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Coming to San Francisco for the first time in a few years brings home how much it has been transformed. Whatever you call what is happening — a boom, a bubble or a flood of money into what was known as new technology before the “new” became redundant — has augmented the city’s reality.
有些年没来过旧金山，这次来到这里，我意识到这座城市发生了巨大的变化。不管你怎么形容这里正在发生的事情——繁荣、泡沫或者大量资金流入技术（以前曾被称为“新”技术，现在“新”字可以省略了），这座城市的现实状况因此而提升。
Once, there was a gaping divide between southern and northern California — between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. To the south was the dream factory of fantasy and imagination; in the north was science, hardware such as the transistor and chino-clad venture capitalists who worked in business parks on Sand Hill Road and lived in sprawling suburbia. San Francisco was a pretty, but unexciting tourist town.
过去，加利福尼亚州的南部和北部——好莱坞和硅谷——之间存在巨大的鸿沟。南部是制造幻想和想象的梦想工厂；北部则属于科学，属于晶体管等硬件，以及那些在沙山路(Sand Hill Road)商业园工作、在不断扩张的广大郊区居住、衣着休闲的风险资本家。旧金山那时是一个美丽，但也平淡乏味的旅游城市。
It feels more like Hollywood now, full of people writing scripts and honing pitches. “Brave new world companies create something that was not there before. They do not just save somebody money,” a middle-aged man told a young entrepreneur at a nearby table in a diner on Monday morning. The ingénu should portray his venture as more than “faster, better, cheaper”.
现在这里给人感觉更像好莱坞了，满是写“脚本”和打磨推介词的人。那个周一的早上，餐馆邻桌的一名中年男子对一名年轻创业者说：“这些建造‘美丽新世界’的企业创造过去不存在的事物。它们不仅仅是帮某些人省了钱。”这个生涩的小伙子应该将他的项目描述为不只是“更快、更好、更便宜”。
Later that day one venture capitalist described his own firm’s decision to turn down Uber when it was first raising money as “a lamentable failure of imagination”. The partners should have realised that the pitch for a smartphone limousine service in San Francisco implied a platform to revolutionise global transport. Instead of thinking of the legal obstacles, they ought to have suspended their disbelief.
当天晚些时候，一名风险资本家讲述了他自己的企业在优步(Uber)首次募集资金时拒绝了它的事情，称那个决定是“一次令人惋惜的想象力失灵”。他的合伙人们当时应该意识到，那场关于一款旧金山智能手机叫车软件的推介活动，预示着一个将为全球交通出行带来变革的平台。他们本不应考虑法律方面的障碍，而应暂时放下自己的怀疑。
The old things are shrunken — the San Francisco Chronicle is thin and full of wire stories — and others are exploding. An entire district has sprung up around China Basin on the edge of the city; Apple, which used to carve its stores into old buildings, has levelled a building by Union Square to build a Foster + Partners retail temple; the city’s bars are sleek and vibrant.
陈旧的东西正在萎缩——旧金山的编年史不长，充满了新鲜事物——其他的东西则在爆炸。在这座城市的边缘，围着China Basin，一整片城区拔地而起；过去曾将门店挤进老旧建筑中的苹果(Apple)，拆除了联合广场(Union Square)上的一栋大楼，建造了一座由Foster + Partners建筑事务所设计的标志性零售门店；这座城市的酒吧既时髦又充满活力。
Silicon Valley is at one of those historic moments when a set of technologies start to work — and to work together — in unexpected ways. In this case, the interaction of mobile, robotic and artificial intelligence is producing a wave of applications and devices, from voice-activated software to self-driving cars. The machine knows what you want and where you are, and is steadily learning how to serve you.
