235 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2023
  2. Oct 2022
  3. Sep 2022
    1. tossed shoes in the garbage

      如弃敝履

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  4. Aug 2022
  5. Jul 2022
    1. 广受欢迎的韩剧《鱿鱼游戏》因英文字幕受到批评。字幕制作者需要对抗不切实际的期望、紧迫的时间期限以及来自机器翻译的竞争。通常他们的工作被低估了。在字幕翻译公司工作的 Doga Uludag 有时会在晚上11点发文件要求翻译——“他们会说在明天早上 8 点之前就需要它。”如果没有熟练的字幕制作者,奥斯卡奖得奖影片《寄生虫》等电影就会在翻译中失色。然而字幕艺术正在衰落,在受到更便宜的新兴人工智能技术诱惑的娱乐行业中,它几乎注定要衰败。字幕制作者成了一个即将消失的群体。这正是全世界开始观看《鱿鱼游戏》之前的困境。在 28 天内,《鱿鱼游戏》超越《布里奇顿》成为 Netflix 有史以来最受欢迎的系列剧。它还在无意间引发了一场关于糟糕字幕的全球吐槽。虽然评论家盛赞这部韩国大逃杀主题剧制作精良、故事扣人心弦而且角色令人难忘,但很多人都吐槽 Netflix 对《鱿鱼游戏》的英文字幕质量太过敷衍。Netflix 曾有内部字幕翻译,它在 2017 年推出内部字幕程序 Hermes 但在一年之后就放弃了它,该公司对另一个翻译领域有兴趣:配音。原因不难理解。例如 72% 的 Netflix 美国观众表示,他们在观看 Netflix 有史以来第三受欢迎的西班牙热播剧《纸钞屋(Money Heist)》时更喜欢配音。不公正的批评、资金不足以及缺乏娱乐行业的支持,字幕制作者处于濒临灭绝的边缘。至少《鱿鱼游戏》的争议挑破了一个不为人知的事实:好的字幕是一门非常困难的艺术。

  6. Jun 2022
  7. Mar 2022
    1. That’s a lot of match! The match expression is very useful but also very much a primitive.

      这儿有很多 match! match 语法非常有用,但是也非常原始。

  8. Jan 2022
    1. crafted specification

      I love JMX. It is a well crafted specification, #card

      • 设计精心的规范
    2. failed spectacularly

      壮观的失败

  9. May 2021
    1. Ken: What does long-term mean for Stripe? How far out are you looking?Michael: We talk a lot about building multi-decade abstractions. I personally like to think 10 to 30 years to get out of the three- to five-year mode, but generally here people do say “multi-decade” a lot. Patrick and John and the entire leadership team are clear that this is a long-term bet and that we’re still very early. That long time horizon comes from the top, and it’s in the culture. And my sense is it’s been like that at Stripe since day one.

      Ken:对于 Stripe 来说,长期意味着什么?你们的眼光有多远? Michael:我们经常谈及建立数十年的抽象概念。我个人喜欢考虑 10 到 30 年,以摆脱 3 到 5 年的模式,但一般来说,这里的人确实经常说「数十年」。Patrick 和 John 以及整个领导团队都清楚,这是一个长期的赌注,我们仍然是非常早期的。这种长期的视野来自于高层,而且是文化的一部分。我的感觉是,在 Stripe,从第一天起就是这样的。

    1. But focusing on the risks within the game obscures a much bigger problem: The game is no longer optional. Everyone must play. We have little to lose because we already lost everything: Stable jobs, affordable homes, education that lasts a lifetime, and worry-free retirement are no longer an option. Even money itself ain’t what it used to be. It loses value by simply sitting in the bank.

      关注游戏中的风险掩盖了一个更大的问题:游戏不再是可选的。每个人都必须玩。我们没有什么可失去的,因为我们已经失去了一切:稳定的工作、负担得起的房屋、持续一生的教育和无忧无虑的退休都不再是一种选择。甚至钱本身也不再是以前的东西了。仅仅是把钱存在银行里,就已经贬值了。

    1. A.) A map may have a structure similar or dissimilar to the structure of the territory. B.) Two similar structures have similar ‘logical’ characteristics. Thus, if in a correct map, Dresden is given as between Paris and Warsaw, a similar relation is found in the actual territory. C.) A map is not the actual territory. D.) An ideal map would contain the map of the map, the map of the map of the map, etc., endlessly…We may call this characteristic self-reflexiveness.

      A. 一张地图的结构可能与领土的结构相似或不相似。 B. 两个相似的结构具有相似的「逻辑」特性。也就是说,如果在一张正确的地图上,德累斯顿被列为巴黎和华沙之间,那么在实际的领土上也会发现类似的关系。 C. 地图并非真正的地形。 D. 一张理想的地图会包含地图的地图,地图的地图的地图,等等 ... 我们可以把这个特性成为自我反身性。

    1. If you want to change how a system works, and move the system into a new steady state that’s closer to your goal, sequential effort won’t do much. What you need is parallel effort: you need several different things to happen, all at the same time, for the system to actually move in the direction that you want and stay there. 

      如果你想改变一个系统的工作方式,并使系统进入一个新的稳定状态,更接近你的目标,串行的努力不会有什么作用。你需要的是并行的努力:你需要几件不同的事情同时发生,让系统真正朝着你想要的方向发展并保持在那里。

    1. Vibes were made for the Internet not just because they’re audiovisual but because, like all memes, they are participatory. Anyone can assemble her own version. They’re not scarce or limited-edition.

      Vibes 为互联网而生,不仅因为它们是视听的,而且因为像所有的 memes 一样,它们是参与性的。任何人都可以组装自己的版本。它们不是稀缺的,也不是限量版的。

    2. We know the meaning of the word “vibe,” of course. It’s a placeholder for an abstract quality that you can’t pin down—an ambience (“a laid-back vibe”). It’s the reason that you like or dislike something or someone (good vibes vs. bad). It’s an intuition with no obvious explanation (“just a vibe I get”). Many vibes don’t have specific names, but some do.

      当然,我们知道「氛围」这个词的含义。它是一种你无法确定的抽象品质的占位符——一种气氛(「一种悠闲的氛围」)。它是你喜欢或不喜欢某事或某人的原因(好的氛围与坏的氛围)。它是一种没有明显解释的直觉(「只是我感受到的一种氛围」)。许多氛围没有具体的名字,但有些氛围有。

    1. 每天我们都像登上新舞台一样,开启不同的冒险。每天你都在长大,也在变得更加勇敢。我知道我不能要求你永远都是小孩,也不能要求你永远保持天真。自然的发展是不受外力控制的,你会变化,也会成长。就像花朵在寒冬来临之前的绽放一样,你将为童年披上天鹅绒斗篷。就像蜕变一样,是美丽的,但也令人心碎。我亲爱的孩子,我希望你野蛮生长,一生珍重。

  10. Apr 2021
    1. use company revenue to fund a Universal Creative Income program for emerging creators on the platform. For instance, companies like Facebook or YouTube could carve out a fund to support creators on the platform and send them a monthly check to cover basic living expenses, regardless of skill, training, or background. UCI differs from most prevailing platform creator funds in terms of consistency of payments, transparency of eligibility criteria, and focus on smaller emerging creators. To the last point: we believe focusing on creators who are in the greatest financial need would create the largest impact on participation in the creator economy.

      利用公司收入为平台上的新兴创作者提供通用创意收入计划。例如,像 Facebook 或 YouTube 这样的公司可以划出一个基金来支持平台上的创作者,每月向他们发送一张支票,以支付基本的生活费用,而不考虑技能、培训或背景。UCI 在付款的一致性、资格标准的透明度以及对较小的新兴创作者的关注方面,与大多数普遍存在的平台创作者基金不同。对于最后一点:我们相信关注那些经济需求最大的创作者将对创作者经济的参与产生最大影响。

    1. The more complex or valuable is whatever you’re trying to sell, the more important it is for you to build a world around that idea, where other people can walk in, explore, and hang out – without you having to be there with them the whole time. You need to build a world so rich and captivating that others will want to spend time in it, even if you’re not there. 

      你试图销售的东西越复杂或越有价值,你就越需要围绕这个想法建立一个世界,让其他人可以走进去,探索和闲逛——而不需要你一直在那里陪着他们。你需要建立一个丰富而迷人的世界,即使你不在那里,别人也会愿意花时间在那里。

    1. Part of the appeal of miracles was stated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume in his 1748 essay “Of Miracles”: “The passion of surprise and wonder arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events from which it is derived.” In their book Wonders and the Order of Nature, the historians of science Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park document humankind’s enchantment with wonders and oddities. Things that don’t fit. Surprises and peculiarities. Miracles. Marco Polo enthuses over finding completely black lions in the Indian Kingdom of Quilon. Other travelers excitedly record gourds with little lamblike animals inside, beasts with the faces of humans and the tails of scorpions, unicorns, and people who vomit worms.

      1748年,苏格兰哲学家大卫·休谟(David Hume)在一篇题为《论奇迹》的文章中指出了奇迹的部分吸引力:“由奇迹引起的惊讶和神奇是令人愉快的感情,它让我们从情感上更倾向于相信奇迹的确存在。”

      科学历史学家洛林·达斯顿(Lorraine Daston)和凯瑟琳·帕克(Katharine Park)合著的《奇迹与自然秩序》(Wonders and the Order of Nature)中记录了人类对于灵异志怪的沉迷,包括不合常理的东西,惊异和怪奇之事物,奇迹。马可·波罗(Marco Polo)在印度奎隆王国发现纯黑狮子时欣喜若狂。其他旅行人士兴奋地记录下装有似山羊的小动物的细颈瓶,长有人脸的野兽,蝎子的尾巴,独角兽和呕吐出虫子的人。

    1. You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. The fairy tale version of “be yourself” is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it continuously.

      你必须为你的与众不同付出代价,而这是值得的。「做自己」的童话版本是,只要你让自己的独特性发光,所有的痛苦就会停止。这个版本是误导性的。做自己是值得的,但不要期望它是容易或免费的。你必须不断地投入精力。

    1. Marcus du Sautoy, a general question to start with: What is creativity – and who is creative?    Creativity is a word that is hard to pin down, just like consciousness, which is interesting as the two are closely linked. My hypothesis is that as a species, our creativity emerged about the same time as our consciousness because, as psychologist Carl Rogers put it, creativity became our tool for exploring this strange inner world. With regards to creativity, I quite like cognitive scientist Margaret Boden’s definition as something that is a) new b) surprising and c) has value. Creativity means novelty, because if you create something, it has not been there before. But novelty alone is not enough, it also needs to move us and to make us look at things in a new way. And value is an important factor because you don’t want your creation to just be surprising, but also to resonate and change things.

      哈拉尔德·威伦布洛克:杜·索托伊先生,让我们先来讨论两个基础性的问题吧:首先,什么是创造力?第二个问题:是谁拥有创造能力?

      马库斯·杜·索托伊:我们很难对“创造力”这个概念下定义,“意识”这个名词也是类似的情况。有意思的是这两者总是密切相连的。我的假设是,人类的创造能力大概是与我们的意识同时产生的。因为——正如著名心理学家卡尔·罗杰斯(Carl Rogers)所指出的那样,创造力是我们人类的工具,通过它我们能够探索自身非同寻常的内心世界。至于什么是创造力,我本人更喜欢借用认知学专家玛格丽特·博德(Margaret Bode)所做出的界定,她将“创造力”的特征大致概括为:首先是新颖的;其次是令人惊讶的;第三是能产生价值的。创造能力涉及到新颖性,因为如果说你创造了某样东西的话,那么在此之前它应该是不存在的。但是,仅有新颖性还不够。一些体现创造性的东西也应该能够触动我们的情感,并且能够引导我们用不同以往的方式看待事物。创造性的作品还必须有价值,这也是一个重要的方面,也就是说,你的创造不仅为人们带来了惊喜,而且它也将发挥作用,并且为世界带来变化。

    1. The termites’ abilities in self-organisation speak to humanity’s growing awareness that people can sometimes solve their own problems from the bottom-up. The prolific science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, writing about the future fall of the Galactic Empire, patterned on the ancient Roman empire, makes this point: suffice to say, the Galactic Empire’s central-control strategy doesn’t end well. The empire collapses from over-reliance on outer planets and the complexity of ruling from afar. At a smaller scale, examples of communities who self-organise to manage their own forests, fisheries and other affairs better than distant authorities issuing commands illustrate the power of nature’s experience. Analogies between human societies and termite colonies have their limits. Ideas, morals and learning, rather than instincts and pheromones, shape human civilisation. But nature’s strategies that counterbalance the ricocheting hazards of a complex adaptive system – where diseases can spread, unreliable partners can bring down a network and an unexpected collision or volcano can wipe out previously successful life forms – should give us some pointers. Civilisations throughout history, from the Indus Valley to ancient Rome to the Anasazi of the American Southwest had similar conundrums. They relied on vast networks and dependencies for trade and, similar to a termite queen, rulers couldn’t simply command and control over distant lands. Like the interacting biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and solid Earth, all of which keep our planet habitable, human societies fit the definition of complex adaptive systems.

      白蚁在自组织方面的能力使人类日益意识到,有时人们可以自下而上地解决问题。多产的科幻作家艾萨克·阿西莫夫(Isaac Asimov)在描写以古罗马帝国为原型的《银河帝国》未来的衰落时指出:银河帝国的中央控制战略结局并不好。帝国由于过分依赖外界星球及远距离统治的复杂性而崩溃。在较小的规模上,社区自发组织,管理其森林、渔业和其他事务,比听命于远方政府要好,这些例子说明了自然经验的力量。

      将人类社会和白蚁聚居区之间的类比有其局限性,塑造人类文明的是思想、道德和学习,而不是本能和信息素。但是,自然界对应复杂适应系统中风险的策略给了我们一些启示——在复杂系统中,疾病可以轻易传播,不可靠的伙伴可能导致合作网络崩溃,意外的碰撞或火山爆发随时可能摧毁已经建立的文明。纵观历史,从印度河流域到古罗马,再到美国西南部的阿纳萨齐(Anasazi),各种文明都面临着类似的难题。他们依赖于巨型网络和信赖关系进行贸易,并且统治者如蚁后一般,不能简单地指挥和控制遥远的领地。相互作用的生物圈、大气圈、海洋和地质圈使我们的星球适宜居住,人类社会也符合复杂适应性系统的定义。

    1. Ad Astra (now known as AstraNova) uses simulations, case studies, fabrication and design projects, labs, and corporate collaboratives to develop students that are enthralled by complexity and solving for the unknown.

      Ad Astra(现名AstraNova)使用模拟、案例研究、制作和设计项目、实验室和企业合作来培养学生,使他们对复杂性和未知的解决方法着迷。

    1. These examples have several things in common. For one, they were highly collaborative. Two, they pushed a new technology beyond what anyone imagined possible into something dramatic, whole, and full of promise. Three, they were - fundamentally - not works, but tools. "Space War" was a game, nothing without players, and never the same from game to game. The Aspen Movie Map was not a tour of Aspen; it was Aspen. The tour was what you did with it.

      这些例子有几个共同点。第一,它们都是高度协作的。第二,它们将一项新技术推向了超越任何人想象的可能,使之成为戏剧性的、完整的、充满希望的东西。三,它们——从根本上说——不是作品,而是工具。"太空战争"(Space War)是一个游戏,没有玩家就什么都不是,而且不同的游戏之间也绝不相同。阿斯本电影地图(Aspen Movie Map)不是阿斯本的旅游,它就是阿斯本(Aspen)。游览的是你用它做了什么。

    1. (1) the effort toward developing the innovations in the individual's way of doing things that are expected to make him more effective (we call this our Synthesis function); (2) the effort toward developing measurement and analysis techniques by which we can study and evaluate the human activity that we wish to make more effective (our Analysis function); (3) the effort to develop testing facilities that provide support for, and common grounds for interaction between, Synthesis and Analysis (we are thinking of a computer and special testing laboratory); and (4) the forward and outward looking efforts that provide scouting, guiding, and coordination for the other effort (our search effort).

      (1)努力发展个人做事方式的创新,使其更有效率(我们称之为“综合功能”[Synthesis function]);(2)努力发展测量和分析技术,通过这些技术,我们可以研究和评估人类活动,我们希望使其更有效(我们的"分析功能"[Analysis function])。(3)努力开发测试设施,为 "综合 "和 "分析 "之间的交互提供支持和共同基础(我们考虑的是计算机和特殊的测试实验室);(4)前瞻性和外向性的努力,为其他努力提供侦查、指导和协调(我们的搜索努力)。

    2. (1) to find the factors that limit the effectiveness of the human individual's basic informationhandling capabilities in meeting the various needs of society for problem solving in its most general sense; and (2) to develop new techniques, procedures, or systems that will better match these basic capabilities to the needs or problems of society.

      (1)找出限制个人基本信息处理能力的因素,以满足社会解决最一般性问题的各种需求;(2)开发新的技术、程序或系统,使这些基本能力更好地与社会的需求或问题相匹配。

    1. “Biology is the most interesting and powerful technology platform anyone’s ever seen,” he said. “It’s already taken over the world with reproducing machines. You can kind of imagine that you should be able to program it with DNA.”

      “生物学是前所未有的最有趣、最强大的技术平台。它早已与复制机器一起接管了整个世界。你可能会想到,自己能够利用DNA来编写这些复制机器的程序。”

    2. IGEM has been grooming an entire generation of the world’s brightest scientific minds to embrace synthetic biology’s vision — without anyone really noticing, before the public debates and regulations that typically place checks on such risky and ethically controversial new technologies have even started.

      “国际基因工程机器大赛已经引导整整一代世界最聪明的科学头脑去拥抱合成生物学的愿景。而这一切都发生在没有任何一个人真正注意到的情况下。更不用说,针对这种新技术的风险和伦理争议的公共辩论还未展开,相应的法规也还没有出现。”

    1. The era of garage biology is upon us. Want to participate? Take a moment to buy yourself a molecular biology lab on eBay. A mere $1,000 will get you a set of precision pipettors for handling liquids and an electrophoresis rig for analyzing DNA. Side trips to sites like BestUse and LabX (two of my favorites) may be required to round out your purchases with graduated cylinders or a PCR thermocycler for amplifying DNA. If you can't afford a particular gizmo, just wait six months - the supply of used laboratory gear only gets better with time. Links to sought-after reagents and protocols can be found at DNAHack. And, of course, Google is no end of help.

      车库生物学的时代已经来临。你想参与吗?那就花一点时间去eBay网站为自己买一个分子生物学实验室吧。只要1000美元,你就可以买到一套用来处理液体的精密的微量吸液管,以及用来分析DNA的电泳设备。如果你顺便去逛一下像BestUse和LabX那样的网站(这两个网站都是我所喜爱的)的话,或许它们还会建议你购买刻度量筒和放大DNA用的PCR(聚合酶链反应)热循环器。如果你买不起某个特定的小发明,那么只要再等上6个月就行了——因为随着时间的流逝,二手实验器设备和器材供应会越来越完善。你还可以在DNAHack网站上找到非常抢手的试剂和实验方案的链接。当然,你永远可以从谷歌那里得到帮助。

    1. How can we push digital creative tools to their full potential as co-creators, thus harnessing the full power of creative thought and computational actualization to enable human innovation?

      如何推动数字创意工具充分发挥其作为共创者的潜力,从而充分发挥创意思维和计算现实化的力量,实现人类创新?

    1. “Basically, the project involves creating graph-like models of many possible universes, as defined by rules that determine how the model evolves. As the graphs become more complex — really more complex — they generate phenomena that’s worthy of study in themselves. If the rules are right, one can “discover” in them the real physics that govern our universe — everything from E=mc2 to the law of gravity.”

      “基本上,这个项目包含了创建多种可能的宇宙的图形化的模型,每种模型都被其演化的规则所定义。随着图形越来越复杂,它们产生的现象值得更多的研究。如果这些规则是正确的,我们就能探明我们真实的物理世界的规则,发现所有的事情,从 E=mc2 到万有引力。”

    2. “It’s unexpected, surprising — and for me incredibly exciting. To be fair, at some level I’ve been working towards this for nearly 50 years. But it’s just in the last few months that it’s finally come together. And it’s much more wonderful, and beautiful, than I’d ever imagined.”

      “这是不可预料的,也是令人惊讶的——同时,我本人也是异常地激动。事实上,从某种程度来说我已经为此努力了将近50年,但就是在近几个月,这些东西才终于结合在一起成为现实。它比我想象的更美妙、更美丽!”

    3. His software package Mathematica is in its 12th edition. His 1197 page book “A New Kind of Science” was a best-seller, reaching #1 on Amazon when it was published in 2002.

      他的大部头著作,1197页的《一种新科学》(A New Kind of Science)在2002年出版的时候登上了亚马逊的榜首,畅销无比。

  11. Mar 2021
    1. The idea is to initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network. The tool helps get to initial critical mass. The network creates the long term value for users, and defensibility for the company.

      这个想法是最初用一个单人工具吸引用户,然后,随着时间的推移,让他们参与到一个网络中。该工具有助于达到最初的临界点。网络为用户创造了长期价值,为公司创造了护城河。

    1. For Dorsey, it’s all one big integrated system. Transactions are like traffic. Traffic flows over the beautiful bridge. The bridge is a point on the map. The map is an expression of the scheme, the stream, the grand flow of interactions. And he’s been thinking about this stuff since he was eight.

      对于 Dorsey 来说,这些都可以认为是一个大型集成系统。交易就像交通。交通流过美丽的桥。而桥是地图上的一个点。地图是机制、流动和交互的表达。而他从八岁开始就一直在思考这些东西。

    2. “Payment is another form of communication,” he says, “but it’s never been treated as such. It’s never been designed. It’s never felt magical. About 90 percent of Americans carry cards, but almost nobody can accept them. We want to balance that out and just make payments feel amazing.”

