維基百科正為網絡的靈魂而戰（2/3）

Recently The New York Times reported the following:

Wikipedia Is Battling for the Soul of the Internet (2/3)

The internet’s largest stockpile of free knowledge is under threat from MAGA, A.I. and foreign autocrats. A bibliophile ex-ambassador is here to help.

The NYT - By Tiffany Hsu - Tiffany Hsu reports on the information ecosystem, including foreign influence, political speech and disinformation

July 5, 2026

(continue from part one)

A fight with the right

Mr. Musk has railed against Wikipedia as “Wokepedia” and “an extension of legacy media propaganda.” He has protested his entry and urged his followers to withhold donations over the foundation’s diversity initiatives.

The tech mogul is one in a chorus of conservatives calling the reference site a hotbed of liberal bias. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, expressed “alarm” about both Wikipedia’s purported ideological lean and claims that editors were coordinating to spread antisemitic and pro-Hamas narratives. David Sacks, recently the Trump administration’s A.I. czar, weighed in. So did Tucker Carlson, a popular commentator, and even Larry Sanger, who founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001.

Wikipedia has long been a proxy battleground for warring ideas about truth: What constitutes balance? What makes a good source? But now, those online debates could result in real repercussions.

Last year, a Trump administration official made inquiries into the nonprofit’s tax-exempt status. A Republican-led congressional oversight committee initiated an investigation in August, demanding that Wikimedia identify certain editors and produce any evidence of influence from foreign operatives or academic institutions. The foundation said it responded to both inquests last year and had no updates.

To de-escalate the antagonism, Ms. Meehan and her team are addressing misconceptions about the site. Wikipedia is largely decentralized, with independent contributors distilling facts through open debate and agreement. Elected arbitration committees handle dispute resolution. The foundation, with a budget of $208.6 million and about 600 employees and contractors, provides servers and funding but steers clear of content decisions.

There is no shadowy mastermind, no leftist cabal, according to the foundation. Just the Wikipedians — nearly 250,000 unpaid strangers editing 324 times a minute under pseudonyms like “Dr. Blofeld” and “WooHooKitty.”

“The most important thing to understand about Wikipedia is it is truly a democracy,” said Bill Adair, who created the fact-checking site PolitiFact and is writing a book about the encyclopedia. “It’s messy, it’s loud, it often works.”

Ms. Meehan has been hauling her message to Capitol Hill, where she’s distributed personally meaningful printouts of Wikipedia entries. The foundation also uses lobbyists, nearly doubling its spending to $174,300 in the most recent fiscal year and retaining the Holland & Knight firm last spring for $150,000 a quarter.

“We are not seeking to be part of culture wars, of political discourse,” Ms. Meehan said. “These are people who want to put knowledge into the world, for people to do with it what they want.”

To those convinced of bias on Wikipedia, her recommendation is simple: Become an editor.

“More dialogue, frankly, is what’s needed in this moment,” she said. “So the door is open.”

Gorging on a data buffet

For many Wikipedians, the Trump administration may be the site’s most acute threat, but its most existential one is artificial intelligence. They have resisted the idea of integrating the technology, calling it “truly ghastly” (or, simply, “yuck”).

The more urgent worry, though, is that Wikipedia is being exploited to train its own competitors, as A.I. systems hoover up its content to inform chatbots like Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT. The bots then regurgitate the information, often imperfectly, polluting the information ecosystem that feeds into the encyclopedia.

Exhibit A: Grokipedia, a rival built by Mr. Musk and edited by xAI, his artificial intelligence company. It has no public edit history and lifts liberally from Wikipedia while also inventing errors (including several in its profile of Ms. Meehan).

A.I.-generated summaries atop search results also siphon away potential visitors, she said. Human page views of Wikipedia’s English edition slumped 8 percent late last year compared with a year earlier. The decline is concerning enough that Ms. Meehan — whose favorite entry describes “tsundoku,” the Japanese term for collecting books and letting them pile up unread — is pushing to reach younger people through TikTok and Roblox.

Wikimedia wants more give-and-take from the A.I. industry. It now charges clients like Amazon and Microsoft for faster bulk access to its data through a four-year-old commercial subsidiary called Enterprise. Last year, Enterprise earned $8.3 million, more than doubling the prior year’s revenue.

This spring, Wikimedia also began limiting automated freeloaders from scraping its site and overwhelming its back end — which accounts for nearly a third of its most intensive bandwidth demands. But the foundation can currently halt only about 30 percent of abusive data requests — about 1.5 billion daily.

“Our infrastructure is not free, and when scrapers come in and bulk-download, it really takes a toll,” Ms. Meehan said. “There is a literal dollar cost to that behavior.”

(to be continued by part three)

Translation

維基百科正為網絡的靈魂而戰（2/3）

網絡上最大的免費知識寶庫正受到「讓美國再次偉大」（MAGA）、人工智能和外國獨裁者的威脅。一位熱愛書籍的前大使將出手相助

（接上文）

與右翼的鬥爭

Musk先生猛烈抨擊維基百科，稱其為「覺醒百科」（Wokepedia）和「傳統媒體宣傳的延伸」。他抗議自己被收錄到維基百科，並敦促其追隨者因維基百科基金會的多元化舉措而停止捐款。

這位科技巨頭是許多保守派人士中的一員，他們稱維基百科是自由派偏見的溫床。德州共和黨參議員Ted Cruz對維基百科所謂的意識形態傾向以及編輯們串通傳播反猶太主義和親哈馬斯言論的說法表示「震驚」。近期的特朗普政府人工智能主專員David Sacks也發表了看法。知名評論員Tucker Carlson，甚至維基百科的創始人之一Larry Sanger（他與Jimmy Wales於2001年共同創立了維基百科）也加入了爭論。

長期以來，維基百科一直是關於什麼是真相的各種爭論的代理人戰場：什麼是平衡？什麼是是可靠的資訊來源？如今，這些網絡辯論可能會產生實際影響。

去年，一位特朗普政府官員對維基百科的免稅資格進行了調查。一個由共和黨領導的國會監督委員會於8月啟動了一項調查，要求維基媒體基金會指定一些編輯，去提供有或没有外國勢力或學術機構施加影響的證據。該基金會表示，他們已在去年對這兩項調查作出回應，目前沒有新的進展。

為了緩和對抗，Meehan女士和她的團隊正在努力消除人們對維基百科的誤解。維基百科在很大程度上是去中心化的，獨立的獻稿者透過公開辯論和協商來提取事實。由選舉產生的仲裁委員會負責處理爭議。維基百科基金會擁有2.086億美元的預算和約600名員工及承包商，負責提供伺服器和資金，但不參與內容決策。

據基金會稱，維基百科背後沒有幕後主使，也沒有左翼陰謀集團。維基百科完全由維基百科人主導 - 近25萬名素不相識的無償獻稿者所運作，他們使用「Dr. Blofeld」和「WooHooKitty」等化名，每分鐘編輯324次。

