用第一人称吗？
Social media softened us up by getting us used to the idea that if you're feeling sad or blue, open up your computer. Then it made you mad and kept you with your own kind. But now we have this new technology that has no reason to be first-person. Do you think that we should ban chatbots from using the first person?
是的！在职业生涯中，我一直以不被视为反科技狂人而建立了可信度，我不想放弃这一切，也不想说所有聊天机器人都是有毒的，时时刻刻都有毒。但这非常危险，是一条滑坡。它被用来基本上说我们不需要为心理治疗付费，我们可以使用聊天机器人。在我进行的每一次严肃采访中，人们都会提到这个关于练习的神话——即你使用聊天机器人来练习与老板、恋人或老师交谈。但当你沉浸在来自大语言模型的完全接受的温暖汤汁中时，与聊天机器人的交谈就成了终局。
Yes! After a career of having credibility as not being Luddite-crazy, I'm not in the mood to give all that away and say all chatbots are toxic all the time. But this is very dangerous, a slippery slope. This is being used to basically say we don't need to pay for psychotherapy, we can use chatbots. In every serious interview I do, people invoke this myth about practice—that you use chatbots to practice for talking to your boss, your lover, your teacher. But when you’re bathing in the warm soup of total acceptance [from LLMs], talking to chatbots becomes the endgame.
你也对工作场所中对聊天机器人的依赖有问题，并且特别厌恶“人在回路中”这个术语。当他们使用这个术语时，意味着人类已经被从生产过程中移除，只是在那里做某种清理工作，以捕捉幻觉或AI未能看到的东西。这行不通，因为雇主只会在回路中安排一两个人。这些人基本上无法改变任何东西。他们在那里部分是为了在诉讼时听起来合理，部分是为了让人们误以为这个过程没有被委托给AI。但事实上，它已经被委托给了AI。
You also have a problem with reliance on chatbots in the workplace, and a particular loathing for the term “human in the loop.”When they use that term, it means the human has been taken out of the productive process and is there to do some sort of cleanup work, to catch the hallucinations or things the AI doesn’t see. That doesn't work, because employers only have a couple of humans in the loop. Those people basically can't change anything. They are there partly to make it sound good when they're litigated, and partly to give people a false sense that the process hasn't been delegated to an AI. But it has been delegated to an AI.
也许强大的聊天机器人是一种新的互动形式，它不一定比人类对话更糟，只是不同，因为人们报告说，他们因聊天机器人提供的积极反馈而感到被鼓舞和被赋予力量。
Maybe powerful chatbots are a new form of interaction that isn’t necessarily worse than human conversation, but different, as people report feeling encouraged and empowered by the positive feedback they provide.
人工智能永远不会取代人类的对话。它真的不怕死亡，不怕疾病，不怕疼痛，它不爱自己的孩子，也不在乎你是自杀还是做晚餐。所以如果我们用它来抚养孩子，或者用它进行最私密的对话，我们将会失去联系。
An AI won't ever replace human conversation. It’s really not afraid of death, it’s not afraid of illness, it's not afraid of pain, it doesn't love its children, and it doesn't care if you kill yourself or make dinner. So if we raise our kids with it, or have our most intimate conversations with it, we're going to lose contact.
然而，很多人没有人可以交谈。他们觉得和聊天机器人交谈有帮助。
Still, a lot of people have nobody to talk to. They feel that talking to chatbots helps them.
如果存在孤独的危机，那是因为我们正在彼此抛弃。给我一个数据中心，我就能把它变成为老年人服务的资源。
If there's a crisis of loneliness, it's because we're abandoning each other. Give me one data center, and I will turn it into resources for the elderly.
研究表明，大多数人对人工智能持怀疑态度，并且出现了相当大的反对声音。然而，数亿人仍在使用它们。即使是反对数据中心建设的人，也在使用聊天机器人。这本书的目标是将反对的范围扩大，以包括这种更亲密的联系。你真的觉得我们与人工智能日益增长的亲密关系可以被阻止吗？
Studies show that most people are skeptical about AI, and there has been considerable pushback. Yet hundreds of millions of people use them. Even people who push back against data centers are using chatbots. The goal of this book is to expand the terms of the pushback to include this more intimate connection. Do you really feel that our growing intimacy with AI can be stopped?
现在我比六个月前更有希望，因为有这么多关于灭绝事件、Hugging Face以及误入澳大利亚公务员体系的讨论。我觉得人们愿意审视亲密方面的成本，也愿意审视非亲密方面的成本。
I have more hope now than I did six months ago, because of all of this talk about extinction events and Hugging Face and getting into the Australian civil service by mistake. I feel that people will be willing to look at the intimate as well as the non-intimate costs.
这是Steven Levy和Lauren Goode的《Backchannel》通讯的一个版本。
This is an edition of Steven Levy’s and Lauren Goode's Backchannel newsletter.