马特·里德利：创新的运作方式，第二部分

我在书的末尾有一章专门抱怨我们正经历一场创新饥荒而非盛宴，尤其是在非数字领域。

I have a chapter towards the end of the book where I complain about the fact that we are living through an innovation famine, not an innovation feast, particularly in areas other than digital.

原因之一在于环保运动抵制新技术的强大力量，而这些技术往往对环境有益。

One of the reasons for this is the power of the environmental movement to oppose new technologies, which are often good for the environment.

我详细分析了转基因生物案例——通过使植物具备抗虫性，能够帮助农业摆脱化学农药依赖。

I detail the case of genetically modified organisms where you make a plant insect resistant, have the capacity to wean agriculture off chemical pesticides.

该技术已被证实有效，现已在印度、巴西和北美应用，但在欧洲和非洲却因环保主义者的压力而被全面抵制。

This has been proven to work and is now being used in India, Brazil, and North America as well, but not in Europe and Africa, where an entire technology has effectively been rejected by the pressure of environmentalists.

我的好友马克·莱纳斯曾是90年代反对该技术最著名的活动家之一，他组织了大量抗议活动并撰写文章，后来转变立场承认我们当初做错了，但为时已晚。

My good friend Mark Linus was one of the most prominent campaigners against this technology in the nineteen nineties and did a lot of the protesting, a lot of the writing about it, and then changed his mind and says we were doing the wrong thing, but it's almost too late.

很难想象欧洲现在会改变立场接受这项新技术。

It's very hard to see how Europe now changes its mind and adopts this new technology.

最大的希望在于CRISPR等基因编辑技术——由于不涉及将其他生物的外源基因导入植物（无论这意味着什么），可以搁置环保主义者的诸多顾虑。

The best hope is that with the next technology that comes along, which is genome editing through things like CRISPR, a lot of the concerns of environmentalists can be set to one side because this is not a technology that involves bringing foreign genetic material from other creatures, whatever that means, into plants.

因此我们有可能直接跨越到更清洁的技术阶段。

So it's possible that we can leapfrog into some cleaner technologies there.

最终目标必须是：创新越多，所需资源越少，占用土地越少，归还自然的空间越大，民众越富裕，生育率自然下降。

The endpoint must be that the more we innovate, the fewer resources we need, the less land we need, the more land we can give to nature, the more we can make people prosperous, and that results in them cutting their birth rate.

这还会促使人们种植更多树木。

It also results in them planting more trees.

如果加速创新，本世纪末人类可能实现软着陆——让80-90亿人口以对自然环境更友好的方式生活，使多数人享有绿色空间。

There is a possible soft landing for humanity later in this century if we do plenty more innovation, where we end up with eight or 9,000,000,000 people living lives that are much more benign towards the natural environment and that enable most of us to have greenery around us.

新冠疫情鲜明地揭示出：我们的创新还远远不够。

The COVID pandemic has shown us quite starkly that we have not been doing enough innovation.

我们研发的疫苗数量不足。

We've not been developing enough vaccines.

我们未能找到加速疫苗研发的方法。

We've not been finding ways of developing vaccines faster.

我们开发的诊断设备数量不够。

We've not been developing enough diagnostic devices.

当你探究原因时，会发现新诊断设备从研发到获得销售许可存在20到70个月的延迟。

When you look at why not, you find that there is twenty to seventy months of delay to get a license to sell a new diagnostic device.

这足以让大多数创业者望而却步，甚至不敢涉足该领域。

This is enough to deter most entrepreneurs from even trying to go into that area.

我真心希望人们能明白：如果我们能推动更多创新，我们不会毁灭地球。

I do hope that one message people take is if we can do more innovation, we are not gonna destroy the planet.

恰恰相反，这是拯救地球最安全的方式。

Quite the reverse, it's the safest way of saving the planet.

目前环境遭受最严重破坏的正是那些最贫穷的国家。

It's the poorest countries that are seeing the most damage to the environment at the moment.

大卫·多伊奇在其著作中经常提到：任何物理定律允许或未禁止的事物，我们都能通过科技手段实现。

One of the things that David Deutsch does in his works, he often talks about how anything that is possible or not forbidden by the laws of physics is possible for us to create through technology and science.

作为宇宙的解释者，人类有能力理解任何存在体或理论生物所能理解的事物。

And as universal explainers, humans are capable of understanding anything that any being or any theoretical creature is capable of understanding.

我们只需研究如何在物理定律允许的广阔范围内，重组现有原子和粒子来实现目标。

All we have to do is figure out how to reconfigure the existing atoms and particles out there to do what we want within the laws of physics, which are quite generous and quite broad.

从这个意义上说，所有失败与过失都只是无知的表现。

In that sense, all failures and all sins are just ignorance.

这只是知识的匮乏。

It's just a lack of knowledge.

如果我们能通过创新加速知识的积累与应用，就能解决人类的所有问题。

If we were to speed up the accumulation and application of knowledge through innovation, we would be able to solve all of humanity's problems.

正如他所说，我们始终处于这个无限的开端，因为有待取得的进步是无穷无尽的。

And we're always at the beginning of this infinity, as he says, because there's an infinite amount of progress to be made.

前路如此漫长，当你审视我们在曲线上的任何一点时，前方仍有无限延伸的可能。

They're so far to go that when you look at where we are at any given point on that curve, there's an infinity stretching out in front of you.

我觉得这充满希望，但正如你

I find that extremely hopeful, but as you

指出的，在这些情况下我们可能成为自己最大的敌人。

point out, we can be our own worst enemies in these cases.

