科技創新迷失了方向 世界變得更美好了嗎
Every day, innovative companies promise to make the world a better place. Are they succeeding?
每一天，那些創新公司都在承諾着要讓世界變得更美好。他們做到了嗎？
Here is just a sampling of the products, apps and services that have come across my radar in the last few weeks:
下面是幾個產品、手機應用和服務的例子，都是最近幾個星期我注意到的。
A service that sends someone to fill your car with gas.
讓別人來幫你加滿油的服務。
A service that sends a valet on a scooter to you, wherever you are, to park your car.
在任何地方叫代泊車服務員踩着滑板車來幫你停車的服務。
A service that will film anything you desire with a drone.
用無人機幫你爲任何東西攝像的服務。
A service that will pack your suitcase — virtually.
幫你收拾行李的服務——虛擬的。
A service that delivers a new toothbrush head to your mailbox every three months.
每三個月把新的牙刷頭寄到你郵箱裏的服務。
A service that delivers your beer right to your door.
送啤酒上門的服務。
An app that analyzes the quality of your French kissing.
分析你法國式接吻水平的手機應用。
A “smart” button and zipper that alerts you if your fly is down.
褲子拉鍊沒拉上時會提醒你的“智能”鈕釦和拉鍊。
An app with speaker that plays music from within a mother’s vaginal walls to her unborn baby.
可以通過揚聲器，在孕婦的陰道內給胎兒播放音樂的手機應用。
A sensor placed in your child’s diaper that sends you an alert when the diaper needs changing.
放在尿布上的傳感器，該換尿布時發送警告。
An app that lets us brew our coffee from anywhere.
在任何地點都可以煮咖啡的手機應用。
A refrigerator advertised as “the Family Hub” that promises to act as a personal assistant, message board, stereo and photo album.
一種在廣告宣傳中被定義爲“家庭中樞站”的冰箱，承諾充當私人助理、信息板、立體聲音箱和相冊。
An app to locate rentable driveways for parking.
尋找可供租用的私人停車位的手機應用。
An app to locate rentable yachts.
尋找出租遊艇的手機應用。
An app to help you understand “cause and effect in your life.”
幫你瞭解“人生因果”的手機應用。
An app that guides mindful meditation.
指導冥想的手機應用。
An app that imparts wisdom.
傳遞智慧的手機應用。
And a new proposal to create an app designed to stop police killings.
最近還有人建議開發一種用來杜絕警察殺人的手機應用。
We are overloaded daily with new discoveries, patents and inventions all promising a better life, but that better life has not been forthcoming for most. In fact, the bulk of the above list targets a very specific (and tiny!) slice of the population. As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do.
每一天，我們都被各種承諾要讓生活更美好的新發現、新專利和新發明所淹沒，但是對於大部分人來說，更美好的生活沒有到來。其實在上面的單子裏，大部分項目都是針對一個特定（而且很小！）的人羣。最近一個科技領域的同事向我解釋說，對於大多數研發這類項目的人來說，他們的目標基本上就是爲自己提供各種媽媽不再爲他們做的事情。
He was joking — sort of — but his comment made me think hard about who is served by this stuff. I’m concerned that such a focus on comfort and instant gratification will reduce us all to those characters in “Wall-E,” bound to their recliners, Big Gulps in hand, interacting with the world exclusively through their remotes.
某種程度上，他是在開玩笑，但是他的話啓發我去深入思考那些使用這些服務的人們。我擔心，這樣關注方便舒適和即時的滿足感，會把我們都變成《機器人瓦力》(Wall-E)裏的人，終日躺在在躺椅上，拿着大杯飲料，只靠遙控器和世界互動。
Too many well-funded entrepreneurial efforts turn out to promise more than they can deliver (i.e., Theranos’ finger-prick blood test) or read as parody (but, sadly, are not — such as the $99 “vessel” that monitors your water intake and tells you when you should drink more water).