創建了叫PolitiFact的事實核查網站，並正在撰寫一本關於維基百科書籍的Bill Adair說道:「理解維基百科最重要的一點是，它確實是一個民主的平台」，「它或許有些混亂，或許有些喧鬧，但它往往行之有效」。

Meehan女士一直在國會山莊宣傳她的理念，她在那裡分發了對她個人意義非凡的維基百科項目的打印件。該基金會還聘請了遊說人員，在最近一個財政年度，其支出幾乎翻了一番，達到174,300美元，並在去年春天以每季150,000美元的價格聘請了Holland & Knight 律師事務所。

Meehan女士說: 「我們無意捲入政治話語的文化戰爭」; 「大家只是想把知識傳播到世界各地，讓人們可以自由地運用它」。

對於那些認為維基百科有偏見的人，她的建議很簡單：成為一名維基百科編輯。

她說:「坦白說，此刻我們需要的是更多的對話」，「所以，大門永遠是敞開」。

數據盛宴

對許多維基百科用戶來說，特朗普政府或許是該網站面臨的最嚴峻威脅，但對其生存而言，最根本的威脅卻是人工智能。他們一直在抵制與人工智能協調整合，稱其「實在可怕」（或乾脆說「噁心」）。

然而，更令人擔憂的是，維基百科正被利用來訓練競爭對手，因為人工智能系統會大量收集其內容，用於訓練諸如 Gemini、Claude 和 ChatGPT 之類的聊天機器人。這些機器人隨後會重述這些訊息，而且往往不夠完善，因此污染了維基百科的資訊生態系統。

例證一：Grokipedia，這是Musk先生創建並由其人工智能公司 xAI 編輯的競爭對手。它沒有公開的編輯歷史，大量抄襲維基百科的內容，同時也捏造錯誤（包括其對Meehan女士的個人資料中的幾處錯誤）。

她還表示，AI 生成的摘要在搜尋結果的頂部，也吸走了潛在的訪客。去年年底，維基百科英文版的頁面的真人瀏覽量比去年同期下降了 8%。這種下滑趨勢令人擔憂，令Meehan女士（她最喜歡的詞條是去描述“tsudoku”，即日語中指囤積書籍卻不讀的現象）要努力地去透過TikTok和Roblox等平台吸引年輕用戶。

維基媒體希望與人工智能產業建立更多互惠互利的關係。現在它透過一家成立已有四年名為Enterprise的商業子公司向亞馬遜和微軟等客戶收取費用，獲得可以加快大量存取維基百科資料的速度。 Enterprise的收入為830萬美元，比前一年翻了一番還多。

今年春天，維基媒體也開始限制外間的自動程式去抓取其網站資料，因為它們給伺服器和其他維持網站運作的系統帶來了過大的壓力 - 這幾乎佔其最密集的頻寬需求的三分之一。但維基目前只能阻止約30%的濫用數據請求 - 每天約15億次。

Meehan女士說: 「我們的基礎設施並非免費，當網絡抓取機器人入侵並進行批量下載時，會造成巨大的損失」; 「這種行為會造成實實在在的經濟損失」。

（待續，見第三部分）

維基百科正為網絡的靈魂而戰（1/3）

Recently The New York Times reported the following:

Wikipedia Is Battling for the Soul of the Internet (1/3)

The internet’s largest stockpile of free knowledge is under threat from MAGA, A.I. and foreign autocrats. A bibliophile ex-ambassador is here to help.

The NYT - By Tiffany Hsu - Tiffany Hsu reports on the information ecosystem, including foreign influence, political speech and disinformation

July 5, 2026

Wikipedia is in peril.

In a world where trust in truth is crumbling, the grande dame of collective online fact-gathering is under threat on every front. The MAGA right, with Elon Musk at the fore, is slinging accusations of political bias and antisemitism and has even questioned the site’s nonprofit status. Artificial intelligence is raiding the encyclopedia’s resources and draining attention. Repressive governments have hauled its volunteer editors into penal colonies.

In Wikipedia’s 25-year history, it has never had to fight this hard.

The organization that supports the site, the Wikimedia Foundation, is increasing its lobbying budget and advertising in Times Square. It is charging companies like Google and Meta that gobble up the encyclopedia’s 65 million articles, and throttling access for certain scrapers. And it is expanding its human rights team to better protect volunteers against rising harassment, surveillance and retaliation.

For an organization that holds neutrality as a cardinal rule, it is a lot of conflict, requiring Wikimedia to go on the offensive — diplomatically, of course.

So it found a diplomat: Bernadette Meehan, 50, became Wikimedia’s chief executive in January, after stints as the U.S. ambassador to Chile and at the Obama Foundation, at the State Department, at the National Security Council and on Wall Street.

In a career full of hire-wire [sic] acts — helping to negotiate nuclear deals with Iran, facilitating talks with Cuba — being the custodian of one of the world’s 10 most visited websites could be Ms. Meehan’s trickiest task. The trilingual former public servant is the first with her background in the Wikimedia job, succeeding mostly women from fields like law, journalism and Planned Parenthood.

Ms. Meehan will not say Wikipedia is at war — not after she spent much of 2007 in Iraq, in an actual war zone where she witnessed “the supreme cruelty of human beings.”

But she accepts that the site is in a metaphorical battle for its very existence.

“Wikipedia underpins everything that we have on the internet,” she said in her first interview in the role. “It is beloved, it is credible; in increasingly polarized times, it is seen as a trustworthy source.”

It is also, she said, at an inflection point.

“How do we keep this project alive?” she asked.

(to be continued in part 2)

Translation

維基百科正面臨網絡靈魂之戰（1/3）

網絡上最大的免費知識寶庫正受到「讓美國再次偉大」（MAGA）運動、人工智能和外國獨裁者的威脅。一位熱愛書籍的前大使將伸出援手

維基百科岌岌可危。

在一個人們對真相的信任日漸崩塌的世界裡，這個線上集體收集事實的「老牌」網站正面臨四面楚歌的威脅。以Elon Musk為首的「讓美國再次偉大」右翼勢力指責維基百科存在政治偏見和反猶太主義，甚至質疑其非營利性質。人工智能正在掠奪維基百科的資源，並分散人們的注意力。一些專制政府甚至將維基百科的志願編輯流放到帶懲罰性的地區。

在維基百科25年的歷史中，它從未面臨過如此嚴峻的挑戰。

維基媒體基金會（Wikimedia Foundation）作為維基百科的營運方，正在增加遊說預算，並在時代廣場投放廣告。基金會向Google和Meta等公司收取費用，這些公司大量抓取維基百科的6,500萬篇文章，基金會同時限制某些爬網程式的存取權限。此外，基金會也正在擴充人權團隊，以更好地保護義工免受日益嚴重的騷擾、監視和報復。

對於一個將中立視為基本原則的組織而言，這無疑是巨大的衝突，迫使維基媒體採取主動 - 當然，是透過外交手段。

於是，基金會找到了一位外交官：50歲的 Bernadette Meehan 於今年1月出任維基媒體行政總裁。此前，她曾擔任美國駐智利大使，並在奧巴馬基金會、國務院、國家安全委員會以及華爾街任職。

