2018考博英语阅读经济学人文章每日精析：人工智能

　　Young Chinese appear particularly keen on AI-powered services and relaxed about use of their data. Xiaoice, an upbeat chatbot operated by Microsoft, now has more than 100m Chinese users. Most talk to it between 11pm and 3am, often about the problems they had during the day. It is learning from interactions and becoming cleverer. Xiaoice no longer just provides encouragement and tells jokes, but has created the first collection of poems written with AI, “Sunshine Lost Its Window”, which caused a heated debate in Chinese literary circles over whether there can be such a thing as artificial poetry.

　　年轻的中国人似乎尤其热衷由人工智能驱动的服务，对于自身数据被使用也比较淡然。微软运营的聊天机器人、阳光正向的小冰如今有超过一亿个中国用户，多数都是在晚上11点到凌晨3点和它聊天，通常都是谈论自己在白天遇到的问题。小冰从互动中学习，过程中又变得更聪明。如今它不再只是给人鼓励和讲笑话，还运用人工智能创作出了首部诗集——《阳光失了玻璃窗》。中国的文学界为此展开了激烈的争论，探讨人工智能生成的诗歌算不算诗歌。

　　Another important source of support for AI in China is the government. The technology figures prominently in the country’s current five-year plan. Technology firms are working closely with government agencies: Baidu, for example, has been asked to lead a national laboratory for deep learning. It is unlikely that the government will burden AI firms with over-strict regulation. The country has more than 40 laws containing rules about the protection of personal data, but these are rarely enforced.

　　中国的人工智能还有一个重要的支持力量：政府。在该国当前的五年计划中，科技是其中的重点。科技公司正与政府部门开展密切的合作，例如，百度已受命领导一个深度学习的国家级实验室。政府也不大可能用过于严格的监管增加人工智能公司的负担。中国有40多部法律包含了个人数据保护规则，但很少执行。

　　Entrepreneurs are taking advantage of China’s talent and data strengths. Many AI firms got going only a year or two ago, but plenty have been progressing more rapidly than their Western counterparts. “Chinese AI startups often iterate and execute more quickly,” explains Kai-Fu Lee, who ran Google’s subsidiary in China in the 2000s and now leads Sinovation Ventures, a venture-capital fund.

　　创业者正在利用中国的人才及数据优势。许多人工智能公司一两年前才开始运营，但其中有不少公司发展速度都快过西方的同类。李开复解释说，“中国的AI创业公司通常有更快的迭代及执行速度。”他在本世纪初曾负责管理谷歌在中国的子公司，如今领导风险投资基金创新工场。

　　As a result, China already has a herd of AI unicorns, meaning startups valued at more than $1bn. Toutiao, a news aggregator based in Beijing, employs machine learning to recommend articles using information such as a reader’s interests and location; it also uses AI to filter out fake information (which in China mainly means dubious health-care announcements). Another AI startup, iFlytek, has developed a voice assistant that translates Mandarin into several languages, including English and German, even if the speaker uses slang and talks over background noise. And Megvii Technology’s face-recognition software, Face++, identifies people almost instantaneously.

　　结果是，中国已经出现了一批人工智能独角兽公司，即估值超过十亿美元的创业公司。总部位于北京的新闻聚合器“头条新闻”根据读者的兴趣及位置，利用机器学习来推荐文章，还运用人工智能过滤掉虚假信息(在中国，这类信息主要是各种可疑的养生资讯)。另一家人工智能创业公司科大讯飞开发了一款语音助手，可将普通话翻译成包括英语和德语在内的若干种语言，即使说话者话语间夹杂俚语或背景有杂音也没影响。旷视科技的人脸识别软件Face++几乎可以瞬间将人识别出来。

　　Skynet lives

　　“天网”恢恢

　　At Megvii’s headquarters, visitors are treated to a demonstration. A video camera in the lobby does away with the need for showing ID: employees just walk in without showing their badges. Similar devices are positioned all over the office and their feeds are shown on a video wall. When a face pops up on the wall, it is immediately surrounded by a white rectangle and some text giving information about that person. In the upper right-hand corner of the screen big letters spell “Skynet”, the name of the AI system in the Terminator films that seeks to exterminate the human race. The firm already enables Alipay and Didi, a ride-hailing firm, to check the identity of new customers (their faces are compared with pictures held by the government).

　　在旷视科技的总部，公司向来访者做了一番演示。大堂里的一个摄像机省去了展示身份证件的必要：员工不用出示工作牌就可进入公司。办公楼各处都安置了类似的装置，其所收集的数据显示在一面视频墙上。当墙上跳出一张人脸时，周围立刻就出现一个白色方框，以及关于这个人的一些文字信息。屏幕的右上角，几个大大的字母拼写出“Skynet”(天网)，也就是《终结者》系列电影中那个试图消灭人类的人工智能系统的名字。旷视科技已向支付宝以及网约车公司滴滴提供支持，帮助它们核查新客户的身份(将他们的面孔与政府持有的照片做对比)。

　　Reacting to the success of such startups, China’s tech giants, too, have begun to invest heavily in AI. Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, collectively called BAT, are working on many of the same services, including speech- and face-recognition. But they are also trying to become dominant in specific areas of AI, based on their existing strengths.

