长期视角下的技术演进

注：机翻，未校。

Technology over the long run: zoom out to see how dramatically the world can change within a lifetime

It is easy to underestimate how much the world can change within a lifetime. Considering how dramatically the world has changed can help us see how different the world could be in a few years or decades.

人们很容易低估世界在有生之年可以发生多大的变化。考虑到世界发生了多么巨大的变化，可以帮助我们看到世界在几年或几十年内可能会有多么不同。

By: Max Roser

February 22, 2023

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Technology can change the world in ways that are unimaginable until they happen. Switching on an electric light would have been unimaginable for our medieval ancestors. In their childhood, our grandparents would have struggled to imagine a world connected by smartphones and the Internet.
技术可以以难以想象的方式改变世界，除非它们发生。对于我们中世纪的祖先来说，打开电灯是不可想象的。在他们的童年时代，我们的祖父母很难想象一个由智能手机和互联网连接的世界。

Similarly, it is hard for us to imagine the arrival of all those technologies that will fundamentally change the world we are used to.
同样，我们很难想象所有这些技术的到来将从根本上改变我们习惯的世界。

We can remind ourselves that our own future might look very different from the world today by looking back at how rapidly technology has changed our world in the past. That’s what this article is about.
我们可以提醒自己，我们自己的未来可能与今天的世界大不相同，回顾过去技术如何迅速地改变了我们的世界。这就是本文要讨论的内容。

One insight I take away from this long-term perspective is how unusual our time is. Technological change was extremely slow in the past – the technologies that our ancestors got used to in their childhood were still central to their lives in their old age. In stark contrast to those days, we live in a time of extraordinarily fast technological change. For recent generations, it was common for technologies that were unimaginable in their youth to become common later in life.
从这个长期的角度来看，我得到的一个见解是，我们的时代是多么不寻常。过去的技术变革极其缓慢——我们的祖先在童年时期习惯的技术在晚年仍然是他们生活的核心。与那些日子形成鲜明对比的是，我们生活在一个技术变革异常迅速的时代。对于最近几代人来说，在他们年轻时无法想象的技术在以后的生活中变得普遍是很常见的。

The long-run perspective on technological change

从长期角度来看技术变革

The big visualization offers a long-term perspective on the history of technology.[1]
大可视化提供了对技术历史的长期视角。

The timeline begins at the center of the spiral. The first use of stone tools, 3.4 million years ago, marks the beginning of this history of technology.[2] Each turn of the spiral represents 200,000 years of history. It took 2.4 million years – 12 turns of the spiral – for our ancestors to control fire and use it for cooking.[3]
时间线从螺旋的中心开始。340 万年前首次使用石器，标志着这一技术历史的开始.2 螺旋的每一圈都代表着 200,000 年的历史。我们的祖先花了 240 万年——旋转 12 圈——才控制火并用它来做饭。

To be able to visualize the inventions in the more recent past – the last 12,000 years – I had to unroll the spiral. I needed more space to be able to show when agriculture, writing, and the wheel were invented. During this period, technological change was faster, but it was still relatively slow: several thousand years passed between each of these three inventions.
为了能够直观地看到最近过去——过去 12,000 年的发明——我不得不展开螺旋。我需要更多的空间来展示农业、写作和轮子是什么时候发明的。在此期间，技术变革更快，但仍然相对缓慢：这三项发明之间都经过了几千年。

From 1800 onwards, I stretched out the timeline even further to show the many major inventions that rapidly followed one after the other.
从 1800 年开始，我把时间线进一步拉长，以展示一个接一个迅速跟进的许多重大发明。

The long-term perspective that this chart provides makes it clear just how unusually fast technological change is in our time.
从长期来看，这张图表清楚地表明，在我们这个时代，技术变革的速度是多么异常迅速。

You can use this visualization to see how technology developed in particular domains. Follow, for example, the history of communication: from writing to paper, to the printing press, to the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, all the way to the Internet and smartphones.
您可以使用此可视化效果来了解技术在特定领域中的发展情况。例如，遵循通信的历史：从文字到纸张，到印刷机，到电报、电话、收音机，一直到互联网和智能手机。

Or follow the rapid development of human flight. In 1903, the Wright brothers took the first flight in human history (they were in the air for less than a minute), and just 66 years later, we landed on the moon. Many people saw both within their lifetimes: the first plane and the moon landing.
或者跟随人类飞行的快速发展。1903 年，莱特兄弟进行了人类历史上的第一次飞行（他们在空中停留了不到一分钟），仅仅 66 年后，我们就登上了月球。许多人在他们的一生中都看到了：第一架飞机和登月。

This large visualization also highlights the wide range of technology’s impact on our lives. It includes extraordinarily beneficial innovations, such as the vaccine that allowed humanity to eradicate smallpox, and it includes terrible innovations, like the nuclear bombs that endanger the lives of all of us.
这种大型可视化还突出了技术对我们生活的广泛影响。它包括非常有益的创新，例如使人类能够根除天花的疫苗，还包括可怕的创新，例如危及我们所有人生命的核弹。