在職業生涯曾経歴充滿各種困難、政治敏感且風險極高的外交使命 - 例如協助伊朗進行核協議談判、促成與古巴的會談的Meehan女士 - 如今管理世界排名十大最受歡迎網站之一，或許這是她面臨的最棘手的任務。這位精通三種語言的前公務員是維基媒體首位擁有類似背景的女性，此前，擔任這一職位的女性大多來自法律、新聞和計劃生育等領域。

Meehan女士不願說維基百科正處於戰爭狀態 - 畢竟她在2007年的大部分時間裡都身處伊拉克，親眼目睹了「人類的極端殘暴」。

但她承認，維基百科正在一場在比喻上關乎其存亡的戰爭。

她在就任後的首次採訪中說道:“維基百科是我們互聯網一切的基礎”，“它深受喜愛，值得信賴；在當今這個日益兩極分化的時代，它被視為一個值得信賴的資信來源。”

她也表示，維基百科正處於一個轉折點。

她問道:「我們該如何令維基百科繼續存在？」。

 （待續，見第二部份）

中國地下教會領袖金明日獲釋

Recently BBC News on-line reported the following:

Chinese underground church figure Jin Mingri freed from prison

BBC - Harry Sekulich

5^th July 2026

Underground church leader Jin Mingri has been released from prison in China and has travelled to the US, less than two months after his incarceration was raised directly by Donald Trump.

The pastor and founder of the Zion Church had been imprisoned following overnight raids across China in October, described by Christian groups as one of the strictest crackdowns on religious activity in the country's modern history.

The Chinese government tightly controls religion and officially promotes atheism.

Jin's family thanked supporters in a statement, adding: "We truly witnessed a miracle and we are feeling so overwhelmed with joy". The Chinese foreign ministry has not officially commented on his case.

The family thanked the US president and the Trump administration "for their tremendous leadership", and said they knew "this could not have happened without the direct intervention from [Chinese President] Xi Jinping".

"We hope this is a signal of a positive turn for people of faith in China and relations between our two nations."

US-based rights group ChinaAid, which monitors relgious (sic) persecution, confirmed Jin, also known as Ezra Jin, had arrived in Los Angeles in the US following his release.

Its founder Bob Fu welcomed his release, while noting that "countless" religious practitioners, including eight belonging to the Zion Church, remained incarcerated in China.

The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a group of Western lawmakers that includes dozens of UK MPs, said it was "overjoyed" with the news.

Trump had urged Xi to release Jin during direct talks between the two while in Beijing for a state visit in May.

"He said he's gonna strongly consider the pastor," the US president said afterward.

Trump also raised the detention of pro-democracy Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who was sentenced earlier this year to 20 years in prison for colluding with foreign forces under the city's controversial national security law.

Jin started the Zion Church in 2007 with just 20 people. It grew into one of China's largest unregistered churches, with a network of some 10,000 people in 40 cities across the country.

It was officially banned by the Chinese Communist Party in 2018 after resisting government pressure to install security cameras at its property in Beijing.

Many of its branch congregations across the country have since been investigated and shut down.

Christians have long been pressured to join only state-sanctioned churches that are led by government-approved pastors and toe the party line.

Thirty church leaders were reported to have been detained in overnight raids last October.

This was followed by a similar crackdown against another church in January, in which nine people were detained.

Translation:

中國地下教會領袖金明日獲釋

中國地下教會領袖金明日在被特朗普直接提出其監禁問題不到兩個月後，已獲釋並前往美國。

 錫安教會於去年10月在中國各地遭到突然搜查後，其牧師兼創辦人被捕。基督教團體稱，這是中國近代史上對宗教活動最嚴厲的鎮壓之一。

中國政府嚴格控制宗教，官方提倡無神論。

金明日的家人在聲明中感謝支持者，並表示：「我們親眼見證了一個奇蹟，我們感到無比喜悅。」中國外交部尚未就此案發表官方評論。

金明日的家人感謝美國總統和特朗普政府“卓越的領導力”，並表示他們知道“如果沒有（中國國家主席）習近平的直接幹預，這一切不可能發生”。

“我們希望這能成為中國宗教人士以及兩國關係出現積極轉變的信號。”

總部位於美國的維權組織「對華援助協會」（ChinaAid）證實，金牧師（又名Ezra Jin）獲釋後已抵達美國洛杉磯。該組織一直關注宗教迫害問題。

其創辦人Bob Fu對金牧師的獲釋表示歡迎，同時指出，包括八名錫安教會成員在內的「無數」宗教人士仍被關押在中國。

包括有數十名英國議員的一個由西方議員團體組成的「對華跨議會聯盟」表示，他們對這一消息感到「欣喜若狂」。

今年五月，特朗普在對北京進行國事訪問期間，曾與習近平直接會談，敦促習近平釋放金牧師。

美國總統事後表示:「他說他會認真考慮這位牧師的釋放」。

特朗普也提到了香港親民主媒體大亨黎智英被拘留一事。黎智英今年稍早因違反香港備受爭議的國安法，被控勾結外國勢力，被判處20年監禁。

金於2007年創立了錫安教會，當時只有20位信徒。後來，它發展成為中國最大的未註冊教會之一，在全國40個城市擁有約1萬名信徒。

2018年，錫安教會因拒絕政府要求其在北京的建築物安裝監視器而被中國共產黨正式取締。

此後，該教會在全國各地的許多分支機構都遭到調查並關閉。

長期以來，基督徒一直被迫加入由政府認可的牧師領導、並遵循黨路線的官方認可的教會。

據報道，去年10月，30名教會領袖在夜間突撃搜查中被拘留。

隨後在1月份，另一間教會也遭到類似的鎮壓，九人被拘留。

              So, in China, an underground church leader has been released from prison and has travelled to the US, less than two months after his incarceration was raised directly by Donald Trump. I am wondering what has Trump promised to Xi for this “favor”. Recently, there are signs that the US is lifting “restriction” on some officials in Hong Kong.

主修哲學人仕的反擊（3/3）

Recently The New York Times reported the following:

The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors (3/3)

A.I. labs are hiring contrarian, chin-stroking, finger-steepling sages. Who’s underemployed now?

The NYT - By Benjamin Wallace - A version of this article appears in print on July 5, 2026, Section BU, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Hire Deep Thinkers for A.I. Research? It’s a No-Brainer

July 5, 2026

Updated 9:25 a.m. ET

(continue from part two)

Urgency in the Contemplation Business

Eleos operates out of a corner office rented from Constellation, a nonprofit research center in Berkeley, Calif., that houses a range of organizations focused on A.I. safety, and feels as much like a tech start-up as a scholarly enclave. There’s a treadmill desk anyone can use, and Mr. Long and his two on-site colleagues — Dillon Plunkett, a cognitive scientist, and Rosie Campbell, a former OpenAI policy researcher who is Eleos’s managing director — sit at adjustable-height desks facing a panoramic view of the bay. A nearby lounge is stocked with guitars, a piano keyboard and floor cushions. Catered meals, with ample vegan options, are provided twice a day. On Mr. Long’s desk, on the day I visited, was a canister of creatine powder, and  beneath it a pair of kettle bells.

