摘要
麦克尤恩在其新作《像我这样的机器》中,以人工智能为噱头,极尽人物叙述之能事,生动刻绘了机器人介入人类生活所引发的冲突与矛盾,适逢其时地提出了"机器人的本质是什么?""人与机器人之间的关系如何?"以及"人工智能是否可以超越或替代人脑?"等一系列发人深省的问题。本文基于机器人亚当与女主人公米兰达"偷吃禁果"和亚当之死两个叙事片段之文学伦理学分析,试图对上述问题加以回应。文章认为,人是自然选择和伦理选择的产物,机器人是科学选择的产物。亚当只有存储相关信息和指令的电子文本,不具有人类特有的生物性脑文本,缺乏区别善恶观念的伦理意识;人工智能在本质上属于电子文本,无法替代承载伦理意识的脑文本,由此导致它难以应对人类世界的伦理问题。在某种程度上来说,以亚当为代表的机器人与以查理和米兰达为代表的人类之间的矛盾隐喻了科学选择和伦理选择的冲突,而亚当的毁灭则揭示了机器人之于人类道德生活介入的失败。
With the gimmick of artificial intelligence and the tricks of character narration, McEwan’s newly released novel, Machines Like Me, tells a realistic story about conflicts and contradictions in the wake of a machine’s engagement with the life of humans and, timely, raises a number of thought-provoking questions, such as "What is the nature of the machine?" "How is the relationship between the machine and humans?" and "Can artificial intelligence surpass or replace human brain?" This article attempts to explore the above mentioned questions by analyzing, within the conceptual framework of Ethical Literary Criticism, two episodes of the story, namely, the tasting of the "Forbidden Fruit" by Adam, the robot,and Miranda, the heroine, and the destruction of Adam. It contends that human beings are products of natural selection and ethical selection, while machines are products of scientific selection. As a machine, Adam has no biological brain text like humans, but only an electronic text used for storing and processing information and commands. Therefore, he has no ethical consciousness to tell the good from the evil. To a large degree, artificial intelligence is a type of electronic text in nature and cannot replace the brain text armed with ethical consciousness, which accounts for Adam’s failture to deal with ethical issues in the world of humans. In a way, the conflicts between robots like Adam and humans like Charlie and Miranda can be seen as the conflicts between scientific selection and ethical selection, and the death of Adam signals the failure of machines’ engagement with ethical issues of the humans.
作者
尚必武
Shang Biwu(Shanghai Jiao Tong University,Shanghai 200240,China)
出处
《外国文学研究》
CSSCI
北大核心
2019年第5期61-74,共14页
Foreign Literature Studies
基金
国家社科基金一般项目“麦克尤恩小说的叙事艺术与伦理思想研究”(14BWW039)~~