What technology can we really apply to reducing global poverty? And what I found was quite surprising. We started looking at things like death rates in the 20th century, and how they'd been improved, and very simple things turned out. You'd think maybe antibiotics made more difference than clean water, but it's actually the opposite. And so very simple things -- off-the-shelf technologies that we could easily find on the then-early Web -- would clearly make a huge difference to that problem.
什么技术可以真正帮助我们减少全球贫困? 我找到的答案让我颇为吃惊。 我们在二十世纪开始关注死亡率这样的事情, 以及如何改善这些指标。找到的答案其实很简单。 你也许认为抗生素所做的贡献大于净水, 其实答案恰恰相反。 所以很简单的事物,那些能很容易在早期的网络上 找到的现成的技术, 就能解决问题。
But I also, in looking at more powerful technologies and nanotechnology and genetic engineering and other new emerging kind of digital technologies, became very concerned about the potential for abuse. If you think about it, in history, a long, long time ago we dealt with the problem of an individual abusing another individual. We came up with something -- the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not kill. That's a, kind of a one-on-one thing. We organized into cities. We had many people. And to keep the many from tyrannizing the one, we came up with concepts like individual liberty. And then, to have to deal with large groups, say, at the nation-state level, and we had to have mutual non-aggression, or through a series of conflicts, we eventually came to a rough international bargain to largely keep the peace.
与此同时,当我开始关注更加高级的技术, 像纳米技术、基因工程以及其他一些新兴的 数字技术,我开始变得非常担心, 担心这些技术将来会被滥用。 想一想历史上,很久很久以前, 我们要解决人类个体之间相互虐待的问题, 于是摩西十诫应运而生:你不能杀人。 那时还是一对一的事情。 然后人们聚合成很多城邦,从此很多人生活在一起。 为了防止很多人欺负一个人, 人们又发明了“个人自由”这一概念, 再后来,为了对付更大的社会群体, 比如说国家之间, 人们就必须制定互不侵犯协定, 或者在经历了一系列的冲突之后,最终达成 一个简要的国际合约来维护基本的和平。
But now we have a new situation, really what people call an asymmetric situation, where technology is so powerful that it extends beyond a nation-state. It's not the nation-states that have potential access to mass destruction, but individuals. And this is a consequence of the fact that these new technologies tend to be digital. We saw genome sequences. You can download the gene sequences of pathogens off the Internet if you want to, and clearly someone recently -- I saw in a science magazine -- they said, well, the 1918 flu is too dangerous to FedEx around. If people want to use it in their labs for working on research, just reconstruct it yourself, because, you know, it might break in FedEx. So that this is possible to do this is not deniable.
今天我们又有了新的挑战,人们认为这是个 不对称的形势。技术已经发展得非常强大, 已经超越了国界。 大规模杀伤性武器不再只是被控制在 国家的手中,而有可能被个人掌控。 这是新技术数字化的一个直接后果。 我们都见过基因组序列, 如果你想要知道病原体的基因序列, 你可以从因特网下载到。 而且我从《科学》杂志上看到,最近就有人这么做了。 嗯——,1918年的流感病毒用联邦快递(FedEx)传播也许太危险了些。 如果你想用这些基因组在实验室里做研究, 只要自己进行重组就可以了, 因为我们都知道联邦快递可能会毁掉这些基因组。 这也就是说这件事情的可行性已经毋庸置疑了,
So individuals in small groups super-empowered by access to these kinds of self-replicating technologies, whether it be biological or other, are clearly a danger in our world. And the danger is that they can cause roughly what's a pandemic. And we really don't have experience with pandemics, and we're also not very good as a society at acting to things we don't have direct and sort of gut-level experience with. So it's not in our nature to pre-act. And in this case, piling on more technology doesn't solve the problem, because it only super-empowers people more.
