It was a cold March day in High Point, North Carolina. The girls on the Wesleyan Academy softball were waiting for their next turns at bat during practice, stamping their feet to stay warm, Eighth-grader Taylor Bisbee shivered a little as she watched her teammate Paris White play. The two didn’t know each other well —Taylor had just moved to town a month or so before.

北卡罗莱纳州海角市三月寒冷的一天，卫斯理学院垒球队的女孩们在练习时跺脚取暖，等待下一轮击球，八年级的泰勒·比斯比看着她的队友帕里斯·怀特打球时，有一点颤抖。这两人彼此不太了解——泰勒大约一个月前刚搬到城里。

Suddenly, Paris fell to the ground,“Paris’s eye rolled back,” Taylor says. “She started shaking . I knew it was an emergency.”

突然，帕里斯倒在地上，“帕里斯的眼睛向后转，”泰勒说，“她开始发抖，我知道这很紧急。”

It certainly was, Paris had suffered a sudden heart failure. Without immediate medical care, Paris would die. “Does anyone know CPR?”

的确，帕里斯突然心力衰竭。如果不能马上进行医疗护理，帕里斯就会死。”有人会心肺复苏术吗？”

CPR is a life-saving technique. To do CPR, you press on the sick person’s chest so that blood moves through the body and takes oxygen to organs. Without oxygen the brain is damaging quickly.

心肺复苏术是一种拯救生命的技术。做心肺复苏术时，你按压病人的胸部，使血液在体内流动，并将氧气输送到器官。没有氧气，大脑很快就会受损。

Amazingly, Taylor had just taken a CPR course the day before. Still, she hesitated. She didn’t think she knew it well enough. But when no one else came forward, Taylor ran to Paris and began doing CPR, “It was scary. I knew it was the difference between life and death,” says Taylor.

令人惊喜的是，泰勒前一天刚刚参加了心肺复苏课程。尽管如此，她有些犹豫，她认为自己还不熟练。但当没有其他人站出来时，泰勒跑到帕里斯身边开始做心肺复苏术，“太可怕了，我知道这是生死一线，”泰勒说。

Taylor’s swift action helped her teammates calm down. One girl called 911. Two more ran to get the school nurse, who brought a defibrillator, an electronic devices that can shock the heart back into work. Luck stayed with them: Paris’ heartbeat returned.

泰勒的迅速行动让她的队友们冷静了下来。一个女孩打了911，另外两个跑去找学校的护士，护士带来了一个除颤器——一种可以让心脏重新投入工作的电子设备。幸运与他们同在：帕里斯的心跳恢复了。

“I know I was really lucky,” Paris say now. “Most people don’t survive this. My team saved my life.”

“我知道我真的很幸运，”帕里斯现在说，“大多数人都不能活下来，我的团队救了我。”

Experts say Paris is right: For a sudden heart failure, the single best chance for survival is having someone nearby step in and do CPR quickly.

专家们说帕里斯很幸运：对于突发性心力衰竭来说，仅有的最好的生存机会是让附近的人介入并快速进行心肺复苏。

Today, Paris is back on the softball team. Taylor will apply to college soon. She wants to be a nurse. “I feel more confident in my actions now,” Taylor says. “I know I can act under pressure in a scary situation.”

现在，帕里斯又回到了垒球队。泰勒不久将申请上大学，她想成为一名护士。”“我现在对自己的行为更有信心，”泰勒说，“我知道，在情况危急下，我可以承受住压力。”

Hollywood’s theory that machines with evil minds will drive armies of killer robots is just silly. The real problem relates to the possibility that artificial intelligence(AI) may become extremely good at achieving something other than what we really want. In 1960 a well-known mathematician NorbertWiener, who founded the field of cybernetics, put it this way: “If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we can not effectively interfere, we had better be quite sure that the purpose which we really desire.”

好莱坞的理论认为有着邪恶头脑的机器会成为杀手机器人大军，这太愚蠢了。这一可能性的真正问题在于，AI（人工智能）可能会变得非常擅长于实现某些东西，不仅是我们真正想要的。1960年，著名数学家诺伯特维纳创立了控制论领域, 提到：“如果我们为了达到我们的目的而使用一种我们无法有效干预其运作的机械装置，我们最好确定我们真正想要的目的。”

A machine with a specific purpose has another quality, one that we usually associate with living things: a wish to preserve its own existence. For the machine, this quality is not in-born, nor is it something introduced by humans; it is a logical consequence of the simple fact that the machine can not achieve its original purpose if it is dead. So if we send out a robot with the single instruction of fetching coffee, it will have a strong desire to secure success by disabling its own off switch or even killing anyone who might interfere with its task. If we are not careful, then, we could face a kind of global chess match against very determined, super intelligent machines whose objectives conflict with our own, with the real world as the chess board.

有特定目的的机器还有另一种特性，我们通常把它与生物联系在一起：希望保留自己的存在。对于机器来说，这种特性不是天生的，也不是由人类引入的；如果机器死了，就无法达到其原始目的，这就是这一简单事实的逻辑化结果。因此，如果我们给机器人发送一条取咖啡的简单指令，它就会有强烈的愿望，禁止关闭自己的开关，甚至杀死任何可能干扰其任务的人，来确保成功。如果我们不小心，那么，我们可能会面临一场全球象棋比赛，棋盘就是现实世界，对手是异常坚定，其目标与我们的目标冲突的超级智能机器。

The possibility of entering into and losing such a match should concentrating the minds of computer scientists. Some researchers argue that we can seal the machines inside a kind of firewall, using them to answer difficult questions but never allowing them to affect the real world. Unfortunately, that plan seems unlikely to work: we have yet to invent a firewall that is secure against ordinary humans, let alone super intelligent machines.

参加并输掉这样一场比赛的可能性应该会引起计算机科学家的注意。一些研究人员认为，我们可以将这些机器密封在一种防火墙内，用它们解决困难的问题，但决不允许它们影响现实世界。不幸的是，这一计划似乎不太可能实现：我们还没有发明一种防火墙来保护普通人，更不用说超级智能机器了。

Solving the safety problem well enough to move forward in AI seems to be possible but not easy. There are probably decades in which to plan for the arrival of super intelligent machines. But the problem should not be dismissed out of hand, as it has been by some AI researchers. Some argue that humans and machines can coexist as long as they work in teams—yet that is not possible unless machines share the goals of humans. Others say we can just “switch them off” as if super intelligent machines are too stupid to think of that possibility. Still others think that super intelligent AI will never happen. On September11, 1933, famous physicist Ernest Rutherford stated, with confidence, “Anyone who expects a source of power in the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.” However, on September 12, 1933, physicist Leo Szilard invented the neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction.

很好地解决安全问题以推动AI的发展似乎是可能的，但并不容易。几十年内为超级智能机器的到来做好计划是可能的，但这个问题不应该像一些AI研究人员所做的那样，随意被忽视。有些人认为，人和机器可以共存，只要他们在团队中工作，但这是不可能的，除非机器与人类的目标相同。也有人说我们可以“关掉它们”，好像超级智能机器很蠢，不会想到这种可能性。还有人认为超级智能AI永远不会发生。1933年9月11日，著名物理学家欧内斯特·卢瑟福满怀信心地说，“任何期望这些原子转化过程成为能量来源的人都在胡说八道。”然而，1933年9月12日，物理学家利奥·西拉德发明了中子诱导链式核反应。