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人脑上传与虚拟意识:未来数字化生活的全景分析

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本文从未来数字化生活的视角,探讨人脑上传技术与虚拟意识的可能性。通过分析M(上传人脑副本)的行为、生活方式及社会结构,揭示虚拟世界中速度、资源与生存的关系,并结合TED演讲素材提升英语听力能力。

小技巧:选中单词后按放大器可以翻译单词哦

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精选100篇经典TED演讲,时长8-15分钟,内容涵盖创新、成长与未来趋势。提供MP3在线播放、下载及英文文本,助你提升听力与口语。用思想的力量,点燃学习热情!下面是本期【TED】100篇经典演讲口语听力素材合集的内容,坚持积累,让你的英语更贴近生活!

Some day we may have robots as smart as people. Artificial intelligence, AI, how could that happen? One route is that we'll just keep accumulating better software like we've been doing for 70 years at past rates of progress that may take centuries. Some say it'll happen a lot faster as we discover grand new powerful theories of intelligence. I'm skeptical but a third scenario is what I'm going to talk about today. The idea is to port the software from the human brain. To do this we're going to need three technologies to be good enough and none of them are there yet. First we're going to need lots of cheap fast parallel computers. Second we're going to need to scan individual human brains and find spatial and chemical detail to see exactly what cells are where connected or what type. And third we're going to need computer models about how each kind of brain cell works, taking input signals, changing internal state, and sending output signals. We have good enough models of all the kinds of brain cells and a good enough model of the brain; we can put it together to make a good enough model of an entire brain and that model would have the same input-output behavior as the original.

People have been talking about this idea for decades under the name of uploads; I want to call them M's. When they talk about it they ask: is this even possible? If you made one would it be conscious or is it just an empty machine? If you made one of me, is that me or someone else? These are all fascinating questions that I'm going to ignore because I see a neglected question: what would actually happen? I became obsessed with this question. I spent four years trying to analyze it using standard academic tools to guess what would happen, and I'm here to tell you what I found. But be warned: I'm not offering inspiration, I'm offering analysis. I see my job as telling you what's most likely to happen if we did the least to avoid it. If you aren't at least a bit disturbed by something I tell you here, you're just not paying attention.

The first thing I can tell you is that M has been most of their life in virtual reality. This is what you might look like if you were using virtual reality, and this is what you might see: sunlight limping off of water, goals flying above, you might even feel the wind on your cheeks or smell sea water with advanced hardware. Now, if you spend a lot of time here, you might want a dashboard where you could do things like make a phone call, move to a new virtual world, or check your bank account. While this is what you would look like in virtual reality, this is what an M would look like when virtual reality. It's computer hardware sitting in a server rack somewhere, but it could still see and experience the same thing. Some things are different for M's. First, while you'll probably always notice that virtual reality isn't entirely real, to an M it can feel as real to them as this room feels to you now or as anything ever feels. And M's also have more action possibilities. For example, your mind just always runs at the same speed, but an M can add more or less computer hardware to run faster or slower and therefore, if the world around them seems to be going too fast, they can just speed up their mind and the world around them will seem to slow down.

In addition, an M can make a copy of itself at that moment. This copy will remember everything the same, and if it starts out with the same speed, it may even be told it is the copy. And M can make archive copies; with enough redundant archives, an M can be immortal, in principle though not usually in practice. And an M can move its brain, the computer that represents its brain, from one physical location to another. M's can actually move around the world at the speed of light, and by moving to a new location they can interact more quickly with M's near that new location. So far I've been talking about what M's can do. What do M's choose to do? To understand that, we need to understand three key facts. First, M's by definition do what the human they emulate would do in the same situation. So their lives and behaviors are very human. They're mainly different because they're living in a different world.

Second, M's need real resources to survive. You need food and shelter or you'll die. Also, M's need computer hardware, energy, and cooling or they can't exist. For every subjective minute that an M experiences, someone usually had to work to pay for it. Third, M's report. The M population can grow quicker than the M economy, so that means wages fall down to M's subsistence levels. That means M's have to be working most of the time. So that means this is what M's usually see: beautiful and luxurious, but desks. They're working most of the time. Now, a subsistence wage scenario might seem exotic and strange, but it's actually the usual case in human history and it's how pretty much all wild animals have ever lived. Humans basically do what it takes to survive. And this is what lets me say so much about the M world.

