AI may not change your job, but it will transform government


Too little attention is being paid to the way the technology could fundamentally alter the state. 6park.com
虽然人工智能可能永远不会便宜到能在工作中取代你，但它已经在改变你被政府管理的方式。



Cynicism about artificial intelligence is here, but it is unevenly distributed. There is not enough scepticism about the technology’s applicability in a variety of fields in the business world, and too little awareness of how transformative it can be, and indeed already is being, for states.  6park.com
对人工智能的怀疑是有的，但分布不均。人们对该技术在商业世界各个领域的适用性没有足够的怀疑，也没有意识到它对政府有多大的变革性——事实上它已经在产生变革。 6park.com
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More scepticism should be applied to how usefully AI can be deployed in creative fields. Chris Cocks, the chief executive of the entertainment conglomerate Hasbro, which owns among other things the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, recently made some eyebrow-raising and self-contradictory remarks about the use of AI in his own field. 6park.com
我们应该对人工智能在创意领域的应用有多大用处持更多怀疑态度。娱乐集团孩之宝(Hasbro)的首席执行官克里斯•科克斯(Chris Cocks)最近就人工智能在自己领域的应用发表了一些令人惊讶且自相矛盾的言论。孩之宝旗下拥有桌上角色扮演游戏《龙与地下城》(Dungeons & Dragons)。 6park.com
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He believes that century-old companies like his own have an advantage today because large language models and generative AI work more effectively the more information you can feed them, and “legacy” companies like Hasbro have plenty of information. Or, as Cocks put it: “D&D has 50 years of content that we can mine. Literally thousands of adventures that we’ve created, probably tens of millions of words we own and can leverage.” 6park.com
他认为，像他的公司这样的百年老公司如今具有优势，因为你能提供给大型语言模型和生成式人工智能的信息越多，它们的工作就越有成效，而孩之宝这样“历史悠久”的公司拥有大量信息。或者，如科克斯所说：“《龙与地下城》拥有50年的内容可供我们挖掘。我们创造了成千上万的冒险故事，我们拥有并可以利用的文字数量可能高达数千万。” 6park.com
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There’s a tension here: Cocks is arguing both that the use of AI will reward large organisations which have their own data and resources with which to feed it, and that the costs of using it will remain low enough for this to be worthwhile. But for the likes of Hasbro to have a structural advantage in the age of AI, copyright and intellectual property will have to be strictly enforced. This has implications for both the cost and effectiveness of the technology. In evidence given to the UK House of Lords, OpenAI warned that it is “impossible” to train AI without the use of copyrighted materials. 6park.com
这里有一个矛盾：科克斯既认为，人工智能的使用将奖励那些有自己的数据和资源可以提供给人工智能的大型组织，又认为使用人工智能的成本将保持在足够低的水平，从而值得使用。但孩之宝之类的公司要想在人工智能时代拥有结构性优势，就必须严格执行版权和知识产权。这对该技术的成本和效果都有影响。OpenAI在提交给英国上议院的证据中警告称，不使用受版权保护的材料训练人工智能是“不可能的”。 6park.com
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The trouble is that the history of court judgments arriving at an expansive definition of what is already someone else’s intellectual property is long. Similar court cases might well drastically raise the cost of designing and deploying AI at scale, at least in the private sector. Cocks’ argument is that using AI for storytelling can be cheaper than using humans: but whether regulators and governments will oblige with the narrow definition of intellectual property this would require is an open question. 6park.com
问题在于，法院判决对已经属于他人的知识产权作出宽泛定义的历史很长。类似的法庭案件很可能会大幅提高大规模设计和部署人工智能的成本，至少在私营部门是这样。科克斯的观点是，使用人工智能讲故事的成本可能比使用人类更低：但监管机构和政府是否会施以这所需要的对知识产权的狭义定义，是一个悬而未决的问题。 6park.com