衆多資金雄厚的企業項目最後都被證明無法實現自己的承諾（比如Theranos的指血檢測技術），或者看上去像是玩笑（不過悲哀的是，事實並非如此，比如價值99美元的“容器”，用來監控你攝入了多少水，告訴你何時應該再喝水了）。
When everything is characterized as “world-changing,” is anything?
當一切都被打上“改變世界”的標籤，到底有什麼東西真能正改變世界？
Clay Tarver, a writer and producer for the painfully on-point HBO comedy “Silicon Valley,” said in a recent New Yorker article: “I’ve been told that, at some of the big companies, the P.R. departments have ordered their employees to stop saying ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ specifically because we have made fun of that phrase so mercilessly. So I guess, at the very least, we’re making the world a better place by making these people stop saying they’re making the world a better place.”
作家克萊·塔弗(Clay Tarver)是一針見血的HBO喜劇《硅谷》(SiliconValley)的編劇。他最近在《紐約客》(New Yorker)的一篇文章中說：“我被告知，在某些大公司裏，公關部門要求僱員不要再說‘我們在讓世界變得更美好’這句話，主要是因爲我們拿這句話開玩笑開得太狠了。所以我想，通過讓這些人停止說‘我們讓世界變得更美好’，我們讓世界變得更美好了。”
O.K., that’s a start. But the impulse to conflate toothbrush delivery with Nobel Prize-worthy good works is not just a bit cultish, it’s currently a wildfire burning through the so-called innovation sector. Products and services are designed to “disrupt” market sectors (a.k.a. bringing to market things no one really needs) more than to solve actual problems, especially those problems experienced by what the writer C. Z. Nnaemeka has described as “the unexotic underclass” — single mothers, the white rural poor, veterans, out-of-work Americans over 50 — who, she explains, have the “misfortune of being insufficiently interesting.”
好吧，這是個開始。但是，把寄送牙刷和諾貝爾獎級別的傑作混爲一談的衝動，不只是一種宗教狂熱，而是像燎原野火般橫掃所謂的創新產業。很多產品和服務都是旨在“擾亂”市場劃分（換言之，就是把根本沒人需要的東西推向市場），而不是用來解決真正的問題，尤其不能解決那些被作家C·Z·納埃梅卡(C. Z. Nnaemeka)稱之爲“尋常的下層社會”所面臨的問題——就是那些單親媽媽、鄉村貧窮白人、老兵、年過50的失業美國人——她解釋說，他們“很不幸，不夠有趣”。
If the most fundamental definition of design is to solve problems, why are so many people devoting so much energy to solving problems that don’t really exist? How can we get more people to look beyond their own lived experience?
如果設計的最基本定義是用來解決問題，爲什麼那麼多人投入那麼多精力，去解決根本不存在的問題？我們該怎樣讓更多人看到超越自身生活體驗之外的東西？
In “Design: The Invention of Desire,” a thoughtful and necessary new book by the designer and theorist Jessica Helfand, the author brings to light an amazing kernel: “hack,” a term so beloved in Silicon Valley that it’s painted on the courtyard of the Facebook campus and is visible from planes flying overhead, is also prison slang for “horse’s ass carrying keys.”
《設計：慾望的發明》(Design: The Invention of Desire)是一本深思熟慮又非常有用的新書，作者是設計師兼理論家傑西卡·赫爾方(Jessica Helfand)。她解釋了那個驚人的內核“駭客”(hack)，這個詞爲硅谷所深愛，被繪在Facebook園區的院子裏，從飛機上都能看見。在監獄裏，它是用來指代“獄警”的俚語。
To “hack” is to cut, to gash, to break. It proceeds from the belief that nothing is worth saving, that everything needs fixing. But is that really the case? Are we fixing the right things? Are we breaking the wrong ones? Is it necessary to start from scratch every time?