      支付是另一种交流形式,但它从来被如此看待,也从来没有被精心设计过,更是从来没有令人神奇的感觉。大约 90% 的美国人都带着信用卡,但很多商户并不接受信用卡付款。我们想平衡这一点,让支付的体验变得神奇。

    1. n We Are As Gods, Brand emerges as one of the signature players of the technological age, in and out of the most important rooms at just the right moments in history. Most casual followers of his will know the rough trajectory. What they might not know are the tools of Brand’s farsightedness. Drugs, for starters. Also a gift for harnessing boredom. Finally, expert networking. Through the catalog, Brand linked up with Doug Engelbart, from whom he learned the potential of networked communication, which got him thinking about early social media, and so on. “The intellectual Johnny Appleseed of the counterculture,” someone calls him, seeding the land with thought-trends. Slightly in awe of their subject, the filmmakers, David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg, portray Brand as that rare kind of tech prophet, a man who never looks back. A true, uncompromising futurist.

      在《We Are As Gods》中,布兰德作为科技时代的标志性人物之一,在历史上最重要的时刻出入最重要的房间。他的大多数普通的追随者都会知道他的大致轨迹。他们可能不知道的是布兰德远见卓识的工具。首先是药物。还有驾驭无聊的天赋。最后,是专家网络。通过目录,布兰德联系到了道格·恩格尔巴特(Doug Engelbart),从他那里了解到网络通信的潜力,这让他开始思考早期的社交媒体等等。有人称他为 "反主流文化的知识分子约翰尼·阿普尔兹"(the intellectual Johnny Appleseed of the counterculture),在这片土地上播撒思想潮流的种子。导演大卫·阿尔瓦拉多(David Alvarado)和杰森·苏斯伯格(Jason Sussberg)对他们的拍摄对象略有敬畏,他们把布兰德描绘成一种罕见的科技预言家,一个从不回头的人。一个真正的、不妥协的未来主义者。

    1. Jon: What was your favorite experience in People’s Computer Company? Bob: We became a focus for a lot of activity during these early days of computers in education. Then, of course, I loved traveling all over California and teaching weekend courses. We typically get around 30 teachers to attend the courses. These courses were called “Computers in the Classroom 1 and 2”. Two different courses two credits from the University of California extension. Teachers could use these credits to lobby for pay raises, and the other courses were called “Games Computers Play 1 and 2”. Whenever we went to teach somewhere we ran all four concurrently, so if you have taken Computers in the Classroom 1, you can sign up for 2. If you have taken Games Computers Play 1, then you can sign up for Games Computers Play 2. There was virtually no structure, the instructors, usually two of us, would wander around and help people play games or if they wanted to learn to program we would give them teach yourself set up materials so they can start teaching themselves how to program. Sometimes we would wander around and say: “For all of you people who crave structure we will be in the lunchroom at 1:00 for an hour to have a seminar if you want to come.” And a few people would come and some wouldn’t. Some would just continue working away. We also asked these teachers to grade themselves because I was not a classroom teacher in a normal sense. A lot of teachers intensely resisted grading themselves and practically begged us to give them a grade. So I have no idea of how many of these we did, but it was a lot of them. We taught a few at Lawrence Hall of Science (UC Berkeley), UC San Diego, UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbra, UC Davis, and we even ran one course at the airport in San Mateo. We traveled to almost all of the campuses of the University of California extension and ran these courses. Well, all of this happened because I began teaching kids how to program, and I liked doing that so much that it sort of just took over my life. Almost everything that was going on was related in some way to helping kids teach themselves. I don’t like to say that we are teaching, I like to set up environments in which people can teach themselves with a little help. That is why I write ‘teach yourself’ instruction materials. I wrote teach yourself books so that people who did not have access to a computer teacher could use these books as an alternative; so all they need is access to a computer that ran BASIC and they could teach themselves how to program. It was really fun. I loved Wednesday evenings because all of these interesting people would come in and they would play computer games; especially when the computer center was set up next door. So, we had these two places; we had so many things going on at the same time.

      Jon Cappetta:你在人民电脑公司最喜欢的经历是什么?

      鲍勃·阿尔布莱特(Bob Albrecht):在计算机应用于教育的早期,我们成为了许多活动的焦点。然后,当然,我喜欢在加州各地旅行,教授周末课程。我们通常会有30名左右的老师来参加课程。这些课程被称为“1号和2号教室的计算机”(‘Computers in the Classroom 1 and 2’)。两门不同的课程两个学分,来自加州大学的延伸课程。教师可以用这些学分来争取加薪,另一门课程叫 "计算机玩的游戏1和2"(‘Games Computers Play 1 and 2’)。每当我们去教学的时候,我们都会同时运行这四门课程,所以如果你已经参加了 "1号教室的计算机",你可以报名参加 "2号教室的计算机"。如果你学过 "计算机玩的游戏1",就可以报名参加 "计算机玩的游戏2"。课程几乎没有什么结构,通常是我们两个人,会四处闲逛,帮助人们玩游戏,或者如果他们想学习编程,我们会给他们自学的材料,让他们自己学习如何编程。有时我们会四处闲逛,然后说:“对于你们这些渴望结构的人来说,如果你们愿意的话,我们将在1点在午餐室开一个小时的研讨会。”有些人会来,有些人不会。有些人只会继续工作。我们还让这些老师给自己打分,因为我不是一个正常意义上的课堂老师。很多老师强烈反对给自己打分,实际上是求我们给他们打分。所以我不知道我们做了多少这样的事,但确实很多。我们在劳伦斯科学馆(加州大学伯克利分校)、加州大学圣地亚哥分校、加州大学河滨分校、加州大学圣巴巴拉分校、加州大学戴维斯分校教了几门课,我们甚至在圣马特奥的机场开了一门课。我们几乎走遍了加州大学分校的所有校区,开设了这些课程。

      这一切的发生,是因为我开始教孩子们如何编程,我非常喜欢这样做,它几乎占据了我的生活。几乎所有发生的事情都与帮助孩子们自学有关。我不喜欢说我们是在教学,我喜欢建立一个环境,让人们可以在一些帮助下自学。这就是为什么我写'自学'的教材。我写了'自学'的书,让那些没有机会接触到电脑老师的人可以用这些书来替代;因此,他们所需要的只是一台运行BASIC语言的电脑,他们可以自学如何编程。这真的很有趣。我喜欢星期三晚上,因为所有这些有趣的人都会来,他们会玩电脑游戏,尤其是当电脑中心设在隔壁的时候。我们有这两个地方;我们同时有那么多事情要做。

    1. First, the explosive expansion in access to opportunity facilitated by the internet. Sounds prosaic but I think still underestimated. Several billion people recently immigrated to the world's most vibrant city and the system hasn't yet equilibrated. When you think about how YouTube is accelerating the dissemination of tacit knowledge, or the number of creative outsiders who can now deploy their talents productively, or the number of brilliant 18 year-olds who can now start companies from their bedrooms, or all the instances of improbable scenius that are springing up... in the landscape of the global commons, the internet is nitrogen fertilizer, and we still have a long way to go -- economically, culturally, scientifically, technologically, socially, and everything in between.

      首先,互联网促进了机会的爆炸性扩张。听起来很平淡,但我认为还是被低估了。最近有几十亿人移民到世界上最有活力的空间,但这个体系还没有达到平衡。当你想到YouTube是如何加速隐性知识的传播,想到有多少有创造力的局外人现在可以有效地发挥他们的才能,想到有多少18岁的聪明人现在可以在自己的卧室里创办公司,想到所有不可思议的奇闻异事如雨后春笋般涌现... ...在全球公共领域,互联网就是氮肥,我们仍然有很长的路要走——经济上、文化上、科学上、技术上、社会上,以及介于这之间的一切。

    2. California shifted mid century from being the US's fastest-growing state -- 50% population growth between 1950 and 1960 -- to a state that is somehow, improbably, shrinking. This is, obviously, mostly because of the regulations the state's inhabitants put in place that block the housing that's required to support California’s economic success. As a result, California has lost the "technology" of being able to affordably house its inhabitants. In these ways and many others, technology is both advancing rapidly and yet often receding in the state.

      加利福尼亚州在本世纪中叶从美国增长最快的州--1950年至1960年间人口增长50%--转变为一个莫名其妙地萎缩的州。很明显,这主要是因为该州居民制定的法规,阻挡了支持加州经济成功所需的住房。因此,加州失去了能够为居民提供负担得起的住房的 "技术"。在这些方面以及其他许多方面,技术在该州既快速发展,却又经常退步。

    3. The period of the early twentieth century was an era of building in the broadest sense, from universities to government agencies to cities to highways. The byproduct of this period of building is maintenance and we haven't figured out how to meta-maintain -- that is, how to avoid emergent sclerosis in the stuff we build. I see the exact same thing in financial services, by the way. Nobody in financial services thinks that real-time settlement is a bad idea. Cryptocurrencies show that it is a quite tractable problem. The "enemy", such as it is, is the calcification that follows from an existing install base. And all cultural questions aside, the US simply has a very large existing install base of aged institutions and systems.

      二十世纪初是一个最广泛意义上的建设时代,从大学到政府机构,从城市到高速公路。这个时期建设的副产品是维护,而我们还没有弄清楚如何进行元维护——也就是说,如何避免我们建造的东西出现硬化。顺便说一句,我在金融服务中也看到了完全相同的情况。金融服务中没有人认为实时结算是个坏主意。加密货币表明,这是一个相当容易解决的问题。如许的 "仇人 "是现有的安装基础所带来的钙化。而抛开所有文化问题不谈,美国只是拥有一个非常庞大的现有老旧机构和系统的安装基础。

    1. Everyone is an allocator of something. Investing is an opportunity to evaluate what you believe. To gain conviction. And then to act on that conviction. 

      每个人都是某些事情的分配者。投资是一个评估自己信念的机会。获得信念。然后以此信念来采取行动。

    1. When growth requires bits instead of atoms, there is no such ceiling. Demand can scale very fast, but supply can also scale in lock step, and those two conditions working in concert is what allows certain businesses grow so fast and become so valuable.

      当增长需要的是比特而不是原子时,就没有这样的天花板。需求的规模可以非常快,但供给也可以按部就班的扩大,这两个条件共同作用,才使得某些企业发展得如此之快,变得如此有价值。

    1. All mathematical and scientific work is determined by social and political factors, from the point of research to the point at which a “discovery” is shaped into narrative.

      所有的数学和科学工作都是由社会和政治因素决定的,从研究的一刻到「发现」被塑造为叙事的一刻。

    1. So this model you’re describing, where you basically connect people from one income level to another higher one via various different processes. I’m curious what other connections you can imagine existing. The way to answer that is to see where all the shortages are, where are people trying to hire and those people don’t exist? Tech is an obvious one, but it’s all over the place in healthcare and the skilled trades. You can actually get a data dump from the Department of Labor that says here are all the roles that we’re unable to fill with the existing talent pools. To start with you just plug those up. Over time you get more fancy and optimize for what level of programmer and other specifics, but right now if you're a long-haul truck driver you’re hired instantly. You can be a felon coming out of prison and you can make $90k, with like three weeks of training, and most people don't even know that that's an option. That may not be a career in 20 years, who knows what happens with self-driving vehicles, and we should probably also have a solution for when that's true.

      问:所以你所描述的这种模式,基本上是通过各种不同的过程,把人们从一个收入水平连接到另一个更高的收入水平。我很好奇,你还能想象到有哪些其他的连接方式存在。

      答:回答这个问题的方法是看看所有的短缺都在哪里,人们想在哪里招聘,而这些人却不存在?技术是一个很明显的问题,但在医疗保健和技术行业中到处都是。其实你可以从劳工部得到一个数据下载,包含我们现有人才库无法填补的所有角色。开始的时候,你只要把这些空缺填补上就可以了。随着时间的推移,你会得到更多的变化,并优化什么级别的程序员和其他具体的细节。但现在如果你是一个长途卡车司机,你会立即被雇用。你可以是一个从监狱里出来的重刑犯,你可以赚到 9 万美金,通过三个星期的培训,大多数人甚至不知道这是一个选择。这可能在 20 年后不是一个职业,谁知道自动驾驶汽车会发生什么,当这成为现实的时候,我们可能也应该有一个解决方案。

    1. Engelbart’s strategic vision began with the recognition of a major reason why some large-scale problems continue to elude humankind’s best efforts. His radical scale change principle asserts that as a complex system increases in scale, it changes not only in size but also in its qualities. This principle, in fact one of the three basic laws of Hegelian dialectic, seems at odds with the common-sense view that large-scale systems are reducible to smaller-scale parts without loss of qualities. Even if Engelbart knew that the computer was just another artifact at a time when more engineering was not necessarily the solution, he also knew that this specific language artifact was offering unusual characteristics. He understood that the computer was opening the cognitive realm to more dimensions than the usual three, allowing non-linear thinking. But, most importantly, it was extremely fast; it could calculate, display and help organize ideas at a blazing speed. He realized that the introduction of the computer, as a powerful auxiliary to human intellect, could turn a quantitative change into a qualitative change. Facing numerous too urgent and complex problems, the little inelastic mind of the human being could, with the augmentation of the computer, become up to the challenge. Most importantly, this basic tenet of his philosophy ended up playing as important of part in the human system as in the tool system.

      恩格尔巴特的战略愿景始于他认识到为什么一些大规模的问题仍然没有得到人类的全力解决。他的激进规模变化原理认为,随着一个复杂系统规模的扩大,它不仅在规模上发生变化,而且在质量上也发生变化。这一原理实际上是黑格尔辩证法的三大基本法则之一,它似乎与常识观点相矛盾,即大规模系统可以被还原成小规模,而不会丧失质量。即使恩格尔巴特知道计算机只是另一种人工制品,而当时更多的工程不一定是解决方案,他也知道这个特定的语言产物提供了不同寻常的特性。他明白,计算机正在向更多的维度打开认知领域,而不是通常的三个维度,允许非线性思维。但最重要的是,它的速度极快,它能以迅雷不及掩耳之势计算、显示和帮助组织思想。他意识到,计算机作为人类智力的强大辅助手段的引入,可以将量变转变为质变。面对众多的过于紧迫和复杂的问题,人类那缺乏弹性的小头脑,在计算机的辅助下,能够应付这种挑战。最重要的是,他的这一哲学基本原理最终在人类系统和工具系统中发挥了同样重要的作用。

    1. In a 1995 interview for JCN Profiles entitled “Visionary Leaders of the Information Age,” Engelbart argues that, while tech (which he calls “the tool system”) has advanced beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, “the human system” continues to lag. He explains: The scale of change [on the tool side was] going to increase by huge factors in the coming decades. It became apparent to me then that this human system side was in for massive, massive changes. […] Are we ready for viewing the scale of change on this [human] side that it will take in order to really, really harness what’s over here [tool side]? […] We better start learning and being explicit about this change in the human system rather than just letting the product people throw new stuff at us.

      在1995年JCN Profiles的题为“信息时代有远见的领导者”的采访中,恩格尔巴特认为,虽然科技(他称之为 "工具系统")的进步超出了任何人最疯狂的梦想,但“人类系统”却继续落后。他解释道:

      在未来几十年里,[工具方面]的变化规模将以巨大的系数增加。对我来说,很明显,人类系统方面将发生巨大的变化。[...]为了真正地驾驭这里的(工具方面),我们是否已经准备好观察(人类方面)将发生的变化的规模?[...]我们最好开始学习并明确人类系统的这种变化,而不是仅仅让产品人员向我们抛出新的东西。

    2. When I look at what the connected world has become, I can’t help but feel that Mike Daisey was right: “We were hopelessly naïve.” And the more I learn about Douglas Engelbart, the earliest days of the personal computer, and the internet, the more I believe that the technology that currently shapes our experience of the world is designed based on unquestioned assumptions and ideologies. By questioning them now, perhaps we can change the future.

      当我看到互联世界变成了什么样子,我不禁觉得迈克·戴西(Mike Daisey)是对的:"我们是无可救药的天真"。我对道格拉斯·恩格尔巴特(Douglas Engelbart)——个人电脑和互联网诞生之初——了解得越多,我就越相信,如今塑造我们的世界体验的技术,是基于无可置疑的假设和意识形态设计出来的。通过现在对它们的质疑,也许我们可以改变未来。

    1. From the Bay Area, for example, a slickly produced magazine called Mondo 2000 introduced readers to virtual reality, hacker culture, smart drugs, life extension, and nanotechnologies. Its debut issue derided the “old” future as being “about going back to the land, growing tubers and soybeans, reading by oil lamps. Finite possibilities and small is beautiful. It was boring!” With the Cold War ending and cyberspace beckoning, “there’s a new whiff of apocalypticism across the land. A general sense that we are living at a very special juncture in the evolution of the species.” But where Bernal and Huxley envisioned biological transformations that could potentially benefit society as a whole, this new cult of transhumanists, death defeaters, and allied techno-enthusiasts focused on the self: the perfection of body and mind as individual self-fulfillment. In California, the net and nanotechnology met Narcissus.

      举例而言,一本名为《Mondo 2000》的时尚杂志向读者介绍了虚拟现实、黑客文化、智能药物、生命延续和纳米科技。它的创刊号嘲讽“之前”的未来是要“回归土地,种植块茎和大豆,点油灯读书。可能性越少越好,越小的事物越美好。太无聊了!”随着冷战时代的终结和网络空间的召唤,“全世界弥漫着一种新的末世主义。人们普遍认为,我们生活在一个特殊的物种进化的关头。”然而,不同于伯纳尔和赫胥黎——他们设想的生物改造可以潜在造福于整个社会,如今这个超人类主义、死亡斗士、技术爱好者联盟组成的新教派更多关注于自我:他们把身体和心灵的完善当作个人的自我实现。在加利福尼亚,网络和纳米科技遇上了自恋症。

    2. Mark O’Connell’s open-minded new book To Be a Machine: Adventures Among the Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death offers an update on the desires, dreams, and delusions of late 20th- and early 21st-century technological optimists. With a practiced journalist’s sense of engagement and empathy leavened by healthy skepticism, O’Connell describes the peculiar constellation of scientists, seekers, grifters, and con artists orbiting techno-optimist communities over the past half century. Hoping to become rich, famous, and/or immortal, this population encompasses a seemingly dizzying array of types and propositions that can, I’d argue, be cleaved into three basic camps.

      马克•奥康奈尔思路大开的新书《成为机器:奇妙之旅——赛博格、乌托邦、黑客、未来主义者如何应对死亡问题之困》中呈现出20世纪晚期至21世纪技术乐观派的欲望、梦境和妄想,这是一幅崭新的图景。奥康奈尔是一名资深记者,良好的怀疑精神培养了他的参与感和同理心。他描摹了过去半个多世纪,充斥于技术乐观派群体中的科学家、追求真理者、赌徒、骗子等一众人等。有些人追名逐利,有些人渴望不朽,这群看上去眼花缭乱的各色人在我看来可以划分为三个基本阵营。

    3. From the Bay Area, for example, a slickly produced magazine called Mondo 2000 introduced readers to virtual reality, hacker culture, smart drugs, life extension, and nanotechnologies. Its debut issue derided the “old” future as being “about going back to the land, growing tubers and soybeans, reading by oil lamps. Finite possibilities and small is beautiful. It was boring!” With the Cold War ending and cyberspace beckoning, “there’s a new whiff of apocalypticism across the land. A general sense that we are living at a very special juncture in the evolution of the species.” But where Bernal and Huxley envisioned biological transformations that could potentially benefit society as a whole, this new cult of transhumanists, death defeaters, and allied techno-enthusiasts focused on the self: the perfection of body and mind as individual self-fulfillment. In California, the net and nanotechnology met Narcissus.

      举例而言,一本名为《Mondo 2000》的时尚杂志向读者介绍了虚拟现实、黑客文化、智能药物、生命延续和纳米科技。它的创刊号嘲讽“之前”的未来是要“回归土地,种植块茎和大豆,点油灯读书。可能性越少越好,越小的事物越美好。太无聊了!”随着冷战时代的终结和网络空间的召唤,“全世界弥漫着一种新的末世主义。人们普遍认为,我们生活在一个特殊的物种进化的关头。”然而,不同于伯纳尔和赫胥黎——他们设想的生物改造可以潜在造福于整个社会,如今这个超人类主义、死亡斗士、技术爱好者联盟组成的新教派更多关注于自我:他们把身体和心灵的完善当作个人的自我实现。在加利福尼亚,网络和纳米科技遇上了自恋症。

    4. “NO MORE SEX!” was the unexpected news that London’s Daily Herald brought its readers in February 1929. Those intrigued enough to continue reading found yet more startling information on “WHAT HUMANS MAY BE LIKE ANOTHER DAY” — such as “MEN WITH EARS UNDER LUNGS” — by the same scientifically pedigreed author. The source: John Desmond Bernal, a young Irishman whose daring new book, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, offered a “PEEP INTO THE FUTURE.”

      “性已消亡!”1929年2月,伦敦《每日先驱报》刊载了这样一则出人意料的新闻。它成功激起了读者深入阅读的兴趣,并在“未来人类会是什么样”的问题上给出了更加惊世骇俗的讯息,比如:“人的耳朵长在肺的下面”。这些言论均出自一位科学背景的作者约翰•德斯蒙德•伯纳尔,这个爱尔兰年轻人标新立异的新书《世俗、肉身与魔鬼》为人们提供了“一窥未来”的视角。

    1. Zuckerberg says hardware changes are a major focus for avatar-building. In VR, “the biggest things that we’re very focused on now are, how do you pack basically more sensors to create a better social experience into the device,” he says. “When I think about where you’re at with VR today, you go into the experience — there are some pretty good games and different experiences. But I’d love to get to the point where you have realistic avatars of yourself, where you can make real authentic eye contact with someone and have real expressions that get reflected on your avatar.”