　　眼见创业公司取得了成功，中国的科技巨头也开始大举投资人工智能。百度、阿里巴巴和腾讯(合称为BAT)正在开发许多类似的服务，包括语音及人脸识别。不过它们也在试图利用现有优势成为特定人工智能领域里的主导力量。

　　Tencent has so far kept the lowest profile; it established its AI labs only in recent months. But it is bound to develop a big presence in AI: it has more data than the other two. Its WeChat messenger service has nearly 1bn accounts and is also the platform for thousands of services, from payments and news to city guides and legal help. Tencent is also a world-beater in games with blockbusters such as League of Legends and Clash of Clans, which have more than 100m players each globally.

　　目前来看，腾讯最为低调，直到最近几个月才建立起自己的人工智能实验室。不过它拥有的数据比百度和阿里巴巴都要多，势必会在人工智能领域占据重要地位。其即时通讯服务微信有近10亿用户，同时还是数千种服务的平台，例如支付、新闻、城市指南以及法律咨询等。腾讯还是全球最大的游戏公司，其大热游戏《英雄联盟》和《部落冲突》在全球的玩家都超过一亿人。

　　Alibaba is already a behemoth in e-commerce and is investing billions to become number one in cloud computing. At a conference in June in Shanghai it showed off an AI service called “ET City Brain” that uses video recognition to optimise traffic in real time. It uses footage from roadside cameras to predict the behaviour of cars and can adjust traffic lights on the spot. In its home town of Hangzhou, Alibaba claims, the system has already increased the average speed of traffic by 11%. Alibaba is also planning to beef up what it calls “ET Medical Brain”, which will offer AI-powered services to discover drugs and diagnose medical images. It has signed up a dozen hospitals to get the data it needs.

　　已是电商巨头的阿里巴巴正豪掷数十亿元，力争在云计算领域取得领先。6月于上海举行的一次会议上，阿里巴巴展示了一项名为“ET城市大脑”的人工智能服务，可利用视频识别来实时优化交通。该服务运用路边摄像头拍摄的视频片段来预测车辆的行为，即刻调整交通信号灯。阿里巴巴声称，在其总部所在地杭州，该系统使交通的平均速度提高了11%。该公司还计划加强其“ET医疗大脑”系统，提供各种人工智能服务来帮助研发新药和诊断医学影像。为获取所需数据，公司已与十几家医院签约。

　　But it is Baidu whose fate is most tied to AI, in part because the technology may be its main chance to catch up with Alibaba and Tencent. It is putting most of its resources into autonomous driving: it wants to get a self-driving car onto the market by 2018 and to provide technology for fully autonomous vehicles by 2020. On July 5th the firm announced a first version of its self-driving-car software, called Apollo, at a developer conference in Beijing.

　　不过，自身命运与人工智能最休戚相关的还是百度，这在某种程度上是因为这项技术也许是它追上阿里巴巴和腾讯的主要机会。如今它将大部分资源都投入到了自动驾驶技术上，目标是在2018年前将无人驾驶汽车投放市场，到2020年为全自动驾驶汽车提供技术。7月5日，百度在北京的一次开发者大会上推出了其首款自动驾驶汽车软件“阿波罗”。

　　Getting Apollo right will not only involve cars safely navigating the streets, but managing a project that is open to outsiders. Rivals such as Waymo, Google’s subsidiary, and Tesla, an electric-car firm, jealously guard their software and the data they collect. Baidu is planning not only to publish the recipe for its programs (making them “open-source”, in the jargon), but to share data. The idea is that carmakers that use Baidu’s technology will do the same, creating an open platform for data from self-driving cars—the “Android for autonomous vehicles”, in the words of Mr Lu.

　　阿波罗系统不仅涉及安全行驶汽车，还要管理一个向外部人士开放的项目。竞争对手如谷歌的子公司Waymo和电动汽车公司特斯拉都对自己的软件和收集来的数据严防死守。而百度不仅计划公开自己项目的“秘方”(用行话说就是将它们“开源”)，还计划共享数据。百度的设想是，采用百度技术的汽车制造商也会效法，从而打造出一个无人驾驶汽车数据的开放平台——用陆奇的话说，就是“自动驾驶汽车领域的安卓系统”。

通用考博英语精品课程【节选】-1元领！

摸清考试命脉，有技巧有方法有准备地进入到考博英语中。