In 1962 at Rice University, JFK told the country about a dream he had, a dream to put a person on the moon by the end of the decade. The eponymous moonshot.
1962年,在萊斯大學, 約翰.甘乃迪總統 向人民宣告了一個他的夢想, 一個10年內要把 人類送到月球的夢想: 阿波羅登月計畫。
No one knew if it was possible to do but he made sure a plan was put in place to do it if it was possible. That's how great dreams are. Great dreams aren't just visions, they're visions coupled to strategies for making them real.
當時沒有人知道,這到底可不可行, 但只要有可能, 他就會擬定計畫讓它實現。 偉大的夢想就是這樣形成的。 偉大的夢想並不只是願景, 它們結合了願景與策略, 使夢想成真。
I have the incredible good fortune to work at a moonshot factory. At X -- formerly called Google X -- you'll find an aerospace engineer working alongside a fashion designer and former military ops commanders brainstorming with laser experts. These inventors, engineers and makers are dreaming up technologies that we hope can make the world a wonderful place.
我何其有幸可以在 「登月工廠」工作。 在 X 公司,之前被叫做 Google X , 你會看到航太工程師 與時尚設計師一起工作, 還有前軍隊指揮官與 雷射專家一起腦力激盪。 這些發明家、工程師、製造者 在為我們更美好的世界築夢。
We use the word "moonshots" to remind us to keep our visions big -- to keep dreaming. And we use the word "factory" to remind ourselves that we want to have concrete visions -- concrete plans to make them real.
我們使用「登月」這個字, 來提醒我們要目光遠大, 並持續夢想。 而我們使用「工廠」這個字, 是要提醒自己, 要有具體的願景、 具體的計畫,讓夢想成真。
Here's our moonshot blueprint. Number one: we want to find a huge problem in the world that affects many millions of people. Number two: we want to find or propose a radical solution for solving that problem. And then number three: there has to be some reason to believe that the technology for such a radical solution could actually be built.
這是我們的登月藍圖。 第一: 我們要找出在這世界上, 會影響好幾百萬人的重要問題。 第二: 我們要找出或提出一個, 可以徹底解決這個問題的方案。 第三: 我們有理由相信, 這個解決方案的科技 可以被實作出來。
But I have a secret for you. The moonshot factory is a messy place. But rather than avoid the mess, pretend it's not there, we've tried to make that our strength. We spend most of our time breaking things and trying to prove that we're wrong. That's it, that's the secret. Run at all the hardest parts of the problem first. Get excited and cheer, "Hey! How are we going to kill our project today?"
但我有個秘密要告訴各位。 登月工廠是一個混亂的地方。 但與其避開混亂 或假裝視而不見, 我們更需要的是發揮我們的實力。 我們花很多時間在突破現狀 並嘗試證明我們是錯的。 就這樣,這就是那個秘密。 先把問題最困難的地方 拿出來討論研究。 並為此感到刺激而且振奮: 「嘿!我們今天會如何 砍掉我們的專案?」
We've got this interesting balance going where we allow our unchecked optimism to fuel our visions. But then we also harness enthusiastic skepticism to breathe life, breathe reality into those visions.
我們在這樣有趣的 平衡中持續往前, 在一個盲目的樂觀中 推動我們的願景。 並裝備上積極的懷疑態度 把生命與實際注入到 我們的願景裡面。
I want to show you a few of the projects that we've had to leave behind on the cutting room floor, and also a few of the gems that at least so far, have not only survived that process, but have been accelerated by it.
我想向各位展示一些計畫, 一些我們必須留在工廠 淘汰掉的計畫, 及其中的一些璞玉, 那些倖存下來, 且在這樣的模式中, 得到加速發展的專案。
Last year we killed a project in automated vertical farming. This is some of the lettuce that we grew. One in nine people in the world suffers from undernourishment. So this is a moonshot that needs to happen. Vertical farming uses 10 times less water and a hundred times less land than conventional farming. And because you can grow the food close to where it's consumed, you don't have to transport it large distances. We made progress in a lot of the areas like automated harvesting and efficient lighting. But unfortunately, we couldn't get staple crops like grains and rice to grow this way. So we killed the project.
