Today’s gloomy mood is centred on smartphones and social media, which took off a decade ago. Yet concerns that humanity has taken a technological wrong turn, or that particular technologies might be doing more harm than good, have arisen before. In the 1970s the despondency was prompted by concerns about overpopulation, environmental damage and the prospect of nuclear immolation. The 1920s witnessed a backlash against cars, which had earlier been seen as a miraculous answer to the affliction of horse-drawn vehicles— which filled the streets with noise and dung, and caused congestion and accidents. And the blight of industrialisation was decried in the 19th century by Luddites, Romantics and socialists, who worried (with good reason) about the displacement of skilled artisans, the despoiling of the countryside and the suffering of factory hands toiling in smoke-belching mills.
如今，人们的悲观情绪主要集中在智能手机和社交媒体上。然而，关于人类在技术上走错了方向，或者某些技术可能弊大于利的担忧，在此之前就已经出现了。20世纪70年代，人口过剩、环境破坏和核毁灭的前景引发了人们的担忧，从而导致了这种沮丧情绪。20世纪20年代见证了一场反对汽车的运动，在此之前，汽车曾被视为解决马车问题的灵丹妙药，马车让街上充满了噪音和粪便，造成了交通堵塞和事故。19世纪，工业化的衰落遭到了反对技术进步者、浪漫主义者和社会主义者的谴责，他们有充分的理由对熟练技工的流失、对农村的掠夺以及在浓烟滚滚的工厂里辛勤劳作的工人的痛苦感到担忧。
Stand back, and in each of these historical cases disappointment arose from a mix of unrealised hopes and unforeseen consequences. Technology unleashes the forces of creative destruction, so it is only natural that it leads to anxiety; for any given technology its drawbacks sometimes seem to outweigh its benefits. When this happens with several technologies at once, as today, the result is a wider sense of techno-pessimism.
退一步来看，在每一个历史案例中，失望都是由未实现的希望和未预见的后果交织而成的。技术释放了创造性破坏的力量，因此自然而然导致焦虑；对于任何给定的技术，它的缺点有时似乎超过了它的好处。当这种情况同时发生在几项技术上时，就像今天，结果是一种更广泛的技术悲观主义。
However, that pessimism can be overdone. Too often people focus on the drawbacks of a new technology while taking its benefits for granted. Worries about screen time should be weighed against the much more substantial benefits of ubiquitous communication and the instant access to information and entertainment that smartphones make possible. A further danger is that Luddite efforts to avoid the short-term costs associated with a new technology will end up denying access to its longterm benefits—something Carl Benedikt Frey, an Oxford academic, calls a “technology trap”. Fears that robots will steal people’s jobs may prompt politicians to tax them, for example, to discourage their use. Yet in the long run countries that wish to maintain their standard of living as their workforce ages and shrinks will need more robots, not fewer.
然而，这种悲观情绪可能过头了。人们太过频繁地关注一项新技术的缺点，却认为好处是理所当然的。对盯屏幕时长的担忧应该与无处不在的通信以及智能手机带来的即时信息和娱乐带来的更实质性的好处进行权衡。将来，另一个危险是，反对技术进步者试图避免一项新技术带来的短期成本的努力，最终将剥夺其长期利益，牛津大学学者卡尔•本尼迪克特•弗雷称之为“技术陷阱”。人们担心机器人会抢走人们的工作，这可能会促使政客们对机器人征税，以阻止它们的使用。然而，从长远来看，随着劳动力的老龄化和萎缩，希望维持生活水平的国家将需要更多的机器人。
译文由可可原创，仅供学习交流使用，未经许可请勿转载。
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