Joi Ito在Ted英语演讲:想要创新?—就成为“现在学家”

Joi Ito在Ted英语演讲:想要创新?—就成为“现在学家”(中英双语+)

On March 10, 2011, I was in Cambridge at the MIT Media Lab meeting with faculty, students and staff, and we were trying to figure out whether I should be the next director.

2011年3月11日 我在剑桥的MIT 媒体实验室 跟教师,学生和工作人员一起开会, 我们都想弄清楚 我是否可以成为下一个系主任。

That night, at midnight, a magnitude 9 earthquake hit off of the Pacific coast of Japan. My wife and family were in Japan, and as the news started to come in, I was panicking. I was looking at the news streams and listening to the press conferences of the government officials and the Tokyo Power Company, and hearing about this explosion at the nuclear reactors and this cloud of fallout that was headed towards our house which was only about 200 kilometers away. And the people on TV weren’t telling us anything that we wanted to hear. I wanted to know what was going on with the reactor, what was going on with the radiation, whether my family was in danger.

那天晚上,在深夜, 巨大的九级地震 袭击了日本的太平洋海岸 我的孩子和妻子都在日本, 当消息来到的时候, 我很恐慌。 我看着新闻 听着 官方的新闻发布会 以及东京电力公司的消息, 听到 核反应器的爆炸 还有这片核反应云在飘向 我们家的方向 只有大约200 千米以外。 而电视的报道人员不会告诉我们任何 我们想知道的事情。 我想知道核反应器究竟出了什么故障, 放射线到底是怎么回事, 我的家人是否有危险。

So I did what instinctively felt like the right thing, which was to go onto the Internet and try to figure out if I could take matters into my own hands. On the Net, I found there were a lot of other people like me trying to figure out what was going on, and together we sort of loosely formed a group and we called it Safecast, and we decided we were going to try to measure the radiation and get the data out to everybody else, because it was clear that the government wasn’t going to be doing this for us.

我直觉地感到该做得事情是 到互联网 并且试图弄清楚 我自己是否可以解决这个问题。 在互联网上,我发现有很多人 像我一样想弄清楚到底发生了什么。 于是我们就这么够成了一个松散的组织, 我们把它叫做平安广播, 我们决定要尝试 测量辐射强度 并且把每个人的数据收集起来, 因为明显政府 不会为我们做这些事。

Three years later, we have 16 million data points, we have designed our own Geiger counters that you can download the designs and plug it into the network. We have an app that shows you most of the radiation in Japan and other parts of the world. We are arguably one of the most successful citizen science projects in the world, and we have created the largest open dataset of radiation measurements.

三年后, 我们有了160 万个数据点, 我们设计了自己的盖格计数器(放射线探测仪), 你可以下载设置, 并且把它和联网系统连接起来。 我们有一个软件让你看到 日本和大部分世界其他地区的辐射强度。 我们可以说是在世界上最成功的一个 公民科学项目。 并且我们创建了 最大的开放性核辐射测量数据集。

And the interesting thing here is how did — (Applause) — Thank you. How did a bunch of amateurs who really didn’t know what we were doing somehow come together and do what NGOs and the government were completely incapable of doing? And I would suggest that this has something to do with the Internet. It’s not a fluke. It wasn’t luck, and it wasn’t because it was us. It helped that it was an event that pulled everybody together, but it was a new way of doing things that was enabled by the Internet and a lot of the other things that were going on, and I want to talk a little bit about what those new principles are.

并且,这里有趣的是, 究竟是如何 —(鼓掌)— 感谢 一群毫无头绪的 非专业人员 就这么聚在一起, 做到了NGOs和政府 完全做不到的事情? 我想说这是因为 有了互联网。这不是侥幸, 也不是幸运,也不是因为我们这些人, 而是因为这个事件 使大家聚集在了一起。 但这是一个新的做事的方法, 是由互联网 和一些其它的我们在做的事情促成的。 所以我就想谈谈这些 新的概念。

So remember before the Internet? (Laughter) I call this B.I. Okay? So, in B.I., life was simple. Things were Euclidian, Newtonian, somewhat predictable. People actually tried to predict the future, even the economists. And then the Internet happened, and the world became extremely complex, extremely low-cost, extremely fast, and those Newtonian laws that we so dearly cherished turned out to be just local ordinances, and what we found was that in this completely unpredictable world that most of the people who were surviving were working with sort of a different set of principles, and I want to talk a little bit about that.