去年,我們砍掉了一個 自動的垂直耕種計畫。 這些是我們種植的生菜。 世界上九個人裡面就有一個人 有營養不良的問題。 所以這是一個需要 被解決的登月問題。 垂直耕種比傳統耕種 少了十倍的水量及百倍的土地。 當你可以在 消費當地直接耕種, 你不須要把食物 運送到很遠的地方。 我們在自動收割及 高效照明方面 下了很多的工夫去研發。 但很不幸, 用這種方式無法種出主食類的 農作物,像是,穀類和米食類。 所以,我們砍掉了這個專案。
Here's another huge problem. We pay enormous costs in resources and environmental damage to ship goods worldwide. Economic development of landlocked countries is limited by lack of shipping infrastructure. The radical solution? A lighter-than-air, variable-buoyancy cargo ship. This has the potential to lower, at least overall, the cost, time and carbon footprint of shipping without needing runways. We came up with this clever set of technical breakthroughs that together might make it possible for us to lower the cost enough that we could actually make these ships -- inexpensively enough in volume. But however cheap they would have been to make in volume it turned out that it was going to cost close to 200 million dollars to design and build the first one.
這裡有另一個重大問題。 我們付出了很高的資源 及環境破壞的成本, 把物品運送到全世界。 內陸國家的經濟發展, 受限於貨運基礎設施的缺乏。 有沒有一個徹底的解決方案呢? 一個比空氣還輕,可調節 浮力的空中貨運船。 至少這是目前最有潛力 可以降低運輸時間、成本及 碳足跡的最佳方案, 而且它不需要公路。 我們想出了這些聰明的 突破性的技術, 結合這些科技, 可讓我們降低成本, 使每單位容量的建造成本, 低至可以接受。 然而這個相對便宜的價格, 是建立在容量夠大的前題上。 然後,我們發現, 設計及建造第一台出來, 得花兩億美金。
200 million dollars is just way too expensive. Because X is structured with these tight feedback loops of making mistakes and learning and new designs, we can't spend 200 million dollars to get the first data point about whether we're on the right track or not. If there's an Achilles' heel in one our projects, we want to know it now, up front, not way down the road. So we killed this project, too.
兩億美金實在是太昂貴了。 「X團隊」架構在迅速的反饋, 它重複地從錯誤中學習 並提出新的設計。 我們不能花兩億美金 只為得到第一筆資料 來證明我們是否在 正確的軌道上。 如果我們的專案 有一個致命的缺點, 我們想要第一時間就知道, 而不是等事情做了才發現。 所以,我們也把這個專案砍了。
Discovering a major flaw in a project doesn't always mean that it ends the project. Sometimes it actually gets us onto a more productive path.
發現了專案的重大缺陷, 並不意味著專案就此結束。 它實際上有時候,這會帶領 我們到更有效率的道路上。
This is our fully self-driving vehicle prototype, which we built without a steering wheel or break pedal. But that wasn't actually our goal when we started.
這是我們全自動駕駛車的原型, 一部不用方向盤及 剎車踏板的自駕車。 但這並不是我們 一開始的目標。
With 1.2 million people dying on the roads globally every year, building a car that drives itself was a natural moonshot to take. Three and a half years ago, when we had these Lexus, retrofitted, self-driving cars in testing, they were doing so well, we gave them out to other Googlers to find out what they thought of the experience. And what we discovered was that our plan to have the cars do almost all the driving and just hand over to the users in case of emergency was a really bad plan. It wasn't safe because the users didn't do their job. They didn't stay alert in case the car needed to hand control back to them.
當全球每年有 120萬人死於車禍, 建造一部自駕車, 自然成為登月計畫的願景之一。 3年半前, 當時我們用 Lexus 改造的 自動駕駛車做測試, 他們做的很棒, 我們邀請 Googler 來試駕, 看看他們體驗後的想法。 但我們卻發現到, 讓車子長時間保持自動駕駛, 在緊急狀況, 把控制權交還給使用者 其實是個很糟的計畫。 它並不安全, 因為使用者沒有 盡到他們的責任。 當車子需要把控制權 交還給使用者時, 使用者並沒有保持警覺。
This was a major crisis for the team. It sent them back to the drawing board. And they came up with a beautiful, new perspective. Aim for a car where you're truly a passenger. You tell the car where you want to go, you push a button and it takes you from point A to point B by itself.