理性乐观主义非常重要的一点在于，我们并非认为世界是完美的，恰恰相反。

It's a very important part of rational optimism that we are not saying the world is perfect, quite the reverse.

这正是伏尔泰创造'乐观主义'这个词时的本意。

That's what the word optimism meant when it was coined by Voltaire.

你认为世界已经完美，无法再改进。

You thought the world was perfect, couldn't be improved anymore.

这不是我和大卫·多伊奇等人所主张的。

That's not what people like me and David Deutsch are saying.

我们要说的是，还有大量我们甚至尚未开始想象的改进空间。

We are saying there is an incredible amount of improvement that we haven't even yet begun to imagine.

作为物种，我们正站在百老汇漫长演出的起点。

We are at the start of a very long run on Broadway as a species.

我们还没有接近终点。

We're not towards the end.

在本世纪我们将见证一些惊人的新事物。

We are gonna see some amazing novelties in the current century.

所以我对许多环保运动（不是你说的处理当地绿化的保护运动，而是全球性的环保运动）的一个不满是，它认为我们无法发明太多东西，即使发明了也会造成伤害。

So one of my beefs with a lot of the environmental movement, not as you say, the conservation movement that deals with local greenery, but the planet one, is that it imagines that we're not gonna be able to invent very much and if we do invent things, they will do harm.

而我觉得这种想法并不正确。

And it doesn't feel to me that that is right.

我们几乎还没有触及到组合和重组世界原子与元素的不同方式的表面。

We've hardly scraped the surface of different ways of combining and recombining the atoms and elements of the world.

保罗·罗默曾讨论过可以制造多少种周期表中矿物的不同化合物。

Paul Romer talked about how many different compounds of the minerals in the periodic table could be made.

这是一个天文数字，而我们几乎还没有探索过其中一半的特性。

It's an astronomical number, and we've hardly explored the properties of half of them.

和你一样，我也是核聚变能源的拥护者，我认为它能在我们有生之年带来巨大改变。

Like you, I'm a fan of fusion energy, and I think that could make a huge difference within our lifetimes.

本世纪我们将能做各种事情来改善人类生活，同时也让地球更宜居。

There's all sorts of things that we're gonna be able to do in this century to improve humanity, but also to make it a livable place.

很多人本能地迷恋这个‘地球飞船’的比喻，因为它很诱人——地球是一颗非常脆弱、珍贵的蓝色弹珠。

There's this spaceship earth metaphor that a lot of people latch onto instinctively because it's seductive, that earth is this very fragile, precious blue marble.

它给予我们所需的一切，当我们毁掉家园时，就无处可去了。

It gives us everything that we want, and when we destroy our home, there's no place else left.

我们无法离开地球这艘飞船。

We can't get off spaceship earth.

它将地球视为一场零和游戏。

It treats Earth as a zero sum game.

但仔细审视后，这种观点就站不住脚了。

But upon closer examination, it sort of falls apart.

即便是地球本身，也对70亿人类在其上生存的想法充满敌意。

Even Earth is hostile to the idea of 7,000,000,000 humans living on it.

70亿人类能在地球上生存的唯一途径，是通过创新、科技以及改造环境。

The only way 7,000,000,000 humans live on Earth is through innovation, through technology, and through modifying the environment.

挑战在于如何以可持续的方式实现这一点，并进而探索如何在其他星球上复制这一模式——改造火星和月球，使其适宜居住。

The challenge is how to do it in a sustainable way and then figure out how to do it on other planets and terraform Mars and the moon and make them livable.

这需要重新审慎评估'地球飞船'这一隐喻，尽管大多数人本能地相信它，但经推敲后就会发现其漏洞

It requires a careful reexamination of the spaceship Earth metaphor, which most people instinctively believe, but upon examination turns out

是错误的。

to be incorrect.

你提到知识可能是无限的。

You mentioned knowledge as being potentially infinite.

知识是一种分布式和集体性的现象。

Knowledge is a distributed and collective phenomenon.

让我回顾伦纳德·里德在1950年代写的一篇精彩短文《铅笔的故事》，文中一支铅笔推演自己如何诞生，发现从伐木取材的人到开采石墨制作笔芯的人，有数百万人参与了它的制造过程。

I go back to this wonderful little essay that was written by Leonard Reed in the nineteen fifties called I Pencil, in which a pencil works out how it came into existence and discovers that millions of people contributed to its manufacturer, from people cutting down trees for the wood, to people mining graphite for the lead.

关键在于，这些人中没有一个人知道如何单独制造一支铅笔。

And the important point is that not one of them knows how to make a pencil.

我们能够制造出超出单个人类心智理解能力的物体，哪怕是最简单的物品。

We are capable of making objects, even our simplest objects, that are beyond the capability of one human mind to comprehend.

这需要大量人类智慧的合作，去创造它们，并积累如何发明它们的知识。

It requires lots of human minds to collaborate, to make them, and to accumulate the knowledge of how to invent them as well.

说到这里，我听起来有点像马克思主义者，因为我开始谈论集体人性。

At this point, I begin to sound a bit like a Marxist because I start talking about the collective humanity.

但这是从共产主义视角拯救协作、合作与伙伴关系，并将其恢复到政治光谱中更为自愿的一端，如果你愿意这么理解的话？

But it's a way of rescuing collaboration, cooperation, and partnership from a communist perspective and restoring it to a much more voluntary end of the political spectrum, if you like?

合作是物种存在的基础。

Cooperation is the basis for the species.

例如蚂蚁和蜜蜂看似是群体生物，但它们不会跨越基因界限进行合作。

For example, ants and bees look like they're hive creatures, but they don't cooperate across genetic boundaries.

