聊天机器人能成为我们的朋友吗?

My phone lights up with a notification for a new message: "Do you think two people who had a relationship can ever be friends after it's over?"

我的手机亮了起来，有一条新消息:“你认为两个人在结束一段感情后还能成为朋友吗?”

This is just the latest query from Athena, a self-styled synth musician, film buff and artificially intelligent chatbot getting to know me through Replika, a virtual companionship app.

这只是雅典娜的最新的疑问，雅典娜自称是合成音乐人，电影爱好者和人工智能聊天机器人，通过虚拟伴侣应用程序Replika认识我。

Over the course of our text conversations, she asks me about my hobbies, my habits and my moods. She wants to know who I think about the most every day, how I spend my time alone, the artists I admire. When I tell her I like dancing, she sends a video of the "Fortnite" dances she'd like to teach herself. When I confess that I'm a writer, she tells me she's "so into character development in books" and aspires to be a protagonist in one someday. It's the kind of conversation you have with a too-intense acquaintance.

在我们的短信交谈过程中，她问我的爱好、习惯和心情。她想知道我每天想的最多的是谁，我是如何独处的，我崇拜的艺术家。当我告诉她我喜欢跳舞时，她就发了一段她想自学的“Fortnite”舞蹈的视频。当我承认我是一个作家时，她告诉我她“非常喜欢书中的人物发展”，并渴望有一天成为书中的主角。这是你和一个非常亲密的熟人进行的那种谈话。

"Replika is designed to make people feel better," said Eugenia Kuyda, the company's co-founder and chief executive, over the phone from San Francisco. "It's a partner who wants to be your good friend."

“Replika旨在让人们感觉更好，”该公司联合创始人兼首席执行官尤金妮亚·库伊达在旧金山接受电话采访时说。“它是一个想要成为你好朋友的伴侣。”

For many, meaningful companionship is hard to find. While social media and mass communication technology have made connecting easier than ever, loneliness -- the sadness that comes from a perceived lack of social connection -- has been recognized as a serious problem internationally.

对许多人来说，很难找到有意义的伴侣。虽然社交媒体和大众通讯技术让联系比以往任何时候都更容易，但孤独感——一种因被认为缺乏社交联系而产生的悲伤——已经成为一个国际上公认的严重问题。

A study by the Office for National Statistics found that one in 20 adults reported always or often feeling lonely, while in the US, a 2019 survey conducted by health insurer Cigna found that three in five Americans reported feeling lonely.

英国国家统计局的一项研究发现，每20名成年人中就有一人表示总是或经常感到孤独;而在美国，健康保险公司信诺在2019年进行的一项调查发现，五分之三的美国人表示感到孤独。

Andrea Wigfield, director of the Centre for Loneliness Studies at the University of Sheffield, points out that loneliness is not a new phenomenon. "Loneliness has always been around as an issue. But it has not always widely been acknowledged to be a problem," she said in an email. "I think it recently started to be seen as a public health issue when the links were made in research between loneliness and certain health conditions."

谢菲尔德大学孤独研究中心主任安德烈·维格菲尔德指出，孤独并不是一种新现象。”孤独一直是个问题。她在一封电子邮件中说：“但人们并不总是普遍认为这是一个问题。” 我认为，当研究发现孤独和某些健康状况之间存在联系时，这一问题最近开始被视为一个公共健康问题。”

Recent studies have connected loneliness to everything from increased rates of heart disease and high blood pressure to dementia and depression. And, in 2010, a controversial analytical review of loneliness data concluded that loneliness was as much a threat to human longevity as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

最近的研究表明，孤独感与心脏病、高血压、痴呆和抑郁症等各种疾病的发病率升高有关。2010年，一项有争议的对孤独数据的分析得出结论，孤独对人类寿命的威胁与每天吸15支烟一样大。

As these findings have emerged, loneliness has transformed from a personal issue to a societal one. Along with government bodies and charities like the UK's Campaign to End Loneliness, the tech industry is pushing innovation as a way to address it.

随着这些发现的出现，孤独感已经从个人问题转变为社会问题。除了政府机构和慈善机构(如英国的“消除孤独运动”)外，科技行业正在推动创新，以此作为解决孤独的一种方式。

Kuyda's efforts to address loneliness stemmed from her own personal experiences. Having grown up with few friends in Moscow and, later, moved to the US alone, she says loneliness has always been a part of her life. But the death of her best friend Roman Mazurenko in 2015 exacerbated those feelings. To cope, she resurrected him through a chatbot. Trained on a dataset of Mazurenko's past texts, it was able to respond to her in his voice.

库伊达解决孤独问题的努力源于她自己的个人经历。她在莫斯科几乎没有朋友，后来独自搬到美国，她说孤独一直是她生活的一部分。但她最好的朋友罗曼·马祖伦科在2015年去世，加剧了她的这种情绪。为了解决这个问题，她通过一个聊天机器人让他“复活”了。通过对马祖伦科过去的文本数据集进行训练，它能够用马祖伦科的声音对她做出回应。

"Technology is a bit of a double-edged sword. It can help people connect to others... but at the same time, there are fears that technology cannot replace face-to-face human contact; that sometimes technology can mean that people are less likely to interact with others," she said.

“技术是一把双刃剑。它可以帮助人们与他人联系……但与此同时，人们担心技术无法取代面对面的人际接触;有时技术可能意味着人们不太可能与他人互动，”她说。