這是團隊的一大災難。 這把團隊人員再度送回白板前, 結果他們想出了一個漂亮的, 全新的觀點。 專注於把使用者設定在 完全是一位乘客的角度上來思考, 你只要告訴車子你要去哪, 按下按鈕後, 它自己就會把你從A點帶到B點。
We're really grateful that we had this insight as early on in the project as we did. And it's shaped everything we've done since then. And now our cars have self-driven more than 1.4 million miles, and they're out everyday on the streets of Mountain View, California and Austin, Texas.
我們很幸運, 能在專案的早期, 就洞悉到這一點。 這個概念形塑了我們 接下來的所有設計。 我們的車子目前 已經行駛了140萬英哩, 它們現在每天在 加州山景市及德州 奧斯丁市的街上跑。
The cars team shifted their perspective. This is one of X's mantras. Sometimes shifting your perspective is more powerful than being smart.
汽車團隊改變了他們的觀點。 這是 X 的魔法咒語之一。 有時候轉換你的想法 比天賦異稟更有力量。
Take wind energy. It's one of my favorite examples of perspective shifting. There's no way that we're going to build a better standard wind turbine than the experts in that industry. But we found a way to get up higher into the sky, and so get access to faster, more consistent winds, and so more energy without needing hundreds of tons of steel to get there.
談一下風力發電。 這是其中一個我最愛的 改變觀點的例子。 我們不可能打造出 比產業專家所設計 更優秀的風力渦輪機標準 但我們找到方法 去接近天空的上層。 那裡有更快、更持續的風, 而且不需要好幾百噸的鋼鐵 去取得更多的風力。
Our Makani energy kite rises up from its perch by spinning up those propellers along its wing. And it pulls out a tether as it rises, pulling energy up through the tether. Once the tether's all the way out, it goes into crosswind circles in the sky. And now those propellers that lifted it up have become flying turbines. And that sends energy back down the tether.
我們的 Makani 能量風箏, 是藉由機翼上的螺旋槳旋轉 將它從連桿上推升上去。 當它飛起來後, 會把繫繩跟著拉出來, 並透過繫繩取得能量。 一旦繫繩全部被拉出來後, 它就會在天空中開始旋轉。 現在這些推升風箏上來的螺旋槳, 已經變成飛行渦輪機。 它會把能量透過繫繩傳送回來。
We haven't yet found a way to kill this project. And the longer it survives that pressure, the more excited we get that this could become a cheaper and more deployable form of wind energy for the world.
我們還沒找到 可以砍掉這個專案的理由。 這個專案存活越久,我們就越興奮, 因為它有機會變成更便宜 又可以部署到全世界 的風力電能。
Probably the craziest sounding project we have is Project Loon. We're trying to make balloon-powered Internet. A network of balloons in the stratosphere that beam an internet connection down to rural and remote areas of the world. This could bring online as many as four billion more people, who today have little or no internet connection.
Loon 計劃可能是, 我們最瘋狂的專案。 我們嘗試要做出 熱氣球動力網路。 一個在大氣層中 由熱氣球組成的網路, 它可以為郊區及世界上的 偏遠地區提供網路服務。 這可以讓至今缺乏網路 連線的40億人口 連結到網際網路上來。
But you can't just take a cell tower, strap it to a balloon and stick it in the sky. The winds are too strong, it would be blown away. And the balloons are too high up to tie it to the ground.
但你不能直接把手機基地台 綁起來黏在熱氣球上 然後送上天空。 風太大了,會被吹走。 而且熱氣球飛很高, 沒辦法綁在地上。
Here comes the crazy moment. What if, instead, we let the balloons drift and we taught them how to sail the winds to go where the needed to go? It turns out the stratosphere has winds that are going in quite different speeds and directions in thin strata. So we hoped that using smart algorithms and wind data from around the world, we could maneuver the balloons a bit, getting them to go up and down just a tiny bit in the stratosphere to grab those winds going in those different directions and speeds. The idea is to have enough balloons so as one balloon floats out of your area, there's another balloon ready to float into place, handing off the internet connection, just like your phone hands off between cell towers as you drive down the freeway.