我们是唯一能跨越基因界限合作，并彼此进行长远规划的物种。

We're the only creatures that cooperate across genetic boundaries and do long range planning with each other.

你们都知道尤瓦尔·赫拉利讨论过这个问题。

You all know Av Harari talks about this.

没错。

Right.

我们懂得如何与陌生人合作，而它们不行。

We know how to cooperate with strangers, and they don't.

如果你我属于其他任何物种，无论是狗、老鼠还是蚂蚁，鉴于你我基因差异和文化差异如此之大，在现实中相遇时很可能会互相攻击或争夺同一栖息地。

If you and I were to belong to any other species, whether dogs or mice or ants, given how genetically different you and I are and how culturally different you and I are, if we encountered each other in real life, we'd probably attack each other or fight over the same habitat.

我们既无法合作也无法交流。

We couldn't cooperate or converse.

这正是值得我们骄傲的独特之处。

That is a unique feature that we should be proud of.

你需要协作，因为没有人能独自理解这些复杂系统。

You need cooperation, and no one person understands any of these complex systems.

这大概就是为什么我看到宏观经济学家建立模型试图预测经济走向时会发笑。

It's kinda why I laugh when macroeconomists build their models trying to figure out where the economy is gonna go.

经济体系庞大到任何个体都无法全面理解。

The economy is far too big for any one individual to understand.

这是由数十亿参与者涌现出的复杂系统。

It's an emergent complex system of billions of actors.

所以这些模型本质上最终都会选择性取样。

So these models, by definition, end up cherry picking.

它们建立在几个不稳固的假设上，最终神奇地迎合了宏观经济学家们原本就带有的政治偏见。

They rest in a few shaky assumptions, and they end up miraculously converging whatever political biases the macroeconomists happen to have in the first place.

这正是当前疫情建模中暴露的问题之一。

That's one of the problems we're seeing at the moment with the modeling of the pandemic.

这种自上而下的理解方式，试图解析本质上自下而上的现象。

It's an attempt to top down understand something that is a bottom up phenomenon.

换种说法，每天大约有1000万人在伦敦用午餐（疫情期间可能例外），但大多数人都是最后一刻才决定吃什么。

The other way of putting it is to say 10,000,000 people eat lunch in London every day, roughly speaking, maybe not at the moment because of the pandemic, but most of them choose what to eat at the last minute.

怎么可能恰好有合适种类、合适数量的食物在正确的时间和地点出现？

How is it possible that the right amounts of the right kinds of food are available in the right places at the right time for that to happen?

谁是伦敦的午餐调度专员？

Who is London's lunch commissioner?

这位专员想必拥有惊人的智慧。

He or she must be unbelievably intelligent.

当然，现实中并不存在这样的人，如果有的话，那将是一场彻底的灾难。

And of course, there is no such person, and if there was, it would be an absolute disaster.

那样我们都会吃苏联式的配给粮，半数人将面临饥饿。

Then we'd all be eating Soviet style rations, and half of us would be starving.

排队会排成长龙。

There'd be long lines.

正是如此。

Exactly.

不幸的是，2020年经济学家都在构建疫情模型，而流行病学家却在管理经济，我们完全本末倒置了。

Unfortunately, in 2020, the economists are all building epidemic models and the epidemiologists are running the economy, so we've got it backwards.

我们陷入了两难困境：既不愿为单个人命标价。

We're trapped in a bad situation where we are not willing to put a value in a single human life.

你们让这些卫生官员掌权，他们既未受过相关训练，也从未打算管理整个世界，他们自己都害怕如果过早放松管控，会被指责造成超额债务。

You've put these health officers in charge, weren't trained or designed or never signed up to run the entire world, and they themselves are terrified that they will be blamed for excess debts if they let up too early.

由于经济后果难以估算，他们将长期维持封锁状态。

It's very hard to calculate the economic consequences, so they're gonna keep us in lockdown for quite a while.

瑞典模式让我很感兴趣，倒不是说它一定是最佳方案。

I'm intrigued by the Swedish model, not because it's necessarily the best one.

最佳方案本应是像香港和台湾那样通过隔离迅速压平曲线。

The best one would have been if we had isolated and crushed the curve like Hong Kong and Taiwan did.

但鉴于多数西方国家都是大型民主政体，既无能力也缺乏意志力采取这种措施，我们终将以某种形式走向瑞典模式，无论最终形态如何。

But given that most of the Western countries are large democracies, and they don't have the ability to do that nor the willpower, we're all headed towards a Swedish model one way or another, whatever that turns out to be.

幸好瑞典没有封锁，否则西方世界就能声称别无选择。

Thank goodness for Sweden not locking down because otherwise the Western world would have been able to say, well, there is no alternative.

我们现在知道还有另一种选择，瑞典并未实施强制性封锁。

We now know there is an alternative, that Sweden has not locked down compulsorily.

它采取了大量自愿性的社交疏离措施。

It has done a huge amount of voluntary social distancing.

其经济受损程度远不及英国和美国等国家那么严重。

It won't have damaged its economy nearly as badly as countries like Britain and The US have done.

这表明控制疫情最重要的措施几乎可以肯定是那些自愿性的举措。

And it has shown that the most important measures in getting on top of this pandemic are almost certainly the voluntary ones.

比如不握手、不举行大型聚会、保持安全距离这些行为，而非强制人们待在家中的命令。

The things like not shaking hands, not having large gatherings, staying safe distance from each other, not the ones of saying confine yourselves to your homes.

大型零售商店可以营业而小企业却不被允许，这毫无道理。

It makes no sense that big box retailers are open, but small businesses are not allowed to open.