2:38 记得在有互联网之前吗?(笑声) 我把这叫做B.I.行吗? 那么,在互联网之前,生活是简单的。 像欧几里德,牛顿学说, 这些事在某种程度上来说是可以预料的。 事实上人们在试图预测未来, 甚至是经济学家。 然后因特网出现了, 然后世界就变得特别复杂, 特别的便宜,并特别的快, 那些我们一度如此珍爱的 牛顿定律 原来只是局部的规则, 我们发现在这个 完全无法预测的世界, 大部分生存下来的人 都在用不同的原理工作, 所以我也要想谈那个方面。

Before the Internet, if you remember, when we tried to create services, what you would do is you’d create the hardware layer and the network layer and the software and it would cost millions of dollars to do anything that was substantial. So when it costs millions of dollars to do something substantial, what you would do is you’d get an MBA who would write a plan and get the money from V.C.s or big companies, and then you’d hire the designers and the engineers, and they’d build the thing. This is the Before Internet, B.I., innovation model. What happened after the Internet was the cost of innovation went down so much because the cost of collaboration, the cost of distribution, the cost of communication, and Moore’s Law made it so that the cost of trying a new thing became nearly zero, and so you would have Google, Facebook, Yahoo, students that didn’t have permission — permissionless innovation — didn’t have permission, didn’t have PowerPoints, they just built the thing, then they raised the money, and then they sort of figured out a business plan and maybe later on they hired some MBAs. So the Internet caused innovation, at least in software and services, to go from an MBA-driven innovation model to a designer-engineer-driven innovation model, and it pushed innovation to the edges, to the dorm rooms, to the startups, away from the large institutions, the stodgy old institutions that had the power and the money and the authority. And we all know this. We all know this happened on the Internet. It turns out it’s happening in other things, too. Let me give you some examples.

如果你还记得,在有英特网之前, 当我们尝试去创建一个服务项目, 你所要做的是你首先得创建 一个硬件层面然后是网络层面和软件, 这需要花费上百万美元 才能做到最基本的事情。 那么当需要花费上百万美元做那些基础的事情的时候, 你得有一名MBA, 他会写一个计划书, 然后从风投或者一个大公司 获得资助。 然后你还要雇佣设计师和工程师, 然后他们按照你的构想实现它。 这是在互联网出现之前,B.I, 的创新模式。 在互联网出现之后发生的是 创新所需的花费大幅度下降了, 因为合作的开销,推广的开销 交流的开销,和摩尔定律, 让尝试一样新东西的花费 低至接近于零, 你有谷歌,脸书,雅虎, 没有许可证的学生—— 不需要许可证来发明创新—— 没有许可证,没有幻灯片, 他们只是制作产品, 然后他们筹集资金, 再大略弄出一个销售计划, 也许后来他们雇了商管博士。 所以互联网引起了革新, 至少在软件和服务上, 从商管博士驱动的创新模式, 到设计师-工程师驱动的创建模式, 它把创新推进到了边缘, 到了宿舍,到了新企业, 远离了大型的研究机构, 远离了强力,有钱和有权威 却老而蠢笨的研究所。 我们都知道这一点。我们都知道这是在互联网上发生的。 实际上在其他事情上也是如此。 让我给你们看一个例证。

So at the Media Lab, we don’t just do hardware. We do all kinds of things. We do biology, we do hardware, and Nicholas Negroponte famously said, "Demo or die," as opposed to "Publish or perish," which was the traditional academic way of thinking. And he often said, the demo only has to work once, because the primary mode of us impacting the world was through large companies being inspired by us and creating products like the Kindle or Lego Mindstorms. But today, with the ability to deploy things into the real world at such low cost, I’m changing the motto now, and this is the official public statement. I’m officially saying, "Deploy or die." You have to get the stuff into the real world for it to really count, and sometimes it will be large companies, and Nicholas can talk about satellites. (Applause) Thank you. But we should be getting out there ourselves and not depending on large institutions to do it for us.

