硅谷不止造錢造技術 被評爲造夢工廠
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.
有些年沒來過舊金山，這次來到這裏，我意識到這座城市發生了巨大的變化。不管你怎麼形容這裏正在發生的事情——繁榮、泡沫或者大量資金流入技術（以前曾被稱爲“新”技術，現在“新”字可以省略了），這座城市的現實狀況因此而提升。
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.
過去，加利福尼亞州的南部和北部——好萊塢和硅谷——之間存在巨大的鴻溝。南部是製造幻想和想象的夢想工廠；北部則屬於科學，屬於晶體管等硬件，以及那些在沙山路(Sand Hill Road)商業園工作、在不斷擴張的廣大郊區居住、衣着休閒的風險資本家。舊金山那時是一個美麗，但也平淡乏味的旅遊城市。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”.
現在這裏給人感覺更像好萊塢了，滿是寫“腳本”和打磨推介詞的人。那個週一的早上，餐館鄰桌的一名中年男子對一名年輕創業者說：“這些建造‘美麗新世界’的企業創造過去不存在的事物。它們不僅僅是幫某些人省了錢。”這個生澀的小夥子應該將他的項目描述爲不只是“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.
當天晚些時候，一名風險資本家講述了他自己的企業在優步(Uber)首次募集資金時拒絕了它的事情，稱那個決定是“一次令人惋惜的想象力失靈”。他的合夥人們當時應該意識到，那場關於一款舊金山智能手機叫車軟件的推介活動，預示着一個將爲全球交通出行帶來變革的平臺。他們本不應考慮法律方面的障礙，而應暫時放下自己的懷疑。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.
陳舊的東西正在萎縮——舊金山的編年史不長，充滿了新鮮事物——其他的東西則在爆炸。在這座城市的邊緣，圍着China Basin，一整片城區拔地而起；過去曾將門店擠進老舊建築中的蘋果(Apple)，拆除了聯合廣場(Union Square)上的一棟大樓，建造了一座由Foster + Partners建築事務所設計的標誌性零售門店；這座城市的酒吧既時髦又充滿活力。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.
硅谷正處在這樣一個歷史性時刻：一系列技術開始以一種意想不到的方式發揮作用——並且協同並進。在這種情況下，移動智能、機器智能和人工智能的互動產生了大批應用和設備，從語音激活軟件到自動駕駛汽車。機器知道你想要什麼，身處何地，並且不斷地學習如何爲你服務。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.
《第二次機器革命》(The Second MachineAge)的合著者安德魯•麥卡菲(Andrew McAfee)稱自己乘坐谷歌(Google)自動駕駛汽車的心路歷程是“15分鐘內從害怕到興奮到索然無味”。機器不僅能勝任駕駛，還開得極爲標準，其駕駛表現毫無懸念到令人厭煩的地步——總能觀察到限速標誌，在每一個障礙物前都會減速，就像總在參加路考一樣。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.
在面部和語音識別等人們驟然感覺習以爲常的創新背後，模式識別迅速發展，各種新型人工智能紛紛涌現。計算機篩查數據庫並理解人們在說什麼、意思是什麼、以及想要什麼的能力，發展得比許多研究者預想得更快。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.
結果是，許多投資者急切地向這樣一些初創企業大舉投資——它們看上去擁有一樣技術或一個商業點子，能至少部分構成這美麗新世界。Benchmark Capital的比爾•格利(Bill Gurley)最近警告稱，錯過的恐懼壓倒了賠錢的恐懼。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.
歷史上著名的投資泡沫往往萌生於這種輕易可得的金錢和美妙非凡的發明的結合。如今的風險資本家中，有一些曾經歷過2000年互聯網泡沫的破滅。我故意問起關於那次泡沫的事情，一些樂觀的人迴應說，美國風投基金去年投資了480億美元，這僅是15年前上一次高峯時期總額的一半。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.
這種說法忽略了一點，很多新投資並非來自於風投基金，而是來自其他投資者，包括普信集團(T Rowe Price)和富達(Fidelity)等共同基金。硅谷律師事務所Fenwick & West的最新研究表明，“獨角獸”公司（指價值10億美元或者以上的初創企業）最近幾輪融資中，有四分之三是由“非傳統”投資者牽頭。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.
維權投資者卡爾•伊坎(Carl Icahn)就是其中之一。不久前伊坎給優步的競爭對手Lyft投資了1億美元。伊坎經常讓他的投資目標公司日子不好過，但他還是像其他所有人一樣迷戀於他挑選的硅谷公司。不久前他寫給蘋果的信極盡恭維：“我們將頭一個承認你們更懂這些領域。”