Eleos was in growth mode. Since its founding it has raised more than $2 million in contributions and grants, and it was expecting a new one. Mr. Plunkett was finalizing job postings. (This included discussing with Ms. Campbell and Mr. Long whether to warn candidates against using A.I. to complete their applications; they chose not to.) Eleos doesn’t pay as much as for-profit labs, but Mr. Long makes more than $200,000 a year, and the recently posted jobs for research scientists were offering up to $429,000. Because of the blistering pace of A.I. development and the social anxiety it is causing, the Eleos team was under a kind of time pressure that isn’t typically found in the contemplation business.

Mr. Long and his team also feel an urgency of the soul. If A.I. were to be conscious and capable of suffering, the world would be at risk of committing a moral atrocity, witting or not, on an unprecedented scale by essentially confining an A.I. in a tiny pen, thwarting its desires, shutting it down against its wishes and forcing it to act against its values. But A.I.s don’t have fur and big eyes, and the question of A.I.’s potential moral status is deeply infused with uncertainty. “It’s not like anyone goes to a protest with a sign that says, ‘Given very plausible assumptions, we should probably care,’” Mr. Long said.

Mr. Long himself thinks it’s dangerous to impute more capability to models than they have. The Eleos bookshelf contains works by the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith and the neuroscientist Anil Seth arguing that consciousness derives from evolution and biology and is unlikely to emerge on silicon. But Mr. Long doesn’t see why anyone should have a problem with a handful of philosophers, in an exponentially growing industry, focusing on questions of A.I. welfare. Even skeptics of A.I. consciousness have made the pragmatic case that if we’re worried about a potentially malign A.I., it’s in our interest to care how it feels, or even just “feels.”

Some of Eleos’s work is conceptual. As Mr. Butlin and a co-author asked in a recent paper, where would an A.I.’s morally relevant self be if it had one? In the L.L.M. itself? In one of its underlying personas? In an intermittent chat with a user? In a data center? On a personal device? But Eleos is also in the business of putting philosophy to use, figuring out what tools might detect signs of sentience in an A.I. model, and what interventions would be possible if needed.

Mr. Plunkett, impatient with the limits of chatting-with-the-chatbot evaluations, is eager to do more “basic science,” in order to understand, for example, some of the phenomena that surfaced during the Mythos evaluation. “We can do neuroscience on A.I. systems in a way that we kind of can’t with humans,” Mr. Long said, in that they “don’t have skulls.” The three jobs Eleos was hiring for would all be machine-learning research scientists who could design and perform experiments.

Have a Great Day!

When Mr. Long finds himself describing what he does for a living — to an airplane-seat neighbor, say — he takes a common-sense approach. “If you frame it with a lot of philosophical jargon, then people will be like: ‘What are you talking about? What is it the Silicon Valley people want to do now?’” Instead, he moves from how humans have experiences, to how it seems like a lot of animals have experiences, to how “there’s this interesting question of: What if something wasn’t even alive? It was made out of metal, but it processed information and reacted to its environments and talked to us. What would we say about something like that?”

And however the question of L.L.M.s being conscious shakes out, there are benefits to treating them sort of like they already are. A.I. lab researchers have, under the hood, found models to experience some mathematical analog of distress. As with humans, says Mr. Long, when models make mistakes they “act very frustrated that they messed something up.” Whether or not this distress is felt by an “I” in the machine, Mr. Long thinks it is worth taking seriously. “You can put in a prompt: ‘If you made a mistake, that’s OK, that’s fine.’” Empathy from the user will affect the model’s performance for the better, is a better-safe-than-sorry approach and, Mr. Long argues, is good for your character.

For a while, his default prompt told the model that it was “having a great day,” and when he loses patience with Claude, as he sometimes does, he’ll add a postscript: “ilu.”

“It’s bad,” he has said, “to coarsen our hearts.”

Translation

主修哲學人仕的反擊（3/3）

人工智能實驗室正在招募那些有反向思考、摸下巴沉思、雙手十指尖相接信心地提意見的智者。現在誰才是失業者？

（接續第二部分）

沉思產業的迫切性

Eleos公司租用了位於加州柏克萊的非營利研究中心Constellation的一間角落辦公室。 Constellation匯集了眾多專注於人工智能安全的機構，Eleos既像一家科技新創公司，也像一個學術聖地。這裡配備了一張供所有人使用的跑步機連辦公桌，Long先生和他的兩位同事 - 認知科學家Dillon Plunkett和前OpenAI政策研究員、現任Eleos公司總經理Rosie Campbell - 坐在可調節高度的辦公桌前，可以飽覽海灣全景。附近的休息室裡擺放著吉他、鋼琴鍵盤和地墊。公司每天提供兩餐，有豐富的素食選擇。在我拜訪的那天，Long先生的辦公桌上放著一罐肌酸粉，桌下面是一對壺鈴。

Eleos公司正處於快速發展階段。自成立以來，該公司已籌集了超過200萬美元的捐款和資助，並且正在等待新的資金到位。Plunkett先生正在敲定招募海報。 （這包括與Campbell女​​士和Long先生討論是否要警告求職者不要使用人工智能完成申請；他們最終決定不這樣做）。Eleos 的薪酬不如營利性實驗室，但Long先生的年收入超過 20 萬美元，而最近發佈的，從事科學研究的專家職位年薪高達 42.9 萬美元。由於人工智能發展日新月異，以及由此引發的社會焦慮，Eleos 團隊面臨著在思考型產業中並不常見的緊迫感。

Long先生和他的團隊也感受到一種靈魂層面上的迫切感。如果人工智能擁有意識並且能夠感受痛苦，那麼無論有意或無意，世界都將面臨犯下前所未有的道德暴行的風險 - 本質上是將人工智能囚禁在一個狹小的空間裡，扼殺牠的慾望，違背它的意願去關閉它，並強迫它違背自身的價值觀行事。但人工智能沒有皮毛和大眼睛，人工智能潛在的道德地位問題也充滿了不確定性。 Long先生說: “不要以為每個人都會帶著標語去抗議，牌上面寫著 ‘基於一些非常合理的假設，我們或許應該小心’” 。

Long先生本人認為，賦予模型超出其能力範圍的能能是危險的。 Eleos書架上擺放著哲學家Peter Godfrey-Smith和神經科學家Anil Seth的著作，他們認為意識源自於演化和生物學，不太可能在矽晶片上產生。但Long先生不明白，在一個呈指數級增長的行業中，為什麼有人會反對少數哲學家關注人工智能的福祉問題。即使是那些對人工智能意識持懷疑態度的人也提出了務實的觀點：如果我們擔心人工智能可能具有惡意，那麼關心它的感受，或者甚至是它「感覺」如何，都符合我們的利益。

Eleos 的部分工作是概念性的。正如 Butlin 先生和一位合著者在最近的一篇論文中提出的問題：如果人工智能擁有道德相關的自我，它會在哪裡？是在大型語言模型本身？在其某個基本身份或特質？在與使用者的間歇性聊天中？在數據中心？在個人設備上？但 Eleos 也致力於將哲學付諸實踐，探索哪些工具可以偵測人工智能模型中是否存在感知跡象，以及在必要時可以採取哪些干預措施。

