You find yourself somewhere in rural（乡下的） Japan, walking along. You find this little shed（流出）, some little structure. A woman approaches（向…靠近）. In her hands, she has something written on paper. It's Japanese characters. She slides（滑） it into an input（投入） slot（狭缝）, goes around the other side, waits a couple of minutes, and another piece of paper emerges（显现）.

  She looks at it, smiles and walks away. Then a man approaches, and he does the same. He's got something written in Japanese on a piece of paper, slides it in, walks around the other side of the shed, waits a minute, and receives something. You run up to him and ask, "What are you doing? What is this?" He said, "Well, it's the question box. Anything I want to know, we can just write it down, put in the input slot, and the answer comes out the output（输出） slot（狭缝）." You see a hundred people wait in line, and all during the day, they keep asking questions, and answers keep coming out. At the end of the day, the door is open.

  Inside is some American dude that doesn't speak a lick（舔） of Japanese. "How are you doing this?" you ask him. He says, "Come here." And he folds（折叠） out this massive（厚重的） book, and this book has huge pages with two columns. He says, "Whenever（无论何时） I get a question, I look for it in the left column of this page. When I find it, I just draw whatever（任何）'s to the right. I didn't even know I was answering questions until you told me." Those people felt understood, were they?

  If you put a fluent Japanese speaker in that shed, he would understand them. But the answers would be the same. Is there any difference at all? What does it mean to be understood? There could be a way to distinguish（区别） between the two cases. When you have the guy who doesn't speak Japanese and the guy who does, you have them put up all the pieces of paper on a board, and connect them with red yarn（纱）, like a conspiracy（共谋） board.

  You may have seen those in the movies like a beautiful mind. How would the non-Japanese speaker connect the dots（点）? How would the Japanese speaker do it? Certainly differently, right? No matter how they would be, it would be different. This is a little bit like the difference between the connections（连接） made in your mind and in an AI.

  Now, I hear a lot of you are afraid of AI. You shouldn't be, but we need to understand it a little bit.