      扎克伯格表示,硬件的改变是构建虚拟角色的主要关注点。在VR中,"我们现在关注的最重要的事情是,如何将更多的传感器整合到设备中来创造更好的社交体验,"他说。"当我想到今天VR的发展状况时,你会进入到体验中——有一些非常棒的游戏和不同的体验。但我希望你能有一个真实的自己的虚拟形象,你可以和别人进行真实的眼神交流,你的虚拟形象也能反映出你真实的表情。"

    1. The creator of the work was a brilliant art director named Craig Tanimoto. Craig had worked with me for many years (mainly on the Nissan business), and he virtually always had a unique way of looking at things. When I started my own ad agency a few years later, Craig was one of the first creative people I hired. Craig’s Apple campaign seemed big and fresh in a room that was filled with classic computer shots and stereotypical celebrity photos. I loved it. But at the same time, the work seemed in need of explanation. I asked Craig what it all meant, and he said, “IBM has a campaign out that says "Think IBM" (it was a campaign for their ThinkPad), and I feel Apple is very different from IBM, so I felt “Think Different” was interesting. I then thought it would be cool to attach those words to some of the world’s most different-thinking people.”

      这个系列的作品是由一位很有才华的美术指导Craig Tanimoto创作的。Craig与我共事多年(主要是在尼桑项目中),他总是能从独特的角度来看待事物。几年后,当我成立了自己的广告公司,Craig成了我第一批聘请的创意人之一。

      在充斥着电脑照片和老套的名人照的房间里,Craig的作品显得醒目而新鲜。但同时,这个作品还需要有人来做些解释。

      我问Craig这一系列作品有什么含义,他说,“IBM有一个广告运动,叫‘Think IBM’,我想,苹果和IMB非常不同,所以我想‘Think Different’会很有趣。然后我想,如果把这个语句和世界上思维最不同寻常的人的照片放在一起,那将会非常酷。”

    1. We will tame the computer’s appealing transcendental charm and restrain it from serving established power. This stance is the way to solve complicated problems in the machine society. We do not praise machine civilization, nor do we criticise it. By a strategic collaboration with artists, scientists and other creative people from a wide variety of backgrounds, we will deliberate carefully [sic] the relationships between human beings and machines, and how we should live in the computer age.

      我们将驯服计算机那迷人的超凡魅力,限制它为既定的权力服务。这种立场是解决机器社会中复杂问题的方法。我们既不赞美机器文明,也不批评它。通过与艺术家、科学家和来自各种背景的其他有创造力的人的合作,我们将仔细研究人与机器之间的关系,以及我们在计算机时代应该如何生活。

    2. There is something important to be claimed – or reclaimed – from those Macys conversations, for while there was a great deal of interest in how the mind works, there was also a clear and deliberate examination of the role of technology in our lives. In the fading shadows of World War II, it was clear computers would have a profound impact on our futures, and Mead and her contemporaries fretted about how to theorise a cybernetic system in such a way that it could accommodate humans and culture, and even the environment. The atomic bomb was a graphic reminder of the power of technology to profoundly reconfigure the natural world. Participants at the Macy Conferences wanted a different kind of technological future – something far less destructive, although they clearly did not yet grasp the energy needs of the computing systems they were building, and their ultimate cost.

      从这些梅西参会者的讨论中,有一些重要的东西值得宣称——或者说是重新宣称——因为尽管人们对大脑如何工作很感兴趣,但也对技术在我们生活中的作用进行了清晰而审慎的审视。在二战的阴影逐渐消失的时候,计算机显然会对我们的未来产生深远的影响,玛格丽特 · 米德(Margaret Mead)和她同时代的人都在为如何建立一个能够容纳人类和文化,甚至是环境的控制系统而烦恼。原子弹生动地提醒人们,技术的力量可以深刻地改变自然世界。梅西会议的与会者希望有一种不同的技术未来——一个破坏性小得多的未来,尽管他们显然还没有意识到他们正在建造的计算机系统的能源需求,以及它们的最终成本。

    1. In 1970, Life magazine published an article about a Stanford University research project that had resulted in the construction of what it called the first-ever “electronic person.” This creature, called Shakey, was a six-foot-tall robot on wheels, and it looked like a filing cabinet carrying around an elaborate video camera. It was an early experiment in artificial intelligence, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or DARPA—the technological research arm of the Pentagon—and conceived by the Canadian applied physicist Charles Rosen. It was the first robot designed to be entirely autonomous, to reason and make decisions based on information about its environment. Shakey was intended as a prototype for more advanced automatons that would eventually replace human beings in dangerous and hostile territories, and its makers saw it as the advance guard of a near future in which humans would be emulated, and eventually replaced, by intelligent machines. Shakey’s degree of autonomy was much more limited than that suggested by Life’s Promethean claims; its movements were slow and halting, and its battery tended to die after a few minutes of juddering operation. But many of the project’s innovations eventually entered the bloodstream of modern technology: the mapping software in your smartphone, for instance, was first used in Shakey, and Siri’s voice-command technology is a successor of a speech-control mechanism that was pioneered for the project.

      1970年,杂志Life发表了一篇文章,文章介绍了一个斯坦福大学的科研项目最新成果,世界上第一个“电子人”在实验室中问世。他们把这台机器称为Shakey,这家伙由六个轮子驱动,看起来像电视柜上挂着一台摄像机。可以说,它是最早期的人工智能,由美国国防部先进研究计划局(DARPA)赞助,由加拿大应用物理学家Charles Rosen提出。它也是世界上第一台全自动机器人,制造的初衷是为了军事目的。Shakey本来计划量产之后代替活人士兵,研发人员甚至视其为机器人时代的先锋,最终将代替人类的大部分工作。然而,Life杂志过分夸大了Shakey的自动化程度,实际上它的行动十分迟缓,且不时停止工作,更糟糕的是,Shakey自带的电池在某些状态下只够支撑10分钟,取代人类基本上没什么可能。毫无疑问,Shakey是一款超前于时代的产品,在当时的技术条件下,失败属于必然。但当时运用的许多技术至今仍有深远的影响,比如说手机上的地图应用和语音助手,在移动设备上的首次应用都始于Shakey。

    1. Christoph Grienberger oversaw all mathematical works written by Jesuit authors, a role akin to an editor at a modern scientific journal. He was modest and productive, and could not resist solving problems. He reasoned that since a 1:10 gear could allow one person to lift 10 times as much as one unassisted, if one had 24 gears linked to a treadmill then one could lift the Earth… very slowly.

      克里斯托夫-格里恩伯格(Christoph Grienberger)负责整理所有耶稣会信徒写的数学著作,他的这一角色类似于现代科学杂志的编辑。此人非常谦虚,也很勤快,还特别喜欢解决问题。他推断,既然一个1:10的齿轮可以让一个人抬起十倍于他的重量,那如果一个人把24个齿轮连上踏板车,就可以慢慢抬起地球。

    1. In his book The Mysterious Flame (1999), the British philosopher Colin McGinn argues that it is impossible to understand the phenomenon of consciousness because we cannot get outside of our minds to discuss it. We are inescapably trapped within the network of neurons whose mysterious experience we are attempting to analyze. Likewise, I would argue that we are imprisoned within our own cosmos of meaning. We cannot imagine a universe without meaning. We are not talking necessarily about some grand cosmic meaning, or a divine meaning bestowed by God, or even a lasting, eternal meaning. But just the simple, particular meaning of everyday events, fleeting events like the momentary play of light on a lake, or the birth of a child. For better or for worse, meaning is part of the way we exist in the world.

      英国哲学家科林·麦金(Colin McGinn)在他的《神秘的火焰》(The Mysterious Flame,1999)一书中指出,我们不可能理解意识现象,因为我们无法跳出自己的思维去讨论它。我们不可避免地被困在神经元网络中,而我们试图分析的正是这张网络产生的神秘体验。同样地,我认为我们被禁锢在自己的意义之宇宙中。我们无法想象一个没有意义的宇宙。我们不一定是在谈论某种宏大的宇宙意义,或是某种上帝赋予的神圣意义,甚或是某种长存、永恒的意义。我们谈论的也许只是寻常点滴、转瞬即逝的事件,比如湖面上一闪而过的波光,或是一个婴孩的出生,我们谈论它们那简单、具体的意义。无论是好是坏,意义是我们存在于这个世界的方式的一部分。

    1. An article in the New York Times from 1966 called the Ball Chair the most antisocial, leave-me-alone-chair in Europe, fascinating more to men than women. The design was described as the ideal chair for the businessman who wants to seclude himself from all the noise at home and get some peace to read the newspaper.

      1966年《纽约时报》发表的一篇文章称球形椅子是欧洲最反社会的家具——Leave-me-alone-chair(“别烦我椅子”)。对于希望在家中获得一方净土的人而言,这把椅子再理想不过。用现在的话来说,这是一款对社恐人士非常友好的椅子。

    1. By suggesting that her readers (the general public) need to learn to think clearly, and helping to provide the means, Stebbing was adding herself to a long line of philosophers known as ‘freethinkers’. ‘Freethinking’ dates back to the European Enlightenment and originally involved rejecting religious authority and academic dogma in the light of new developments in science. Essentially, freethinkers pushed for a democratisation of knowledge and believed we should follow our own reason over the Bible or ancient philosophical texts. The frontispiece to Thinking to Some Purpose even includes a quotation from the 18th-century philosopher Anthony Collins, who literally wrote the textbook on freethinking. The quotation, which is from Collins’s A Discourse of Free-thinking (1713), reads: if we have a right to know any Truth whatsoever, we have a right to think freely … there is no other way to discover the Truth.

      斯泰宾建议读者(普通大众)要学会清醒地思考,并为他们提供思考的方法,她自己也由此加入到了被称之为“自由思想家”的众多的哲学家行列中。“自由思考”源于欧洲启蒙运动,它最初从科学革新的角度拒绝宗教权威和学术教条。从根本上说,自由思想家是推动知识的民主化,认为我们应该遵循自己的理性,而非圣经或古代的哲学文本。《有效思维》甚至在卷首引用了由18世纪哲学家安东尼•柯林斯在他所著的自由思想教科书《自由思想论》(1713)中写的一句话:

      如果我们拥有了解任何真相的权利,我们就有了自由思考的权利......其他方式无法让我们抵达真相。

    2. ‘There is an urgent need today for the citizens of a democracy to think well.’ These words, which could have been written yesterday, come from Thinking to Some Purpose, a popular book by the British philosopher Susan Stebbing, first published in 1939 in the Penguin ‘Pelican’ books series, with that familiar blue-and-white cover. This little book, which could easily be slipped into a pocket and read on the train, in a lunch hour, or at a bus stop, was pitched at the intelligent general reader. In Thinking to Some Purpose, Stebbing took on the task of showing the relevance of logic to ordinary life, and she did so with a sense of urgency, well aware of the gathering storm clouds over Europe.

      “如今民主国家的公民迫切需要清醒地思考。”这就像写于昨天的话,是出自英国哲学家苏珊·斯泰宾的畅销书《有效思维》,它于1939年首次发行在企鹅图书旗下的那套熟悉的蓝白封面的鹈鹕丛书中。这本小册书,很容易就塞进口袋里,可以在火车上、午餐时,或在公共汽车站阅读,它的目标受众是那些聪明的大众读者。斯泰宾在《有效思维》一书中着眼阐释逻辑之于日常生活的意义,她当时十分急迫地着手此事,因为她清醒地意识到欧洲的上空正笼罩着不祥的阴云。

    1. Open data — A world in which vital and useful data is shared between all parties and made open for anyone to utilise, rather like a commons.Privacy First — digital platforms should minimise the data created about users and personal data should remain private and under individual control by default. Sharing data should happen only in the most necessary circumstances and everything should be encrypted.Data ownership — People should be able to take control of the data they generate through the framework of ownership and it should be within their right to license the use of that data to whomever they choose.
      1. 开放数据——在这个世界上,重要及有用数据在各方之间共享,并开放给所有人使用。
      2. 隐私至上——数字平台应尽量减少用户数据,并且默认情况下,个人数据应默认保持隐私,并由用户自身控制。只有在最必要情况下才应共享数据,且所有内容均应加密。
      3. 数据所有权——人们应该能够通过所有权框架控制他们生成的数据,并应有权将数据使用权提供给他们选择的任何人。
    2. In part, Swash acts as a basic enough tool to allow people to have a genuine say over what data from their browser they’d like to share (and monetise) and what they would prefer to remain private. It turns out that, given the chance at reclaiming some of their power or imagining an alternative to data tyranny, consumer indifference fades away.

      在某种程度上,Swash 作为一个基础工具,使人们能够选择自身哪些浏览器数据可共享(并变现),哪些数据保持隐私。事实证明,如果用户有部分权利,或设想出一种替代数据垄断的方法,消费者就不会变得这么冷漠。

    1. Although Andreessen has been a board member of Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, and eBay, he doesn’t take many board seats in a16z’s portfolio companies, preferring to train his eyes on the horizon. Andreessen is tomorrow’s advance man, routinely laying out “what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years,” as if he were glancing at his Google calendar. He views his acuity as a matter of careful observation and extrapolation, and often invokes William Gibson’s observation “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Jet packs have been around for half a century, but you still can’t buy them at Target. To smooth out such lumps in distribution, Andreessen disseminates his views via every available podcast and panel discussion and CNN interview slot: he’s a media soothsayer, Andreessen the Magnificent. He also tweets a hundred and ten times a day, inundating his three hundred and ten thousand followers with aphorisms and statistics and tweetstorm jeremiads. Andreessen says that he loves Twitter because “reporters are obsessed with it. It’s like a tube and I have loudspeakers installed in every reporting cubicle around the world.” He believes that if you say it often enough and insistently enough it will come—a glorious revenge. He told me, “We have this theory of nerd nation, of forty or fifty million people all over the world who believe that other nerds have more in common with them than the people in their own country. So you get to choose what tribe or band or group you’re a part of.” The nation-states of Twitter will map the world.

      虽然 Andreessen 是 Facebook,Hewlett-Packard,和 eBay 的董事会成员,但他在 a16z 的投资公司里并没占据很多董事会席位。他更倾向于训练自己看得远一些。Andreessen 是未来预言家,能够轻易描绘出「未来十年,二十年,三十年里会发生什么」,就像是看了一眼自己的谷歌日历一样。他认为自己的敏锐来自仔细的观察和推断,而且经常援引 William Gibson 的那句「未来已经来了——只是还未均匀分布」(The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.)。喷气式背包已经存在了半个世纪了,但你还是不能在 Target 超市买到。为了让这种不均匀尽量消失,Andreessen 通过各种途径——播客、论坛和 CNN 的采访来传播他的观点:他成了一个媒体上的预言者,「伟大的 Andreessen」。他可以一天写 110 条推特,用各种格言警句、统计数据或者「推特风暴」 (tweetstorm) 淹没他的 31 万关注者。Andreessen 说他喜欢 Twitter 是因为「记者都会对它上瘾。它就像个管道,而我在世界上每一个记者的工作间都装了一个喇叭。」他相信如果你能频繁地说,那么事情就会发生——像一场华丽的复仇。他对我说,「我们有个所谓的『书呆子国度』(nerd nation)理论,全世界有四、五千万人会觉得其他国家的 nerds 比他们自己国家的人和自己更相似。所以你是可以选择自己属于哪个群体的。」 Twitter 的群体分类就是整个世界的图谱。

    1. Today, most of us accept that the Internet is important, but this is a recent phenomenon. As late as 1995, astronomer Clifford Stoll wrote an article for Newsweek, entitled “Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana,” which includes this unfortunate analysis: Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping — just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet — which there isn’t — the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: Salespeople.

      现在我们绝大多数人已经认清了互联网的重要性,但这其实只是一个现象。就像1995年一样,天文学家 Clifford Stoll 给 Newsweek 写了一篇文章,标题为“为何网页不能成为极乐世界(Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana)”,我们来看看这个不幸的分析中的片段:

      接下来还会有网上贸易(cyberbusiness),我们被告知会有即时的商品目录,只需要点击就能完成购买。我们将可以在网上订购飞机票、酒店等,实体店将不再兴盛... 那为何现在我居住的城市一个下午当地的电话销售都比整个互联网一个月的销售额还要大呢?就算以后会有一个有效的网上转账方式(但这是不可能的),网络还忽略了一个最重要的因素:销售人员。

    2. In 1837, Charles Babbage set out to build something he called The Analytical Engine — the world’s first general-purpose computer, that could be described in modern times as Turing-complete. In other words, given enough resources the machine that Babbage was building could compute anything that the most powerful computer in the world today can compute. The computation might be slower and the computer might take up more space (okay, amazingly slow and incredibly huge), but his design matched today’s computational power.

      1837年 Charles Babbage 开始着手打造被他称为“The Analytical Engine”的东西——这个世界上的第一台电脑,被我们现在称之为“图灵机”,也就是说,Babbage 当时打造的机器只要有足够资源,它的计算能力和现在最强力的计算机没有区别,虽然计算速度可能会慢很多(好吧,其实是超级慢),但他的设计却是和现在的机器匹配的。

    1. Singer’s demo caused quite the stir and for good reason: tools such as this will continue to improve, and we all know it. It signals a future where many of the tasks we perform now will be automated or at least aided by AI. Technology that has the potential to eliminate tasks, and by extension the potential to eliminate jobs, will invariably elicit some fear. This is especially true in an industry that already has a firm grasp on how technology can disrupt entire industries. While AI will no doubt eliminate the need to manually perform many tasks, its benefits will also open up opportunities and help to automate menial tasks which will free us up to focus on the more meaningful work that provides additional value. The question becomes: how might we leverage AI and the benefits it brings to help in the design process? Additionally, how might things go wrong when leveraging AI in the design process?

      Singer的演示引起了不小的轰动,原因很充分:像这样的工具将继续改进,我们都知道这一点。它预示着未来我们现在所执行的许多任务都将实现自动化,或者至少有人工智能的辅助。有可能消除任务的技术,进而有可能消除工作岗位,总会引起一些恐惧。在一个已经牢牢把握技术如何颠覆整个行业的行业,这一点尤其重要。人工智能无疑将消除人工执行许多任务的需求,但它的好处也将带来机会,并帮助实现琐碎任务的自动化,这将使我们腾出时间专注于提供额外价值的更有意义的工作。问题变成了:我们如何利用人工智能及其带来的好处来帮助设计过程?此外,在设计过程中利用人工智能时,可能会出现怎样的问题?

    1. Benedict Evans, the tech analyst, argues “when software becomes part of society, all of society’s problems get expressed in software”. But innovation, while a force for good, is also reshaping our lives. Businesses, communications, cities, even political systems are being altered and destabilised in ways beyond the control of nations.

      科技分析师本尼迪克特·埃文斯(Benedict Evans)认为,"当软件成为社会的一部分时,社会的所有问题都会在软件中得到体现"(when software becomes part of society, all of society’s problems get expressed in software)。但是,创新在成为一种善的力量的同时,也在重塑我们的生活。商业、通信、城市,甚至政治制度都在以国家无法控制的方式被改变和破坏。

    1. Danny Hillis, my mentor as we were working at Thinking Machines in the early 1980s, often said, “We want to build a machine that will be proud of us.” We were bringing up the next generation. In my conversations with Carl Feynman at that time, we thought if we were going to be bringing up our new overlords, they should at least read good books. While not of the Internet yet, the computer we were building did share the recognition of the importance of the network, of the interconnections of the links. The machine we were building was called the “Connection Machine,” where the connections between the processors were seen as important as the tens of thousands of processors themselves. The difference between this machine and the Internet was that these processors were not yet spread around the world.This imagining of a machine’s view of us, a machine that is distinct from us, a machine that has evolved beyond us, brings me around to my original ill-formed vision in 1980 of what I could help make the Internet become: a network of people, the library, and machines. I did not see it in a light that was either glorifying or terrifying, but rather as a major inevitable project that could be built well or badly, and I could help build it well. In that way it could be a major positive step forward.

      丹尼 · 希利斯(Danny Hillis)是我的导师,我们上世世纪80年代初在“思考机器”(Thinking Machines)工作的时候,他经常说:"我们要打造一台让我们骄傲的机器。"(We want to build a machine that will be proud of us.) 我们是在培养下一代人。在我当时与卡尔 · 费曼(Carl Feynman)的对话中,如果我们要培养我们的新领主,他们至少应该读些好书。虽然还没有互联网,但我们正在建造的计算机确实认识到网络的重要性,认识到各个环节相互连接的重要性。我们正在建造的机器被称为 "连接机"(Connection Machine),在这里,处理器之间的连接被视为与数以万计的处理器本身一样重要。这台机器与互联网的区别在于,这些处理器还没有遍布全球。

      这种对机器看待我们的想象,一台不同于我们的机器,一台超越了我们的机器,让我想起了我在1980年最初的不成形的设想,那就是我可以帮助互联网变成:人、图书馆和机器组成的网络。我并没有把它看成是美化或恐怖的,而是把它看成是一个不可避免的重大项目,它可以建得好,也可以建得不好,我可以帮助它建得好。这样一来,这可能是向前迈出的积极一大步。

    1. Timekeeping devices have trans­formed civiliza­tions more than once. As Lewis Mumford pointed out in 1934: “The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern indus­trial age.” Today, it is again a timekeeping device that is trans­forming our civiliza­tion: a clock, not computers, is the true key-machine of the modern infor­ma­tional age. And this clock is Bitcoin.