瘋狂時刻來臨了。 如果要是,換個角度想, 我們讓熱氣球用飄的呢? 我們如何教它們駕馭風力 去到它們需要去的地方呢? 事實證明,大氣層中 有一個薄的氣層區域 裡面的風有不同的速度與方向。 我們希望透過聰明的演算法及 來自世界各地的風力資料, 讓我們可以調動熱氣球, 讓熱氣球在大氣層裡上上下下, 抓住不同方向與速度的風。 這個想法是利用夠多的氣球, 當一顆熱氣球飄出你的區域時, 馬上有另一顆熱氣球 替補進來這一區, 送出網路的連結訊號, 就像是你的手機從高速公路下來後, 訊號交換到另一個基地台一樣。
We get how crazy that vision sounds -- there's the name of the project to remind us of that. So since 2012, the Loon team has prioritized the work that seems the most difficult and so the most likely to kill their project.
我們對這個計畫 的規模感到瘋狂, 專案的名稱隨時 提醒著我們莫忘初衷。 從2012年起, Loon 團隊優先處理 最困難及最可能結束專案的項目
The first thing that they did was try to get a Wi-Fi connection from a balloon in the stratosphere down to an antenna on the ground. It worked. And I promise you there were bets that it wasn't going to. So we kept going.
他們做的第一件事, 是試著把大氣層裡面 熱氣球的 Wi-Fi 訊號, 傳送到地面上的天線。 它成功了。 我向各位保證, 真的曾有人打賭這個辦不到。 所以,我們繼續前進。
Could we get the balloon to talk directly to handsets, so that we didn't need the antenna as an intermediary receiver? Yeah.
我們可以讓熱氣球 與手機直接對話嗎? 這樣我們就不需要天線 作為居間的接收器了? 可以的。
Could we get the balloon bandwidth high enough so it was a real Internet connection? So that people could have something more than just SMS? The early tests weren't even a megabit per second, but now we can do up to 15 megabits per second. Enough to watch a TED Talk.
我們可以把熱氣球的頻寬加大, 大到跟真的網路連結一樣快嗎? 所以人們除了簡訊之外, 還可以得到更多的功能嗎? 早期測試時,每秒的 傳送速度甚至不到 1MB , 但現在我們已經達到 每秒 15MB 以上的傳送速度, 足夠看 TED 的演講影片了。
Could we get the balloons to talk to each other through the sky so that we could reach our signal deeper into rural areas? Check.
我們可以讓熱氣球彼此溝通, 把訊號傳到更深遠的郊區嗎? 沒問題。
Could we get balloons the size of a house to stay up for more than 100 days, while costing less than five percent of what traditional, long-life balloons have cost to make? Yes. In the end. But I promise you, you name it, we had to try it to get there. We made round, silvery balloons. We made giant pillow-shaped balloons. We made balloons the size of a blue whale. We busted a lot of balloons.
我們可以製造出跟房子一樣大的 熱氣球,在天空停留超過 100 天, 讓它比傳統製造方式生產的氣球更耐用、 而成本只要原本的5%嗎? 是的。結果可以。 但我向你保證,你想的到的, 我們都已經嘗試做過了。 我們有做過圓形的銀色熱氣球。 我們做過超大枕頭型熱氣球。 我們做過藍鯨型的熱氣球。 我們砍破一大堆的熱氣球。
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
Since one of the things that was most likely to kill the Loon project was whether we could guide the balloons through the sky, one of our most important experiments was putting a balloon inside a balloon.
因為 Loon 專案的關鍵難題是, 我們是否能夠 引導熱氣球穿越天際。 因此我們最重要的實驗之一, 是把一個熱氣球裝在另一個裡面。
So there are two compartments here, one with air and then one with helium. The balloon pumps air in to make itself heavier, or lets air out to make it lighter. And these weight changes allow it to rise or fall, and that simple movement of the balloon is its steering mechanism. It floats up or down, hoping to grab winds going in the speed and direction that it wants.