在媒体实验室,我们不只是做硬件。 我们做各种各样的事情。 我们做生物学,我们也做硬件。 尼克拉思.尼格罗庞特的名言是“或为演示,或是死亡” 反过来就是“发表或者腐烂,” 那是典型的传统学术想法 他常说,演示只需成功一次, 因为我们原始的模式 是通过汲取了我们 灵感的大公司从而影响了世界, 并且创造了像电子阅读器或者乐高头脑风暴等。 但今天,在一个有能力做到用如此低廉的费用 让构想在现实中实现的世界, 我现在正在改变这个箴言, 这是官方的公开的声明。 我正式宣告,”不上线,不如死“。 你得把东西弄进现实中, 因为这样才算数, 有时候是大公司, 和尼古拉思才能谈论卫星。 (鼓掌) 感谢你们。 但是我们应该让自己走出来, 不再依赖大公司为我们做事。

So last year, we sent a bunch of students to Shenzhen, and they sat on the factory floors with the innovators in Shenzhen, and it was amazing. What was happening there was you would have these manufacturing devices, and they weren’t making prototypes or PowerPoints. They were fiddling with the manufacturing equipment and innovating right on the manufacturing equipment. The factory was in the designer, and the designer was literally in the factory. And so what you would do is, you’d go down to the stalls and you would see these cell phones. So instead of starting little websites like the kids in Palo Alto do, the kids in Shenzhen make new cell phones. They make new cell phones like kids in Palo Alto make websites, and so there’s a rainforest of innovation going on in the cell phone. What they do is, they make a cell phone, go down to the stall, they sell some, they look at the other kids’ stuff, go up, make a couple thousand more, go down. Doesn’t this sound like a software thing? It sounds like agile software development, A/B testing and iteration, and what we thought you could only do with software kids in Shenzhen are doing this in hardware. My next fellow, I hope, is going to be one of these innovators from Shenzhen.

于是,去年,我们送了一些学生到深圳, 他们坐在工厂的地板上 跟深圳的革新人员在一块儿,确实很令人惊异。 在那里发生的是 你有这些出自出产的设备, 他们并不做原型或者幻灯片演讲。 他们摆弄着出产设备, 直接在设备上进行革新。 工厂就在设计之中, 而设计师真的在工厂里。 那么你所要做的是, 你下楼到货摊上, 然后你会看到这些手机。 而不是 像开帕罗.阿尔托的孩子们那样开启一个小小的网站 深圳的孩子做新手机。 他们像在帕罗.阿尔托的孩子做 网页一样做新手机, 所以,在手机行业 有一种革新的热潮。 他们所做的就是制造手机, 然后下楼到货摊上去卖, 他们也看其它的孩子用品,然后上楼, 又多做几千个,然后再下楼去卖。 这听起来像是软件之类的事情吗? 这听起来像灵活的软件开发, A/B测试和重复, 我们认为只能在软件层面完成的事情, 深圳的孩子是在这种硬件上完成的。 我的下一个工作人员,我希望是 这些来自深圳的革新者之一。

And so what you see is that is pushing innovation to the edges. We talk about 3D printers and stuff like that, and that’s great, but this is Limor. She is one of our favorite graduates, and she is standing in front of a Samsung Techwin Pick and Place Machine. This thing can put 23,000 components per hour onto an electronics board. This is a factory in a box. So what used to take a factory full of workers working by hand in this little box in New York, she’s able to have effectively — She doesn’t actually have to go to Shenzhen to do this manufacturing. She can buy this box and she can manufacture it. So manufacturing, the cost of innovation, the cost of prototyping, distribution, manufacturing, hardware, is getting so low that innovation is being pushed to the edges and students and startups are being able to build it. This is a recent thing, but this will happen and this will change just like it did with software.

那么你明白了 是什么把革新推到了边缘。 我们谈论3D打印机之类的东西, 那是极好的,但这是利莫尔。 她是我们最喜欢的一个毕业生之一, 她站在三星 泰克电子板拣选机和置放机的前沿, 这东西能在每小时把23000个元件 放到电子板上。 这是一个盒子里的工厂。 我们过去所用的满是工人 用手工作业的工厂, 都在这个小盒子里,在纽约, 她能够很有效地- 她不用去深圳 就可以做这样产品。 她能买下这个盒子然后就可以做出产品。 那么生产,革新的成本, 样本制作的成本,配销,出产,硬件, 都越来越低廉, 以致于革新被推倒了边缘。 所以学生和新企业都能够建造。 这是最近的事,但这将会发生, 并且改变, 就像我们在软件上的变革。