硅谷正处在这样一个历史性时刻：一系列技术开始以一种意想不到的方式发挥作用——并且协同并进。在这种情况下，移动智能、机器智能和人工智能的互动产生了大批应用和设备，从语音激活软件到自动驾驶汽车。机器知道你想要什么，身处何地，并且不断地学习如何为你服务。
Andrew McAfee, co-author of The Second Machine Age, describes the experience of being transported in one of Google’s self-driving cars as going “from terrifying to thrilling to boring in 15 minutes”. The machine not only drives competently but with tedious predictability, always observing the speed limit and slowing at every obstacle, as if constantly trying to pass a driving test.
《第二次机器革命》(The Second MachineAge)的合著者安德鲁•麦卡菲(Andrew McAfee)称自己乘坐谷歌(Google)自动驾驶汽车的心路历程是“15分钟内从害怕到兴奋到索然无味”。机器不仅能胜任驾驶，还开得极为标准，其驾驶表现毫无悬念到令人厌烦的地步——总能观察到限速标志，在每一个障碍物前都会减速，就像总在参加路考一样。
Behind innovations that have suddenly come to feel routine, such as facial and voice recognition, lie rapid advances in pattern recognition and emerging forms of artificial intelligence. The capacity of computers to sift through databases and comprehend what people are saying, what they mean and what they desire is evolving faster than many researchers had anticipated.
在面部和语音识别等人们骤然感觉习以为常的创新背后，模式识别迅速发展，各种新型人工智能纷纷涌现。计算机筛查数据库并理解人们在说什么、意思是什么、以及想要什么的能力，发展得比许多研究者预想得更快。
As a result, plenty of investors are eager to throw money at start-ups that look as if they possess a piece of technology and a business idea that will form at least part of the brave new world. The fear of missing out is overwhelming the fear of losing money, as Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital warned recently.
结果是，许多投资者急切地向这样一些初创企业大举投资——它们看上去拥有一样技术或一个商业点子，能至少部分构成这美丽新世界。Benchmark Capital的比尔•格利(Bill Gurley)最近警告称，错过的恐惧压倒了赔钱的恐惧。
History’s famous investment bubbles often formed around such combinations of easy money and fantastical inventions, and some of today’s venture capitalists suffered through the dotcom bust of 2000. Prod them about that and the optimists respond that the $48bn invested by US venture capital funds last year is only half the amount sloshing around at the last peak 15 years ago.
历史上著名的投资泡沫往往萌生于这种轻易可得的金钱和美妙非凡的发明的结合。如今的风险资本家中，有一些曾经历过2000年互联网泡沫的破灭。我故意问起关于那次泡沫的事情，一些乐观的人回应说，美国风投基金去年投资了480亿美元，这仅是15年前上一次高峰时期总额的一半。
This ignores the fact that a lot of the new money is coming not from venture funds but from other investors, including mutual funds such as T Rowe Price and Fidelity. Three-quarters of recent fundraising rounds by “unicorns” — start-ups valued at $1bn or more — were led by “non-traditional” investors, according to a recent study by Fenwick & West, a Silicon Valley law firm.
这种说法忽略了一点，很多新投资并非来自于风投基金，而是来自其他投资者，包括普信集团(T Rowe Price)和富达(Fidelity)等共同基金。硅谷律师事务所Fenwick & West的最新研究表明，“独角兽”公司（指价值10亿美元或者以上的初创企业）最近几轮融资中，有四分之三是由“非传统”投资者牵头。
One is Carl Icahn, the activist investor, who this week put $100m into Lyft, a rival to Uber. Mr Icahn often makes life difficult for his investment targets but is as enamoured as everyone else with his Silicon Valley picks. “We’ll be the first to admit that you are more knowledgeable in these areas than we are,” he wrote fulsomely to Apple this week.
维权投资者卡尔•伊坎(Carl Icahn)就是其中之一。不久前伊坎给优步的竞争对手Lyft投资了1亿美元。伊坎经常让他的投资目标公司日子不好过，但他还是像其他所有人一样迷恋于他挑选的硅谷公司。不久前他写给苹果的信极尽恭维：“我们将头一个承认你们更懂这些领域。”