製造出兩個分離的空間, 一個裝空氣,另一個裝氦氣。 熱氣球打進空氣 來增加它自身的重量, 或者把空氣放掉 來減輕重量。 這些重量的改變, 可以讓熱氣球上升或下降, 這個簡單的動作, 是操縱熱氣球方向的機制。 它上下飄浮, 去抓取適當的風向, 達到它想要的速度與方向。
But is that good enough for it to navigate through the world? Barely at first, but better all the time.
但這就足以讓它 在全世界航行了嗎? 剛開始很困難, 但漸漸的好轉起來了。
This particular balloon, our latest balloon, can navigate a two-mile vertical stretch of sky and can sail itself to within 500 meters of where it wants to go from 20,000 kilometers away.
這個獨特的熱氣球, 是我們最新的版本, 它可以在天空 垂直上下航行兩英哩, 而且可以自兩萬公里外, 自己航行到的目的地, 誤差在 500 公尺內。
We have lots more to do in terms of fine-tuning the system and reducing costs. But last year, a balloon built inexpensively went around the world 19 times over 187 days. So we're going to keep going.
我們還有很多改進的空間, 包括微調系統還有降低成本。 但去年,我們有一個低成本的熱氣球, 已經環繞地球19 圈,超過187 天。 所以,這個專案會繼續前進。
(Applause)
(掌聲)
Our balloons today are doing pretty much everything a complete system needs to do. We're in discussions with telcos around the world, and we're going to fly over places like Indonesia for real service testing this year.
今日,我們的熱氣球, 已經幾乎是一個完整的系統。 我們正在與世界各地 的電信公司討論, 我們今年打算飛越印尼, 做真實服務的測試。
This probably all sounds too good to be true, and you're right. Being audacious and working on big, risky things makes people inherently uncomfortable.
這聽起來好到令人難以置信, 你是對的。 參與大膽的創新, 成就巨大而高風險的事物 會讓人感到如履薄冰。
You cannot yell at people and force them to fail fast. People resist. They worry. "What will happen to me if I fail? Will people laugh at me? Will I be fired?"
你不能對著人們吼叫, 強迫他們趕快失敗。 人們會抗拒。他們擔心: 「如果失敗了,我會發生甚麼事? 其它人會笑我嗎? 我會失去工作嗎?」
I started with our secret. I'm going to leave you with how we actually make it happen. The only way to get people to work on big, risky things -- audacious ideas -- and have them run at all the hardest parts of the problem first, is if you make that the path of least resistance for them.
讓我從我們的祕密開始講起。 我會告訴各位,我們實際上 是如何讓它發生的。 要讓人們勇於任事,冒高風險, 開創大膽想法, 並直入所有問題最困難的核心。 唯一方法是... 為他們減低這條路上的阻力。
We work hard at X to make it safe to fail. Teams kill their ideas as soon as the evidence is on the table because they're rewarded for it. They get applause from their peers. Hugs and high fives from their manager, me in particular. They get promoted for it. We have bonused every single person on teams that ended their projects, from teams as small as two to teams of more than 30.
在 X 公司,我們盡其所能 讓專案安全著地。 一旦證據攤在眼前, 團隊就中止他們的計劃。 因為,他們會因此而得到報償。 他們從同事那邊獲得掌聲。 從他們的經理,特別是我這邊, 獲得擁抱並擊掌。 他們會因此獲得晉升。 當他們結束了他們的專案, 我們還會分紅給每一個人, 小至 2 人、大至 30 人的團隊都有。
We believe in dreams at the moonshot factory. But enthusiastic skepticism is not the enemy of boundless optimism. It's optimism's perfect partner. It unlocks the potential in every idea. We can create the future that's in our dreams.
在登月工廠,我們相信夢想。 但積極的懷疑態度 並不是無邊際的樂觀主義的敵人。 它是樂觀主義的最佳夥伴。 它打開了每一個想法的潛力。 我們可以創造 我們夢想中的未來。
Thank you very much.
非常謝謝各位。
(Applause)
(掌聲)