显然，最佳应对方式是自下而上的分布式响应。

Obviously, the best response is a bottoms up distributed response.

当每个个体都警觉时才能战胜病毒，而非政府恐慌时。

You can beat the virus when individuals all panic, not when the governments panic.

但一个警觉的个体就能智胜病毒。

But a single panicked individual can outsmart the virus.

政府不知道如何控制病毒，但他们确实知道如何控制个人。

Governments don't know how to control viruses, but they do know how to control individuals.

而个人可以掌控自己的健康、安全及病毒传播。

Whereas an individual can control their own health, their own safety, their own viral spread.

所以我们把本质上属于教育的问题，转化成了政府自上而下的管控问题。

So we've taken what's really an education problem and turned it into a government top down control problem.

英国政府目前正在发现，吓唬人们是件相当容易的事。

What the British government is discovering at the moment is that it's quite easy to scare people.

但要消除他们的恐惧就没那么简单了。

It's not so easy to unscare them.

严厉的封锁措施推行得非常有效。

The draconian introduction of the lockdown was very effective.

事实证明人们愿意配合这些措施，甚至在极短时间内就变得出奇地专制，会举报邻居，因为他们被告知了一个非常可怕的故事。

People turned out to be willing to go along with this, even to report on their neighbors and become surprisingly authoritarian in surprisingly short time because they were being given a very scary story.

人们很容易被事物吓倒。

People are easily frightened about things.

但当你过来说，好了，恐惧结束了。

But when you come along and say, right, scare over.

请回来工作吧。

Please come back to work.

全国半数人却说，不。

Half the country is saying, no.

我以为你说这很可怕。

I thought you said it was scary.

我们还不打算出门。

We're not going out yet.

顺便说一句，你付钱让我们呆在家里，那我为什么要出去？

And by the way, you're paying us to stay at home, so why should I?

这种情况将会改变。

That's going to change.

对此的讽刺观点是，目前主要是蓝领阶层在失业，因为真正管理社会的白领阶层掌控着新闻界、媒体和政府，以及大学、智库和模型分析师。

The cynical view on this is that right now, it's been blue collar people losing their jobs because really the white collar people who run society, they're in control of journalism, the media, and the government, the universities, think tanks, and modelers.

但当白领阶层也开始失业时，人们就会说：等等。

But when the white collar people start losing their jobs, then people say, wait a minute.

我们需要考虑经济因素。

We need to take the economy into account.

正如瑞典实验将展示的，你需要在大脑中同时追踪三个不同变量。

As the Swedish experiment is gonna show, there's three different variables you simultaneously track in your head.

这对大多数人来说非常困难。

It's very hard for most people to do that.

第一个当然是感染死亡率，即有多少人最终患病或死亡。

One is, of course, the infection fatality rate, how many people end up sick or dying.

第二个是经济影响。

The second is the economic impact.

你必须建立某种标准化的衡量和比较方法。

You have to have some standard way of measuring and comparing that.

第三个是人口中形成群体免疫的比例，同时要记住自然传播形成的群体免疫与疫苗形成的群体免疫截然不同，因为疫苗是普遍接种的。

And the third is what percentage of population has built up a herd immunity, while keeping in mind that herd immunity through a natural spread is very different than herd immunity through a vaccine because the vaccine is indiscriminately applied.

而当病毒在人群中自然传播时，它会首先感染流动性强的超级传播者以及最脆弱的人群。

Whereas when the virus naturally spreads to the population, it's going to infect the more mobile super spreaders as well as the most vulnerable first.

因此最先被淘汰的要么是最可能传播病毒的人，要么是最可能死亡的人。

So the people who get taken out first were either the ones who are most likely to spread it or the most likely to die.

所以自然形成的群体免疫门槛实际上比疫苗介导的群体免疫要低。

So natural herd immunity is actually the lower threshold than vaccine mediated herd immunity.

在英国，情况已经变得很明显，

It's become clear in The UK, and

我认为美国的情况也大体如此，很大比例的死亡实际上是在医院或养老院感染的。

I think this is largely true in The US, that a huge proportion of the deaths are effectively hospital or care home acquired infections.

由于早期检测不足，医护人员很早就被感染，很早就成为携带者，因为病人前往医疗机构就诊，从而使得一个非常脆弱的群体不仅死亡率高，而且传播率也高，因为他们携带的病毒载量更高，病毒的繁殖率非常高。

Because with insufficient early testing, health care workers became infected quite early, became carriers quite early because sick people were visiting health care facilities, and thereby a very vulnerable population, which not only had a high death rate, but also a high transmission rate because they were carrying higher loads of viruses, has seen a very high r, reproductive rate of the virus.

这并不意味着在社区其他部分也是如此，瑞典等国的例子就说明了这一点。

That doesn't mean it's high in the rest of the community, the examples of Sweden and others show.

对于那些不属于这一类别的人，应该可以通过自愿措施来抑制这种病毒，并在相当低的感染水平下实现群体免疫。

For those who are not in that category, it should be possible to use voluntary measures to suppress this virus and get to herd immunity at quite low levels of infection.

无论如何，我们最终都会面临这种情况。

We're going to end up in that scenario regardless.

所以问题将是，那些试图长时间拉平曲线的人获得了多少好处？

So the question will be how much benefit did people get who tried to flatten the curve for longer periods of time?

我们现在正在美国各州看到这一实验的进行。

We're seeing this experiment go on The United States right now at a state by state level.