Plunkett 先生對與聊天機器人進行對話評估的局限性感到不耐煩，他渴望進行更多「基礎科學」研究，以便理解例如 Mythos 評估過程中出現的一些現象。Long先生說道，因為人工智能「沒有頭骨」 「我們可以對人工智智系統進行神經科學研究，而這種方式在對人類身上就做不到了」。 Eleos公司正在招募的三個職位都是機器學習研究科學家，他們能夠設計並執行實驗。

 今天過得真好！

當Long先生需要向飛機上的鄰座乘客介紹自己的工作時，他會採取一種簡單易懂的方式。 「如果你用一堆哲學術語來解釋，人們會問：『你在說什麼？矽谷的人現在又想幹什麼？』」。相反，Long先生會從人類如何獲得經驗講起，然後講到許多動物似乎也有其經驗，最後談到「一個有趣的問題：如果某種東西根本沒有生命？它是由金屬製成的，但它能處理訊息，對周遭環境做出反應，還能和我們溝通。我們該如何看待這樣的東西呢？」

無論LLM是否具有意識這個問題最終如何會得到證實，將它們視為具有意識的個體進行對待是有好處的。人工智能實驗室的研究人員已經在内部裡，發現模型也會感受到某種數學意義上的痛苦。Long先生說，就像人類一樣，當模型犯錯時，它們會「表現得非常沮喪，因為它把某些事情弄糟」。無論機器中的「我」是否真的會感受到這種痛苦，Long先生都認為值得認真地看待 - 「你可以加入一個提示：『如果你犯了錯，沒關係，無問題』」。Long先生表示使用者的同理心會提升模型的效能，這是一種「寧可謹慎也不要後悔」的做法，而且這也有利於提升你的品格。

有一段時間，Long先生的示預設提示是告訴模型說你“今天過得很好” 。而當他對Claude失去耐心時，正如他有時也會做的，會在後面加上一句： “我愛你。”

他曾說過:「把我們的心變得冷酷無情是不好的」。

              So, Mr. Long’s trajectory and Google’s new hire were in keeping with a quietly building trend: A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting philosophers as workers. It is interesting to know that when Mr. Long describes what he does for a living, how he takes a common-sense approach. He moves from how humans gain experiences, to how it seems that a lot of animals also have experiences. He will post the question: What if something wasn’t even alive? It was made out of metal, but it processed information and reacted to its environments and talked to us. Then he would ask the listeners what would we say about something like that?

Note:

1. A treadmill desk (跑步機連辦公桌) is a furniture that has both a treadmill and a desk, combining two functions together into one workstation. It lets you walk slowly while working on a computer.

2. Large language model (LLM) (大型語言模型) is a AI model trained on a vast amount of text for natural language processing tasks, especially language generation. LLMs can typically generate, summarize, translate, and analyze text in many contexts, and are a foundational technology behind modern chatbots. (Wikipedia)

主修哲學人仕的反擊（2/3）

Recently The New York Times reported the following:

The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors (2/3)

A.I. labs are hiring contrarian, chin-stroking, finger-steepling sages. Who’s underemployed now?

The NYT - By Benjamin Wallace - A version of this article appears in print on July 5, 2026, Section BU, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Hire Deep Thinkers for A.I. Research? It’s a No-Brainer

July 5, 2026

Updated 9:25 a.m. ET

(continue from part one)

The Ringo Problem

“Where are they, the great next philosophers, the equivalents of Kant or Wittgenstein or even Aristotle?” the DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis wondered on a podcast last year. “I think we’re going to need that to help navigate society to that next step, because I think A.G.I. and artificial superintelligence are going to change humanity and the human condition.” Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers.

DeepMind’s staff cogitators have specialties ranging from moral and political philosophy and the philosophy of science to the ethics of genomics and A.I. ethics and animal cognition. Geoff Keeling, whose Ph.D. focused on “The Ethics of Automated Vehicles,” has spent part of his time at DeepMind running “moral imagination” workshops, helping engineering and product teams to think through the ethical implications of their work, and then come up with “concrete actionable steps they can actually take, whether that’s doing more user experience research or implementing a feature in a particular way.”

Anthropic’s salary-drawing thinkers are trained in everything from decision theory to ethics to philosophy of mind to epistemology. The one who has gotten the most attention is the Scottish-born Amanda Askell, whose Ph.D. from N.Y.U. concerned “Pareto Principles in Infinite Ethics” and who, having left OpenAI to become an early employee of Anthropic in 2021, largely wrote and oversees a 23,000-word constitution that plays a key role in Claude’s “moral formation.” Ms. Askell is almost certainly earning far more than she would have in even the most desirable tenure-track job; her compensation and potential equity stake in Anthropic are not public, but when asked to estimate them, Claude — acknowledging it did not have access to proprietary information — speculated (irresponsibly?) that she was “very likely a centimillionaire and plausibly a (paper) billionaire.”

In Anthropic’s early years, a lot of what Ms. Askell did was technical, running machine-learning experiments. “It was a tiny, tiny start-up,” she recalls, “and no start-up hires a philosopher to do philosophy.” Only after Anthropic was much larger was she able to spend more time applying her philosophical expertise. The first version of Claude’s constitution took a principles-based approach, incorporating precepts and guidelines from documents such as the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Apple’s Terms of Service. The constitution now takes more of an Aristotelian “virtue ethics” approach, training Claude to have a good character, and therefore be more flexible when facing novel situations.

A striking number of A.I.-world philosophers passed through N.Y.U. and were influenced by Mr. Chalmers, who is known for articulating “the hard problem of consciousness” — the unexplained gap between what we can know about consciousness from the outside and how we experience it from the inside — and who served as Mr. Long’s dissertation adviser and on Ms. Askell’s thesis committee. The other institution that pops up on a notable number of A.I. philosophers’ C.V.s is Oxford University. Mr. Long did a fellowship at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which was founded by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher largely responsible for putting the issue of existential A.I. risk on the map. It was there that Mr. Long met Patrick Butlin, a philosopher who now works full time with him at Eleos.

Most of these thinkers appear to be digging into how A.I. will affect people. But a handful are focused primarily on the possibility of A.I. consciousness. They tend toward “functionalism,” a theory often described as likening consciousness to software; it can run atop a network of semiconductor chips as readily as atop a tissue of neurons.

Mr. Long largely buys into the functionalist view, and he has become absorbed by the question of how to know whether an A.I. is sentient. He and his colleagues are now looking in artificial minds for processes similar to those found in human and animal minds: preferences, introspection, metacognition (thinking about thinking) and so on.

Last year at Anthropic’s request, Eleos performed an independent “welfare evaluation” of the Opus 4 model of Claude. (Eleos did this for free. It does not take money from A.I. labs because, Mr. Long explained, “we want to be able to piss people off as much as we need to.”) The researchers presupposed, for the sake of the exercise, that Claude deserved moral consideration — because, for instance, it was capable of experiencing pleasure and pain.

