《AI 3.0》美拉尼·密歇尔(著) 中文版序

It is very exciting for me to have my book published in Chinese.  I have long felt a strong kinship with the Chinese people and language. In the late 1980s, I had the opportunity to spend some time at Peking University, learning some Chinese and interacting with the team of people creating a Chinese translation of Gödel, Escher, Bach, a famous book by my PhD advisor, Douglas Hofstadter.  Translating Hofstadter's book into Chinese was an enormously ambitious project, in part due to the complexity of rendering the book's ubiquitous English word play into equally playful Chinese, and I was in awe of the creativity of the translation team in carrying this out.

我的书以中文来出版对我来说是一件非常激动人心的事情。长期以来，我一直觉得和中国人民以及中文十分投缘。在20世纪80年代，我有机会在北京大学待了一段时间，学习了一些汉语并和创造了《哥德尔，艾舍尔和巴赫》一书—一本由我的博士导师道格拉斯·霍夫斯塔德撰写的著作—中文译本的团队的人进行交流。把霍夫斯塔德的书翻译成中文是一项雄心勃勃的工程，部分原因在于把这本书通篇的英文文字发挥为同样好玩的中文文字的复杂性，我由此而敬畏翻译团队来执行这项工作的创造力。

In 2019, Professor Fei-Yue Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences visited me in my office in Portland, Oregon. I was very happy to learn that Professor Wang, a distinguished AI researcher, was coordinating the Chinese translation of my book.  We discussed how translating my book into Chinese would also be a complicated undertaking, especially the chapters that focus on AI approaches to natural language processing, which discuss many subtle points about nature of language itself.  I am thrilled with the ability of the translators who have faithfully captured the content and spirit of my English text into Chinese.

中国科学院的王飞跃教授于2019年拜访了我在俄勒冈州波特兰的办公室。我非常高兴地了解到王教授—一位杰出的人工智能研究人员—在协调推动把我的书翻译为中文。我们讨论了如何翻译我的书也将也是一项复杂的工作，特别是那些聚焦用AI方法来进行自然语言处理的章节，其中讨论了许多关于语言本身的微妙之处。我对本书的翻译者们忠实地捕捉到了我英文文本中要表达的文字内容和精髓、并将其传达到中文中的能力而感到非常激动！

Some readers of this book may have also read the Chinese translation of my previous book, Complexity: A Guided Tour, and might wonder about the relation between the two books. The Complexity book was a broad survey of the science of Complex Systems—the study of how complex behavior arises from the interaction among relatively simple components, with examples ranging from genetic networks and insect colonies to human intelligence and society.  The book you are reading now focuses less broadly but more deeply on some of the most difficult questions of complexity science: What is the nature of intelligence? How are researchers attempting to create intelligent machines? How do we judge their success? And how far are today’s machines from actually being able to understand the world as humans do? 

本书的一些读者可能读过我之前出版的一本书的中文译本，《复杂（Complexity: A Guided Tour）》，并且可能会想知道两本书之间的关系。《复杂》这本书是对复杂系统科学—关于复杂行为如何从相对简单的组件中产生—的一个广泛调查。而您正在阅读的这本书，关注的少了一些宽度但是更深度地聚焦于复杂科学中的一些最难的问题：智能的本质是什么？研究者们如何试着来创建智能机器？我们如何评判他们的成功？今天的机器距离真正像人一样来理解世界还有多远？

This book is meant to be accessible to anyone.  You don't have to know any computer science or mathematics to read it; the only requirement is an interest in learning about how today’s AI works, how it is applied, and how far it has to go before we can honestly call it “intelligent”.  This book is one among many recent books about AI, but I believe that it is the only book that explains in a deep but accessible way how current AI methods actually work, what they have achieved, what limitations they have, and what central properties of human cognition still remain outside the abilities of all modern AI approaches.  Understanding these factors is essential for all of us, as citizens, to know the extent to which we can trust the AI applications that are increasingly impacting all of our lives.  I hope that you, the reader, find the journey through this book enlightening and that it helps you appreciate both how far AI has come and the distance that remains for it to go.

这本书旨在让任何人都能理解。你不需要知道任何计算机科学或者数学的知识来读懂它，唯一需要的是具有学习—当今之AI如何工作、它如何来应用、以及在我们可以诚实地称它是“智能的”之前，它还有多远须要走—的兴趣。这本书是与AI相关的众多近来出版书籍中的一本，但我相信，它是唯一一本以一种深度但又可接受的方式来讲清楚当下的AI方法实际上如何运作的、它们取得了什么成就、它们受什么限制、以及人类认知的什么核心属性仍然还在所有当代AI方法的能力所及之外。作为国家公民，理解这些情况，对于我们所有人—知道应该在多大程度上信任这些在日渐增加对我们所有人的生活之影响的AI应用—来说，都很必要。我希望你，亲爱的读者，发现阅读本书的过程是引人启发的，并且帮助你欣赏AI已经走了多远，以及它还有多远的距离要走。

Melanie Mitchell

美拉尼·密歇尔

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

圣塔菲，新墨西哥，美国

October, 2020

10月，2020