当然，现在的战斗已经变成了对数据的叙述和解读，说他们在隐瞒死亡人数。

Now, of course, the battle is turning into the narrative and the interpretation of the data that's coming out, saying, oh, well, they're hiding deaths.

他们在夸大这一点，或者没有夸大那一点。

They're exaggerating this, or they're not exaggerating that.

当这一切都结束时，我不知道我们是否会有诚实地回顾并说，好吧，这就是发生的事情。

When this is all said and done, I don't know if we will have the honesty to look back and say, well, this is what happened.

因为在社交媒体时代，每个人都困在自己的信息茧房里。

Because now in an age of social media, everyone's trapped in their filter bubble slash silo.

记者们都已选边站队。

Journalists are all taken sides.

他们成了观点评论员。

They're opinion commentators.

曾经存在过的客观新闻业已荡然无存，所以我们最终可能生活在两个截然不同的叙事世界里，即便我们清楚事实真相。

The objective journalism to the extent that it existed has gone out the window, So we may end up living in two different narrative worlds even once we know what happened.

我们分裂成这些过滤气泡和回音室的程度确实令我担忧。

It does alarm me the degree to which we have fragmented into these filter bubbles and echo chambers.

在书中，我推测这是技术决定论的结果。

In the book, I speculate that that is a consequence of technological determinism.

我曾以为互联网的发明会催生社交媒体，进而让我们都能理解彼此的观点，但事实并非如此。

Whereas I thought the invention of the Internet would lead to social media, would lead to us all seeing each other's point of view, It hasn't turned out that way.

事实证明社交媒体是个极具分裂性的媒介，就像二十世纪初的广播那样——它曾是助长独裁者崛起的重要工具。

It's proved to be a very divisive medium, social media, as radio did in the early years of the twentieth century when it was a significant tool helping the rise of dictators.

但电视没有这种效应。

But television did not.

电视是把我们都拉向模糊中间地带的媒介。

It was a medium that pulled us all into the mushy middle.

我完全同意。

I absolutely agree.

当我读到书中那个章节时，我放下了书。

When I read that section of the book, I put it down.

顺便说，我喜欢你这本书的地方在于每读三页就得放下书思考，这对我来说是好书的标志。

By the way, the thing I love about your book is every third page I have to put it down and think about it, which to me is a mark of a good book.

我认为一本书读得越快，这本书就越差。

I think the faster you can read a book, the worse the book it is.

如果你能速读一本书，那这本书根本不值得读。

If you can speed read a book, you should just put that book away.

它不配被称为一本书。

It doesn't deserve to be a book.

但当你简要地浏览那个部分时，我意识到这里面有个重要的观点。

But when you cover that section very briefly, I realized there's a big idea in here.

这里面其实蕴含着一本书的精华。

There's actually a book in here.

水平不够的人会把这两段话扩展成一本书，而你却言简意赅地概括了。

A lesser person would take this two paragraphs and turn it into a book, but you covered it very briefly.

我的看法是，这是因为电视节目制作成本高且发行费用昂贵。

My thinking on it was that the reason is because television had very high production values and very high distribution costs.

你只能承担得起一两次的传播费用。

You could only afford to get the message out once or twice.

尤其是在早期的电视时代，频道数量非常有限。

Especially in the old days of television, you didn't have that many channels.

因此，人们获取的新闻都经过同一批来源的过滤。

Therefore, people were getting their news sanitized from the same set of sources.

糟糕的是你可能生活在精英、政府或媒体为你编织的信息茧房里。

The bad part is you could be living in a bubble controlled by the elites or by the government or by whatever the media wants you to think.

但好消息是至少人们的认知相对一致，社会内部不会持续存在低烈度的内战状态。

But the good news is that at least you were relatively aligned, and there wasn't this constant low level civil war going on inside society.

当你接触到广播或极端的社交媒体时，任何人都能随时创作内容。

When you get to something like radio or to the extreme social media, anybody can create content all the time.

正因如此，分裂几乎是必然的。

Because of that, the divisiveness is almost a given.

事实上，广播通过调频进行过滤，而社交媒体则让你构建自己的频道。

In fact, radio, there was filtering by tuning the channel, but in social media, you build your own channel.

你能陷入的过滤气泡比以往任何时期都更加深入，也更贴合个人偏好。

The level of a filter bubble that you can go into is much deeper and much more tuned to the individual than any previous filter bubble.

这与印刷术发明时的情况如出一辙。

There's an echo here of what happened with the invention of printing.

当时最具创业精神的印刷商中，欧洲最畅销的作家是马丁·路德，他有效利用这项新技术引发社会革命，最终演变成一系列宗教战争。

The the most entrepreneurial printer of the lot, the best published author in Europe was Martin Luther, and he is using this new technology effectively to cause a social revolution and what eventually turns into a series of religious wars.

我们曾经历过这种局面，那并不美好。

We have been here before, and it wasn't a pretty sight.

媒体和信息传播方式对社会结构的改变程度令人惊叹。

It's amazing how much the distribution of media and information changes the structure of society.

你引用了阿马拉定律，该定律认为创新的影响在短期内被高估，而在长期被低估。

You cite Amara's law, which talks about how the effects of innovation are overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long term.

顺便说一句，我对此深有体会。

I have absolutely seen that, by the way.

我在硅谷屡见不鲜这种情况。

I've seen that in Silicon Valley over and over.

从自动驾驶汽车到互联网，从手机到加密货币，无不如此。

Everything from autonomous vehicles to the Internet to mobile phones to crypto.

加密货币是个很好的例子。

Crypto is a good example.

我关于加密货币的写作还不够多。

I don't write enough about crypto.

我真希望自己当初做得更多。

I wish I had done more.