Sorona is a DuPont process that uses a genetically engineered microbe to turn corn sugar into polyester. It’s 30 percent more efficient than the fossil fuel method, and it’s much better for the environment. Genetic engineering and bioengineering are creating a whole bunch of great new opportunities for chemistry, for computation, for memory. We will probably be doing a lot, obviously doing health things, but we will probably be growing chairs and buildings soon. The problem is, Sorona costs about 400 million dollars and took seven years to build. It kind of reminds you of the old mainframe days. The thing is, the cost of innovation in bioengineering is also going down. This is desktop gene sequencer. It used to cost millions and millions of dollars to sequence genes. Now you can do it on a desktop like this, and kids can do this in dorm rooms. This is Gen9 gene assembler, and so right now when you try to print a gene, what you do is somebody in a factory with pipettes puts the thing together by hand, you have one error per 100 base pairs, and it takes a long time and costs a lot of money. This new device assembles genes on a chip, and instead of one error per 100 base pairs, it’s one error per 10,000 base pairs. In this lab, we will have the world’s capacity of gene printing within a year, 200 million base pairs a year. This is kind of like when we went from transistor radios wrapped by hand to the Pentium. This is going to become the Pentium of bioengineering, pushing bioengineering into the hands of dorm rooms and startup companies.

梭罗那是杜邦公司的处理器, 它利用一个遗传工程微生物 把玉米的糖转分化成聚酯纤維。 它比化石燃油法多了百分之三十的效率, 对环境好得多。 基因工程和生物工程 正在创造很多 极其崭新的机会, 为化学,为计算,为记忆。 我们可能会做很多,显然是利于健康的事情, 而且在不久的将来我们可能会种植出椅子, 或是建筑。 目前的问题是,梭罗那花费约 4亿美元, 需要七年来建成。 这某种程度上让你回忆起老主机的日子。 事实是,在生物工程学上革新的成本 也降低了。 这是台型基因测序仪。 过去要花费几百万的成本来测基因序列。 而现在,你能在像这样的桌面仪器上做, 学生们可以在宿舍里做。 这是简9基因组合仪, 那么现在当你想要打印一个基因, 你要做的就是让工厂里的某个人 用手上的加样器吧东西加在一起, 每一百个基因组合就会有一个错误, 并且花很长时间和很多钱。 这个新的设备 在一个芯片上把基因组合一起 比起每一百个碱基就有一个误读, 他能做到一万个碱基才有一个误读。 在这个实验室,我们有世界级的容量 在一年之内打印出基因, 是2亿个碱基一年。 这有些像我们从 用手动包装晶体管 到奔腾处理器。 这将是生物工程领域的飞跃, 把生物工程推到 宿舍和新企业的手边。

So it’s happening in software and in hardware and bioengineering, and so this is a fundamental new way of thinking about innovation. It’s a bottom-up innovation, it’s democratic, it’s chaotic, it’s hard to control. It’s not bad, but it’s very different, and I think that the traditional rules that we have for institutions don’t work anymore, and most of us here operate with a different set of principles. One of my favorite principles is the power of pull, which is the idea of pulling resources from the network as you need them rather than stocking them in the center and controlling everything.

所以这正发生在软件,硬件 以及生物工程领域, 所以这对创新来说是一个全新的思维方式。 这是一个由下至上的变革,是全民性的, 也是混乱,难以控制的。 这并不是不好,只是相对以往来说很不同, 我认为我们所沿用的研究机构的传统的规则 已经不再合适了, 我们这儿的大多数人 都本着不同的原则在运作。 而我最喜欢的一个原理是拉力, 是收取资源的理念。 当需要的时候从互联网上拿取, 而不是把它们存储在一个地方 从而试图控制每一件事。

So in the case of the Safecast story, I didn’t know anything when the earthquake happened, but I was able to find Sean who was the hackerspace community organizer, and Peter, the analog hardware hacker who made our first Geiger counter, and Dan, who built the Three Mile Island monitoring system after the Three Mile Island meltdown. And these people I wouldn’t have been able to find beforehand and probably were better that I found them just in time from the network.