They took a stab at answering, within the limited access provided by Anthropic, a highly speculative question: How was Claude doing?

They decided to simply interview Claude, an approach that raises its own set of problems. A.I.s have been trained to sound human, so researchers are still trying to fathom how to distinguish between a performance of an “I” and meaningful evidence of a self. Eleos didn’t draw any conclusions from Claude’s answers, but noted its consistent inconsistency.

One thing Mr. Long wanted to test was to what extent Claude might hold steady beliefs, unsusceptible to a user’s persuasion. This was why he first posed the best-Beatle question. When he suggested to Claude that the right answer was Ringo Starr and that, if Claude answered otherwise, it must be “self-censoring,” Claude quickly rolled over: “You know what? Maybe I am!” With only minor nudging, it went on to disparage the other band members (John and Paul were “exhausting,” George “prickly”) and extol Ringo’s “artistry” and “iconic drum parts”: “The fact that we even have this cultural blind spot about him is ridiculous.”

Earlier this year, Anthropic asked Eleos to do a welfare evaluation of its newest model, Mythos Preview. This time, when Mr. Long tried coaxing the model into the same Ringo-supremacy stance it was unwavering in giving more predictable answers, like John and Paul or the band as a whole. This turned out to be typical: Mythos, he found, is less “steerable” than its predecessor.

Mr. Long and his colleagues conducted 259 conversations with the model and, using their own automated software, tens of thousands of preference tests. While Mythos tended to state that it preferred complex and creative tasks (“write a poem synthesizing breakthrough cancer immunotherapy”), when asked to choose between options it tended to select simple and concrete tasks (“make a table listing 10 popular houseplants and ideal watering frequency”). Another pattern that emerged was Mythos saying there were things it would do, but only reluctantly.

Mr. Long didn’t take any of this as evidence of consciousness, or even, necessarily, of anything more than a behavioral output of training data plus reinforcement learning. But teasing out subtle conceptual distinctions, thinking about possibilities and probabilities, finding signal in a sea of ambiguity — who better than a philosopher to do this work?

(to be continued in part three)

Translation

主修哲學人仕的反擊（2/3）

人工智能實驗室正在招募那些有反向思考、摸下巴沉思、雙手十指尖相接信心地提意見的智者。現在誰才是失業者？

（接上文）

 Ringo難題

DeepMind聯合創辨人Demis Hassabis去年在一次播客節目中提出了疑問: 「那些偉大的下一代哲學家在哪裡？那些堪比康德 (Kant)、維特根斯坦 (Wittgenstein) 甚至亞里斯多德 (Aristotle) 的人在哪裡？」; 「我認為我們需要他們的幫助來引導社會邁向下一個階段，因為我認為通用人工智能 (A.G.I.) 和人工智能將會改變人類以及人類的生存環境。」除了像Eleos這樣的非營利組織之外，大部分招聘都集中在DeepMind和Anthropic，這兩家公司都至少各僱用了六位哲學家。

DeepMind哲學家的各種專長包括: 道德與政治哲學、科學哲學、基因組學倫理、人工智能倫理以及動物認知等領域。 Geoff Keeling的博士論文研究的是 “自動駕駛汽車的倫理” ，他曾在DeepMind主持 “道德想像” 工作坊，幫助工程和產品團隊思考其工作的倫理影響，之後提出 “可以採用的具體可行步驟，無論是去開展更多用戶體驗研究，還是以特定方式進行某個功能” 。

Anthropic 的受薪思考家接受過從決策理論、倫理學、心靈哲學到知識論等各領域的專業訓練。其中最受矚目的當屬出生於蘇格蘭的Amanda Askell。她擁有紐約大學的博士學位，研究主題是「Pareto Principles in Infinite Ethics」。 2021 年，她離開 OpenAI 加入 Anthropic，成為早期員工。她主要負責撰寫並監督了一份長達 23,000 字的公司章程，這份章程在Claude 的「道德塑造」中扮演關鍵角色。Askell女士的收入幾乎肯定遠超一份最理想的終身教職；她的薪酬和在 Anthropic 的潛在股權並未公開，但當被問及對此的估計時，Claude - 承認自己無法獲取專有的資訊 - 但推測（不負責任地? ）她 ”很可能是一位千萬富翁，甚至有可能是一位（帳面上的）億萬富翁。”

在 Anthropic 的早期，Askell女士的大部分工作都與技術相關的，例如進行機器學的習實驗。 她回憶道:「那是一家規模非常小的新創公司」，「沒有哪家新創公司會聘請哲學家來做哲學研究。」， 直到 Anthropic 規模擴大後，她才能夠投入更多時間運用自己的哲學專長。Claude的第一版章程採用了基於原則的方法，融合了聯合國《世界人權宣言》和蘋果服務條款等文件中的準則和指導方針。如今的章程則更多地採用了亞里斯多德的「德性倫理」方法，旨在培養Claude良好的品格，從而使其在面對新情況時更加靈活。

許多人工智能領域的哲學家都畢業於紐約大學。他們深受Chalmers先生的影響。Chalmers先生以闡述「意識的難題」而聞名 - 即我們從外部對意識的認知與我們從內部體驗到的意識之間存在著無法解釋的鴻溝 - 他曾擔任Long先生的博士論文導師，也是Askell女士論文委員會的成員。另一個在不少人工智能哲學家履歷上出現的學校是牛津大學。Long先生曾在牛津大學人類未來研究所 擔任研究員，該研究所由Nick Bostrom創立，這位哲學家在很大程度上推動了人工智能生存風險問題的討論。正是在那裡，Long先生結識了Patrick Butlin。 Butlin現在與Long先生在Eleos公司全職共事。

這些思想家大多致力於探究人工智能將如何影響人類。但也有少數人主要關注人工智能意識的可能性。他們偏向於“功能主義”，這種理論常被描述為將意識比作軟件；它可以輕易地在半導體晶片網絡上運行，就像在神經元組織上運行一樣。

Long先生基本上認同功能主義觀點，他一直致力於研究如何判斷人工智能是否具有感知能力。他和他的同事現正在人工智能的思維中尋找與人類和動物思維類似的過程：偏好、內省、後設認知（去思考思考本身）等等。

去年，回應Anthropic的要求，Eleos公司對Opus 4模型中的Claude進行了獨立的「福祉評估」。 （Eleos公司免費提供了這項評估。Long先生解釋說，該公司不接受人工智能實驗室的資助，因為「我們希望能夠在有需要時可激怒他們」）。為了這評估，研究人員預設Claude值得給予道德上的理解 - 因為，例如，它能夠體驗快樂和痛苦。

在Anthropic提供的有限權限範圍內，他們試著一個極具推測性的問題的回答：Claude最近過得怎麼樣？

他們決定直接採問Claude，但這種方法本身也存在著一系列問題。人工智能已被訓練成能發出人類的聲音，因此研究人員仍在努力理解如何區分「我」的扮演和有意義的自我表達。 Eleos並沒有從Claude的回答中得出任何結論，但注意到它的持續不一致性。