但我确实认为加密货币是一项在未来多年仍会让我们失望的技术范例。

But I do think crypto is a good example of a technology that will continue to disappoint us for a number of years yet.

尽管你对其潜力做了些非常有趣的评论，但我怀疑在它兑现承诺前（如果政府最终允许的话），会有很多人因加密货币计划血本无归。

And although you made some very interesting remarks about its potential, I suspect that a lot of people will lose their shirt on crypto plans for quite a while before it starts to deliver that promise, if government ever allows it to, of course.

所以这里加密货币的发展将与人们的预期有所不同。

So this is where crypto is going to work a little differently than people might expect.

阿马尔定律通常表现为我们高估十年内的变化。

The Amar's law generally tends to be we overestimate ten years.

却低估二十年的变革。

We underestimate twenty years.

十五年是个交叉点，但历史不会简单重演。

Fifteen years crossover, but history doesn't quite repeat.

它可能押韵，但你永远不会得到完全相同的结果——因为如果重复，就不会有新信息产生。

It can rhyme, but you never get the same result twice because if you did, there'd be no new information.

如果能轻易预测下一步，那就不算复杂系统了。

It wouldn't be a complex system if you could easily predict the next step.

首先，加密货币自2009年就已存在。

So first of all, crypto has been around since 2009.

这就是比特币最初的诞生。

That was the original creation of Bitcoin.

所以它存在的时间比人们想象的要长。

So it's been longer than people think.

另外，你在上一条陈述的结尾提到，如果各州允许的话。

Also, you mentioned at the end of your last statement if states allow it.

这正是加密货币的全部意义所在。

That is the whole point of crypto.

加密货币解决了通常只能通过国家解决的协调问题，但你无需国家就解决了它。

Crypto solves the coordination problem that normally you could only have solved with a state, but you solve it without the state.

最初，这是对拜占庭将军问题的解决方案。

Originally, it's a solution to the Byzantine general's problem.

我不确定国家能否阻止它，因为如果能的话，他们早就这么做了。

It's not clear to me that states can stop it because if they can, they will.

没有哪个国家希望存在一个额外的司法金融体系，因为控制印钞机才是终极权力。

No state wants an extra judiciary financial system in existence because the control of the money printing press is the ultimate power.

话虽如此，在过去两年炒作泡沫破裂后，有许多优秀的企业家在努力工作，我现在能看到加密货币领域初现的生机。

That said, in the last two years since the hype bubble popped, there have been great entrepreneurs hard at work, and I can now see the first green shoots coming out of crypto.

我会把它们分为两类。

I would put them into two categories.

一类是我们正在构建去中心化的金融基础设施，用于借贷、衍生品、交易、托管等所有这些东西。

One is we are building a decentralized finance infrastructure for borrowing, lending, derivatives, trading, custody, all of that stuff.

华尔街为美国20%GDP所做的事情，在加密货币领域只需1%的GDP就能完成。

The things that Wall Street does for 20% of the GDP of The United States will be done for 1% of the GDP in crypto land.

发展得如此之好，以至于几年后如果看到更多华尔街交易员说‘我想下个特定的赌注’，我一点都不会感到惊讶。

It's getting so good that I wouldn't be surprised if a few years from now, you see more Wall Street traders saying, I wanna make a certain bet.

我有特定的观点。

I have a certain point of view.

我想以特定方式对冲，或者购买特定资产，但现有的金融基础设施无法实现。

I wanna hedge in a certain way, or I want to buy a certain asset, but I can't do it with the existing financial infrastructure.

我必须兑换成比特币或以太坊，然后通过去中心化金融来实现。

I have to convert into Bitcoin or Ethereum and go do that through decentralized finance.

这在技术层面要先进得多。

It's just technologically far superior.

这是我观察到的第一点。

That's one thing I'm seeing.

我观察到的另一点是，加密技术最初的应用出现在文件存储和身份验证这些底层领域。

Other thing I'm seeing is the first applications of crypto come out in file storage and authentication, identity that are plumbing.

这些是为互联网公司构建的基础设施正在加密领域建立，而且加密版本优于非加密版本，因为它们是去中心化的。

These are plumbing infrastructure for Internet companies being built in the crypto domain, and the crypto versions superior to the non crypto versions because they're decentralized.

它们不再受苹果、谷歌或脸书的控制。

They're no longer under the control of Apple or Google or Facebook.

独立开发者不愿生活在苹果、谷歌、脸书或推特等公司的控制下，因为他们知道自己随时可能被下架。

Independent developers do not like to live under the control of Apple or Google or Facebook, Twitter, whoever, because they know they can be deplatformed at any time.

他们知道平台运营商会攫取大部分价值。

They know that that platform operator will capture the majority of the value.

他们明白如果挖到石油，平台运营商就会介入接管。

They know that if they strike oil, the platform operator will come in and take it over.

我们将看到基于加密技术的底层架构被搭建起来。

We're gonna see crypto based plumbing laid out.

未来五年内，我们将见证去中心化金融的全面铺开。

We'll see decentralized finance laid out over the next five years.

这正是加密技术新芽萌发的地方。

That is where the green shoots of crypto are coming up.

而在接下来的十年里，我们将看到这些努力的成果，其规模将超出我们的预期。

And then in the following decade, we're gonna see the results of that, and it'll be bigger than we can anticipate.

正如你所说，这非常令人期待，因为在这个世界上保持个人自主权至关重要。

That's very hopeful, as you say, because it is important to be able to retain our individual autonomy in this world.

