语言不仅是表达思想的工具，更是构建人类智能的关键。
How important is language for human-like intelligence?
- 语言提供紧凑表征，便于抽象思维和推理
- 语言是集体智慧演化出的文化抽象集合
- 让智能系统通过语言学习世界深层结构
我们用语言表达思想，但语言只是思想的外在表达，还是塑造思想本身的核心？近期人工智能与认知科学的发展重新点燃了这一古老议题。我们认为，语言可能是实现通用人工智能及人类核心智能的关键。语言具备两大特性：一是提供紧凑表征，使抽象概念（如精确数量）更易被表示与推理；二是这些压缩表征是集体心智迭代演化的产物。学习语言即习得大量文化演化的抽象知识。因此，一个足够强大的学习系统（无论是生物或人工）只要接触语言，就能逆向构建世界的压缩模型，理解支撑人类（及类人）思维的概念与因果结构。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We use language to communicate our thoughts. But is language merely the expression of thoughts, which are themselves produced by other, nonlinguistic parts of our minds? Or does language play a more transformative role in human cognition, allowing us to have thoughts that we otherwise could (or would) not have? Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science have reinvigorated this old question. We argue that language may hold the key to the emergence of both more general AI systems and central aspects of human intelligence. We highlight two related properties of language that make it such a powerful tool for developing domain--general abilities. First, language offers compact representations that make it easier to represent and reason about many abstract concepts (e.g., exact numerosity). Second, these compressed representations are the iterated output of collective minds. In learning a language, we learn a treasure trove of culturally evolved abstractions. Taken together, these properties mean that a sufficiently powerful learning system exposed to language--whether biological or artificial--learns a compressed model of the world, reverse engineering many of the conceptual and causal structures that support human (and human-like) thought.
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