当人工智能开始写小说：机器人写人类，或者机器写机器？，双

文学包含着人类经验的精髓。如今一些小说家被人工智能的潜力所吸引，但是当机器真的会写作时，它们会如何刻画人类？

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全文共2288个单词。

To generalise heroically, the entire arc of world literature can be summarised as follows: writing about gods, then kings and queens, then ordinary people and, finally, ourselves.

如果我们大胆概括的话，世界文学的整个脉络是这样的：先是写神，然后写国王和王后，接着写普通人，最后写我们自己。

But having exhaustively explored the divine and almost every dimension of the human, we are plunging deeper into a new era of literary history: writing about machines. And that may even presage the most startling evolution of all: machines writing about humans and perhaps, one day, machines writing about machines.

但是，在详尽探究了神性以及人性的几乎每个方面之后，我们正更深入地进入文学史的一个新时代：以机器为题材写作。这甚至可能预示着最令人震惊的演变：机器写人，甚至有一天，机器写机器。

Literature, sometimes described as crystallised emotion, contains the very essence of the human experience. So what will it mean when machine intelligence trespasses into human territory? Will it open up exciting new vistas of understanding and insight? Or will it only highlight our own diminishment in the cosmic scheme of things?

文学有时被称为情感的结晶，包含着人类经验的精髓。那么，当机器智能进入人类领域，这意味着什么？它是会开启增进理解和洞察力的令人兴奋的新视野？还是只会突显出我们自己在大千世界中的渺小？

Almost every day brings a startling new advance in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), the seemingly magical general-purpose technology of our times. In 1997, the world was stunned when IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat the greatest chess player of all time, Garry Kasparov. Although impressive in its way, Deep Blue was little more than an immensely powerful rules-based calculating machine, a “$10m alarm clock”, in Kasparov’s irritable phrase.

人工智能(AI)领域几乎每天都有惊人的新进展，它是我们这个时代看似神奇的通用技术。1997年，IBM的深蓝电脑(Deep Blue)击败了有史以来最伟大的棋手加里•卡斯帕罗夫(Garry Kasparov)，震惊世界。尽管令人印象深刻，但“深蓝”不过是一台功能强大的基于规则的计算机器，用卡斯帕罗夫在恼怒之下脱口而出的话说，就是一台“价值1000万美元的闹钟”。

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But more recent advances in Deep Learning techniques, combined with an explosion of data from our smartphones and computers and massive increases in computing power, have enabled machine-learning programs to perform an increasing array of tasks as well as (if not better than) any human: interpreting radiology scans, flying aircraft, identifying images and recognising speech (just ask Siri).