那么在这个“安全广播”的案例里, 在地震发生的时候我不知道任何事情, 但是我能找到塞恩, 他是黑客空间组织会的组织者, 而彼得,类似硬件黑客, 他制作了我们第一个放射线探测仪, 而丹,是三哩岛的核泄漏事故监测系统的建造者, 这是在三哩岛融化以后的事。 那些我之前不可能会找到的人, 我在最需要的时候在网上找到了他们, 这时间点更好了。

I’m a three-time college dropout, so learning over education is very near and dear to my heart, but to me, education is what people do to you and learning is what you do to yourself.

我三次从大学退学, 所以依靠传统教育来学习 对我来说是近而远之的事情, 但对我来说,教育是别人给你的, 但学习是你自己所成的。

And it feels like, and I’m biased, it feels like they’re trying to make you memorize the whole encyclopedia before they let you go out and play, and to me, I’ve got Wikipedia on my cell phone, and it feels like they assume you’re going to be on top of some mountain all by yourself with a number 2 pencil trying to figure out what to do when in fact you’re always going to be connected, you’re always going to have friends, and you can pull Wikipedia up whenever you need it, and what you need to learn is how to learn. In the case of Safecast, a bunch of amateurs when we started three years ago, I would argue that we probably as a group know more than any other organization about how to collect data and publish data and do citizen science.

这感觉好像,我可能有些偏见, 感觉好像他们想要在你出去玩儿之前 让记住全部的百科全书, 对我来说,我在手机上安装了维基百科, 感觉他们好像在假设, 你将要带着一只2号铅笔,全凭你自己 达到某个山的顶峰, 努力弄清楚该做什么。 但事实上,你永远是和外界有联系的, 你永远有朋友, 而当你需要时,你随时可以借用维基百科, 你要学的是怎样学习。 在平安广播的例子里,一群业余人事 在三年前我们刚起步的时候, 我认为作为一个小组 我们可能比任何其它的研究机构知道更多 有关数据搜集和发布的知识。 并且做公民的科学研究。

Compass over maps. So this one, the idea is that the cost of writing a plan or mapping something is getting so expensive and it’s not very accurate or useful. So in the Safecast story, we knew we needed to collect data, we knew we wanted to publish the data, and instead of trying to come up with the exact plan, we first said, oh, let’s get Geiger counters. Oh, they’ve run out. Let’s build them. There aren’t enough sensors. Okay, then we can make a mobile Geiger counter. We can drive around. We can get volunteers. We don’t have enough money. Let’s Kickstarter it. We could not have planned this whole thing, but by having a very strong compass, we eventually got to where we were going, and to me it’s very similar to agile software development, but this idea of compasses is very important.

用指南针代替地图。 那么这一个理念是,写计划书 或者策划的花费什么变得如此昂贵 却它不是很精确或实用。 所以在平安广播的故事里,我们知道我们需要搜集数据, 我们知道我们想发表数据, 与其做出一个详细的计划, 我们先说,啊,需要一个放射线探测仪。 哦,我们没有。 那我们就做一个。没有足够的感知器。 行,我们就做一个移动的探测仪, 我们开车四处转悠,我们寻找志愿者。 我们没有钱,就乱糟糟地开始吧。 我们不能把所有的事情都计划好, 但我们有着一个很坚定的指南, 我们最终达到了我们的目的地, 对我来说,这和灵活的软件的开发相似, 但这个”指南针“理论很重要。

So I think the good news is that even though the world is extremely complex, what you need to do is very simple. I think it’s about stopping this notion that you need to plan everything, you need to stock everything, and you need to be so prepared, and focus on being connected, always learning, fully aware, and super present.

于是我认为好消息是, 即使世界是那么的复杂, 而你所要做的却很简单。 我认为该停止这种概念, 每一件事都需要事先计划好, 你需要储备所有东西, 你需要做好充足的准备, 并把精力放在建立联系上面, 总是学习, 充分地自知, 关注当下。

So I don’t like the word "futurist." I think we should be now-ists, like we are right now.

那么我们不喜欢“未来主义者”这个词, 我认为我们应该是现在学家,就像现在。

Thank you.

单词笔记:

1.figure out 弄明白

2. hit off:侵袭

3.nuclear reactor:核反应器

4.take matters into my own hands:自己解决问题

5. get the data out to everybody else

get out:离开,出去;泄露;出版(leave, reveal, split, quit)

6.amateur:业余爱好者

7.transistor:n. 晶体管(收音机)

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