      计时装置不止一次地改变了人类文明。正如刘易斯·芒福德(Lewis Mumford)在1934年指出的那样: "现代工业时代的关键机器是时钟,而不是蒸汽机"。(The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.)今天,又是一种计时装置在改变着我们的文明:时钟,而不是计算机,才是现代信息时代真正的关键机器。而这个时钟就是比特币。

    1. BLVR: How important is reading to your work? TC: I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re asking, but I’ll say this. This has to do with the question of genre, which is often defined in terms of a certain set of tropes or a formula. But there’s this other definition of genre that I find speaks more to me, which is to think of genre as an ongoing conversation. Genre is a conversation between authors, between books, that extends over decades. And one of the reasons I definitely identify as a science fiction writer is because I want to be a participant in the ongoing conversation that is science fiction. My writing is informed by the books I’ve read, so it is a response to what other writers have written. I want to be in conversation with other works of science fiction. 

      BLVR:阅读对你的作品有多重要?

      TC:我不知道这是不是你想问的,但是我要说。这与流派问题有关,这个问题通常是用一组特定的比喻或公式来定义的。但是我发现另外一个关于流派的定义更能说明我的观点,那就是把流派看作是一种持续的对话。流派是作者之间的对话,是书本之间的对话,它延续了几十年。我确定自己是科幻小说作家的原因之一,是因为我想成为正在进行的科幻小说对话的参与者。我的写作是由我读过的书所启发的,所以它是对其他作家所写的东西的回应。我想与其他科幻作品对话。

    2. BLVR: How important would you say the Clarion Workshop was to your development as a writer?  TC: Clarion was a life-changing event not just because of what I learned about writing, but because it made me believe that I could be a writer. Prior to attending Clarion, I’d been working in complete isolation. I didn’t know anyone else who was trying to write science fiction—I knew barely anyone who read science fiction. So I had no one to really talk to about what felt like the central passion of my life. I’d gotten only form-letter rejections; I didn’t know if I was cut out to be a writer. At Clarion people told me that my stuff was good; that was the first time I had gotten positive reinforcement. But it was also the first time that I found other people who shared my passion. A lot of people say that going to Clarion is like meeting a family you didn’t know you had, and to me it definitely felt that way. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who had read the books I had read and understood the things I was interested in and were trying to do the things I was trying to do. I remember, on maybe the first or second night at Clarion, one of my classmates mentioned the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis3 and then started to explain what it was, and I said, “Oh, I know what that is.” And he said, “You’re the first person I’ve met who’s heard of that before.” That sort of thing happened to us constantly. Going to Clarion was how I found there was a community for writers out there that I could fit into. 

      BLVR:你认为号角作家工作坊(Clarion Workshop)对你作为作家的发展有多重要?

      TC:号角作家工作坊(Clarion Workshop)是改变我一生的事件,不仅因为我学到了写作的知识,还因为它让我相信自己可以成为一名作家。在参加号角作家工作坊之前,我一直在与世隔绝地工作。我不认识任何想写科幻小说的人——我几乎不认识读科幻小说的人。所以,我没有人可以真正谈论我生命中核心激情。我只收到过一些格式化的拒绝信;我不知道自己是否适合做一个作家。在号角作家工作坊(Clarion Workshop),人们告诉我,我的作品很好;这是我第一次得到积极的支持。但这也是我第一次找到和我有同样热情的人。很多人说,进入号角作家工作坊(Clarion Workshop)就像遇到了一个你不知道的家庭,对我来说确实如此。突然间,我周围的人都读过我读过的书,了解我感兴趣的事情,并试图做我想做的事情。我记得,也许在号角作家工作坊(Clarion Workshop)的第一或第二个晚上,我的一个同学提到了萨皮尔·沃夫假说(Sapir-Whorf hypothesis),然后开始解释它是什么,我说:"哦,我知道那是什么。" 他说:"你是我遇到的第一个听说过这个的人。" 这种事经常发生在我们身上。去工作坊的时候,我发现那里有一个作家社区,我可以融入其中。

    1. It didn’t take long for the founding duo to ship v1. Written in Graham’s beloved Lisp, the site served as a fairly straightforward link aggregator that allowed for upvoting and downvoting. The first 100 accounts on the site were created by either Ohanian or Huffman to give the appearance of activity. A snapshot from the site from that period (thank you WayBackMachine) illustrates just how much of the culture was baked in early on, featuring conspiracy theories, wonkish dev chat, strong opinions, and “spez,” Huffman’s username.

      这个网站用Graham钟爱的Lisp写成,是一个相当简单的链接聚合器,可以进行升级和降级。网站上的前100个账户是由Ohanian或Huffman创建的,让人觉得很活跃。从这一时期的网站快照(感谢WayBackMachine)可以看出,网站文化在早期就已经形成了,包括阴谋论、古怪的开发聊天、强烈的意见和 "spez",Huffman的用户名。

    1. This problem was no secret. Computer scientists had been working on ways to network computers as early as 1962. Then on October 29, 1969—only a few months after Apollo 11 landed on the moon—grad student, Charley Kline, sent a message from his computer at UCLA to a computer some 350 miles north at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). To Kline and his co-conspirator, Bill Duvall, it was no big deal. “It was just engineers working,” said Leonard Kleinrock, a pioneer of computer networking and a leader of the project.

      这个问题并不是什么秘密。早在1962年,计算机科学家们就已经开始研究计算机联网的方法。然后在1969年10月29日,也就是阿波罗11号登陆月球几个月后,研究生查理 · 克莱恩(Charley Kline)从加州大学洛杉矶分校的计算机向北边大约350英里的斯坦福研究所(SRI)的一台计算机发送了一条信息。对克莱恩和他的同谋比尔 · 杜瓦尔(Bill Duvall)来说,这没什么大不了的。"这只是工程师们的工作,"计算机网络的先驱和项目的领导者伦纳德·克兰罗克(Leonard Kleinrock)说。

    1. Li: Yeah. So in terms of where I’m focused on these days, as an investor, I’m focused on backing new platforms that are empowering people to have happier work lives and to do work that they find meaningful where they have more ownership and autonomy and feel more motivated and fulfills in doing that type of work. So it’s really an antidote, I think, to a lot of the gig models of the past, where people were totally alienated from whatever they were creating, didn’t have any sort of ownership or agency to even dictate the terms of their labor. And instead I’m backing new platforms where people are given the tools to be able to monetize their creativity. So, that’s where I’m focused on these days. And that’s where I have the most optimism around technology. Like when I was growing up, there was no path that I could see or that my parents could see for me to monetize a lot of my creative interests.

      作为一名投资者,我专注于支持新的平台,这些平台赋予人们权力,让他们拥有更幸福的工作生活,并在他们拥有更多自主权和自主权的地方做他们认为有意义的工作,并在做这类工作时感到更有动力和满足感。因此,我认为这真的是过去许多工作模式的解药,在那里,人们与他们创造的任何东西完全疏远,甚至没有任何所有权或代理来决定他们的劳动条件。相反,我正在支持新的平台,在那里人们可以获得工具,使他们能够将他们的创造力货币化。所以,这就是我这些天关注的焦点。这就是我对技术最乐观的地方。

    1. I’m also not surprised that social features, users to users interacting with each other, are working. So it is an interesting space, and it’s definitely something that we’re keeping an eye on. Long-term, though, I think the broader shift that has been true with the internet has been most of the hours of consumption, we believe, will be moving from linear to on-demand. Meaning consumers should be able to consume whatever content that they want on their terms and not necessarily be beholden to someone else’s schedule. So I think it’s a really interesting format from a creation perspective, but I suspect that from the consumption perspective, most of the time consumed will still be on-demand which is what Spotify is known for today.

      我并不奇怪,社交功能,即用户与用户之间的互动,正在发挥作用。所以这是一个有趣的空间,这绝对是我们在关注的事情。不过从长期来看,我认为互联网更广泛的转变,就是大部分的消费时间会从线性转向按需消费。这意味着消费者应该能够按照自己的方式消费任何他们想要的内容,而不一定要受制于别人的时间表。所以,我认为从创作的角度来看,这是一种非常有趣的形式,但我猜测从消费的角度来看,大部分的消费时间仍将是按需消费,这也是 Spotify 如今的特色。

  12. Feb 2021
    1. Jo Szczepanska provides us an extensive timeline for this “multi-disciplinary, human-centered… amalgamation of approaches that involve research and rapid ideation.” I’ll give you the cliff notes here:

      Jo Szczepanska在文章《Design Thinking Origin Story Plus Some of the People Who Made It All Happen》中为这个“多学科,以人为中心...涉及研究和快速构思的方法集合”提供了一个广泛的时间轴。我将在这里展示精华部分:

    1. Fiction Bonus! Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo: I’m unabashedly a part of a young adult fiction book club, so if there’s a fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian, or historical novel that features teen protagonists called to save the world under extraordinary circumstances, I’m there. This is my favorite series in recent memory. It’s two books long and features the most lovable band of crooked thieves you will ever meet attempting a heist that is equal parts madness, redemption and glory. Just pure, wonderful storytelling and a rollicking good time.

      毫不掩饰,我是成年人小说书友会中年轻的一员,所以如果有一本关于幻想,科幻,反乌托邦,或者有十几岁的主角在特殊情况下被召唤拯救世界的历史小说(怎么感觉像穿越网文?),我肯定会读。 在最近的记忆里这是我最爱的系列。它有两本书长,有最可爱的犯罪团伙,还会遇到疯狂的救赎与荣耀。它只是纯粹的美妙故事和一段欢闹的好时光。

    1. The term 'scientific"is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA.

      约翰·布罗克曼:这里所说的“科学”是广义上的理解,即获取关于万物知识的可靠途径,不论是人类行为、组织行为、星球演变,还是宇宙的未来。

    1. We wanted people to think about the "Internet", which includes, but is a much bigger subject than the Web, an application on the Internet, or search, browsing, etc., which are apps on the Web.

      约翰·布罗克曼:2010年,我请Edge的作者思考“互联网”,但这包括且又不限于万维网及互联网上的一个应用(搜索引擎、浏览器等网络应用)。

    1. To be sure, many aspects of the life of the mind have been affected by the Internet. Our physical folders, mailboxes, bookshelves, spreadsheets, documents, media players, and so on have been replaced by software equivalents, which has altered our time budgets in countless ways. But to call it an alternation of "how we think" is, I think, an exaggeration.

      可以肯定的是,人类思想生活的方方面面都受到了互联网的影响。但将其称为“人类思维”的改变者,我认为过于夸张了。

    2. The most interesting trend in the development of the Internet is not how it is changing people's ways of thinking but how it is adapting to the way that people think. The leap in Internet usage that accompanied the appearance of the World Wide Web more than a decade ago came from its user interface, the graphical browser, which worked around the serial, line-based processing of the actual computer hardware to simulate a familiar visual world of windows, icons, and buttons. The changes we are seeing more recently include even more natural interfaces (speech, language, manual manipulation), better emulation of human expertise (as in movie, book, or music recommendations, and more intelligent search), and the application of Web technologies to social and emotional purposes (such as social networking, sharing of pictures, music, and video) rather than just the traditional nerdy ones.

      互联网最有趣的发展趋势为,它并非改变了人类思维,而是它正在适应人类思维。十几年前,万维网的诞生是互联网应用方面的质的飞跃,这主要体现在用户界面即图形浏览器上,它基于一系列计算机线性处理器硬件,模拟出了带有窗口、图标和按钮的熟悉的视觉世界。特别是最近,我们看到更多自然的设计取代了传统的呆板模式:更自然的用户界面、对人类专业知识更优化的模拟,以及互联网技术在社会和情感方面的应用。

    3. As someone who believes both in human nature and in timeless standards of logic and evidence, I'm skeptical of the common claim that the Internet is changing the way we think. Electronic media aren't going to revamp the brain's mechanisms of information processing, nor will they supersede modus ponens or Bayes' theorem.

      作为同时相信人类天性以及逻辑和证据标准永恒性的人,我对互联网正改变类思维的常见说法存疑。电子媒介并不会改变大脑处理信息的机制,也不会取代“假言推理”或是贝叶斯定理。

    1. Maeda is to design what Warren Buffet is to finance---a seasoned technologist who spent more than a decade at the MIT Media Lab before becoming president of the Rhode Island School of Design, a partner at VC powerhouse Kleiner Perkins, and now the head of computational design and inclusion at Automattic, WordPress.com’s parent company. Every year, Maeda travels to South By Southwest to deliver his Design in Technology report, a sprawling presentation that outlines the field’s growing impact on technology and business.

      Maeda正在为Warren Buffet所要资助的项目做设计。他是一个经验丰富的技术专家,他在麻省理工大学媒体实验室工作了十多年,之后担任了罗德岛设计学院校长,VC 发电公司Kleiner Perkins的合伙人,并且现在是WordPress.com的母公司Automattic的计算化设计的负责人。 Maeda每年都会前往South By Southwest做他的“技术中的设计(Design in Technology)”报告,这个的涉及面广泛的演讲概述了该领域对技术和商业不断增长的影响。

    1. What became known as the Google Books Search Amended Settlement Agreement came to 165 pages and more than a dozen appendices. It took two and a half years to hammer out the details. Sarnoff described the negotiations as “four-dimensional chess” between the authors, publishers, libraries, and Google. “Everyone involved,” he said to me, “and I mean everyone—on all sides of this issue—thought that if we were going to get this through, this would be the single most important thing they did in their careers.” Ultimately the deal put Google on the hook for about $125 million, including a one-time $45 million payout to the copyright holders of books it had scanned—something like $60 per book—along with $15.5 million in legal fees to the publishers, $30 million to the authors, and $34.5 million toward creating the Registry.

      这个被称为《谷歌图书搜索修正协议》(Google Books Search Amended Settlement Agreement)的文件有十几条附录,共计165页。确定各项细节前前后后花了两年半时间。萨诺夫将谈判过程比作一个在作者、出版商、图书馆和谷歌公司之间进行的“四维象棋”。“每个谈判参与者,真的是每个人,当时都觉得如果我们真的把这事儿谈成了,那就是每个人在自己的事业里最大的成就。”最终,协议要求谷歌支付1亿2500万美元,其中包括一次性支付给它已经扫描过的图书的版权方的4500万美元(大约按每本书60美元计算),分别向出版商和作者支付的1550万美元和3000万美元诉讼费,以及用来创立图书版权登记处的3450万美元。

    2. The stations—which didn’t so much scan as photograph books—had been custom-built by Google from the sheet metal up. Each one could digitize books at a rate of 1,000 pages per hour. The book would lie in a specially designed motorized cradle that would adjust to the spine, locking it in place. Above, there was an array of lights and at least $1,000 worth of optics, including four cameras, two pointed at each half of the book, and a range-finding LIDAR that overlaid a three-dimensional laser grid on the book’s surface to capture the curvature of the paper. The human operator would turn pages by hand—no machine could be as quick and gentle—and fire the cameras by pressing a foot pedal, as though playing at a strange piano.

      这些扫描仪是谷歌定制的,它们与其说是扫描,还不如说是给书拍照。每台仪器一小时可以数字化1000页左右的图书。待扫描的书会被放在一个特别设计的自动支架上,支架可以适应不同的书脊,并且将图书固定。仪器上方有一排灯,还有价值至少1000美元的光学器材,包括四个摄像头,两个分别照着摊开的书的左右两半,还有一个负责确定扫描范围的光学雷达,它会在图书表面生成一层激光网格,从而捕捉到纸页的曲度。操作员负责手动翻页,因为也没有机器能比得上人手的快捷和轻柔了,然后脚踩踏板来触发相机进行拍照,一系列动作仿佛是在弹一架奇怪的钢琴。

    1. In light of this, Fuller developed synergetics, a field of study that considers a system to be larger than the sum of its parts, thereby implying that it is impossible to understand a given system only by considering its parts in isolation. In short, Fuller's synergetics champions a holistic approach to thinking about systems, particularly our own planet and the human societies that inhabit it.

      富勒创造了“协同学”这样一门学问,其基础概念,是“系统”要大于其组成部分的总和。这也意味着,仅仅考虑孤立的组成部分是无法理解一个特定系统的。简而言之,富勒的协同学主张对系统做整体分析,尤其是对我们的地球以及寄居其上的人类社会来说,更应如此。

    1. “The goal is to make the process of designing robots accessible,” said Adriana Schulz, a PhD student at MIT who co-led the project. “The actuators, the materials, the code, things like that require a lot of knowledge. Our system encapsulates that expert knowledge, so the user can focus on conceptual design.”

      联合领导这个项目的MIT博士生Adriana Schulz表示:“这个项目的目标是使机器人的设计过程变得更加容易。要掌握机器人的各种零部件、代码这样的东西往往需要很多的知识。 而我们的这一系统包括了有关专家知识,这样一来用户可以更加专注于机器人的概念设计。”

    1. It’s interesting how we identify the “beginnings” of modern design. The website Online Design Teacher begins its timeline in the Victorian period, around the 1830s. Meanwhile, Design Is History begins in 1450, a period which marked the introduction of printing presses in Europe, and the beginnings of the mechanical reproduction of graphic media. Going further back still, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design (a big book now in its 6th edition) starts its detailed timeline right back at the invention of writing systems, around 15,000 BCE.

      有趣的是我们如何定义现代设计的“开端”。Online Design Teacher网站的时间轴始于维多利亚时期,大约在19世纪30年代。同时,“ Design Is History”始于1450年,标志着欧洲印刷机的引进,以及图形传媒开始了机械复制。回溯更甚迈格斯平面设计史 (一本现在已经出到了第六版的巨著),在公元前15000年左右的写作系统发明之前就有了具体的时间轴。

    1. Today, the Russians living in Gornoe often say it’s a ghost town, and sailors call it a Fata Morgana (a mirage), in honor of the sea fairies who, as legend has it, live on the ocean floor, deceiving travelers with phantom visions. By the last count on December 1, 2015, there were 635 people living in Gornoe — 128 of them children.

      今天,Gornoe的俄国居民把这里称作鬼镇,水手则把这里称作蜃景,以此纪念传说中的海神。传说他们住在海底,会用幽灵幻象迷住海上的水手。据2015年12月1日最后的一次人口统计,Gornoe共有635位居民,其中128人为儿童。

    1. When I paint … I look at it and I say, “The space in that corner there needs a little blue,” and so I put my blue up there and then, then I look over there and it looks blue over there so I take my brush and I move it over there and I make it blue over there, too.

      在我画画时...我看着画布,告诉自己,"那个角落还需要加上一点蓝色",然后我在那里加上些蓝色,然后我又看了眼,那里看起来也要来一下,于是我拿起画笔,把它移到那里,让那里也变蓝了一些。

    1. It’s impossible to anticipate the arrival of global crises such as the coronavirus outbreak, but firms can mitigate their impacts by taking supply chain preparedness to a higher level. They should act before a disruption occurs and adjust and execute new plans afterward rather than starting from scratch every time they are plunged into a new crisis.

      我们不可能准确预测新冠肺炎疫情等全球危机出现的时间,但企业可以选择在供应链方面做更充分的准备,从而减少危机的影响。他们应当防患于未然,并在危机事后相应地调整和执行新计划,避免每次陷入新的危机后都重蹈覆辙。

    1. In a 2016 interview with Wired, Parscale called himself “a farm boy from Kansas.” His childhood home was not on a farm but on a paved cul-de-sac in Topeka, within walking distance of a Sonic Drive-In and a disk-golf course. His parents, Dwight and Rita, were entrepreneurs whose businesses, according to ProPublica, “included a swimming pool company, a scuba shop, real estate enterprises, restaurants and a Western-themed nightclub featuring a mechanical bull.” “Am I worth over a million bucks?” Dwight said in an interview with ProPublica. “Yes. But that’s not that much today.” Brad attended a public high school, Shawnee Heights, which students at a nearby school sometimes referred to as Scrawny Whites. In Parscale’s case, the aspersion was exactly half accurate: by ninth grade, according to a former coach, he was already a sturdy six feet five.

      2016年接受《连线》采访时,帕斯凯尔称自己是“来自堪萨斯州的农场男孩”。童年时代他的家不在农场,而是在托皮卡的一条铺了路的死胡同里,步行就能到达索尼克汽车穿梭餐厅和高尔夫球场。他的父母德怀特和丽塔都是企业家,根据《ProPublica》新闻机构的说法,他们家的生意包括 “一家游泳池公司,一家潜水店,房地产企业,餐馆和一家以机械公牛为主题的西部主题夜总会。” “我的身价超过一百万美元吗?” 德怀特在接受《ProPublica》采访时说。“是的,但这些钱在今天看来并不多。” 帕斯凯尔就读于肖尼高地(Shawnee Heights)的公立高中,这里有时会被另外一所学校的学生谐音戏称为“Scrawny Whites”(意为瘦骨嶙峋的白人)。就帕斯凯尔的情况来说,这玩笑话只说对了一半:据一位学校的前教练说,帕斯凯尔九年级时,就已经长成六尺五高的壮小伙了。

    1. In twenty volumes, published between 1885 and 1922, the Fairy Tale series introduced traditional Japanese folk tales, first to readers of English and French, and later to readers of German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Russian. The tales themselves have diverse sources.

      于1885至1922年间分为20本出版的《日本神话故事与传说》,首先将日本传统民间故事介绍给了英语和法语读者,然后是德语,西班牙语,葡萄牙语,荷兰语和俄语读者们。故事的来源多种多样。

    1. “The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. […] the view of the ancients is clearer insofar as they have an acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.”

      “整个现代世界观是建立在所谓的自然法则是对自然现象的解释的幻想之上的。因此,今天的人们止步于自然法则,把它们当作神圣不可侵犯的东西,就像上帝和命运在过去的时代里被视作神圣不可侵犯一样。[……]古人的观点更加清晰,因为他们有一个公认的(不可解释的)终点,而现代系统试图让自己看起来好像一切都得到了解释。”

    2. “event of first-rate importance in my life, and affected everything I have done since. I saw that he was right, and I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy.”

