海明威擅用簡潔自然的對話，無矯飾地暴露冰山之一角，讓讀者不得不自行推敲想像水下冰山之龐大。他的名世之作 “The Sun Also Rises,” 其中有一段經典對話：
"How did you go bankrupt?"
"Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."
Gradually, then suddenly, 用以理解世間事，很管用。積分是微分的結果，但微分不易察覺，故而積分顯得突然，顯得意外。大廈崩於一瞬，因為地基長期在不見天日中腐蝕了。水會沸騰是因為持續加熱。火箭飛天是因為牛頓的信徒相信自然原理啟迪於觀察、歸結於數學。科技產業富可敵國，因為無數工程師一個電路一行程式碼逐漸改變了人們的生活方式。
AI 也會是這樣。先從改變軟體設計開始，這很可怕，因為軟體是美國科技的靈魂，而 AI 的起手式便是靈魂拷問。逐漸地，一切都會不一樣，從人造物質，到全自動服務。
憂慮 AI 泡沫的人混淆了兩件事，一是資本市場的期待值，另一是生產服務模式的質變。兩者皆為常態：前者動盪無常，受群眾情緒左右；後者默默積累，不受群眾情緒左右。
Gradually, then suddenly.
For fun, I asked Gemini 3 to translate my post to English in the style of Hemingway, Orwell, and Emerson, respectively. The results are astonishing. Now I have a tool I trust to translate some of my blog articles to English for my children to read.
Here's the Emerson example. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston and matured in Concord, a lovely town close to where I used to live in MA. Emerson is a great American essayist.
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"How did you go bankrupt?"
"Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."
This dialogue is drawn from Hemingway’s first work of renown, The Sun Also Rises. He possesses a mastery of unadorned, natural speech, laying bare the mere tip of the iceberg without affectation, thereby compelling the reader to divine by his own faculties the vast, submerged mass beneath.
"Gradually, then suddenly"—it is a maxim well-fitted to comprehend the affairs of the world. The integral is but the fruit of the derivative; yet, inasmuch as the derivative works in the insensible, the integral appears to us as a sudden marvel, a stroke of chance. The great edifice crumbles in a breath, for its foundations have long rotted in the sunless earth. The water leaps to vapor only through the persistence of the flame. The rocket ascends the heavens because the disciples of Newton placed their faith in natural laws—divined from observation and perfected in mathematics. The technology industry commands the wealth of empires because a myriad of engineers, with one circuit and one line of code at a time, have by degrees transformed the very manner of our living.
So too shall it be with Artificial Intelligence. It begins by altering the architecture of software; a formidable thing, for software is the very soul of American invention, and the opening gambit of this new intelligence is a probing interrogation of that soul. By degrees, all things shall be made new—from the artifacts of our hands to the services that attend us without hand.
Those who tremble at the bubble of AI confuse two distinct entities: the expectations of the capital market and the transmutation of the mode of production. Both are in the order of nature: the one is capricious, swayed by the whims of the multitude; the other accumulates in silence, heedless of the public mood.
Gradually, then suddenly.