When creatures are rich like you, you have to know a lot about what they want to figure out what they do. When creatures are poor, you know that they mostly do what it takes to survive. So we've been talking about the M world from the point of view of the M's, and now let's step back and look at their whole world. First, the M world grows much faster than ours, roughly a hundred times faster. So the same amount of change we would experience in a century or two, they would experience in a year or two. Second, the typical emulation runs even faster, roughly a thousand times human speed. So for them, they experience thousands of years in this year or two, and for them the world around M's actually changes more slowly than your world seems to change for you. Third, M's are crammed together in a small number of very dense areas. This is not only how they see themselves in virtual reality, it's also how they actually are physically crammed together. So at M speeds, physical travel feels really painfully slow. Most M cities are self-sufficient. Most war is cyber war, and most of the rest of the Earth away from the M cities is less important to humans because the M's really aren't that interested in it.

Humans must retire at once or soon. They just can't compete. Humans start out owning all of the capital in this world and the economy grows very fast. Their wealth grows very fast. Humans get rich collectively. Most humans today don't actually own that much besides their ability to work. So between now and then they need to acquire sufficient assets, insurance, or sharing arrangements, or they may starve. Now you might wonder why would M's let humans exist? Why not kill them and take their stuff? But notice we have many unproductive retirees around us today. We don't kill them and take their stuff. In part, that's because it would disrupt the institutions we share with them. Other groups would wonder who's next. So plausibly, M's may well let humans retire in peace during the age of M. You should worry more that the age of M only lasts a year or two and you don't know what happens next.

M's are very much like humans, but they are not like the typical human. The typical M is a copy of the few hundred most productive humans. So in fact they are as elite compared to the typical human as a typical billionaire, Nobel Prize winner, medalist, or head of state. M's look on humans perhaps with nostalgia and gratitude but not so much respect, which is similar to how you think about your ancestors. We know many things about how humans differ in terms of productivity. We can just use those to predict features of M's: for example, they tend to be smart, conscientious, hardworking, married, religious, middle-aged. M world also contains enormous variety. Not only does it continue with most of the kinds of variety that humans do, including variety of industry and profession, they also have many new kinds of variety. One of the most important is mind speed. M's can plausibly go from human speed up to a million times faster than human speed and down to a billion times slower than human speed. Faster M's tend to have markers of high status, embody more wealth, win arguments, and sit at premium locations. Slower M's are mostly retirees and they are like the ghosts of our literature. If you recall, ghosts are all around us. You can interact with them if you pay the price, but they don't know much and can't influence much, and they're obsessed with the past.

What's the point? M's also have more variety in the structure of their lives. This is your life. You start in the UN. This is the life of an M who every day lets off some short-term copies to do short-term tasks and then ends. This M will talk more about those short-term task versions in a moment, but they are much more efficient because they don't have to rest for the next day. This M is more opportunistic. They make more copies than cells when there's more demand for that. They don't know which way their future is going. This is an M designer who conceives a large system and then breaks it recursively into copies who elaborate that so M's can implement larger, more careful designs. This is an organization plumber who remembers that every day for the last 20 years they only ever worked two hours a day. A life of leisure. But what really happened is every day it had a thousand copies, each of whom did a two-hour plumbing job, and only one of them went on to the next day. Objectively they're working well over 99% of the time. Subjectively they remember a life of leisure. This could be you. You start in UN. Some people do this, taking a drug that meant they would not remember that party ever after that day. Towards the end of the party, will you say to yourself 'I'm about to die, this is terrible, that person tomorrow isn't me because they won't remember what I do'? Or you could say 'I will go on tomorrow; I just don't remember what I did.' This is an M who splits off a short-term copy to do a short-term task, and they have the same two attitude possibilities. They can say 'I'm a new short-term creature with a short life; I hate this.' Or they can say 'I am part of a larger creature who won't remember this part.' I predict they'll have that second attitude not because it's philosophically correct but because it helps them get along in this world.