      “我生命中极其重要的一个事件,影响了我此后所做的一切。我意识到他是对的,我也意识到我再也不能指望从事哲学的基础工作了”。

    1. All working architects leave behind a string of monuments to themselves in the form of buildings they have designed. But what about the final spaces that architects themselves occupy? One might expect to find imposing or self-congratulatory memorials, yet most architects’ gravesites are rather understated. Featured below is a selection of photographs and notes on a dozen of the sites Henry Kuehn researched for his book “Architects’ Gravesites: A Serendipitous Guide,” as well as the author’s preface.

      所有正在工作的建筑师都以自己设计的建筑形式为自己留下了一连串的纪念碑。但是,建筑师们自己所占据的最后空间又是什么呢?人们可能会期待找到气势磅礴或自我庆祝的纪念碑,然而大多数建筑师的墓地都相当低调。以下是亨利·库恩(Henry Kuehn)为他的《建筑师的墓地:一个偶然的指南》一书所研究的十几个地点的照片和笔记的精选, 以及作者的序言。

    1. Papert’s career traversed a trio of influential movements: child development, artificial intelligence, and educational technologies. Based on his insights into children’s thinking and learning, Papert recognized that computers could be used not just to deliver information and instruction, but also to empower children to experiment, explore, and express themselves. The central tenet of his Constructionist theory of learning is that people build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world. As early as 1968, Papert introduced the idea that computer programming and debugging can provide children a way to think about their own thinking and learn about their own learning.

      派普特的成就贯穿于三个方面:儿童教育,人工智能和教育科技。基于他对儿童学习和认知的理解,派普特意识到,计算机不仅能够执行指令和传递信息,还能帮助儿童体验、开拓和表达自己。在学习方面,他最有建设性的理论是,认为人们在创造东西时学习知识最有效。早在1968年,派普特认为,计算机编程和调试可以让儿童思考他们自己的想法,并了解自己的学习。

    1. This is the story of those two years, as they played out inside and around the company. WIRED spoke with 51 current or former Facebook employees for this article, many of whom did not want their names used, for reasons anyone familiar with the story of Fearnow and Villarreal would surely understand. (One current employee asked that a WIRED reporter turn off his phone so the company would have a harder time tracking whether it had been near the phones of anyone from Facebook.)

      本文所要讲述的就是这两年来的故事。《连线》杂志采访了51位现任或前任Facebook员工,他们当中很多人都不希望自己的名字出现在文章中,任何熟悉“费斯和维拉利尔”故事的人都会明白这一点。(一位现任员工甚至要求《连线》杂志的记者关掉手机。)

    1. This was urgent business. But almost no one else seemed to understand. No corporation (not even Hewlett-Packard!) saw the potential in digital computers back then. Colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute, where he went in 1957 as an engineer, told him to forget about them. He poked around largely alone. He sometimes felt like Columbus, whose sailors were afraid of falling off the edge of the world. Or like a creature who had climbed a mountain, seen things coming, but found his hands too clumsy to signal what to do.

      但是,当时似乎没有人能理解这是一项紧迫的工作,没有一家公司能发现数字计算机的潜力(就连惠普公司也不例外!)。斯坦福研究所的同事对这个在1957年加入到他们队伍中的工程师说:放弃你那些想法吧。从此,恩格尔巴特开始了孤身一人的闯荡。有时,他感觉自己就像是当年的哥伦布,自己手下的水手们都害怕从世界边缘跌落下去;有时,他又觉得自己就像是一个微不足道的小人物,当自己攀登到山顶,看到灾难向他们袭来时,却发现自己的双手已经笨拙得无法去表达自己想要做什么了。

    2. In the early 1950s, when he began to get into it all, computers meant serried desks of girls with hand-held calculators. Or else they were mainframes that filled whole rooms, processing data at snail speed on punched-paper tape. He had a different vision, in which everyone had instant access to information on small screens and could collaborate, instantly, to solve the increasingly complex problems the world faced.

      他是在上世纪50年代早期开始完全进入这种状态的。那时的计算人员是指一排排坐在课桌旁手拿计算器的女孩,或者是指体积有几间屋子那么大、在穿孔纸带上以蜗牛般的速度处理数据的大型计算机。不过,恩格尔巴特不这么看。在他的设想中,计算机应该是一种能够让人们迅速地获取其小屏幕上的信息的机器,它能让人们在同一个时间以合作的方式来解决这个世界所面临的日益复杂的问题。

    3. WHEN you are a visionary, it’s hard to get other people to see as you do. When you have a plan to save the world through men and computers working together, as Doug Engelbart had, it’s hard to enlist the guys at the water-cooler to take part in the crusade. They called him kooky, and laughed at him for doing weird stuff.

      当你是一个有远见的人的时候,让别人像你那样去观察世界是一件难事;当你像道格·恩格尔巴特那样,计划利用人机合作去拯救世界的时候,将那些游手好闲之人招募到你的队伍中也是一件难事。对这些人来说,恩格尔巴特就是一个怪人,他是一个常因自己做的傻事而招致嘲笑的人。

    1. Computational thinking is not new. Seymour Papert, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and an M.I.T. professor, used the term in 1980 to envision how children could use computers to learn.

      计算机思维并不是一个很新的概念。人工智能领域的前沿学者、MIT教授Seymour Papert,早在1980年,就已经使用这个术语来展望孩子们如何在未来使用电脑来学习。计算机思维主要包括识别模式和顺序、创造算法、设计用于发现以及修正错误的测试,把一般浓缩为精确,把精确拓展到一般。

    1. If you want to build a strong information architecture for the product, you need to understand what it consists of. Pioneers of the IA field, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville in their book “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” have distinguished four main components: organization systems, labeling systems, navigation systems, and searching systems.

      如果你想为你的产品构建强健的信息架构,那么你需要了解内容的生产。信息架构领域的先去 Lou Rosenfeld 和 Peter Morville 在他们的著作《Information Architecture for the World Wide Web》中探讨过信息架构的4个主要组成部分:组织系统,标签系统,导航系统和搜索系统。

    2. Information architecture (IA) is a science of organizing and structuring the content of the websites, web and mobile applications, and social media software. An American architect and graphic designer, Richard Saul Wurman, is considered to be a founder of the IA field. Today, there are many specialists working on IA development who have established the Information Architecture Institute. According to IAI experts, information architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be understandable.

      信息架构(Information architecture ,IA)是一门组织和构建网络、网站、APP以及社交媒体内容的科学。美国建筑师/平面设计师 Richard Saul Wurman 被认为是信息架构领域的开拓者。现如今,许多致力于构建信息架构的专家们甚至都有了各自的信息架构研究所。信息架构专家们的工作,就是致力于将内容按照更易于人们理解接收的方式来整理和排列。

    1. In love, there are no easy guidelines. But perhaps, by coming to recognise the degree to which overlapping and different narratives shape our expectations in love, we can avoid some of the worst outcomes. Perhaps, too, we have a philosophical duty to interrogate the extent to which our narratives are shaped by crass romantic clichés from songs, movies and sitcoms – even if we wrongly believe ourselves above them. However, it won’t suffice to recognise that we’re all entangled in complex webs of romantic narrative. We also need to make sure that we are truly co-authoring our we-narratives. The people we love are not just characters, but also creators, of our shared story. To love each other better, we should respect this. The world is unlikely to furnish us with a perfectly matched storyteller, but love won’t flourish if each of us is trying to tell a different story.

      爱情没有简单的准则。但或许,只要我们认识到共有和不同的叙事多大程度上塑造了我们在爱情中的期望,就可以避免最糟糕的结果。又或者,我们有哲学上的责任去审视我们的叙事多大程度上是由歌曲、电影和情景喜剧中简单粗暴的爱情观所塑造的——即使我们误以为自己凌驾于这些陈词滥调之上。无论如何,仅仅意识到我们身处于复杂的爱情叙事网络之中是不够的,我们还要确保真的在共同创作“我们叙事”。我们所爱之人不仅是角色,也是创作者,书写着我们共同的故事。为了更好地爱对方,我们应该尊重这一点。天上不会掉下一个完美匹配的另一半,如果恋爱中的双方都试图讲述不同的故事,这份爱情就难以健康发展。

    1. “For me, [the goal of] VR is for everyone to do what you want to do and live as you want to,” he says. “It’s not [to recreate] the same issues as you have in reality.”

      “对我来说,VR的目标是让所有人做想做的事,过想过的生活。而不是重现你现实中的烦恼。”他说道。

    1. This device — which is known as the Useless Machine, and more rarely as the Leave Me Alone Box — was conceived at Bell Laboratories in the early 1950s by the computer scientist Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, who was at that point a grad student working a summer job. The first working model was constructed by his mentor, Claude Shannon, who later became known as the father of information theory. This context, the fact that the creators of this aggressively pointless gadget are emblematic figures in the ascendancy of machines over our contemporary world, lends a frisson of historical oddity to what is essentially an executive toy.

      这台设备名叫「无用机器」(Useless Machine),还有一个更罕见的名称「别烦我盒子」(Leave-me-alone Box),是 20 世纪 50 年代早期由计算机科学家马文·明斯基(Marvin Minsky)在贝尔实验室构想出来的。这位人工智能领域的先驱,当时还是一个正在忙于暑期作业的研究生。第一台工作模型由其导师、后来成为信息理论之父的克劳德·香农(Claude Shannon)制造出来。这个极其没用的器具竟然是由象征着机器对我们当代世界支配地位的人物所创造的,这则背景故事,为一件本质上只是个操作性玩具的东西增添了一丝古怪的历史感。

    1. His aim was to download as many pages as possible from an archive of academic journals called JSTOR, which was available by paid subscription only to libraries and institutions. That was morally wrong, he thought; the knowledge contained in it (often obtained with public funding, after all) had to be made available, free, to everyone. And it was absurdly simple to do that. He already had access to the library network; no need to hack into the system. He just ran a script, called keepgrabbing.py, which liberated 4.8m articles at almost dangerous speed. MIT tried to block him, but time after time he outwitted them; and then, as a last resort, he plugged in the laptop in the cupboard.

      他的目的,是要从学术期刊存储系统JSTOR上尽量多下载些内容。JSTOR只对付费图书馆和院校机构开放,而这在他看来有违道义:毕竟其中的知识往往都是公共资助的成果,所以必须向所有人免费开放。而且,开放这些信息的方法简单得离谱:他已能进入图书馆的网络,因此没有必要使用黑客手段;所以他只是调用了一个名为“keepgrabbing.py”的脚本,就让480万篇文章脱离了JSTOR的禁锢,如此骇人的速度令该系统几近崩溃。麻省理工曾试图阻止他,却被他一次次地智胜。随后,他将藏在柜中的笔记本接入了网络,以此作为最后一着。

    2. A lot of money came his way when Reddit was sold to Condé Nast in 2006, but relocation to an office made him miserable. Google offered him jobs, but he turned them down as unexciting. Political campaigning became his passion. He wanted to see everything available online, free, with nothing held back by elites or big money, and nothing censored. Information was power, as he proclaimed in his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto of 2008, and war was needed “by stealth”, “in the dark”, “underground”, for the freedom to connect. In 2011 there was no fiercer voice against the Stop Online Piracy Act, and in 2012 no one prouder to proclaim it dead.

      2006年,Reddit被康泰纳仕集团收购,施瓦茨从中获利颇丰。不过,搬到办公室后的生活让他苦闷不已。谷歌邀请他加盟,但他以工作乏味为由拒绝。政治运动成了他的热爱:他希望看到,所有信息都可以在网上免费获取,没有什么能被上流人士或企业财阀阻隔,也没有什么会遭到审查。正如他2008年的《开放存取的游击宣言》一文所言,信息即是权力,网络互联的自由需要“暗地里秘密的地下”斗争。他的声音,在2011年抵制《禁止网络盗版法案》的运动中最为激烈,而在2012年宣布该法案“倒毙”时也最为自豪。

    1. I-Be Area, a chaotic, vibrant and alarming film made in 2007, turns on these questions of identity and its dissolution. Its central character is engaged in a war with his clone, and his clone’s online avatar. Making lavish use of jump cuts, face paint and cheap digital effects, the film captures the manic possibilities and perils of digital existence. All the cast, starting with the children in the first frame making hyper-cute adoption videos for themselves, are in search of a desirable persona. They perform for an audience that may at any moment dissolve or turn aggressive, which stimulates them into increasingly creative and bizarre transformations. Often seemingly imprisoned in teenage bedrooms, everyone is talking all the time: a tidal wave of rapid, high-pitched, Valley Girl inflections, the spiel of YouTube bedroom celebrities mashed with corporate catchphrases and the broken English of bots and programming lingo. Everyone is promoting, no one is listening.

      I-BE Area(2007),一个嘈杂、响亮而又有警示性的影片,开始了对于这些关于身份和身份分解的问题的探索。这部影片的主要角色和他的“克隆人”在打架,而他的“克隆人”就是一个在线的角色。用了大量的jump cut处理,脸部特写和廉价的数字处理,电影捕捉了许多关于数码存在物狂热的可能性和危险。影片的开始是一群小孩子在拍一些超萌的求包养的视频,就是在寻求一种欲望。

      他们要在表演中随时爆发,随时显示出侵略性,这也刺激了他们保持创新性,进行一些吊诡的转化。场景总是在少年们的卧室里:每个人都总是在说——快速变化的潮流,声音尖的乡村姑娘的转变,用youtube播放音乐在房间庆祝,还有机器人状支离破碎的英文和编程行话等等。每个人都在宣传自己,没有人真的在听。

    2. In 1930, Jean Cocteau wrote his haunting monologue The Human Voice, a play intimately concerned with the black holes that technologically mediated failures of communication produce. It consists of nothing more than a woman speaking on a bad party line – as these shared services were known – to the lover who has jilted her and who is imminently to marry another woman. Her terrible grief is exacerbated by the constant danger of being drowned out by other voices, or disconnected. “But I am speaking loud … Can you hear me? … Oh, I can hear you now. Yes, it was terrible, it was like being dead. You’re here and you can’t make yourself heard.” The final shot of the television film of the play, starring Ingrid Bergman, leaves no doubt as to the culprit, lingering grimly on the shining black handset, still emitting the dead end of a dial tone as the credits roll.

      1930年,Jean Cocteau写了一篇独白戏The Human Voice,这出戏详细地阐释了科技在调解传播的失败时产生的黑洞。这出戏中只有一个女人在一个很烂的party上讲话,这个party到底是干什么的并不知道,这个女人只是在说她的情人如何抛弃她,然后又娶了另一个女人。她极度的忧伤通过断断续续地呼号体现出来:“我已经讲得很大声了……你能听到我吗?……噢,我能听到你了。是的,我很糟糕,像要死掉了。你在哪里,却听不到你自己的声音。”这出戏在电视电影中的最后一幕中,扮演者英格丽·褒曼,一口咬定伤害自己的人,无助地靠在闪闪发光的听筒前,还在听着重复的拨号令声,此时,演员表字幕走起。

    3. Back in 1999, the critic Bruce Benderson published a landmark essay, Sex and Isolation, in which he observed: “We are very much alone. Nothing leaves a mark. Today’s texts and images may look like real carvings – but in the end they are erasable, only a temporary blockage of all-invasive light. No matter how long the words and pictures stay on our screens, there will be no encrustation; all will be reversible.”

      回到1999年,批评家Bruce Benderson发表了一篇全景式的文章,性与孤独(Sex and Isolation),在这其中他观察到:“我们很孤独。没有什么会在这世上留下印记。今天的文字和图像可能会看起来像真的雕塑一样,但是最终他们会是可擦除的,全方位的曝光只能稍作遮挡。无论文字或图片会在我们的屏幕上停留多久,都不会盖棺定论,所有事情都可以被翻转。”

    4. This aspect of digital existence is among the concerns of Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been writing about human-technology interactions for the past three decades. She has become increasingly wary of the capacity of online spaces to fulfil us in the ways we seem to want them to. According to Turkle, part of the problem with the internet is that it encourages self-invention. “At the screen,” she writes in Alone Together (2011), “you have a chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you wish them to be, constructing them for your purposes. It’s a seductive but dangerous habit of mind.”

      麻省理工的Sherry Turkle关注数字技术在这个方面的影响,她在过去的三年一直在研究人机交互。她越来越意识到,人们所希望网络空间对自身的充实感是需要被谨慎对待的。据她说,一个重要的问题是,互联网会导致“自我虚构(self-invention)。”“在屏幕上,”她在一本叫《共同孤单(Alone Together,2011)》的书里写到,“你会有把自己描绘成那个你希望成为的人的机会,或者你会想象别人也是你希望他们成为的样子,你会根据自己的需要去建构他们的角色。这是一个值得注意,而且很危险的思想状态。

    5. In 1942, the American painter Edward Hopper produced the signature image of urban loneliness. Nighthawks shows four people in a diner at night, cut off from the street outside by a curving glass window: a disquieting scene of disconnection and estrangement. In his art, Hopper was centrally concerned with how humans were handling the environment of the electric city: the way it crowded people together while enclosing them in increasingly small and exposing cells. His paintings establish an architecture of loneliness, reproducing the confining units of office blocks and studio apartments, in which unwitting exhibitionists reveal their private lives in cinematic stills, framed by panes of glass.

      1942年,美国画家Edward Hopper创作了关于城市孤独的代表画作。在这幅名为Nighthawks的画中,四个人坐在夜幕下的餐厅里,被玻璃窗与街道隔离,这是一幅怎样令人忧郁的图景,断掉了链接,陌生了画面。Hopper在作品中主要关注的是电气时代的人们如何处理彼此之间的关系——喧哗的人群聚集的方式是把他们推进越来越小的房间里。他的画作代表、建设出了一种孤独感,重新定义了咖啡厅和工作室这种狭窄空间,在这些空间里,人们的私人生活通过玻璃窗被不经意地展览出来,正如在电影院中。

    1. You can look at history and ask yourself, “Who do you think were the greatest energy innovators of all time?” I think Charles Algernon Parsons5 [the inventor of the steam turbine] was really incredible. I think Rudolf Diesel6 [the inventor of the diesel engine] was also incredible. Go and look at how much money they or the company they worked for made. Diesel committed suicide because he thought he was going bankrupt. Parsons made basically nothing. During the first 20 years after you invent a new energy technology, as [Vaclav] Smil7 likes to remind us, the deployment that takes place, with very, very few exceptions, is quite modest. So the incentive for the inventor is most reduced where the adoption cycles are greater than 20 years. We don’t have a similar situation in IT. We don’t have that even in health care, although they sometimes complain that the 20 years don’t give them enough time.

      BG:如果你回望历史,然后问自己“谁才是能源创新上最伟大的人?”我会认为查尔斯•阿尔杰农•帕尔森斯(Charles Algernon Parsons,汽轮机的发明者)是很了不起的;鲁道夫•地索尔(Rudolf Diesel,柴油发动机的发明者)也是很了不起的。看看他们和他们所就职的公司创造了多少效益。然而地索尔因为破产而自杀,帕尔森斯几乎一无所有。

      正如瓦克拉夫•斯密尔(Vaclav Smil)教授所说的,在技术发明问世的头20年里,绝大多数情况下,能够实施的规模非常有限。当实施周期超过20年时,发明者的积极性会极大受挫。在 IT行业则不然,甚至医疗行业也不这样,虽然有时候医疗从业者觉得20年还不够。

    1. No matter how advanced technology is, it needs human partners to enhance competitive advantage. It must be embedded in what we call the integrated strategy machine. An integrated strategy machine is the collection of resources, both technological and human, that act in concert to develop and execute business strategies. It comprises a range of conceptual and analytical operations, including problem definition, signal processing, pattern recognition, abstraction and conceptualization, analysis, and prediction. One of its critical functions is reframing, which is repeatedly redefining the problem to enable deeper insights. Within this machine, people and technology must each play their particular roles in an integrated fashion.

      不管技术有多先进,都需要人类伙伴强化它的竞争优势。技术必须嵌入到我们称之为综合战略机器(integrated strategy machine)的概念中。

      综合战略机器是资源的集合,它同时包括技术和人力资源,这两者共同行动以开发和执行商业战略。综合战略机器包含一系列的概念和分析操作,其中包括问题定义、信号处理、模式识别、抽象和概念化、分析和预测。它的一个关键功能是重构(reframing),即反复地重新定义问题以得到更深度的洞见。在这样的机器中,人与技术必须以一种综合化的方式各自扮演其特定的角色。

    1. Zeitgeist novels tend to fall in one of three categories, none of which have anything to do with the quality of the work itself. In the first category are books nostalgic for a simpler, romanticized past; James A. Michener’s Centennial, the best-selling novel of 1974, is an example. The second category is made up of books that unwittingly capture the spirit of their time, a feat accomplished in the early ’60s by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Group. Forward-looking novels that provide glimpses into the future, while echoing anxieties of the present—1984, Neuromancer, White Noise—comprise the third category. Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance pulls off the remarkable feat of straddling all three categories, achieving an unusual triple crown. It is a nostalgic, old-fashioned novel that nevertheless reflects the malaise of its era and prefigures our own technophiliac age. Pirsig’s hat trick has much to do with the novel’s incredible commercial success. But it tells us nothing about the novel’s quality.

      时代思潮小说往往可以归为三类,这种归类跟作品本身的品质没什么关系。第一类是追思简单浪漫的过往时代,詹姆斯·米切纳 1974 年所著的畅销小说《百年》(Centennial)便是一例。第二类书是无意中捕捉到时代精神,20 世纪 60 年代初问世的《飞越疯人院》和《群体》(The Group)可谓个中杰作,作者分别是肯·克西和玛丽·麦卡锡。第三类则是富有前瞻性的小说,不但重现眼前的焦虑,更是让我们窥见未来,譬如乔治·奥威尔的《1984》、威廉·吉布森的《神经漫游者》和唐·德里罗的《白噪音》。罗伯特·波西格的《禅与摩托车维修艺术》堪称横跨三个类别的集大成者,一举夺下了不起的三重冠。这部长篇小说怀旧而又老式,却折射出那个年代的痼疾,也预示着我们这个技术狂热时代的到来。波西格的帽子戏法关乎小说不可思议的商业成就,但没有告诉我们小说的品质。

    1. “ If you look at your Product Designer as someone that makes your solution look presentable, look again. A product designer helps you identify, investigate, and validate the problem, and ultimately craft, design, test and ship the solution.” — Eric Eriksson

      「如果你只把产品设计师视作一种把方案设计得可以见人的职业,请重新思考。产品设计师是帮你识别、调查和验证问题的,并最终精巧地制作、设计、测试和完成整个解决方案的。」-- Eric Eriksson

    2. Product Design is about problem solving, and product designers seek to improve the experiences of products. And, they do so by using a variety of skills: Animating, Prototyping, Coding, Research, Visual, Interaction Design, Psychology, and Business Strategy (Eric Eriksson).