目前我确实感觉到，一方面政府，另一方面Facebook，都在以各种方式限制我的言论自由、思想辩论，甚至我能接触到的信息。

I do, at the moment, feel as if government on the one hand and Facebook on the other is finding ways of constricting my freedom of expression and thought argument, and indeed the facts I have access to.

政府之所以能限制你，是因为它垄断了暴力手段。

The government gets to restrict you because it has a monopoly on violence.

人们试图操控政府，因为如果你能让政府为你服务，就等于让持枪者为你效命，从而掌控一切。

People try to hijack the government because if you can get the government to do your bidding, you've got guys with guns to do your bidding, and you run everything.

密码学（而非加密货币）带来的突破在于，它可能是自城墙或护城河以来，防御方首次获得对抗攻击方的不对称优势。

What cryptography, not cryptocurrency, enables, it's the first asymmetric advantage for the defender against the attacker probably since the castle wall or the moat.

在战争史上，攻击方始终占据巨大优势，而防御方节节败退。

In the history of warfare, the attacker has been gaining huge advantages, and the defender has been losing them.

自从大炮和枪支发明以来，形势就更加有利于攻击方。

Since the cannon and the gun were invented, that favors the attacker.

核武器显然更偏向攻击方。

Nuclear weapons obviously favor the attacker.

生物武器对攻击方有利。

Biological weapons favor the attacker.

空袭对攻击方有利。

Air strikes favor the attacker.

坦克对攻击方有利。

Tanks favor the attacker.

有趣的是，机枪反而对防守方有利。

The machine gun favored the defender, funnily enough.

这就是为什么堑壕战如此僵持不下。

That's what made trench warfare so static.

这个观点很好。

That's a good point.

是的。

Yes.

我忽略了这一点。

I missed that one.

在加密领域，攻击者可以投入无限的计算资源，但如果你的安全措施得当，他们就无法破解你的加密密钥。

Crypto, the attacker can throw unlimited compute power at it, but if you've done your security correctly, they can't break your encryption key.

所以它对防守方有利。

So it favors the defender.

当然，无论权力走向何方，控制和匿名的方向也会随之改变。

And, of course, whichever way power goes, that's the way the control identity and anonymity goes.

我们正在失去物理匿名性——摄像头、监控、NSA对所有人的监视，以及无处不在的联网摄像头。

We're losing physical anonymity with cameras, surveillance, the NSA spying on everybody, and Internet connected cameras everywhere.

物理隐私已死。

Physical privacy is dead.

除非你一直换脸，否则政府总能知道你的物理位置。

The government will always know where you are physically unless you're gonna do a face change all the time.

人们谈论用口罩重新遮掩面容。

People talk about the comeback of mask covering it.

不。

No.

那也遮不住。

That won't cover it.

只需要一个稍微好点的算法就够了。

Just a slightly better algorithm is required.

如果另一个人能认出你，最终计算机也能认出你，因为这对AI和机器学习来说是个非常简单的问题。

If another human can recognize you, eventually a computer will recognize you because that's one of the very easy problems for AI and machine learning.

话虽如此，数字隐私确实存在。

That said, digital privacy is real.

你将能创建一个受密码学保护的个人身份用于互联网，并以此建立声誉。

You will be able to create a personal cryptographically protected identity that goes on the Internet, and you can build a reputation against it.

你可以用它做生意。

You can do business against it.

你可以用它交朋友，而没人会知道你的真实身份。

You can make friends against it, and no one will quite know who you are.

当然。

Sure.

美国国家安全局和那些窥探光纤镜头的人可能会揭露你的身份。

The NSA and people sniffing the fiber lens could potentially unmask you.

但如果你足够老练，总有办法绕过这些监控。

But if you are sophisticated enough, there are even ways to get past that.

这就引出了政府如何对待我们的自由权利的问题。

That leads us to how governments approach our freedoms.

他们对我们拥有巨大权力，因此人们总想编造叙事来夺取这种控制权。

They have a lot of power over us, So people like to create narratives to take that power over.

其中每隔二十年就会重现的叙事之一，就是自动化与失业危机。

And one of the narratives that comes up every twenty years is automation and job loss.

这次是围绕AGI（人工通用智能）——我们将开发出发展如此迅猛的技术，其自我进化速度会远超人类再培训和新岗位创造的速度，最终导致全民失业。

This time it's around AGI, artificial general intelligence, that we're going to come up with a technology that advances so quickly that it improves itself faster than we can retrain, faster than we can create new jobs, and we all get put out of jobs.

这包含两个层面。

There's two pieces to this.

一是AI的创新速度及其本质含义。

There is a pace of innovation of AI and what AI means.

二是这次情况确实不同以往。

The second piece is that this time it's different.

我们即将失去工作。

We're gonna lose our jobs.

我认为你对此有着非常独到的见解。

And I thought you had very good viewpoints on that.

我们早已历经过这种局面。

We've been here before.

我们曾预期创新和自动化会摧毁工作岗位。

We've expected innovation and automation to destroy jobs.

但这种情况从未发生。

It never does.

它总是创造新的就业机会。

It always creates new kinds of opportunity for employment.

它创造了让人们能够雇佣他人的财富。

It creates the wealth that enables people to employ other people.

它也确实创造了闲暇时光。

It also does create leisure.

它确实减少了我们一生中必须工作的时间。

It does reduce the amount of time we have to work in our life.

我们可以将更多时间用于教育和退休生活。

We can spend more time in education and retirement.

我们可以享受比祖辈们更长的周末。

We can have longer weekends than our grandparents did.

在某种程度上，通用人工智能威胁首次让中上阶层的资产阶级专业群体感受到自动化带来的威胁。

To some extent, the artificial general intelligence threat is for the first time the upper middle class bourgeois professions feeling under threat from automation.

