Deep inside a spaghetti bowl of suburban Maryland streets this weekend, I turned to a trusted guide for directions back to the highway. But this guide couldn’t figure out what direction we were going, and she asked me to perform nonsensical maneuvers. “Actually, don’t listen to Siri—she can’t figure out where we are,” said a friend in the passenger seat.

周末我和朋友去马里兰州的郊区吃意大利面，返程的时候我向一名信得过的向导求助，问她向哪个方向能走回大路。但向导却说不出来，让我们问问Siri.“说实在的，别听Siri的，她又不知道我们在哪。”坐在一旁的朋友说。

Referring to Apple’s artificial-intelligence (AI) assistant as “she” feels natural because of Siri’s female-sounding voice. Although Siri herself will tell you she is neither male nor female—“I exist beyond your human concept of gender”—her relatively natural-sounding voice elicits a warmer response than a stilted robot voice would.

人们一直把苹果的人工智能（AI）助手当成女性，一说起“她”，大家就觉得亲切自然，这是因为Siri用女声说话。虽然Siri说自己不是男性也不是女性，只会回答你“我的存在超越了你们的性别观念”，但与机器人呆板的声音相比，Siri的声音更加自然，更能引起人们热情的回应。

There’s an option buried in every iPhone to make Siri speak in a male-sounding voice (or in a British or an Australian accent), but Siri is not “he” by default for a reason: Research shows that people react more positively to female voices.

在iPhone的设置中，Siri的声音也可以被设置为男声（一般是是英音或澳音），但Siri默认是女声的原因在于，有研究证明，人们听到女声时，反应会更加积极。

The quality of these digital assistants’ voices earns them a gendered pronoun—but what about AI that looks and sounds more like a robot? The iconic R2-D2, for example, speaks entirely in bleeps and bloops, but is referred to with a male pronoun throughout the Star Wars saga. The latest Star Wars droid, BB-8, is even less humanoid, rolling around on a smooth sphere. But he, too, has been assigned a gender, although his gender identity fluctuated during the production of The Force Awakens.

数字助手的声音不同，使用的性别代词也不同。那么，看上去更像机器人的人工智能应该用什么样的代词呢？比如《星战》中的机器人R2-D2，就只会发出“哔哔”和“噗鲁”的声音，但影片中这个机器人却用的是男性人称代词。《星球大战：原力觉醒》中新出现的机器人BB-8在光滑的地面上滚来滚去，并不太像人，但“他”也被定义了性别，尽管在影片制作的过程中，“他”的性别变了好几次。

The obvious alternative to calling a robot a he or a she is to refer to them as “it.” The pronoun certainly avoids the pitfalls of gendering AI—pitfalls that maintain the stereotype of the submissive female assistant, for example—but it renders the human-machine relationship in impersonal terms. This is everything an AI developer wants to avoid: Apple, for example, has tried to imbue Siri with character by programming the assistant with clever responses.

除了判断机器人的性别，还有一种方法，就是称机器人为“它”。代词“它”避开了定义人工智能性别的苦恼。一直以来，人们都把人工智能设置为顺从的女性助手形象，而一旦使用非人称代词，就表明了人机关系——而这正是每个人工智能开发者极力想摆脱的事。例如，苹果就一直在编写代码，让Siri的回答更加人性化，强化Siri的女性特征。

Often, a new technology that departs from the familiar will be designed in such away to make it look less foreign. Early iterations of iPhone operating systems, for example, mimicked real-world items—a yellow notepad, a calculator with shiny buttons—to help users understand how to interact with the alien plastic-and-glass slab in their hands. After seven years of skeuomorphic design, perhaps assuming that it no longer needed to hold users’ hands, Apple shifted to the relatively inscrutable flat design it still uses today.

通常说来，从旧技术中脱胎而出的新技术，在设计上不会有太大的变动。早期的几代iPhone操作系统模仿的就是真实世界中的事物，它的外观就像是一个黄色的笔记本，一个按键闪闪发亮的计算器，这样可以帮助用户了解如何使用手里这个崭新的、用塑料和玻璃制成的厚板。七年间，苹果在一直采用拟物化设计，直到后来他们发现不再需要教用户如何操作了，于是开始采用扁平化设计，直至今日。

It could be that robots and AI that share qualities with humans—like a gender identity—are a similar design trick. These shared qualities help humans acclimate to the proliferation of AI without feeling overrun by metallic Terminators. Once it becomes commonplace, we may no longer need a familiar crutch—human gender pronouns—to refer to artificial intelligence.

机器人和人工智能也可能拥有人类特征，比如设计性别就是一个例子。这些特征使人们能够适应人工智能在数量上的不断增长，而不会觉得泛滥成灾。一旦有一天，人工智能成为了司空见惯的事，我们也就不需要用“人称代词”来定义人工智能了。

When that happens, likely not too far in the future, we’ll need a new way to talk about computers. More than an “it,” but not quite a “he” or a “she,” AI is a new category of entity. But creating new pronouns is hard. Although many people prefer to be referred to using gender-neutral pronouns like “ze” rather than “him” or “her,” these pronouns haven’t caught on widely.

人工智能成为家常便饭，可能也不会是很久之后的事。到那时，我们需要以一种新的方式与计算机进行交流。我们不能仅仅将人工智能称作“它”，更不能称作“他”或“她”。人工智能是一种新的实体，但创造一个新代词并不简单，尽管很多人倾向于使用中性代词，如“ze”来代替“him”或“her”，但这些代词并未得到广泛应用。

Meanwhile, popular culture is increasingly focused on the role of robots—and their gender—in our lives. Two recent films that have featured female AI characters have taken on the trope of an obedient, hapless Siri-like assistant. Samantha from Her and Ava from Ex Machina become sexualized romantic interests for male protagonists, fulfilling the fantasies of the lonely men that become obsessed with them. But in both films, the female AI get the better of their human suitors, leaving the men behind as they grow stronger.

同时，流行文化正在逐渐关注机器人在我们生活中担任的角色，以及机器人的性别。近期，在两部关于女性人工智能角色的电影中，她们的性格就像Siri一样顺从又低声下气。《她》（Her）中的萨曼莎（Samantha），《机械姬》（Ex Machina）中的艾娃（Ava）都与男主角产生了爱情，满足了迷恋人工智能的光棍们的一场幻想。但在两部影片中，女性人工智能后来都有了更好的人类追求者，她们越来越强大，最后甩了男主角。

But even Samantha and Ava are, in a way, stock female characters. Until we can conceive of a genderless intelligence, even a rolling sphere that pings and whirrs to communicate will be a “he,” with all the baggage and connotations that come with that word.

但从某种程度上说，萨曼莎和艾娃也拥有女性特征。就算是一个只会呼呼地飞来飞去、砰砰乱撞的机器人也可以称之为“他”，也能够体现出“他”这个字的内涵，除非我们能制造出真正的无性人工智能。

译者：顾楠，山东曲阜师范大学外国语学院翻译硕士

审校&编辑：钦君

英文来源：大西洋月刊