      产品设计离不开解决问题,而产品设计师追求的是提高产品的体验。并且,他们还要懂得通过运用许多技能来完成这一目标:动画、原型、编程、调查、视觉设计、交互设计、心理学以及经营策略 (Eric Eriksson)。

    1. Very soon, perhaps in five years, the bounded worlds within virtual reality will begin to be networked together into distributed virtual worlds. When you’re wearing the visor of an augmented- or mixed-reality system such as Magic Leap, HoloLens, or Meta, it maps the local environment. To make, say, a virtual teacup appear on your real table, it needs to know where your table is. The visor uses outward-facing cameras and sensors to scan your environment to create this map. Magic Leap (among others) is working on protocols that save a mapped place in the cloud so it doesn’t have to be remapped for each encounter. Your unit (or perhaps another unit in the same location) merely needs to register and update any changes in the space. This in turn will let you share virtual objects across different surroundings, even if participants are in distant places. Someone in Barcelona can drop a virtual flower into your virtual vase in Chicago. Because artificial reality is inherently social, its environments will be inherently social and networked.

      很快,也许在五年后,虚拟现实里的各个有限世界会连接起来,成为一个分布式的虚拟世界网络。当你戴着诸如 Magic Leap、HoloLens 或 Meta 的增强现实或混合现实系统头盔时,它可以描绘本地的现实环境的地图。也就是说,要让一个虚拟茶杯出现在你的桌子上,它需要知道桌子在哪。头盔利用向外的摄像机以及感应器去扫描周边环境以创造这一地图。Magic Leap (以及其他)正在研发协议,以在云端储存地图,从而不用重新在同样的地点再次创造地图。你的头盔(以及其他出现在同一地点的头盔)只需要登录并更新这个空间的任何改变即可。这可以让你在不同的环境中共享虚拟目标,即使参与者在遥远的地方。在巴塞罗那的人可以为你在芝加哥的虚拟花瓶中放上一束虚拟花朵。由于人工现实本身是社交性的,它的虚拟环境也是社交性和网络性的。

    2. ne of the first things I learned from my recent tour of the synthetic-reality waterfront is that virtual reality is creating the next evolution of the Internet. Today the Internet is a network of information. It contains 60 trillion web pages, remembers 4 zettabytes of data, transmits millions of emails per second, all interconnected by sextillions of transistors. Our lives and work run on this internet of information. But what we are building with artificial reality is an internet of experiences. What you share in VR or MR gear is an experience. What you encounter when you open a magic window in your living room is an experience. What you join in a mixed-reality teleconference is an experience. To a remarkable degree, all these technologically enabled experiences will rapidly intersect and inform one another.

      我从最近在合成现实领域的漫步中学到的一件重要的事情:虚拟现实正在创造新一轮互联网进化。现在的互联网是一个信息网络。它包含六十万亿网页,贮存了四十万亿亿字节信息,每秒传递数百万封电子邮件,并通过数十万亿亿个晶体管连结在一起。而我们将用人工现实建造的是一个由体验构成的互联网。你通过虚拟现实或混合现实装置分享的是一段体验。当你在自己的起居室里打开一扇魔法窗户时,你遭遇的是一段体验。你在混合现实电话会议中参与的也是一段体验。在相当大的程度上,所有这些都在技术上使得各种各样的体验得以彼此交汇和分享。

    3. I first put my head into virtual reality in 1989. Before even the web existed, I visited an office in Northern California whose walls were covered with neoprene surfing suits embroidered with wires, large gloves festooned with electronic components, and rows of modified swimming goggles. My host, Jaron Lanier, sporting shoulder-length blond dreadlocks, handed me a black glove and placed a set of homemade goggles secured by a web of straps onto my head. The next moment I was in an entirely different place. It was an airy, cartoony block world, not unlike the Minecraft universe. There was another avatar sharing this small world (the size of a large room) with me—Lanier.

      我第一次把脑袋伸进虚拟现实头盔,是在 1989 年。那时,甚至连互联网都尚未诞生。我拜访了北加利福尼亚的一间办公室,墙上贴满了缝着金属线的氯丁橡胶冲浪套装、装点着电子元件的巨大手套和一排排改装过的游泳镜。办公室的主人,Jaron Lanier,蓄着及肩的金发脏辫儿,递给我一只黑色手套并把一套用条带网子系结起来的自制护目镜戴在了我头上。下一刻,我已身处一个完全不同的地方。那是一个轻盈的、卡通般的砖块世界,与当今 Minecraft 游戏中的世界不无相通之处。另一个虚拟存在者—— Lanier 和我共处在这个一间大屋子那么大的小小世界里。

    4. Virtual reality overlaid on the real world in this manner is called mixed reality, or MR. (The goggles are semitransparent, allowing you to see your actual surroundings.) It is more difficult to achieve than the classic fully immersive virtual reality, or VR, where all you see are synthetic images, and in many ways MR is the more powerful of the two technologies.

      以这种方式把虚拟现实叠加在现实世界之上,这被称为混合现实,或 MR。(提供虚拟现实的眼镜是半透明的,你能看到周围现实环境。)它比传统全沉浸式虚拟现实(VR)更难实现,你在 VR 中看到的所有东西都是合成图像。在许多方面,MR 比 VR 更强大。

    1. “Our approach, which we call ‘printable hydraulics,’ is a step toward the rapid fabrication of functional machines,” Daniela Rus, one of the research paper’s co-authors, told CSAIL. “All you have to do is stick in a battery and motor, and you have a robot that can practically walk right out of the printer.”

      「我们把我们的方式叫做『可打印的液压装置』,在快速制造功能机器方面又迈进了一部。」这篇论文的作者之一Daniela Rus 告诉 CSAIL ,「而你要做的只是插入电池和发动机,你就拥有了一台差不多能正常行走的打印机器人。」

    1. Modern users expect seamless, uncomplicated solutions to their needs and wants. Stuffing a product or service with vanity features is no longer viable. As the market moves towards simplicity and no-brainer user experiences, anticipatory design is no longer something you can afford to ignore. Look at the examples and consider the checklist above to spot opportunities for improvement in your current user experience. If you are starting out from scratch, you have a unique opportunity to embed these principles from the outset. Regardless, keep this idea close to heart:

      现代的用户期望无缝连接,简单的解决方案满足他们的需求和他们想要的。用毫无价值的东西去填充产品或者服务不是长久之计。随着市场走向简单并且显而易见的用户体验,预知引导设计不再是你可以忽略的东西。看看这些例子并认真思考上面的清单,发掘机会去改善你目前的用户体验。如果你是从头开始,你有一个独一无二的机会从一开始就把这些原则加入进来。不管怎样,让这一理念深入人心:

      “事情应该尽可能的简单,而不是更简单”----爱因斯坦

    1. Mike is able to have some fast iterations by using After Effects and Cinema 4D, but he also advocates translating other ideas from web design such as the design grid. You can still do a lot of paper prototyping of interface ideas, but VR is a medium that has spatial, depth, and lighting considerations and so it’s helpful to see what it actually might look like in VR as well.

      他能够通过使用 After Effects 和 Cinema 4D 进行创作的快速迭代,同时也支持将其他的网页设计的想法运用到自己的设计里来。虽然你可以继续写出很多关于交互设计原型的设计方案,但 VR 原型具有空间性,深度和光线变化,这一点是纸上文字无法表述出来的。

    1. Hypnophobia was a striking theme in Existentialist thought. “Blessed are the sleepy ones” Nietzsche said sarcastically, “for they shall soon drop off.” And he sometimes endeavoured to do without sleep, on one occasion trying to live on four hours sleep a night for a fortnight. (I read this unimpressed when I was a junior doctor in the 1970s, and my 104-hour-week included periods of up to 48 hours continuously on call.)

      在存在主义哲学中,睡眠恐惧(Hypnophobia)就是一个引人注目的主题。尼采曾经以讽刺的口吻写道:“困倦的人有福了,因为他们马上就会安睡。”他自己还尝试过尽量不睡觉,比如有一次他试着在两周的时间里每天只睡四小时。(当我在七十年代第一次读到这些的时候完全不觉得这有什么,因为那时我还是一名实习医生,每周工作 104 小时,有时还需要 48 小时不间断待命。)

    1. What are you trying to solve?How do you know it’s a real problem? What data, anecdotes, etc. lead you to believe this?Why solve this problem over others? You have limited resources and time — why apply them to this problem above all else?

      你在解决什么问题?

      • 你是为什么觉得这个问题真的是一个问题,从数据来看,还是一个哪里看来的一则小故事,还是别的一些什么?
      • 为什么你会觉得某个问题需要优先解决?
      • 你的时间和资源都是有限的,为什么放掉别的而先解决这个?
    2. In summary, design allows you to demonstrate an ambitious vision (or several) for what the world could be. The better and more precise the design, the easier it is to rally people to create that future.

      宏观地讲,设计让我们能够表达自己对更好的世界的景愿,所以越好的设计越会有一种预见未来的气质,也引导人们朝着这个方向去继续创造未来。

    1. Many of the Bernard-centered sections of The Brothers Vonnegut are taken up with byzantine bureaucratic feuds between Project Cirrus, the Army, and the U.S. Weather Bureau, which was skeptical about cloud seeding and viewed it as a distraction from more important advances in computer-assisted statistical meteorology. Many famous midcentury scientists tromp through these pages, including the mathematician John von Neumann, who worked on computer prediction of weather patterns at the Institute for Advanced Study, and the physicist Edward Teller, who made crucial theoretical contributions to the development of both the atomic and the hydrogen bombs. Most prominent of all is the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, an idol of Kurt’s, who, in 1948, publicly denounced the type of scientist who knowingly participated in the production of weapons technology as “a morally irresponsible stooge in a science-factory.” (One would guess that Bernard took this to heart.)

      《冯内古特兄弟》一书以伯纳德为中心人物的许多章节,充斥着卷云计划、陆军和美国气象局之间错综复杂的官僚争斗。美国气象局始终对云播种技术持质疑态度,认为它分散了人们对计算机辅助统计气象学领域获得的许多更为重要的进展的关注。许多在上世纪中叶名满天下的科学家逐一在这些页面现身。其中包括在高等研究院(Institute for Advanced Study)从事计算机预测天气模式研究的数学家约翰·冯·诺伊曼(John von Neumann),为原子弹和氢弹作出重大理论贡献的物理学家爱德华·特勒(Edward Teller)。最突出的一位莫过于库尔特的偶像,控制论学者诺伯特•维纳(Norbert Wiener)——维纳曾在1948年公开谴责那些故意参与武器技术开发的科学家,声称他们是“科学工厂中缺乏道义的走狗。”(伯纳德想必记住了这个称谓。)

    2. About half of The Brothers Vonnegut tells a familiar tale of Bildung: It’s the story of a writer becoming a writer, and it’s a compelling and uncommonly detailed one. Strand’s book focuses mostly on the period between 1945—when Vonnegut witnessed firsthand the bombing of Dresden, which would later inspire Slaughterhouse-Five—and 1952, when Bernard left G.E., apparently in a fit of conscience. 

      《冯内古特兄弟》有大约一半篇幅都在讲述一个众人耳熟能详的成长故事——他如何走上作家之路等等,这本书笔力详尽,令人叹服。斯特兰德着墨的重点是1945年到1952年这段时期。在1945年,冯内古特亲眼目睹了德累斯顿遭到轰炸的凄惨景象,这一幕后来启发他撰写了《五号屠宰场》(Slaughterhouse-Five)一书。而伯纳德在1952年离开通用电气时,显然是受到良心的驱使。

    3. In 1973, Kurt Vonnegut was asked by an interviewer why he started writing science fiction. “I was working for General Electric at the time,” he replied, “right after World War II, and I saw a milling machine for cutting the rotors on jet engines, gas turbines.” The machine was computer-operated, and it inspired Vonnegut to write a novel, Player Piano, about a future society in which industry has become completely automated, at enormous human cost. “There was no avoiding [writing science fiction],” he told his interviewer, “since the General Electric Company was science fiction.”

      1973年,一位采访者问库尔特·冯内古特(Kurt Vonnegut),为什么他开始写科幻小说。“我当时在通用电气公司(General Electric)工作,”他回答说。“那时二战刚刚结束,我看到一台给喷气发动机和燃气轮机切割转子的铣床。”这台由电脑操作的机器启发冯内古特撰写了一部小说:《自动钢琴》(Player Piano)。在这部小说描述的未来社会中,工业已经完全实现自动化,但却付出了巨大的人力成本。“写出一部科幻小说是不可避免的,”他告诉这位采访者,“因为通用电气公司本身就是一部科幻小说。”

    1. 唯一你能做出的决定是你现在在想什么,你需要准备好不断修改自己的决定。让我说得更明白一些。我不是在试图说服你们都成为音乐家或者作家。成为医生、律师、科学家、工程师或者经济学家没有什么不好,这些都是可靠的、可敬的选择。我想说的是你需要思考它,认真地思考。我请求你们做的,是根据正确的理由做出你的选择。我在敦促你们的,是认识到你的道德自由并热情拥抱它。

      最重要的是,不要过分谨慎。去抵抗我们社会给予了过高奖赏的那些卑怯的价值观的诱惑:舒服、方便、安全、可预测的、可控制的。这些,同样是罗网。最重要的是,去抵抗失败的恐惧感。是的,你会犯错误。可那是你的错误,不是别人的。你将从错误中缓过来,而且,正是因为这些错误,你更好地认识你自己。由此,你成为更完整和强大的人。

    1. Tesla’s factory is messy, it hiccups, modules are repaired on the line, stockpiles of parts lie around in “semi-organized” fashion. It goes against all the tenets of the lean manufacturing operation pioneered by Toyota, celebrated in The Machine That Changed The World, and universally adopted for its advantages in reliability, cost, and higher job satisfaction. This is not a manufacturing line that can, by the force of Musk’s will and charisma, produce 10X more cars two years from now.

      Tesla 的工厂内部相当混乱、小状况频传,有问题的模组就在产线上直接维修,一堆堆的备料则以「乱中有序」的方式到处堆放;跟《改变世界的机器》(The Machine That Changed The World)一书中赞誉有加的日本丰田「精实生产」精神完全背道而驰,也看不出来有精实生产的可靠、低成本、高员工满意度等特性。

      即使有 Musk 这样充满意志力与个人魅力的领导者,这样的工厂在两年之内仍然看不出有提升产量 10 倍的可能性。

    2. What Elon Musk has accomplished with Tesla goes beyond good and bad company numbers. Electric cars used to be associated with moderation bordering on self-denial. With the Model S, Musk has given us an electric car that looks like the luxury car that it is… and is a blast to drive (I know, my spouse lets me drive hers). As an impolitic Valley wag once said: Before Tesla, e-cars were for vegetarians; Musk made an electrifying chariot for carnivores.

      Elon Musk 和 Tesla 的成就,其实已经超越了「卖得好不好」的层次。过去,电动车在各种妥协之下,只能算是「勉强可用」的替代产品,但在 Tesla Model S 问世之后,不仅证明了电动车也可以豪华,而且开起来还很过瘾。就像某位硅谷人士说的:在 Tesla 之前,电动车都只能算是吃素的,但 Tesla 却是不折不扣的电动肉食野兽。

    1. Andreessen says that Joseph P. Kennedy Presents, which chronicles the banker's time as a Hollywood movie mogul, is one of his favorite books, and he calls Kennedy "the one who wasn't like the others." That sums up Kennedy, and it sums up Andreessen too. Both were outsiders (Kennedy an Irish Catholic Bostonian among Jewish immigrant traders from New York, Andreessen a computer nerd among financiers). "He's someone who looks at society and says interesting things," García Martínez says of Andreessen, "which is unlike most VCs, who are total followers and don’t have much interesting to say about the world."

      安德森说,《约瑟夫·肯尼迪传》是他最喜欢的书之一,其中记录了这位银行家在好莱坞呼风唤雨的日子。安德森说肯尼迪是“跟其他人不同的人”,这句话能够很好地描述肯尼迪,同时也能用在安德森身上。他们都是圈外人(肯尼迪身处一帮纽约犹太移民商人中间,但他本人是波士顿人,信奉爱尔兰天主教;安德森则是一群金融家中间的计算机极客)。

      “他是那种放眼社会、口出妙语的人,”加西亚·马丁内斯在谈到安德森时说,“这跟大多数风险投资家不同,他们都是跟风者,对这个世界说不出太多有趣的话。”

    2. The title of David Thompson's 2006 Hollywood history, The Whole Equation, is a nod to an oft-quoted passage about Hollywood in F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. "It can be understood," it reads, "but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads."

      《完整公式》(The Whole Equation)是大卫·汤普森(David Thompson)在2006年出版的好莱坞史记,其书名致敬了弗朗西斯·斯科特·菲茨杰拉德(F. Scott Fitzgerald)未完成小说《最后的大亨》(The Last Tycoon)中的一段话,人们在谈论好莱坞时经常引用这段话。

      “它是可以被理解的,”小说中写道,“但只是模模糊糊和只鳞片甲。能够在头脑中掌握图景完整公式的人从没有超过半打。”

    3. This is how Silicon Valley works too. It makes stars, shaping their origin stories into legends like the one about Lana Turner and Schwab’s Drugstore.

      这也是硅谷的运作方式:它制造明星,把创业者原来的故事扭曲成拉娜·特纳和Schwab’s药店那样的传奇。

    4. Later, as she rose to fame at MGM, the star machine didn't just change her name and her clothes and her voice. It remade her story. She wasn’t Julia Jean Mildred Francis. She was Lana. She wasn't discovered at Currie’s drinking a Coke. She was discovered at Schwab's Drugstore drinking a chocolate malted, because that sounded better. The studios were shameless about spinning things their way, and the press was shameless about spinning things the same way to keep on the good side of the studios.

      后来,随着她在米高梅(MGM)声名鹊起,造星机器不仅改变了她的名字、服饰和嗓音,而且还重塑了她的故事。

      她不再是茱莉亚·琼·米尔德里德·弗朗西斯,她成了拉娜。她也不是在Currie’s杂货店喝可乐时被发掘的,而是在Schwab’s药店吃麦芽巧克力冰淇淋,因为这听上去更好。

      制片公司对按照自己的意愿扭曲事实不觉羞耻,新闻媒体也是一样,为的就是呈现制片公司好的一面。

    5. Old Hollywood, writes Jeanine Basinger in The Star Machine, another book in the Andreessen lobby, was a factory that built illusions. It transformed ordinary men and women into "the gods and goddesses known as a movie stars." Take Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner. Born in an Idaho mining town, she landed a Hollywood agent after the editor of The Hollywood Reporter spotted her drinking a Coke in Currie’s Candy and Cigar Store, across the street from Hollywood High School.

      旧好莱坞是一个制造梦幻的工厂,珍妮·贝辛格(Jeanine Basinger)在《造星机器》(The Star Machine)中这样写道,这也是摆在安德森大厅里的一本书。

      好莱坞把普通的男女改造成了“被誉为男神和女神的电影明星”。

      就拿朱莉娅·简·米尔德里德·弗朗西丝·特纳(Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner,艺名:拉娜·特纳)来说,她出生在爱达荷州的一个矿业小镇,有一次在好莱坞高中街对面的Currie’s杂货店喝可乐时被《好莱坞记者报》(The Hollywood Reporter)的编辑发现,之后在好莱坞找到了一位经纪人。

    6. The story of early Hollywood is very much the story of Silicon Valley, full of innovators fleeing the old rules in search of the new.

      早期好莱坞的故事跟硅谷非常相似,都是创新者逃离旧规则,寻求建立新规则。

    7. Who the Devil Made It—an oral history of Hollywood collected by the director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich—begins in the days of the Patents Company. Allan Dwan, who started making movies in the 1910s, tells Bogdanovich that as independent filmmakers moved west, the Patents Company hired strongmen to enforce its patents. Dwan remembers snipers climbing trees overlooking movie sets and taking shots at the cameras they deemed illegal. He would film as far as he could from the railroad stops, so he and his crew were harder to find.

      《到底谁拍的?》(Who the Devil Made It)是由导演兼电影史学家彼得·博格达诺维奇(Peter Bogdanovich)收集整理的好莱坞口述历史,它的开篇正是电影专利公司横行的时期。

      亚伦·德万(Allan Dwan)从1910年代开始拍摄电影,他告诉博格达诺维奇,随着独立影人向西海岸迁移,电影专利公司开始招募打手来确保专利案判决的执行。

      德万回忆称,那时候会有狙击手爬上树,远眺电影片场,并用枪打坏他们视为非法的摄影机。德万在拍摄的时候会尽可能地远离火车站,这样他和剧组成员就不那么容易被找到。

    8. The lobby also offers myriad books on computer programming and the Silicon Valley ethos, like John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said and Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma.