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Add to that the cost — both financial and in terms of emissions — of running powerful enough processors, and there is reason to doubt that AI will decisively transform most workplaces and business ventures. But we should be less sceptical about the technology’s ability to transform entities that don’t have to worry about copyright, or any of the other limitations that might slow the rollout of AI, or make it exorbitantly costly: namely, states. 6park.com
再加上运行足够强大的处理器的成本——财务成本以及排放成本——我们有理由怀疑，人工智能是否会决定性地改变大多数工作场所和商业企业。但对于不需要担心版权问题，也不需要担心任何其他可能减缓人工智能推广速度或使其成本过高的限制的实体，即政府，我们就不应该那么怀疑这项技术改变它们的能力了。 6park.com
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States need not worry about copyright or data protection for two reasons. First, since they write the laws in the first place, they can give them as much or as little autonomy as they want. Second, and more importantly, most of the relevant information for public policy is already in their hands. And although political pressure will be brought to bear on states to ensure that private companies can’t simply exploit other people’s intellectual property, there are votes to be won by automating bureaucracy, since that frees up government resources to be spent elsewhere. 6park.com
出于两个原因，政府不必担心版权或数据保护。首先，既然法律本就是由它们制定的，它们可以根据自己的意愿给予自己或多或少的自主权。第二，也是更重要的一点，大多数与公共政策相关的信息已经掌握在它们手中。尽管政府将面临政治压力，要求确保私营公司不能随意利用他人的知识产权，但官僚机构的自动化会赢得选票，因为这样可以腾出政府资源用于其他地方。 6park.com
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If you are Hasbro, putting half a century of Dungeons & Dragons into a LLM might open you up to awkward questions about where, exactly, you end and the work of JRR Tolkien or Bram Stoker begins. But if you are the British government, then the only thing stopping you from doing the same with NHS patient data is your own failure to collect and maintain good data sets. 6park.com
如果你是孩之宝，把半个世纪的《龙与地下城》放到大型语言模型中，可能会让你面临一个尴尬的问题：到底哪部分知识产权属于你，哪部分属于JRR•托尔金(JRR Tolkien)或布拉姆•斯托克(Bram Stoker)？但如果你是英国政府，那么唯一阻止你对国家医疗服务体系(NHS)患者数据做同样事情的是你自己未能收集和维护良好的数据集。 6park.com
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The UK government is already moving to improve the way it collects and stores data. It is rolling out schemes trialled at Chelsea and Westminster hospital in London to the rest of NHS England — for many ministers these are a model for how to innovate well in public healthcare. The trials involve general practitioners’ notes, discharge summaries and the clinical coding of records all being automated, which has more than halved the amount of time clinicians spend discharging patients. In the US, AI is helping officials from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to speed up the planning process. 6park.com
英国政府已经开始着手改进收集和存储数据的方式。它正将在伦敦的切尔西和威斯敏斯特医院(Chelsea and Westminster)试点的方案向英格兰NHS的其他医院推广——对许多部长来说，这些方案是如何在公共医疗领域进行良好创新的典范。试验包括全科医生的笔记、出院摘要和临床记录的编码都自动化，这使临床医生花在病人出院上的时间减少了一半以上。在美国，人工智能正在帮助住房与城市发展部(HUD)的官员加快规划过程。 6park.com
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The showy bits of AI — the stuff of corporate presentations — might well never be particularly cost-efficient or effective. But the back-office, time-saving functions that are already here are speeding up businesses. And given that almost everything governments do is in some way tied into back-office functions, AI has the potential to transform how states operate. While it might never be cheap enough to replace you at work, it already is changing how you are governed.
 
企业演示的那些关于人工智能的天花乱坠的东西，很可能永远不会特别具有成本效益或效果。但是已经存在的后台办公、节省时间的功能正在加快业务的速度。鉴于政府所做的几乎所有事情都在某种程度上与后台职能有关，人工智能有可能改变政府的运作方式。虽然它可能永远不会便宜到能在工作中取代你，但它已经在改变你被政府管理的方式。