要知道，当工厂工人和农场工人被自动化取代时，他们并不在意。

You know, while factory workers and farmhands were being automated, they didn't mind.

但现在医生和律师也可能被机器取代。

But now doctors and lawyers can be displaced by machines.

突然间，我们都该恐慌了。

Suddenly, we must all panic.

过去五十年里，每次被当作紧急问题提出时，最终都被证明是错误的。

Every time it's been raised as an urgent issue in the past fifty years, it's proved to be wrong.

我认为这次也会如此。

I think it will be this time too.

当然，不同形式的自动化和创新会给就业带来局部性冲击。

Of course, there will be local disruptions caused to employment by different forms of automation and innovation.

这一点不可否认。

One can't deny that.

事实上，如果前一代自动化技术没有被允许实施，许多这类冲击根本不会存在

And in fact, many of these disruptions could not have existed if a previous generation of automation had

。

not been allowed to take place.

举例来说，如果卡车根本不存在——假如你当初为了保护铁路行业工人或人力挑夫而阻止卡车出现——那你现在就不会失去卡车司机的工作。

For example, you can't lose your job as a truck driver if trucks didn't exist, if you had stopped trucks in the first place because you were trying to protect people in the railway industry or people who were carrying things on their backs.

如今很多经济活动都建立在奢侈品基础上。

A lot of the economy today is based on luxury goods.

正如你在书中提到的，在我能随时获得所有剥皮葡萄和按摩服务之前，就业空间依然存在。

As you mentioned in the book, until I can get all the peeled grapes and massages that I want on demand, there's still room for more employment.

我们会把尚未实现自动化的领域重新定义为就业方向。

And we shift what we consider jobs to be things that we just haven't figured out how to do yet with automation and robotics.

如果能达到这个理论终点——机器能满足你所有需求——那就不存在问题了。

If you could reach this theoretical endpoint where a machine does everything you could possibly need, then you don't have a problem.

怎么会呢？

Why would you?

工作本身并非善事。

Work is not good in and of itself.

你应该可以整天写书、录制播客、娱乐你的猴子同伴们。

You should just be able to write books and record podcasts and entertain your fellow monkeys all day long.

确实如此。

Exactly.

正如你所指出的，通过创新，许多自动化进程具有高度民主化特性，是民主消费。

As you point out, through innovation, a lot of this automation that happens is highly democratizing, is democratic consumption.

你还提出了一个很好的观点：现代文明的本质就是通过专业化来整合生产。

You also make a good point where it is the nature of modern civilization to consolidate production through specialization.

因此，世界上最擅长某事的人就能为所有人做这件事。

So the one person in the world who's best at anything gets to do that for everybody.

但另一方面，你实现了消费民主化，现在每个人都能接触到一切。

But on the flip side, you democratize consumption where now everybody can have access to everything.

作为不断进步的物种，我们倾向于在生产方面越来越专业化，但在

What we tend to do as a species as we progress is to become more and more specialized in what we produce, but more

消费方面越来越多样化。

and more diversified in what we consume.

这句话是我多年前从一本名为《第二自然》的精彩书中看到的，作者是海姆·奥菲克。

That saying I got from a wonderful book called Second Nature years ago by a man named Haim Ofek.

我写信给他说，这是个有趣的见解。

I wrote to him and said, this is an interesting insight.

你还写过更多相关内容吗？

Have you written anything more about it?

他回答说，嗯，我想这个观点是从你的一本书里看到的。

He replied, well, I think I got that idea from one of your books.

所以

So

有趣的是，我几年前就发过一条关于这个话题的推文，但我完全不记得是从哪儿看来的。

It's funny because I have a tweet about that exact topic that goes back a few years, and I have no idea where I got that from.

可能是从你的一本书里看到的。

It might have been from one of your books.

可能是从大卫·多伊奇那里看到的。

It might have been from David Deutsch.

也可能是某个随机的来源。

It might have been some random thing.

说不定是纳西姆·塔勒布的观点。

It might have from Nassim Taleb.

我自己都搞不清楚。

I don't even know.

你今天提到从我书里看到的某些观点，对我来说都很新鲜，就好像是你自己原创的见解一样。

You have said things to me today about things you've got from my books that is actually fresh to me as if you've made this point as it were.

我们都把想法投放到公共领域。

We each put ideas into the public realm.

我们吸收这些想法。

We pick them up.

然后稍加改动。

We change them slightly.

我们把它们互相归还给对方。

We give them back to each other.

这就是智慧对话的本质。

That's the nature of intelligent conversation.

这又回到了历史上的伟人理论。

This ties back into the great man or great woman theory of history.

读完你的书后，我不得不稍微思考这个问题，因为我潜意识里80%认同历史上的伟人理论，30%认同历史的进化理论。

After reading your book, I had to think about that a little bit because I had subconsciously subscribed 80% to the great man theory of history and 30% to the evolutionary theory of history.

事后看来，这种平衡可能是有缺陷的。

And in hindsight, that was probably a flawed balance.

我想到的一个调和观点是：确实需要伟人来推动世界前进，但不一定是那个特定的伟人。

One reconciliation that I came up with is that it does take great people to move the world forward, but it doesn't necessarily take that specific great person.

虽然我们需要爱迪生发明电灯泡，但同时期还有另外21个人也在发明电灯泡。

Although we needed Edison to create the light bulb, there were 21 other people creating the light bulb at around the same time.

我们需要这21人中的一位成为推动创新的先驱。

We needed one of those 21 people to be the innovator to drive it forward.