语言对于类人智能有多重要？
How important is language for human-like intelligence?
AI总结：
本文提出语言通过紧凑表征和集体心智的迭代输出，使学习系统能习得压缩的世界模型，从而成为通用人工智能与人类智能核心能力涌现的关键。
摘要：
我们使用语言来交流思想。但语言是否仅仅是思想的表达，而思想本身是由我们心智中其他非语言部分产生的？还是语言在人类认知中扮演着更具变革性的角色，使我们能够拥有否则可能（或将会）无法拥有的思想？人工智能（AI）和认知科学的最新发展重新激活了这个古老的问题。我们认为，语言可能是通向更通用的人工智能系统和人类智能核心方面之涌现的关键。我们强调语言的两个相关特性，使其成为发展领域通用能力的强大工具。第一，语言提供紧凑的表征，使表示和推理许多抽象概念（例如，精确数量）变得更容易。第二，这些压缩表征是集体心智的迭代输出。在学习一种语言时，我们学到了文化演化抽象的巨大宝库。综合起来，这些特性意味着一个足够强大的学习系统——无论是生物的还是人工的——在接触语言后，会学习到一个压缩的世界模型，逆向工程出支撑人类（以及类人）思维的许多概念结构和因果结构。
英文摘要：
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.
机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来，可能存在错误，请以论文正文为准。