What will the next decades bring?
未来几十年会带来什么？

The red timeline reaches up to the present and then continues in green into the future. Many children born today, even without further increases in life expectancy, will live well into the 22nd century.
红色时间线一直延伸到现在，然后以绿色继续到未来。今天出生的许多儿童，即使预期寿命没有进一步增加，也将活到22世纪。

New vaccines, progress in clean, low-carbon energy, better cancer treatments – a range of future innovations could very much improve our living conditions and the environment around us. But, as I argue in a series of articles, there is one technology that could even more profoundly change our world: artificial intelligence (AI).
新疫苗、清洁低碳能源的进展、更好的癌症治疗方法——一系列未来的创新可以极大地改善我们的生活条件和我们周围的环境。但是，正如我在一系列文章中所论述的那样，有一种技术可以更深刻地改变我们的世界：人工智能（AI）。

One reason why artificial intelligence is such an important innovation is that intelligence is the main driver of innovation itself. This fast-paced technological change could speed up even more if it’s driven not only by humanity’s intelligence but also by artificial intelligence. If this happens, the change currently stretched out over decades might happen within a very brief time span of just a year. Possibly even faster.[4]
人工智能之所以是一项如此重要的创新，一个原因是智能是创新本身的主要驱动力。如果这种快节奏的技术变革不仅由人类的智慧驱动，而且由人工智能驱动，那么它可能会加速得更快。如果发生这种情况，目前长达数十年的变化可能会在短短一年的非常短的时间内发生。甚至可能更快.4

I think AI technology could have a fundamentally transformative impact on our world. In many ways, it is already changing our world, as I documented in this companion article. As this technology becomes more capable in the years and decades to come, it can give immense power to those who control it (and it poses the risk that it could escape our control entirely).
我认为人工智能技术可能会对我们的世界产生根本性的变革性影响。在许多方面，它已经在改变我们的世界，正如我在这篇配套文章中所记录的那样。随着这项技术在未来的几年和几十年里变得越来越强大，它可以给那些控制它的人带来巨大的力量（它构成了它可能完全脱离我们控制的风险）。

Such systems might seem hard to imagine today, but AI technology is advancing quickly. Many AI experts believe there is a real chance that human-level artificial intelligence will be developed within the next decades, as I documented in this article.
这样的系统在今天似乎很难想象，但人工智能技术正在迅速发展。正如我在本文中所记录的那样，许多人工智能专家认为，人类水平的人工智能很有可能在未来几十年内得到发展。

Technology will continue to change the world – we should all make sure that it changes it for the better

技术将继续改变世界——我们都应该确保它让世界变得更好

What is familiar to us today – photography, the radio, antibiotics, the Internet, or the International Space Station circling our planet – was unimaginable to our ancestors just a few generations ago. If your great-great-great grandparents could spend a week with you, they would be blown away by your everyday life.
我们今天所熟悉的东西——摄影、收音机、抗生素、互联网或环绕我们星球的国际空间站——对于我们的祖先来说，仅仅几代人以前是不可想象的。如果你的曾曾曾祖父母能和你一起度过一个星期，他们会被你的日常生活所震撼。

What I take away from this history is that I will likely see technologies in my lifetime that appear unimaginable to me today.
我从这段历史中得到的是，我可能会在有生之年看到今天对我来说无法想象的技术。

In addition to this trend towards increasingly rapid innovation, there is a second long-run trend. Technology has become increasingly powerful. While our ancestors wielded stone tools, we are building globe-spanning AI systems and technologies that can edit our genes.
除了这种创新速度越来越快的趋势之外，还有第二个长期趋势。技术变得越来越强大。当我们的祖先使用石器时，我们正在构建可以编辑我们基因的全球人工智能系统和技术。

Because of the immense power that technology gives those who control it, there is little that is as important as the question of which technologies get developed during our lifetimes. Therefore, I think it is a mistake to leave the question about the future of technology to the technologists. Which technologies are controlled by whom is one of the most important political questions of our time because of the enormous power these technologies convey to those who control them.
由于技术赋予了控制它的人巨大的力量，因此没有什么比在我们的有生之年开发哪些技术的问题更重要了。因此，我认为将有关技术未来的问题留给技术人员是错误的。哪些技术由谁控制是我们这个时代最重要的政治问题之一，因为这些技术向控制它们的人传达了巨大的力量。

We all should strive to gain the knowledge we need to contribute to an intelligent debate about the world we want to live in. To a large part, this means gaining knowledge and wisdom on the question of which technologies we want.
我们都应该努力获得我们需要的知识，以便为关于我们想要生活的世界的明智辩论做出贡献。在很大程度上，这意味着获得关于我们想要哪些技术的知识和智慧。