部分单词释义

  • accumulate

    及物/不及物动词堆积,积累

    不及物动词(数量)逐渐增加,(质量)渐渐提高

    1. 堆积;积累;积聚
    When you accumulate things or when they accumulate, they collect or are gathered over a period of time.

    e.g. Households accumulate wealth across a broad spectrum of assets...
    家庭在以各种各样的资产形式积累财富。
    e.g. Lead can accumulate in the body until toxic levels are reached.
    铅会在体内积聚直至造成铅中毒。

  • substance

    名词物质,材料; 实质,内容; [神]灵; (织品的)质地

    1. 物质;物品;东西
    A substance is a solid, powder, liquid, or gas with particular properties.

    e.g. There's absolutely no regulation of cigarettes to make sure that they don't include poisonous substances...
    根本没有法规来确保香烟不含有毒物质。
    e.g. The substance that's causing the problem comes from the barley.
    引起该问题的物质来自大麦。

    2. 重要性;重大意义
    Substance is the quality of being important or significant.

    e.g. It's questionable whether anything of substance has been achieved...
    是否已经取得了任何实质性进展还是个问题。
    e.g. Syria will attend only if the negotiations deal with issues of substance.
    只有在谈判涉及重大问题时叙利亚才会参加。

    3. 主旨;要点;实质;基本内容
    The substance of what someone says or writes is the main thing that they are trying to say.

    e.g. The substance of his discussions doesn't really matter.
    他讨论的要点实际上根本不重要。

    4. 事实基础;根据
    If you say that something has no substance, you mean that it is not true.

    e.g. There is no substance in any of these allegations.
    这些指控都毫无根据。

    5. 财力雄厚的;有权有势的;有影响力的
    A person of substance has a lot of money, power, or influence.

    e.g. ...mature men of substance.
    有钱有势的成熟男人

  • density

    名词密度; 稠密,浓厚; [物]浓度,比重; 愚钝

    1. 密度;稠密;密集
    Density is the extent to which something is filled or covered with people or things.

    e.g. ...a law which restricts the density of housing...
    限制房屋密集程度的法规
    e.g. The region has a very high population density.
    该地区的人口密度很高。

    2. (物质或物体的)密度
    In science, the density of a substance or object is the relation of its mass or weight to its volume.

    e.g. Jupiter's moon Io, whose density is 3.5 grams per cubic centimetre, is all rock.
    密度为每立方厘米 3.5 克的木星卫星木卫一上遍布岩石。

  • variety

    名词多样; 种类; 杂耍; 变化,多样化

    1. 变化;多样化
    If something has variety, it consists of things which are different from each other.

    e.g. Susan's idea of freedom was to have variety in her life style...
    苏珊心目中的自由就是拥有丰富多彩的生活。
    e.g. I know no store anywhere in the world that has such variety and display...
    我不知道世界上还有哪个商店的经营品种如此繁多,陈列如此美观。

    2. 各式各样;多种多样
    A variety of things is a number of different kinds or examples of the same thing.

    e.g. West Hampstead has a variety of good shops and supermarkets...
    西汉普斯特德有各种各样不错的店铺和超级市场。
    e.g. The island offers such a wide variety of scenery and wildlife...
    这个岛屿拥有丰富多样的景致及种类繁多的野生动植物。

    3. 品种;种类
    A variety of something is a type of it.

    e.g. I'm always pleased to try out a new variety...
    我一直乐于尝试新产品。
    e.g. She has 12 varieties of old-fashioned roses.
    她有12种双花玫瑰。

    4. 综艺表演;综艺节目
    Variety is a type of entertainment which includes many different kinds of acts in the same show.

    e.g. ...a variety show of music, comedy, and magic.
    汇集了音乐、喜剧及魔术表演的一档综艺节目

  • immortal

    形容词不死的; 永恒的,不朽的; 神的; 流芳百世的

    名词神仙; 流芳百世的人; 不朽的作家

    1. 不朽的;流芳百世的
    Someone or something that is immortal is famous and likely to be remembered for a long time.

    e.g. ...the immortal Reverend Dr Spooner.
    不朽的斯普纳牧师
    e.g. ...Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte's immortal love story...
    《呼啸山庄》,艾米莉·勃朗特不朽的爱情小说

    immortality
    Some people want to achieve immortality through their works.
    有些人想通过其作品流芳百世。
  • emulate

    及物动词仿真; 竞争; 努力赶上

    1. (因为钦慕而)仿效,模仿
    If you emulate something or someone, you imitate them because you admire them a great deal.

    e.g. Sons are traditionally expected to emulate their fathers.
    历来认为儿子会仿效父亲。

    emulation
    ...a role model worthy of emulation.
    值得仿效的楷模