Will Robots Inherit the Earth? 译者: dapplehou
（节选）原文：http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/sciam.inherit.txt
Marvin Minsky
(Scientific American, October 1994---with some minor revisions)
Early to bed and early to rise,
Makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise. --- Benjamin Franklin
Everyone wants wisdom and wealth. Nevertheless, our health often
gives out before we achieve them. To lengthen our lives, and improve our
minds, in the future we will need to change our our bodies and brains. To
that end, we first must consider how normal Darwinian evolution brought
us to where we are. Then we must imagine ways in which future
replacements for worn body parts might solve most problems of failing
health. We must then invent strategies to augment our brains and gain
greater wisdom. Eventually we will entirely replace our brains -- using
nanotechnology. Once delivered from the limitations of biology, we will
be able to decide the length of our lives--with the option of immortality--
and choose among other, unimagined capabilities as well.
In such a future, attaining wealth will not be a problem; the trouble will
be in controlling it. Obviously, such changes are difficult to envision, and
many thinkers still argue that these advances are impossible--particularly
in the domain of artificial intelligence. But the sciences needed to enact
this transition are already in the making, and it is time to consider what
this new world will be like.
在这样一个未来世界中，赚取财富不是问题，问题在于如何掌控财富。谁都知道，未来的各种变化难以预知，虽然很多思想家仍然宣称不可能在这方面取得成功，他们说在人工智能领域更不可能有什么突破。但承担此改天换日重任的科学正在取得进展，是时候考虑未来世界的样子了。
Health and Longevity.
Such a future cannot be realized through biology. In recent times we've
learned a lot about health and how to maintain it. We have devised
thousands of specific treatments for particular diseases and disabilities.
However, we do not seem to have increased the maximum length of our
life span. Franklin lived for 84 years and, except in popular legends and
myths, no one has ever lived twice that long. According to the estimates
of Roy Walford, professor of pathology at UCLA Medical School, the
average human life span was about 22 years in ancient Rome; about 50 in
the developed countries in 1900, and today stands at about 75. Still, each
of those curves seems to terminate sharply near 115 years. Centuries of
improvements in health care have had no effect on that maximum. Why
are our life spans so limited? The answer is simple: Natural selection
favors the genes of those with the most descendants. Those numbers tend
to grow exponentially with the number of generations--and so this favors
the genes of those who reproduce at earlier ages. Evolution does not
usually favor genes that length
责任编辑:zhaotingting