Continue reading: Our topic page on AI

Appendix: About the choice of visualization in this article

附录：关于本文中可视化的选择

The recent speed of technological change makes it difficult to picture the history of technology in one visualization. When you visualize this development on a linear timeline, then most of the timeline is almost empty, while all the action is crammed into the right corner:
最近技术变革的速度使得很难在一个可视化中描绘技术的历史。当你在线性时间线上可视化这个发展时，那么大部分时间线几乎是空的，而所有的动作都塞在了右上角：

In my large visualization here, I tried to avoid this problem and instead show the long history of technology in a way that lets you see when each technological breakthrough happened and how, within the last millennia, there was a continuous acceleration of technological change.
在我在这里的大可视化中，我试图避免这个问题，而是以一种方式展示技术的悠久历史，让你看到每个技术突破发生的时间，以及在过去的几千年里，技术变革是如何持续加速的。

Endnotes

尾注

1. The recent speed of technological change makes it difficult to picture the history of technology in one visualization. In the appendix, I show how this would look if it were linear.
   最近技术变革的速度使得很难在一个可视化中描绘技术的历史。在附录中，我展示了如果它是线性的，它会是什么样子。

2. It is, of course, difficult to assess when exactly the first stone tools were used.
   当然，很难评估第一种石器究竟是何时使用的。

The research by McPherron et al. (2010) suggested that it was at least 3.39 million years ago. This is based on two fossilized bones found in Dikika in Ethiopia, which showed “stone-tool cut marks for flesh removal and percussion marks for marrow access”. These marks were interpreted as being caused by meat consumption and provide the first evidence that one of our ancestors, Australopithecus afarensis, used stone tools.
McPherron等人（2010）的研究表明，它至少在339万年前。这是基于在埃塞俄比亚迪基卡发现的两块骨头化石，它们显示了“用于去除肉的石器切割痕迹和用于骨髓进入的敲击痕迹”。这些标记被解释为是由肉类消费引起的，并提供了我们祖先之一南方古猿使用石器的第一个证据。

The research by Harmand et al. (2015) provided evidence for stone tool use in today’s Kenya 3.3 million years ago.
Harmand 等人（2015 年）的研究为 330 万年前的今天肯尼亚使用石器提供了证据。

References: 引用：

McPherron et al. (2010) – Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia. Published in Nature.
McPherron et al. （2010） – 339万年前埃塞俄比亚迪基卡（Dikika）石器辅助食用动物组织的证据。发表在《自然》杂志上。

Harmand et al. (2015) – 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya. Published in Nature.
Harmand et al. （2015） – 来自肯尼亚西图尔卡纳 Lomekwi 3 的 330 万年前的石器。发表在《自然》杂志上。

3. Evidence for controlled fire use approximately 1 million years ago is provided by Berna et al. (2012) Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa, published in PNAS.
   Berna et al. （2012） 在《美国国家科学院院刊》（PNAS）上发表的《南非北开普省 Wonderwerk 洞穴 Acheulean 地层中原位火灾的微地层学证据》提供了大约 100 万年前受控火灾使用的证据。

The authors write: “The ability to control fire was a crucial turning point in human evolution, but the question of when hominins first developed this ability still remains. Here we show that micromorphological and Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy (mFTIR) analyses of intact sediments at the site of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa, provide unambiguous evidence—in the form of burned bone and ashed plant remains—that burning took place in the cave during the early Acheulean occupation, approximately 1.0 Ma. To the best of our knowledge, this is the earliest secure evidence for burning in an archaeological context.”
作者写道：“控制火的能力是人类进化的一个关键转折点，但古人类何时首次发展出这种能力的问题仍然存在。在这里，我们展示了对南非北开普省 Wonderwerk 洞穴遗址完整沉积物的微形态学和傅里叶变换红外显微光谱 （mFTIR） 分析，以烧焦的骨头和灰烬植物残骸的形式提供了明确的证据——燃烧发生在早期 Acheulean 占领期间，大约 1.0 马。据我们所知，这是考古背景下最早的燃烧证据。

4. This is what authors like Holden Karnofsky called ‘Process for Automating Scientific and Technological Advancement’ or PASTA. Some recent developments go in this direction: DeepMind’s AlphaFold helped to make progress on one of the large problems in biology, and they have also developed an AI system that finds new algorithms that are relevant to building a more powerful AI.
   这就是霍尔顿·卡诺夫斯基（Holden Karnofsky）等作家所说的“自动化科学和技术进步的过程”（PASTA）。最近的一些发展朝着这个方向发展：DeepMind的AlphaFold帮助在生物学中的一个大问题上取得了进展，他们还开发了一个人工智能系统，可以找到与构建更强大的人工智能相关的新算法。

Acknowledgments:

I would like to thank my colleagues Hannah Ritchie, Bastian Herre, Natasha Ahuja, Edouard Mathieu, Daniel Bachler, Charlie Giattino, and Pablo Rosado for their helpful comments on drafts of this essay and the visualization. Thanks also to Lizka Vaintrob and Ben Clifford for the conversation that initiated this visualization.

via:

• Technology over the long run: zoom out to see how dramatically the world can change within a lifetime - Our World in Data
  https://ourworldindata.org/technology-long-run