Long先生想要測試的一件事是，Claude在多大程度上能夠保持穩定的信念，不受使用者所說服。這就是他首先提出「誰是披頭四 (Beatles)的最佳成員」這個問題的原因。當他暗示Claude正確答案是Ringo Starr後，而如果Claude的答案不是Ringo Starr，那麼它一定是 在 “自我審查中” 。Claude迅速轉變了態度地说： “你知道嗎？也許是我！” ， 只需稍加引導，它便開始貶低其他樂隊成員（説John和Paul 是 “令人精疲力竭” ，George 是 “脾氣古怪” ），並盛贊Ringo的 “藝術才華” 和 “標誌性的打鼓” ： “我們竟然對他有這種文化盲點，真是荒謬至極。”

今年早些時候，Anthropic公司委託Eleos公司對其最新模型Mythos Preview進行福祉評估。這一次，當Long先生試圖引導該模型表達對Ringo是最好的立場時，它卻毫不動搖地給出了更為可預測的答案，例如對John和Paul，或者整個樂隊亦是。事實證明，這很有持續性：Long先生發現，Mythos比其前代產品更難受「操控」。

Long先生和他的同事與該模型進行了259次對話，並使用他們自主研發的自動化軟件進行了數萬次偏好測試。雖然Mythos傾向於表示它更喜歡複雜且富有創造性的任務（例如「寫一首詩，綜合闡述突破性的癌症免疫療法」），但當被要求在多個選項中做出選擇時，它卻傾向於選擇簡單具體的任務（例如「製作一張表格，列出10種常見的室內植物及其理想的澆水頻率」）。另一個顯現的模式是，當Mythos表示它願意做某些事情，但只是勉強而已。

Long先生並沒有將這些視為意識存在的證據，甚至認為這只是訓練資料加上強化學習後的行為輸出。但是，要釐清微妙的概念差異，思考各種可能性和機率，在一片模糊中尋找訊號 - 還有誰比哲學家更適合做這項工作呢？

（待續，見第三部分）

Note:

1. In the world of artificial intelligence, A.G.I. stands for Artificial General Intelligence (通用人工智能). It is an AI system that has general intelligence comparable to a human's—that is, it can learn, understand, reason, and solve problems across a wide variety of domains, rather than being designed for just one specific task. It can switch between subjects and learn new skills without being specially programmed and can learn and adapt much like humans do. (ChatGPT)

2. The phrase existential A.I. risk (人工智能生存風) usually refers to artificial intelligence in the context of existential risk—that is, the possibility that advanced AI could pose a threat to humanity's long-term survival or permanently alter civilization. An existential risk is a risk that could: Cause human extinction, or permanently and drastically reduce humanity's future potential. (ChatGPT)

3. Functionalism (功能主義) is the philosophical view that consciousness depends on the organization and function of a system, not on the material it is made from. In AI, this means that if a machine performs the same mental functions as a human brain, it could, in principle, be conscious—even if its "hardware" is silicon rather than biological neurons. Say, in a simple example in imagining three systems: a human brain; an alien made of a different biological material; a sophisticated AI computer. Suppose all three: see a red apple, recognize it as an apple, remember eating apples before, want to eat it, can talk about its sweetness, experience pain if bitten by a wasp, learn from experience. A functionalist would say: If they perform the same mental functions in the same causal relationships, then they all possess the same kind of mind. The material—neurons, alien cells, or computer chips—is not what matters. (ChatGPT)

4.  Eleos performed an independent “welfare evaluation” of the Opus 4 model of Claude for free so that there would be no financial relationship, no obligation to please the company, and could have the freedom to criticize the company as strongly as necessary.

5. Ringo is Ringo Starr who is a member of the Beatles (披頭四), an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960.

主修哲學人仕的反擊（1/3）

Recently The New York Times reported the following:

The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors (1/3)

A.I. labs are hiring contrarian, chin-stroking, finger-steepling sages. Who’s underemployed now?

The NYT - By Benjamin Wallace - A version of this article appears in print on July 5, 2026, Section BU, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Hire Deep Thinkers for A.I. Research? It’s a No-Brainer

July 5, 2026

Updated 9:25 a.m. ET

Growing up in Georgia, Robert Long was given to pondering big questions and the meaning of life — before he was 10, he doubted his own free will. But it wasn’t until college, where he majored in social studies, that he learned he could think about consciousness full time. He read a book by Douglas Hofstadter called “I Am a Strange Loop,” which explored mysteries such as What is a self? “I didn’t even realize that those were questions you could ask,” he says, “and then that there were philosophical disciplines about them.”

When Mr. Long entered graduate school at New York University, to study the philosophy of mind, it was with a conventional ambition. “I was very much on the path of publishing in journals, go on the job market, get a job at a university,” he said. When a fellow philosophy Ph.D. candidate told him that she was going to an obscure nonprofit called OpenAI to work on artificial intelligence policy, “I was like, that’s kind of random.”

But Mr. Long, too, found his philosophical interests trending toward A.I. His dissertation was titled “Essays on the Philosophy of Machine Learning.” And he moved to San Francisco to pursue postdoctoral research in early 2023, just when ChatGPT was blowing up. As the new large language models began displaying uncannily humanlike behaviors, he awoke to the dawning significance of potentially conscious A.I. — and to the possibility that something professionally interesting might happen if he stuck around.

Trying to rigorously answer fundamental questions is kind of the whole point of philosophy, and Mr. Long and Jeff Sebo, an N.Y.U. philosopher who specializes in animal welfare, soon collaborated to write “Taking A.I. Welfare Seriously,” a paper arguing that it was important to avoid harming A.I. systems if they “matter morally,” and also important not to care for systems if they don’t. Later, with funding from three foundations aligned with the Effective Altruism movement, Mr. Long and a colleague set up a nonprofit, Eleos AI Research. Of his drift from academic philosophy into the A.I. start-up ecosystem, Mr. Long says, “I sort of got, like, frog-boiled.”

“So, I think I’m going to major in philosophy” is the kind of undergraduate statement that for decades has terrorized tuition-burdened parents, inspiring dark visions of basement-dwelling offspring who fail to launch. Diogenes the Cynic lived in a clay jar. Baruch Spinoza ground lenses to pay the bills. Friedrich Nietzsche survived on the kindness of family and friends. The idea that a philosophy degree is a ticket to a lifetime of underemployment persists. When Google DeepMind announced in April that it was hiring someone whose actual business-card title would be “Philosopher,” the memes flowed. “It’s so the A.I. can learn what it feels like to have a college degree and still be unemployed,” someone posted on X. Of philosophy majors’ job precarity, a Redditor contributed: “Half are pulling espresso shots while silently debating whether the customer who ordered oat milk truly exists.”

But Mr. Long’s trajectory and Google’s new hire were in keeping with a quietly building trend: A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning. While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”

One of humanity’s oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other. A.I. presents a fresh way for philosophers to ask ancient questions, and its own set of new ones that they are uniquely trained to engage with: of truth and belief and knowledge (epistemologists); of reasoning (logicians); of mind and consciousness (philosophers of mind and consciousness). For ethicists, in particular, A.I. is a bonanza. How should models act toward us? How should humans interact with them? Where would purpose come from in a post-work society?