      大厅里也有很多关于计算机编程和硅谷精神的书籍,比如约翰·马科夫(John Markoff)的《睡鼠说》(What the Dormouse Said)以及克莱顿·克里斯坦森(Clayton Christensen)的《创新者的窘境》(The Innovator’s Dilemma)。

    1. Hotz started the autonomous car work because he sees it as Step 1 in the revolution. Transportation is an area where AI can have a massive impact. He hopes to take his technology to retail next, building systems that provide flawless self-checkout at stores. His desire to have AI take over so many jobs stems partly from a near-religious belief in the power and ultimate purpose of technology. “Technology isn’t good or bad,” he says. “There are upsides like nuclear power and downsides like nuclear bombs. Technology is what we make of it. There’s a chance that AI might kill us all, but what we know is that if you’re on the other side of technology, you lose. Betting on technology is always the correct bet.”

      霍茨制造自动驾驶汽车,因为这是他所说的革命的第一步。交通是人工智能可以产生巨大影响的一个领域。他希望下一步能将他的技术推广到零售领域,打造相应的系统,可以在商店实现零瑕疵的自助结账。他希望让人工智能取代众多工作,这个想法在一定程度上源于他对科技的力量以及终极目标抱有近乎宗教式的信念。“科技本身没有善恶,”他说,“科技有好的方面,比如核能,也有不好的方面,比如核弹。我们让它成为什么样,科技就是怎样的。人工智能也有可能杀死我们所有人,但我们深知,如果站在科技的对面,那你必输无疑。押注科技一直是正确的选 择。”

    2. By the fall of 2012 he was bored with the contests and decided to dive into a new field—AI. He enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University with the hope of attaining a Ph.D. When not attending class, he consumed every major AI research paper and still had time for some fun. At one point, the virtual-reality company Oculus Rift failed to man its booth at a job fair, and Hotz took it over, posing as a recruiter and collecting résumés from his fellow students. None of this was enough to keep him interested. “I did two semesters and got a 4.0 in their hardest classes,” he says. “I met master’s students who were miserable and grinding away so that they might one day earn a bit more at Google. I was shocked at what I saw and what colleges have become. The smartest people I knew were in high school, and I was so let down by the people in college.”

      2012年秋季,他厌倦了比赛,决定研究新的领域——人工智能。他注册了卡内基梅隆大学(Carnegie Mellon University),希望获得博士学位。不上课的时候,他专心阅读了所有重要的人工智能研究论文,不过仍有时间找些乐子。有一次,虚拟现实公司Oculus Rift在一场招聘会上没能找到人照管摊位,霍茨就接手下来,扮作招聘人员接收同学的简历。这些都不足以让他长久保持兴趣。“我上了两个学期,最难的课程成绩是4.0,”他说,“我认识了一些硕士生,他们都挺惨的,刻苦用功,希望有朝一日能进入谷歌,多赚点儿钱。我看到的那些情形以及大学现在的样子令我极其吃惊。我认识那些最聪明的人都是在高中的时候,大学这些人太让我失望。”

    1. A short time later I slip into the back of a two-story amphitheater where Zuckerberg, dressed in a dark suit and a tie, has come to make the case that the Internet should be considered, like health care or clean water, a basic human right. He sees this as the most critical social endeavor of our time. Zuckerberg believes peer-to-peer communications will be responsible for redistributing global power, making it possible for any individual to access and share information. People could tap into government services, determine crop prices, get health care. A kid in India—Zuckerberg loves this hypothetical about a kid in India—could potentially go online and learn all of math. “It’s the underpinning for helping people get into the modern economy,” he says. “Ten years from now, we should not have to look back and accept there are people who don’t have access to that.”

      马克·扎克伯格在这次会议的演讲中呼吁让全世界的人都能接入互联网,他认为,互联网应该像卫生保健和净水一样,被当成一项基本人权。他把这个看作是当今时代最关键的社会尝试。扎克伯格相信,点对点通信承担着对全球能力进行重新分配的责任,使每个人都能接触和共享信息。人们能够接入政府服务,决定农作物价格,获取健康护理服务。一个印度的小孩可能借助在线学习掌握所有的数学知识。「这是帮助人们参与当今经济的基础,」他说,「如果在十年后回望今天,我们不应该接受还有人无法使用互联网这个事实。」

    1. So the bottom line is that the Internet as we know it was indeed born as a government project. In fact, without ARPA and Bob Taylor, it could not have come into existence. Private enterprise had no interest in something so visionary and complex, with questionable commercial opportunities. Indeed, the private corporation that then owned monopoly control over America’s communications network, AT&T;, fought tooth and nail against the ARPANet. Luckily for us, a far-sighted government agency prevailed.

      总而言之,我们今天所知道的互联网,其实是诞生于一个美国政府主持开发的项目。事实上,如果没有ARPA和泰勒,互联网很可能根本就不会存在。在互联网发展早期阶段,由于该产业的商机并不是那么明显,私有企业根本没有兴趣在前瞻性太远和过于复杂的项目上投资。当时的实际情况是,获得了对美国通信网络AT&T垄断权的私营公司,则极力反对ARPANet项目。幸运的是,具有远见的ARPA部门最终胜出。

    2. And while I’m gratified in a sense that he cites my book about Xerox PARC, “Dealers of Lightning,” to support his case,

      为了支持其论点,克罗维茨引用了我所撰写书籍《闪电商人》(Dealers of Lightning)有关施乐(Xerox)PARC研究中心的内容。

    1. Wyler’s gamble is to place O3b’s satellites in what’s known as a medium-earth orbit, which is about 5,000 miles into space. At that distance, data can travel up and back in about 150 milliseconds, a performance comparable to fiber-optic cable. There’s a trade-off: The lower the satellite, the less earth it can see. So O3b is putting up an unusually large number of satellites, 12 so far, with more to come. The cost to launch four satellites—each the size of a large restaurant-grade refrigerator—runs about $300 million, and the company has raised more than $1.3 billion to date from the likes of Google, HSBC, and SES, one of the world’s largest satellite operators.

      怀勒的想法是把O3b的卫星置于距离地面约8000公里的中地球轨道上。在这个距离下,数据可以在150毫秒左右完成往返传输,速度可以媲美光纤线缆。但有一个需要权衡的问题:卫星距离地面越近,覆盖地球的面积就越小。所以,O3b要发射非常多的卫星,迄今已经发射了12颗,还需要发射更多。每颗卫星大小相当于一台餐馆级大型冰箱,发射4颗卫星需要约3亿美元,公司目前已经从谷歌、汇丰(HSBC)以及世界最大的卫星运营商之一欧洲卫星全球公司(SES)等筹集了超过13亿美元。

    1. Integrating information flow between varying types of devices from a wide range of global manufacturers with proprietary data and technologies Performing analytics and management of the physical objects and low-level events to detect signals and predict impact Orchestrating those signals and objects to fulfill complex events or end-to-end business processes Securing and monitoring the entire system of devices, connectivity, and information exchange
      1. 整合世界范围内不同制造商采用专利数据和技术制造的不同类型的设备之间的信息流。
      2. 执行实物和底层事件的分析与管理来监测信号预测影响。
      3. 将这些信号和实物组织起来完成复杂事件或端到端的商务过程。
      4. 保护并监测整个系统的设备、链接和信息交互。
    2. Sensors and actuators, including implantables and wearables, that let us capture more data and impressions from more objects in more places, and that affect the environment around them. Ubiquitous computing and hyperconnectivity, which exponentially increase the flow of data between people and devices and among devices themselves. Nanotechnology and nanomaterials, which let us build ever more complex devices at microscopic scale. Artificial intelligence, in which algorithms become increasingly capable of making decisions based on past performance and desired results. Vision as an interface to participate in and control augmented and virtual reality Blockchain technology, which makes all kinds of digital transactions secure, verifiable, and potentially automatic.
      • 传感器和致动器,包括可植入的和可穿戴的,能使我们在更多地方从更多物体上捕获更多数据和印象,并会影响周边环境。
      • 无处不在的计算和超链接,将会指数级地增加人们和设备之间以及设备本身之间的数据流。
      • 纳米技术和纳米材料,会使我们在微观层面建造更多更复杂的设备。
      • 人工智能,基于过去的表现和需求结果,该领域的算法会变得越来越有能力做出决策。
      • 视觉界面,能够参与并控制增强现实和虚拟现实。
      • 区块链技术,能使所有种类的数字交易安全、可验,并有潜力自动化。
    1. Consentful technologies are digital applications and spaces that are built with consent at their core, and that support the self-determination of people who use and are affected by these technologies.

      “同意技术”是以同意为核心建立的数字应用和空间,支持使用这些技术和受这些技术影响的人的自决。

    1. “Machine learning was one of the areas in AI that we thought was kind of most important for everyone to see, which is why that area is required for everyone,” Sahami said. “Through a class like CS 109 that provides an introduction to machine learning, everyone in the CS major will be guaranteed to see at least that level of stuff.” 

      机器学习是 AI 中重要的学习领域。Sahami 表示:「众所周知,机器学习是 AI 中最重要的领域之一,这也是每个人都需要了解机器学习的原因。CS 109 之类的课程提供了机器学习的入门知识,CS 专业的每个人都至少能够学到入门级的知识。」

  13. solid.mit.edu solid.mit.edu
    1. Developers will be able to easily innovate by creating new apps or improving current apps, all while reusing existing data that was created by other apps.

      重复利用已有数据:开发者使用现有的数据,就可以创建新的应用或者改进老的应用。

    2. Because applications are decoupled from the data they produce, users will be able to avoid vendor lock-in, seamlessly switching between apps and personal data storage servers, without losing any data or social connections.

      模块化设计:避免平台锁定,用户可以随时带着他们产生的数据,从一个平台迁移到另一个竞品平台,在过程中不会失去任何数据和社交关系、

    3. Users should have the freedom to choose where their data resides and who is allowed to access it. By decoupling content from the application itself, users are now able to do so.

      真正的数据自主权:让数据和使用数据的应用脱钩 (decouple),确保用户能够自由地选择他们的数据存放的地点,以及谁能够接入这些数据,控制数据授权的时长。

    1. In 2009, there is a photograph where my father is no longer there. He passed away a few days after his 91st birthday. My mother continued to wave good-bye to me. Her face became more forlorn with my departures. In 2017, my mother had to move to assisted living. For a few months, I photographed the good-byes from her apartment door. In October of 2017 she passed away. When I left after her funeral, I took one more photograph, of the empty driveway. For the first time in my life, no one was waving back at me.

      「2009年,有一张照片上父亲已经不在了。他在91岁生日几天后去世了。我母亲继续向我挥手告别。随着我的离去,她的脸色变得更加哀伤。2017年,我母亲不得不搬到养老院。有几个月,我在她的公寓门口拍摄告别的照片。2017年10月,她去世了。当我在她的葬礼后离开时,我又拍了一张房前空空荡荡的照片。这是我有生以来第一次没有人向我挥手。」

    1. Plato believed that expertise is the critical attribute of a leader; He criticizes democracy of seldom producing such characters. Rather, it elects popular spinsters who are effective in manipulating popular opinion.To depict this, Plato uses an analogy of ship navigation in Book VI of ‘The Republic’. He contests that in order to select the appropriate captain, a popular vote is ineffective because people can be swayed by characteristics as irrelevant as their appearance. Instead, we should seek out only the most knowledgeable candidate as it is he who holds the required expertise.Plato illustrates the ignorance that democracy yields in producing a captain:… the true navigator must study the seasons of the year, the sky, the stars, the winds, and all the other subjects appropriate to his profession if he is to be really fit to control the ship…[the electorate] think that it’s quite impossible to acquire the professional skill needed for such control and that there’s no such thing as the art of navigation.

      柏拉图认为,专业知识是领导者应该具备的关键属性之一,且在民主制度下基本不会有此类人物出现。相反,那些可以轻松操纵民意的无知者当选率甚至会更高一点。

      为了阐释这一点,柏拉图在《理想国》第六卷中打了一个航海比喻:为了选出合适的船长,全民投票是无效的,因为人们可能会被候选人的外表或者其他无关紧要的因素所左右。相反,我们应该寻找最有学识的那个人,因为他拥有干好这份工作所必需的专业知识。

      柏拉图说明了民主在选举船长时是多么的愚蠢:

      ……真正的航海家必须学习四季、天空、星星、风向以及与其职业相关的所有知识,才能符合成为船长的标准。选民们却认为,要掌握驾船这一专业技能是完全不可能的,更不存在所谓的航海艺术。

    1. Everything has changed—the cinema and the importance it holds in our culture. Of course, it’s hardly surprising that artists such as Godard, Bergman, Kubrick, and Fellini, who once reigned over our great art form like gods, would eventually recede into the shadows with the passing of time. But at this point, we can’t take anything for granted. We can’t depend on the movie business, such as it is, to take care of cinema. In the movie business, which is now the mass visual entertainment business, the emphasis is always on the word “business,” and value is always determined by the amount of money to be made from any given property—in that sense, everything from Sunrise to La Strada to 2001 is now pretty much wrung dry and ready for the “Art Film” swim lane on a streaming platform. Those of us who know the cinema and its history have to share our love and our knowledge with as many people as possible. And we have to make it crystal clear to the current legal owners of these films that they amount to much, much more than mere property to be exploited and then locked away. They are among the greatest treasures of our culture, and they must be treated accordingly. I suppose we also have to refine our notions of what cinema is and what it isn’t. Federico Fellini is a good place to start. You can say a lot of things about Fellini’s movies, but here’s one thing that is incontestable: they are cinema. Fellini’s work goes a long way toward defining the art form.

      一切都变了——(比如)电影和它在我们文化中的重要性。

      当然,像戈达尔、伯格曼、库布里克和费里尼这样的艺术家,曾经像神一样统治着我们伟大的艺术形式,最终会随着时间的流逝而退居阴影之中,这并不奇怪。

      但在当下,我们不能把一切都当作是理所当然。我们不能依靠电影产业来照顾电影艺术。在电影产业,也就是现在的大众视觉娱乐产业中,强调的永远是“产业”二字,价值永远是由任何一个特定产权的赚钱量决定的:从这个意义上说,从《日出》到《大路》,再到《2001太空漫游》,都只能在流媒体平台上的“艺术电影”频道中逐日干涸,无人问津。

      我们这些了解电影艺术及其历史的人,必须将我们的热爱和知识与尽可能多的人分享。我们要让这些电影的合法拥有者清楚地认识到,它们不仅仅是被利用然后锁起来的财产。它们是我们文化中最伟大的财富之一,必须得到相应的对待。

      我想,我们还必须完善我们对电影“是什么”和“不是什么”的概念。费德里科·费里尼是一个很好的开始。关于费里尼的电影,你可以发表各种看法,但有一点是无可争议的:它们才是电影。

      费里尼的作品对电影艺术形式的定义作出了巨大贡献。

    1. We don’t have a decipherment yet but Rao believes that until we find longer samples or a multilingual text, these statistical strategies are our best bet. And Wells says progress will hinge on cooperation. “I think all of the pieces to decipher the script are there,” he says, “teamwork — interdisciplinary, multigenerational probably — the more we work on it the more progress we make.” Wells and his colleagues have made some progress and plan to present it at the meeting this March. Their findings and other work presented at the meeting should be available to the public in April published as the Proceedings of the Second International Meeting on Indus Epigraphy. In the meantime, anyone working on the script is welcome to contribute to Wells’ collaborative website, which features all of the known symbols and various analytical tools.

      我们还不能破译这些古文,不过 Rao 坚信除非我们找到更长的标本或者一种多语言的文本,否则这些统计学的方法已经是我们最好的尝试。并且 Wells 说进展的程度与合作息息相关。「我认为所有需要破译的文稿都在那,」他说,「团队合作-跨学科、或者可能多辈分-我们做的工作越多我们取得的进展越大。」Wells 和他的同事已经取得了一些进展并且计划这个三月份的会议上发表。他们的发现和其它发表在会议上的工作可以在四月份的 the Proceedings of the Second International Meeting on Indus Epigraphy 上公开查阅。与此同时,任何想要为破译古文做贡献的人可以登陆 Wells 的协作网站(collaborative website),该网站提供了所有目前已知的符号和各种分析工具。

    1. It's a Dorian Grayish fable, transposed to the twenty-first century: Steve Jobs has become Steve Jobs by doing what nobody else has done before -- by treating computers not just as tools but as mirrors, by making technology not just the engine but the emblem of transcendence. One day, however, he will have to do what everybody else has done before, and will wind up demonstrating what it's like to be mortal, even in the age of the beautiful machine. And now that he has drawn undeniably closer to the day that has given all his other days their urgency -- now that the face staring back in the mirror has lost its shiny-haired California glamour and has taken on the frank rapacity of an old Arab trader -- it's worth asking what the pressure of continual existential awareness has done to him.

      这是一个道林·格雷的寓言在21世纪的翻版:乔布斯通过尝试前人从未做的事而成为了乔布斯——将电脑不仅视为工具,而且视作镜子,将科技不仅制造成动力,而且变成了卓越的象征。但总有一天,他一定去做所有人都曾干过的事,并将最终展示什么才是凡夫俗子的人生,即便是在一个完美精致的机器时代。现在不可否认,他已快要接近那一天了,这让他日益增加了对余下日子的紧迫感——在镜子前回眸一望,那张脸已经失去了一头极具加州魅力的光亮的秀发,变成了一张衰老的阿拉伯商人的贪婪之脸——值得去问一问,那种永无休止的存在意识究竟对他造成了什么样的压力。

    1. ProPublica’s story exposed racism in the algorithms police use to predict repeat offenders. Assigning a prisoner’s credit score, these algorithms are factored into determining how long a person will stay in jail and at times even used by judges when sentencing. Not only did they FOIA a data set and do a statistical analysis, but this work also made it into a White House report on AI. The article has even influenced a subdiscipline of computer science; at the time of this writing, there were 13 papers on arxiv.org about ProPublica’s article. It turns out that auditing a black-box algorithm is nontrivial.

      ProPublica的这篇报道揭露,美国警方使用有种族歧视的软件算法来预测罪犯再次犯罪的可能性。通过计算罪犯的风险指数,这种算法被用来决定犯罪人的服刑期限,有时甚至被法官作为判刑的考虑依据。这篇报道不仅通过《信息自由法案》要求公开这部分数据,对数据进行统计分析,还让这一议题进入了《白宫人工智能报告》(White House report on AI)。此外,这篇报道还影响了计算机科学的一个分支学科。在我写这段话的时候,arxiv.org网站上和这篇报道相关的论文达到了13篇。事实证明,要求对此类算法进行公开审查并不是一件无足轻重的事。

    2. Bloomberg Businessweek’s Josh Green wrote three fantastic cover stories about the upheaval in the Republican Party that led to the election of Donald Trump. Josh doesn't see it this way, but I look at them as a trilogy because they’re interconnected. The first, “This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America,” introduced many of us to Steve Bannon, the merry provocateur behind Breibart News. OK, this piece came out last year, but bear with me. The second, “How to Get Trump Elected Without Wrecking Everything You Built,” chronicled the sorrows of Reince Priebus, the seemingly hapless GOP chairman who was struggling with Trump’s rise. It also featured an unforgettable cameo appearance by the candidate himself at Trump Tower. Then there was “Inside the Trump Bunker, With 12 Days to Go,” in which Josh and Bloomberg’s Sasha Issenberg visited the Trump campaign’s data collection headquarters in San Antonio and talked to the foot soldiers who helped pulled off the Election Day upset. The gang’s all here in the piece. Bannon is now Trump’s campaign manager. Priebus seems to have figured out his man has a good shot at the White House. Then there’s that techie who looks like an Amish guy prospecting for votes on the internet, who got the job because he designed a cheap website for Ivanka. They all talked at length to Josh because he doesn’t have an agenda; he just wants to find out what’s going on, and when he does, he knows how to turn it into an irresistible read, which is the only way to describe this trilogy. I told him he should turn it into a book next. I still think so. Josh, are you reading this?

      《彭博商业周刊》的乔什•格林写了三篇非常出色的封面文章,报道了把唐纳德•特朗普送上总统之位的共和党内部乱局。我认为这三篇文章可以组成一个三部曲,因为它们之间互相有联系,但乔什不这么看。第一篇《美国最危险的政治幕后推手》向我们介绍了史蒂夫•班农(Steve Bannon),Breibart新闻网站背后兴高采烈的煽动者。好吧,这篇文章是去年的,但包容一下好吗。第二篇《怎样在不毁掉整个党的情况下让特朗普当选》,叙述了共和党全国委员会主席赖因斯•普里巴斯(Reince Priebus)的懊恼,运气似乎不太好的他因为特朗普的崛起而焦头烂额。文中还有总统候选人本人在特朗普大厦的一段令人难忘的友情客串。第三篇是《距大选12天,走进特朗普的数字战略中心》,乔什和彭博的伊森伯格•萨沙(Sasha Issenberg)采访了那些帮助特朗普在大选日意外获胜的工作人员。特朗普阵营的重要人物都在这篇文章里出现了。班农成了特朗普的竞选经理,而普里巴斯似乎意识到特朗普真的有机会入住白宫。文章还采访了一个长得像阿米什人的技术负责人,他的工作是在网上寻找特朗普的支持者,而他能拿到这份工作是因为他帮特朗普的女儿伊万卡(Ivanka)做了一个廉价网站。这些人都对乔什侃侃而谈,因为乔什没什么目的性,他只想知道事情到底是什么样的。当乔什弄清楚了真相,他知道怎样把这些事实写成让人欲罢不能的文章,也就是上面提及的三部曲。我曾建议乔什下次把这写成一本书。我现在还是这样觉得的。你在读吗,乔什?

    3. Anna Wiener’s fluid first-person essay on life in Silicon Valley is an enviable reminder that business is also culture, and a worthy literary subject, to boot. The author's job at a firm whose clients are other tech firms is the perfect keyhole through which to observe the Valley’s trappings and self-delusions, and her observational skill, wit, and precise, present-tense sentences do the rest of the work, immersing the reader in every scene she describes.

