Whatever happened to the human touch? If you believe the latest fad from the tech world, it won’t be long before we give up talking to real people and start talking instead to machines — or “bots”. Or it might be machines pretending to be people, or people pretending to be machines. The permutations of human and artificial intelligence are about to become interesting.人际对话究竟再次发生了什么？如果你将科技界的近期时尚上当，过没法多久，我们将仍然与真人对话，而开始与机器或者“机器人”聊天。或者，我们谈话的对象有可能是乔装成人的机器人，或是乔装成机器人的人类。人类与人工智能之间的人组变化将显得更加有意思。But if it works as advertised, we will move one step further beyond a world of direct human interaction towards a future when screens — and new ways of engaging with computer intelligence — govern much of our lives. For sheer convenience, it will be hard to resist. Less obvious is what might be lost in the process.但如果这样做到的效果像宣传的那么好，我们将更进一步靠近人际必要对话的世界，迈进一个由屏幕——以及与计算机智能交流的新方式——操纵我们大部分生活的未来。

如果纯粹为了便捷，这种欲望将无法排斥。但较容易被察觉到的是这个过程中我们有可能丧失什么。

Facebook has just given this trend its biggest lift with the release this week of a way for companies to plug their bots into Messenger, its chat system. Want to know the weather? Ask a question and an intelligent agent will answer. Interested in buying something? Bots on hand will show you the latest offers and guide you through to the checkout.Facebook刚为这一趋势带给了史上最大幅的提振，该公司上周公布了一种让企业将自己的机器人终端其聊天系统Messenger的方法。如果想要理解天气，只需发问，智能机器人就不会答题。如果你对购物感兴趣，身旁的机器人将向你展出近期报价，并指导你直到已完成缴付。If people take to the idea, entire call centres could be rendered obsolete. Why hold on waiting for a human when you can get an immediate response from a bot on your smartphone? The call-centre reps are operating from scripts anyway and these are interactions that could be programmed into a piece of software.如果人类拒绝接受这一理念，所有电话服务中心将被出局。

如果你可以马上在自己的智能手机上获得机器人的对此，还有什么理由之后等候人工接收者呢？当真电话服务中心人员是按脚本接收者，这些对话几乎可以被编为一款软件。Whether the bots catch on will depend on not stretching the technology beyond its limits. Microsoft’s wayward chatbot Tay, the algorithm pretending to be an adolescent girl that started spouting racist comments on Twitter, is Exhibit A for what can go wrong. Most artificial intelligence is not very intelligent and when the main technique for training the new systems involves something called machine learning, it turns out that machines can be taught bad behaviour as well as good.要想要让机器人热门，必需不想这一技术走到界。微软公司(Microsoft)任性的聊天机器人Tay就展现出了机器人有可能经常出现怎样的错误，这个装扮成一名青春期少女的算法程序已开始在Twitter上散播种族主义言论。

大多数人工智能并不是很聪慧，当培训新的系统的主要技术牵涉到所谓的机器学习时，事实证明，机器人既有可能懂，也有可能学坏。Not that the chatbots on Facebook are about to have a mind of their own and turn rogue. Most take a very limited approach to AI, using machine learning to “understand” the questions being put to them and returning largely pre-scripted answers. They try to identify a need, then draw you down a chain of conversation to a result.并不是说道Facebook上的聊天机器人迅速不会有自己的思想，而且显得粗俗。大多数机器人的人工智能模式都很受限，它们利用机器学习来“解读”接管到的问题，并主要对系统预设的答案。

它们尝试再行确认市场需求，然后在和你聊天的过程中得出答案。Deeper levels of intelligence will also be on tap. But it is as likely to involve a human brain as one made from silicon. M, another Facebook chat service, relies on real people sitting in the background, returning answers, though to the user, it is not at all clear whether information is being generated by a person or a computer. As the machines become smarter they will take over more of the responses, eventually pushing human workers out of the loop altogether.更加深层次的人工智能也将随时派上用场。但它既有可能牵涉到硅脑，也有可能牵涉到人脑。

Facebook发售的另一款聊天服务M，依赖真人躺在幕后对系统答案，不过对用户而言，他们显然不告诉自己获得的信息是由人还是由计算机分解。随着机器人显得更加聪慧，它们将分担更好的接收者服务，最后将人工几乎吸管对系统流程。The prospect of another layer of human interaction being lost to technology is bound to bring a pang of regret, not to mention a wave of concern about the impact on jobs. But then, who would want to give up ATMs and go back to queueing up for a bank teller? Most people won’t mind at all when the days of call-centre queueing have receded into history.人际对话在又一个层面上败于技术的前景必定不会让人类深感惋惜，更加不用说对影响低收入的大量忧虑。但谁不愿退出自动取款机而回来排队等候银行柜员服务呢？当排队等候电话服务中心接收者慢慢沦为历史时，大多数人都会在乎。

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