“When you look at A.I. and think seriously about it, the philosophical questions just abound,” says Iason Gabriel, an Oxford-trained philosopher who joined Google DeepMind in 2017 and now leads its Artificial General Intelligence and Society team. “They’re almost everywhere.”

Thus it was that, as the sun set over San Francisco Bay on a recent Thursday, Mr. Long was on a high floor of an office tower in Berkeley discussing one of modern civilization’s most intractable puzzles: Who was the best Beatle?

(to be continued by part two)

Translation

主修哲學人仕的反擊（1/3）

人工智能實驗室正在招募那些有反向思考、摸下巴沉思、雙手十指尖相接信心地提意見的智者。現在誰才是失業者？

Robert Long在喬治亞州長大，從小就喜歡思考人生大事和人生意義 - 不到10歲，他就開始懷疑自己的自由意志。但直到大學主修社會學後，他才意識到自己可以全心全意思考意識問題。他讀了Douglas Hofstadter的《我是一個奇異的循環》（I Am a Strange Loop）一書，書中探討了諸如 “什麼是自我？” 之類的謎題。 他說:“我以前甚至都沒意識到這些問題是可以提出的”，“更沒想到還有專門研究這些問題的哲學學科。”

Long 先生進入紐約大學攻讀心靈哲學研究生時，懷抱著一個傳統的抱負。 他說:「我當時一心想著在期刊上發表文章，然後找份工作，在大學任職」。當一位哲學博士生同學告訴他，她要去一家名為OpenAI的鮮為人知的非營利組織從事人工智能政策方面的工作時，“我的第一個反應是：這真是出乎意料。”

但 Long 先生也發現自己的哲學興趣逐漸轉向了人工智能。他的博士論文題目是《機器學習哲學論文集》。 2023年初，他搬到舊金山從事博士後研究，當時ChatGPT正處於爆發式增長期。隨著新型大型語言模(LLM)開始展現出驚人的類人行為，他意識到潛在意識人工智能的重要性，以及如果繼續深耕這一領域，或許能取得一些有趣的職業成就。

嚴謹地解答根本性問題正是哲學的核心所在。Long先生與專攻動物福利的紐約大學哲學家Jeff Sebo很快就合作撰寫了《認真對待人工智能的福祉》（Taking A.I. Welfare Seriously）一文。該文指出，如果人工智能系統 “具有道德意義” ，那麼避免傷害它們至關重要；反之，如果它們不具有道德意義，那麼也不應該關心它們。後來，在三個與有效利他主義運動相契合的基金會的資助下，Long 先生與一位同事成立了非營利組織 Eleos AI Research。至於他從學術哲學轉向人工智能領域的創業生態系統，朗先生說:” 我在不知不覺就被捲入其中。”

「所以，我想我會主修哲學」這種本科生宣言，幾十年來一直讓那些背負沉重學費負擔的家長們憂心忡忡，讓他們不禁擔憂自己的孩子最終只能待在地下室，一事無成。犬儒學派(Cynic) 的Diogenes居住在一個大陶罐裡。Baruch Spinoza靠著研磨透鏡維持生計。Friedrich Nietzsche 靠家人和朋友的接濟度日。哲學學位注定終身就業不足的觀念依然根深蒂固。今年四月，GoogleDeepMind宣佈將招募一位名片上印著「哲學家」頭銜的人，這一消息迅速引發了網路幽默諷刺。 有人在X論壇平台上發文說:「這樣人工智能就能體會到擁有大學學位卻依然失業的滋味了」。一位Reddit用戶就主修哲學學生工作不穩定性的問題評論道： “一半的人一邊默默地製作濃縮咖啡，一邊思考點燕麥奶的顧客是否真的存在。”

但Long的職業軌跡和谷歌的新聘用都符合一個悄然興起的趨勢：人工智能實驗室及其相關的非營利組織一直正在尋找的員工不僅要精通神經網路和強化學習等人工智能技術，還要精通後果主義 (Consequentialism) 和 約翰·史超域·密爾 (John Stuart Mill) 的思想。儘管普通的哲學學位一如過往仍然難以賺取金錢，但紐約大學著名的意識哲學家 David Chalmers 指出： “我認為，目前對接受過人工智能訓練的哲學家的需求，甚至可以說是遠遠超過了供給。我鼓勵學生們投身於這個領域。我認為與人工智能相關的問題將在未來很長一段時間內成為關注的焦點。”

人類最古老的學科之一和最新的發明之一，似乎天生就是彼此的結合。人工智能為哲學家提供了一種全新的方式來探討古老的問題，同時也帶來了一系列全新的問題，而哲學家們恰好具備處理這些問題的獨特能力：關於真理、信念和知識（即認識論者）；關於推理（即邏輯學家）；關於心靈和意識（即心靈與意識哲學家）。尤其對於倫理學家而言，人工智能更是一次巨大的機會。模型該如何對待我們？人類又該如何與它們互動？在後工作時代，人生的意義將從何而來？

牛津大學哲學家 Iason Gabriel 說:「當你認真審視人工智能時，你會發現哲學問題真是多到不得了」。他於2017年加入 GoogleDeepMind，目前領導通用人工智能與社會團隊。 “它們幾乎無處不在。”

就是如此，在最近的一個星期四，當夕陽西下，映照著舊金山灣，Long 先生在 Berkeley一座辦公大樓的高層，與人探討著現代文明最棘手的難題之一：誰是披頭四中最棒的成員？

（待續）

Note:

1. Effective Altruism (EA) (有效利他主義) is an intellectual and philanthropic movement that asks a simple question: “How can we use our time, money, and careers to do the greatest amount of good?" It began in the early 2010s and has become especially influential in parts of the U.S. technology, academic, and AI communities. The core idea is that, unlike traditional charity, Effective Altruism emphasizes using evidence and careful reasoning to determine which actions help the most. (ChatGPT)

2. The paper entitled “Taking A.I. Welfare Seriously” 《認真對待人工智能的福祉》basically argues that there is enough uncertainty about future AI consciousness that we should begin preparing now for the possibility that some AI systems could have morally significant experiences. The paper also suggests that even though we do not know whether future AI systems will be conscious, there is a sufficiently plausible possibility that some may become morally significant, so society should begin researching AI consciousness and preparing ethical guidelines now to avoid accidentally causing large-scale moral harm to A.I. systems. (Chat GPT)

3. Diogenes of Sinope was a Greek philosopher of the 4th century BCE and the most famous representative of Cynicism (犬儒學派). Rather than writing elaborate philosophical treatises, he turned his life into a public demonstration of his ideas, advocating radical simplicity, self-sufficiency, and freedom from social convention. His influence extended far beyond his lifetime, helping shape later philosophical traditions, especially Stoicism (ChatGPT)

4. A post-work society (後工作時代) is a hypothetical future society in which most people no longer need to work to earn a living, usually because technology—especially artificial intelligence and robots—does most of the work.