      安娜•维纳(Anna Wiener)在此文中用第一人称流畅地书写了硅谷生活。令人嫉妒的是,这篇文章让我们意识到商业也是文化,也是有价值的文学题材。作者所在的公司以其他科技公司为客户,这为她提供了观察硅谷的绝佳机会,包括硅谷的装修文化和自欺情结。此外,她的观察技巧、妙语连珠和现在时态的精确语句让读者沉醉于她描写的每一个场景。

    4. I’m sneaking in a threefer. On WNYC’s show, as bracing as the pitch must have been deadly (Thirty issues? Come on), the deeply informed Brian Lehrer rose above the campaign’s din to talk about issues, a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner in my book. Like Lehrer, Tom Ashbrook, whose On Point sprinted into the maelstrom daily, treats every caller with respect but abides no bull. Over at the New Yorker Radio Hour is the appallingly versatile David Remnick, whose bright young show this year featured Tony Schwartz, Donald Trump’s co-author on The Art of the Deal, off Jane Mayer’s important and disturbing piece. You know what? Make it a fourfer. Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield were indispensable in 2016.

      趁推荐一个作品的机会,我偷偷夹带两个私货。做这样的一个电台节目很带劲,也非常有难度(30个问题?),但见识广博的布赖恩.莱恩(Brian Lehrer)还是克服了竞选中的各种杂音,触及到了很多重要的问题。在我看来,他应该获得一枚总统自由勋章(Presidential Medal of Freedom)。和莱恩一样,汤姆•阿什布鲁克(Tom Ashbrook)的节目《On Point》也深入了竞选乱局,他尊敬每一个给节目打电话的听众,但拒不接受任何胡说八道。此外,在《纽约客电台时间》(New Yorker Radio Hour),才艺爆棚的戴维•雷姆尼克(David Remnick)在他的精彩节目中邀请到了托尼•施瓦茨(Tony Schwartz)。施瓦茨和唐纳德•特朗普曾合著《交易的艺术》(The Art of the Deal)一书,对此简•迈耶(Jane Mayer)写过一篇令人深感不安的文章。你知道吗,干脆买一送三得了,我还要推荐布鲁克•格拉德斯通(Brooke Gladstone)和鲍勃•加菲尔德(Bob Garfield),他们的节目是2016年必听。

    1. So our process is first you have to say what the huge problem is you’re trying to solve. You have to be able to describe it in order for it to have any chance of taking root at X. And there has to be some articulatable, hard but potentially solvable, technology problem at the middle of it. Once that’s true, we go down a path where instead of saying, “What’s most fun to do about this or what’s easiest to do first?” we say, “What is the most likely reason this project won’t make it?”

      所以我们的方法的第一步就是首先明确你想解决的最大的问题是什么。你必须能够描述它,以便它能抓住机会在X生根。其中有一些是可以解释,很难但可能解决的技术问题。一旦这问题确实存在,我们就得依序解决。这个时候,我们不是说,“最有趣的是做什么或第一步最容易做的是什么?”而是说,“这个项目不能成功的最大原因是什么?”

    1. When you think about the Twitter-driven shake-out of blogging this evolution makes sense: Twitter captured the long-tail of blogs, in the process dramatically expanding the market for publishing text, but that by definition meant that the blogs that remained popular had readers that would jump through hoops — or at least click a link — to consume their content. It makes sense that the most sustainable way for those bloggers to pay the bills was by directly charging their readers, who already had demonstrated an above-average interest in their content. My personal bet is that podcasts will follow a similar path. Podcasts, even more than blogs, require a commitment on the part of the listener, but that commitment is rewarded by a connection to the podcast host that feels even more authentic; host-read podcast advertising leverages this authenticity, but for most medium-sized podcasts charging listeners directly will make more sense in the long run.

      当你想到Twitter驱动的博客变革时,这种变革是有意义的。Twitter抓住了博客的长尾效应,在这一过程中极大地扩展了文本发布市场,但从定义上来说,这意味着那些仍然受欢迎的博客拥有一些读者,他们会跳过障碍——或至少点击一个链接——阅读它们的内容。对于那些博客来说,最可持续的支付方式是直接向读者收费,这是有道理的,因为读者已经对他们的内容表现出了高于平均水平的兴趣。

      我个人认为播客也会走上类似的道路。播客,甚至比博客更需要听众的投入,但这种投入的回报是,与播客主持人的联系让人感觉更加真实;主持人阅读播客广告利用了这种真实性,但对于大多数中等规模的播客来说,从长远来看,直接向听众收费会更有意义。

    1. Fireside’s job posting claims “social media has failed us” by creating “antagonistic echo chambers with mediums for communication that only further an outrage culture and business models that incentivize spreading disinformation.” Fireside, the posting says, is looking to foster “civil intelligent discourse, shared connected experiences, and genuine relationship building virtually” through its broadcasting platform, which will “promote driving social impact through meaningful conversations at scale.”

      Fireside的招聘启事称,"社交媒体已经让我们失望了",因为它创造了 "对立的回音壁,其交流媒介只会进一步激励传播虚假信息的愤怒文化和商业模式"。该帖子称,Fireside希望通过其广播平台促进 "文明的智慧话语、共享的连接体验和虚拟的真正关系建立",这将 "促进通过有意义的对话,推动社会影响"。

    2. “Today we say goodbye to current media platform limitations created by one-way conversations, a lack of interactivity, and non-existent analytics,” Fatemi writes in the email to creators. “We level the playing field by empowering creators based on what they have to say (not how loud they yell) and we give their ideas the reach to turn a single conversation into the seed of the next media empire.”

      "今天,我们告别了当前由单向对话、缺乏交互性和不存在的分析所造成的媒体平台限制,"法特米在给创作者的邮件中写道。"我们根据创作者要说的话(而不是他们吼得多大声)来赋予他们权力,从而创造公平的竞争环境,我们让他们的想法变得有影响力,可以将一次对话变成下一个媒体帝国的种子。"

    1. CPS Steps Clarify and identify the problem Research the problem Formulate creative challenges Generate ideas Combine and evaluate the ideas Draw up an action plan Do it! (implement the ideas)

      CPS步骤

      1、明确并定义问题

      2、对问题进行调研

      3、进行创造性的质问

      4、产生创意

      5、组合和评估创意

      6、写一个行动计划

      7、干吧!(实施方案 )

    1. Complexity can show up in many parts of a company: its product and service offerings, its organizational structure and processes, or the environment it faces.3 We found that product and service complexity and the business process aspect of organizational complexity have the biggest impacts on achieving top performance.

      复杂性体现在公司的许多方面:所提供产品和服务,公司组织结构和流程,或者公司所面对的环境,等等。研究发现,产品和服务复杂性及组织复杂性中的业务流程复杂性对公司实现最高效率的影响最大。

    1. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington recently wrote: “I thought Twitter was driving us apart, but I’m slowly starting to think half of you always hated the other half but never knew it until Twitter.” This is a good point that highlights something easy to overlook: 1) everyone belongs to a tribe, 2) those tribes sometimes fundamentally disagree with one another, 3) that’s fine if those tribes keep their distance, 4) the internet increasingly assures that they don’t.

      TechCrunch网站的创始人迈克尔·阿灵顿(Michael Arrington)最近在文章中写道:“我认为推特正在拉开人与人之间的距离,不过我也开始思考是不是人群中的一半人其实一直很讨厌另一半,只不过是推特出现后大家才认识到这一点罢了。”这个想法很好,可以让我们重新注意到几个极易被忽视的事情:

      1.所有人都从属于某一种“部落”。

      2.有时,部落与部落之间是完全不能互相认同的。

      3.如果不同的部落选择保持彼此间的安全距离,这并不会引发什么问题。

      4.随着互联网发展,它将确保部落之间再也不能维持安全距离。

    2. And there’s a lot of them. The most important thing about this topic is that people don’t judge their wellbeing in a vacuum. They measure their worth relative to the people they see around them. If your income stays the same while people around you see their income rise 10%, you will likely feel worse off. This is usually subtle, as the material possessions of those with more money inflate your aspirations, often taunting you to close the gap between you and them by taking on debt.

      而且会这样想的人绝不是少数,要知道,人们从来都不会在架空的想象世界中判断自己的生活水平。人们会根据自身的生活状况与周围的其他人进行对比。如果当你周围的人收入提高了10%,而你的收入仍然维持不变,你就会感到很糟糕。这通常是一种很微妙的过程,因为那些拥有更多物质和财富的人会让你提高对生活的期望,通常会促使人们通过承担债务来缩小自己与富人之间的差距。

    3. All that matters here is that it happened, and happened enormously. It’s a Big Thing that impacts all kinds of other topics. Writing in the 1950s, historian Frederick Lewis Allen described the social revolution that took place as the Gilded Age gave way to a more balanced economy: To understand the America of today one must not only realize how vital to its development was the revolt of the American conscience, which implanted in Americans the idea that you could repair the economic and political machinery of the country, so as to make it work better for the majority, without stopping the machine … … through a combination of patchwork revisions of the system–tax laws, minimum wage laws, subsidies and guarantees and regulations of various sorts, plus labor union pressures and new management attitudes–we had repealed the Iron Law of Wages. We had brought about a virtually automatic redistribution of income from the well-to-do to the less well-to-do. And this did not stall the machine but actually stepped up its power. Just as an individual business seemed to run best when it plowed part of its profits into improvements, so the business system as a whole seemed to run better if you plowed some of the national income into improvements in the income and status of the lower income groups, enabling them to buy more goods and thus to expand the market for everybody. We had discovered a new frontier to open up: the purchasing power of the poor. That, it seems to me, is the essence of the Great American Discovery. And it has its corollary: that if you thus bring advantages to a great lot of previously underprivileged people, they will rise to their opportunities and, by and large, will become responsible citizens.

      重要的是,贫富不均正在发生,而且正在广泛、深刻地发生。而这也是另一个足以带来千万种影响的大事件。

      上世纪50年代,历史学家弗雷德里克·刘易斯·艾伦(Frederick Lewis Allen)认为美国从镀金时代(Gilded Age)过渡到一个更平衡的经济时期的过程,其实是爆发了一场社会革命,他在文中写道:

      想要理解今天的美国社会,你要认识到美国各界良知的反抗对美国发展是多么至关重要,这让美国人开始相信自己可以修复这个在国家政治、经济运转中出现的问题,从而可以让整个国家运转得更好,且无需强行终止国家的发展脚步……

      ……经过对国家系统的一系列拼拼凑凑的修订——税法、最低工资法,还有各种津贴、保障和相关规定,再加上来自工会的压力以及全新的管理理念——我们已经打破了“工资铁则”(Iron Law of Wages)。事实上,我们几乎实现了将收入从富裕人群到较富裕人群的自动分配。这并没有让国家这部机器停转,反而提高了它的效率。这就好像当一个企业将部分利润投入到自我改善的工作上,该企业往往就可以提高效率。因此,当你把一部分国家收入投入到改善低收入群体的所得与社会地位的工作中,让这一人群也可以购买更多的商品,从而扩大整个市场,从整体来看经济系统就可以运转得更高效。至此,我们就发现了一个新的开放领域:穷人的购买力。

      在我看来,这才是所有美国伟大发现的本质,而且这还是一种必然:因为如果你因此为大量原本是弱势群体的人谋取了福利,他们将抓住这一机会,并成为负责任的公民。

    4. In his book Strategic Effects of Demographic Shocks, James Holmes quotes Aristotle’s view of ancient Sparta: The legislator, wishing there to be as many Spartiates as possible, encourages the citizens to have as many children as possible; for there is a law that one who has fathered three sons is exempt from [military] duty, and one with four is exempted from all taxes.

      在《人口冲击的战略影响》(Strategic Effects of Demographic Shocks)一书中,作者詹姆斯·福尔摩斯(James Holmes)引用了亚里士多德对古希腊城邦斯巴达的记述:

      由于立法者希望斯巴达人口越多越好,即公民的子嗣越多越好,因此当时推行了一项法律,当一名男性有了3个儿子,他就可以免服兵役——如果他有了4个儿子,他就不需要再上缴任何税收。

    5. John Maynard Keynes predicted countries wrecked by war would go on to have a “craving for social and personal security,” and indeed they did. Historian Tony Judt writes of post-war Europe: Only the state could offer hope or salvation to the mass of the population. And in the aftermath of depression, occupation and civil war, the state—as an agent of welfare, security and fairness—was a vital source of community and social cohesion.

      约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯(John Maynard Keynes)曾经预测,那些遭受战争摧残的国家会因此“渴望社会和人身安全”,当然,这一预言是相当准确的。托尼·贾特(Tony Judt)是这样描述战后的欧洲的:

      只有国家能给民众带来希望或者救助。在长期的萧条、占领、内战之后,国家作为福利、安全和公平的代理机构已经成为了社区与社会凝聚力的重要源头。

    6. Those roots can snake back infinitely. But the deeper you dig, the closer you get to the Big Things: the handful of events that are so powerful they influence a range of seemingly unrelated topics.

      事件的根源总是错综复杂的。但是当你挖得够深,你就会越来越接近真正关键的大事件:换句话说,少数具有强大影响力的大事件会引发一系列看似无关的后续事件。

    1. I stood in my cellWondering about my situationAm I the prisoner, or is it that guard standing nearby?Between me and him stood a wallIn the wall, there was a holeThrough which I see light, and he sees darknessJust like me he has a wife, kids, a houseJust like me he came here on orders from above.

      “我站在牢房里 想知道我的处境 我是囚犯,还是站在旁边的守卫? 在我和他之间有一堵墙 墙上有个洞

      我藉着这光看见光, 他藉着这光看见暗 就像我一样, 他有妻子、孩子和房子 就像我一样, 他也是奉命来的。”

    2. Before leaving Guantánamo, he gave Salahi a novel by Steve Martin, “The Pleasure of My Company.”

      在离开关塔那摩监狱之前,他送给萨拉希一本史蒂夫·马丁(Steve Martin)的小说《The Pleasure of My Company》(参考译名:有我陪伴的乐趣)。

    1. One of my core beliefs is that no one gets to tell an artist what kind of art they should make. I don’t feel that I have a responsibility to write about sex, but I do feel a certain urgency about the endeavour, and part of that urgency has to do with being a queer artist. In an infamous review of Alan Hollinghurst’s 1999 novel The Spell, John Updike made an argument about the fundamental unseriousness of queer sex. In contrast to chronicles of “the rites and stations of banded gayness,” Updike wrote, “novels about heterosexual partnering, however frivolous and reducible to increments of selfishness, social accident, foolish overestimations, and inflamed physical detail, do involve the perpetuation of the species and the ancient, sacralised structures of the family.”

      我的核心信仰之一,是没有任何人有权利告诉艺术家他们应该创作何种艺术。我并不认为自己有描写性爱的义务,但却有一种需要尝试的紧迫感,其中一部分紧迫感和我作为酷儿艺术家的身份有关。在一场关于艾伦·霍林赫斯特(Alan Hollinghurst)1999年出版的小说《魔咒》(The Spell)的访谈中,约翰·厄普代克(John Updike)就酷儿性事的“不严肃”发表过言论。他这样说道:

      “那些描写异性恋者的小说,不管多么无聊、自私、偶然促成,不管被捧得有多么过高,有多么令人恼怒的细节描写,都确确实实促进了人类物种的永存不朽,让家庭结构更加神圣。”

      为何要书写性,在今天已不应成为问题 | 美国作家加思·格林威尔

    1. Poets and philosophers have warned almost forever against this kind of comfort. Socrates famously claimed that his wisdom came from knowing he knew nothing. John Keats defined “negative capability” — a quality he attributed to men “of Achievement” — as the ability to stay “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Donald Barthelme, in his 1985 essay “Not-Knowing,” argues that it is “what permits art to be made.” Georges Bataille thought “non-knowledge” was inherent to the human condition. The “unknowable immensity” of the universe “infinitely eludes an individual who seeks it,” he writes in Inner Experience (1943). Knowledge is “the means [by] which man attempts to take himself for the whole of the universe.” Designed to reduce the world to the answers it can provide, Google belies (or tries to belie) the universe’s infinite elusiveness.

      诗人和哲学家几乎一直警告人们不要这样安逸。苏格拉底有句名言: 他的智慧来自于知道自己一无所知。约翰·济慈把 "消极能力"——一种他认为“有成就的人”所具有的品质——定义为 "处于不确定、神秘、疑惑之中,而不急于追求事实和理性"的能力。唐纳德·巴特尔姆在1985年的文章《无知》中认为,这是 "允许艺术被创造的原因"。乔治·巴泰尔(Georges Bataille)认为 "不知道"是人类与生俱来的。他在《内心体验》(1943)中写道,宇宙的“不可知的无限”,“无限地逃避着寻找它的个人”。知识是 "人类试图将自己视为整个宇宙的手段"。谷歌的目的是将世界简化为它能提供的答案,它掩盖了(或试图掩盖)宇宙的无限不可捉摸性。

    2. “There will be only answers,” the writer Marguerite Duras said in 1985 when a TV show asked her to make a prediction about the year 2000. “The demand will be such that there will only be answers. All texts will be answers… about [man’s] body, his corporeal future, his health, his family life, his salary, his leisure. It’s not far from a nightmare. There will be nobody reading anymore.” Duras, who proceeded to complain about screens, was probably thinking of TV. But no medium has transformed texts into answers — obliterating certain kinds of ignorance and camouflaging others — more systematically than search engines.

      "只有答案",作家玛格丽特·杜拉斯在1985年说,当时一个电视节目请她对2000年进行预测。"人们的需求将是如此强烈,以至于只有答案。所有的文字都将是答案......关于[人的]身体、物质的未来、健康、家庭生活、工资、休闲。这离噩梦不远了。将没有人再读书了。" 杜拉斯接着抱怨屏幕,她可能想到的是电视。但没有任何媒介比搜索引擎更系统地将文本转化为答案——抹去某些种类的无知,掩盖其他种类的无知。

    1. While we stare down at our mapping apps or outsource our navigation to the nearest Uber to speed down city streets, architects, city officials, urban planners and design firms, among others, are paying increasing attention to the ways in which urban design speaks to urban inhabitants. The American urbanist William H Whyte (1917-1999), who wrote the seminal texts The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980) and City: Rediscovering the Center (1988), set the stage for much of the data collecting and spatial observation now being conducted in cities. His groundbreaking work continues to have a huge influence on those, such as the aforementioned Gehl and the American urban planner Allan Jacobs, who are devoted to improving our experience of space and place. The question facing people invested in the life of cities is one of motivation – how, other than through explicit signage, penalties and prohibitions, can they influence the way we move through the city’s public spaces? More specifically, they study how the built environment can be designed so that people are ‘nudged’ to act in ways that are safe, sustainable and socially desirable. Small-scale interventions – chairs that can be moved, water features that add soothing sounds and visuals, the inclusion of ledges and edges on which to perch – have all been found to make spaces more inviting. Good lighting, the exclusion of bushes that might create hidden areas for illegal activity and safe bike paths for those without cars all make an area safer.

      当我们为了尽快去到自己想去的地方,而专心盯着手机里的地图应用程序,或是干脆把找路的任务交给离我们最近的优步司机的同时,建筑师、城市官员、城市规划者和建筑设计公司,正在对城市设计与城市居民之间的对话投注以越来越多的关注。美国城市学家威廉·H·怀特(William H Whyte,1917-1999)著有《小城市空间的社会生活》和《城市:重新发现中心》(City:Rediscovering the Center)两部影响深远的著作,为目前在城市进行的大量数据收集和空间观测工作奠定了基础。他的富有开拓性的研究和著作对那些致力于改善人们对空间和场所的体验的人产生了巨大影响,这些人包括前文提到的格尔和美国城市规划师艾伦·雅各布斯。

      人们在城市中生活中面临的问题是这些专业人士采取行动的动机之一,例如,除了使用明确的标识、惩罚和禁令,还可以用别的什么方法来影响人们在城市空间中穿行的方式?更具体地说,他们致力研究的是如何通过设计城市的建筑环境,使人们能够以一种既安全又具有可持续性、而且符合社会需要的方式在城市里活动。对城市建筑进行小规模的干预,例如摆放可移动的公共长椅、为街头水景添加舒缓声效和视觉效果,以及改造建筑物外墙的凸缘和窗台以方便行人休憩等等,都是使城市空间变得更有吸引力的行之有效的方法。另外,增添良好的街道照明、清除那些可能为非法活动提供隐蔽区域的灌木丛,以及为没有汽车的人提供安全的自行车道等做法,也能够使一个城市变得更加安全。

    2. Our inattention to our lived environment is not universal, of course. Hunter-gatherer societies still exist in places where survival is dependent on an ability to read nature. But the majority of cultures have seen their disconnection from the environment (natural or built) grow over millennia. In his book The Spell of the Sensuous (1996), the American philosopher David Abram points to the alphabet as the earliest technology to estrange humans from the natural environment. Where once hunter-gatherers were dependent on a sensuous connection with nature – intimately familiar with the scents of the animals they hunted, sensitive to the sounds of predators, able to navigate by sight – writing ensured that the human gaze was deflected from the real world to its representations.

      当然,并非地球上所有地方的人都对自己身处的周遭环境心不在焉、毫不留意。在那些必须具有读懂大自然的能力才能生存下去的地方,仍然存在着采集和狩猎的部族社会。但是几千年以来,人类社会的大多数文化都经历过人与环境(包括自然或建筑)脱离的过程。美国哲学家大卫·亚伯兰(David Abram)在他1996年出版的《感官的魅力》(The Spell of the Sensuous)一书中指出,语言和文字是最早出现的一种致使人类疏远并脱离大自然环境的人为技术手段。狩猎采集部族曾经非常依赖于他们与自然界之间的感官联系,例如他们非常熟悉将要捕猎的动物的气味,他们对一些猛兽的动静非常敏感,而且能够根据自然界的景观来辨别方向。但是语言和文字的出现,使人类的目光从关注现实世界,转向了关注这个世界的表象。