做“駭客”就意味着切入、突擊，打破。它源自那種沒有任何事物值得保留，一切都需要被修理的信念。但是事實真的如此嗎？我們是在修理需要修理的東西嗎？我們是不是打破了不該打破的東西？每次都需要從零開始嗎？
Empathy, humility, compassion, conscience: These are the key ingredients missing in the pursuit of innovation, Ms. Helfand argues, and in her book she explores design, and by extension innovation, as an intrinsically human discipline — albeit one that seems to have lost its way. Ms. Helfand argues that innovation is now predicated less on creating and more on the undoing of the work of others.
赫爾方指出，共情、謙卑、同情、良心：這些關鍵成分都是追求創新的過程中所缺失的。她在書中把設計，乃至創新，從本質上作爲一個人文學科來探討——儘管這個學科似乎已經迷失了的方向。赫爾方認爲，如今，創新更多是基於毀掉別人的工作，而不是基於創造。
“In this humility-poor environment, the idea of disruption appeals as a kind of subversive provocation,” she writes. “Too many designers think they are innovating when they are merely breaking and entering.”
“在這樣一個缺乏謙卑的環境下，‘擾亂’的概念顯得像是一種顛覆性的挑釁，”她寫道。“太多的設計師覺得他們是在創新，其實他們只是在破壞和闖入。”
In this way, innovation is very much mirroring the larger public discourse: a distrust of institutions combined with unabashed confidence in one’s own judgment shifts solutions away from fixing, repairing or improving and shoves them toward destruction for its own sake. (Sound like a certain presidential candidate? Or Brexit?)
在這層意義上，創新成了一段更宏大的公共話語的縮影：對制度的不信任，加上對自我判斷的自以爲是，讓解決方案偏離了修補、修正或改善的目的，變成了爲破壞而破壞（聽上去像不像某位總統候選人？或者英國脫歐？）
Perhaps the main reason these frivolous products and services frustrate me is because of their creators’ insistence that changing lives for the better is their reason for being. To wit, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who has invested in companies like Airbnb and Twitter but also in services such as LikeALittle (which started out as a flirting tool among college students) and Soylent (a sort of SlimFast concoction for tech geeks), tweeted last week: “The perpetually missing headline: ‘Capitalism worked okay again today and most people in the world got a little better off.’ ”
或許這些微不足道的產品與服務令我煩惱的主要原因，是因爲它們的創造者堅持認爲，它們的存在就是爲了讓生活變得更好。馬克·安德烈森(Marc Andreessen)上星期在Twitter上的言論也表達了這個意思：“你永遠看不到的新聞：‘今天資本主義再次運行良好，世界上的大多數人生活得到改善’。”這位風險投資資本家曾經給Arirbnb和Twitter等公司投資，但也給LikeALittle（一開始是個大學生調情的工具）和Soylent（面向技術極客們的SlimFast類減肥食譜工具）等服務投資。
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, where such companies are based, sea level rise is ominous, the income gap between rich and poor has been growing faster than in any other city in the nation, a higher percentage of people send their kids to private school than in almost any other city, and a minimum salary of $254,000 is required to afford an average-priced home. Who exactly is better off?
與此同時，在舊金山，很多這類公司的所在地，海平面以危險的勢頭上升，貧富之間的收入鴻溝增長得比這個國家的任何城市更快，送孩子去私立學校的人比例比任何城市都更高。需要至少25.4萬的年薪才能住得起普通價格水平的房子。到底誰過得更好了？
Ms. Helfand calls for a deeper embrace of personal vigilance: “Design may provide the map,” she writes, “but the moral compass that guides our personal choices resides permanently within us all.”
赫爾方呼籲更多的個人警覺：“設計或許能夠提供地圖，”她寫道，“但是能夠指引個人選擇的道德羅盤卻永遠存在於我們每個人的內心。”
Can we reset that moral compass? Maybe we can start by not being a bunch of hacks.
我們能重新校準我們的道德羅盤嗎？或許我們應該從不做駭客開始。