那些手中掌握着此类自我复制技术的人们 就有可能对世界构成威胁,无论是生物技术 还是其他技术。 危险的是这些技术可能引发大规模的流行疾病, 而我们人类在对付流行疾病方面的确没什么经验, 而且对于这些并没有直接和一目了然答案的问题, 我们也不擅长作为一个整体来行动。 也就是说未雨绸缪并不是我们的天性。 这种情况下,发明更多的技术并不能解决问题, 因为这只能让人类能的本领变得越发强大。
So the solution has to be, as people like Russell and Einstein and others imagine in a conversation that existed in a much stronger form, I think, early in the 20th century, that the solution had to be not just the head but the heart. You know, public policy and moral progress. The bargain that gives us civilization is a bargain to not use power. We get our individual rights by society protecting us from others not doing everything they can do but largely doing only what is legal. And so to limit the danger of these new things, we have to limit, ultimately, the ability of individuals to have access, essentially, to pandemic power. We also have to have sensible defense, because no limitation is going to prevent a crazy person from doing something. And you know, and the troubling thing is that it's much easier to do something bad than to defend against all possible bad things, so the offensive uses really have an asymmetric advantage.
所以解决方案就在于,正像卢梭和爱因斯坦等人 在20世纪初在一种更强形式的对话中 提到的一样, 解决方案必须不光存在于脑中,而且在心中, 也就是我们通常说的政策和道德的发展进步。 人类文明正是在避免使用过多权力的前提下建立起来的。 个人权利之所以得到保障,就是因为社会通过法律规定了 什么是合法的行为,从而防止人们为所欲为。 因此要想最终控制这些新事物带来的潜在危险,我们就必须 将有条件接触那些有大规模破坏能力的 群体的能力控制在一定的限度之内。 我们也必须同时具有一定的防卫能力,因为没有什么限制 是能够真正阻止一个失去理智的人做任何疯狂的事情的。 而且大家也知道,最头疼的事情是 干坏事情要比对所有坏事进行防御 要容易得多。 因此进行攻击(相对防御而言)的确是有一些“非对称”优势的。
So these are the kind of thoughts I was thinking in 1999 and 2000, and my friends told me I was getting really depressed, and they were really worried about me. And then I signed a book contract to write more gloomy thoughts about this and moved into a hotel room in New York with one room full of books on the Plague, and you know, nuclear bombs exploding in New York where I would be within the circle, and so on. And then I was there on September 11th, and I stood in the streets with everyone. And it was quite an experience to be there. I got up the next morning and walked out of the city, and all the sanitation trucks were parked on Houston Street and ready to go down and start taking the rubble away. And I walked down the middle, up to the train station, and everything below 14th Street was closed. It was quite a compelling experience, but not really, I suppose, a surprise to someone who'd had his room full of the books. It was always a surprise that it happened then and there, but it wasn't a surprise that it happened at all.
以上这些就是我在1999和2000年所想到的。 我的朋友告诉我说我那时候变得十分忧郁, 他们都很替我担心。 在那之后我又签了一份约稿,要把这些让人忧郁的想法结集出版, 为此我住进了纽约的一家酒店, 酒店的房间里堆满了关于那些想法的书籍, 还有大家都知道的在纽约发生的核炸弹爆炸, 就发生在离我不远的地方,诸如此类。 然后就是9.11,当时我就在那里。 我跟所有人一样站在街头。 那可是个相当难忘的经历。 我第二天早晨起来后走在城市当中, 所有的环卫车辆集结在休斯顿大街, 准备前往出事地点清理那些爆炸垃圾, 我一路走到地铁车站, 14街以下所有的街头店铺都关闭了。 这确实是一次不小的经历,但我想对于我这个 拥有一屋子这类书籍的人来说也许并不应该感到那么意外。 大家会对偶发事件会感到惊讶 但这件事情迟早会发生,这本身并不是个意外。
And everyone then started writing about this. Thousands of people started writing about this. And I eventually abandoned the book, and then Chris called me to talk at the conference. I really don't talk about this anymore because, you know, there's enough frustrating and depressing things going on. But I agreed to come and say a few things about this. And I would say that we can't give up the rule of law to fight an asymmetric threat, which is what we seem to be doing because of the present, the people that are in power, because that's to give up the thing that makes civilization. And we can't fight the threat in the kind of stupid way we're doing, because a million-dollar act causes a billion dollars of damage, causes a trillion dollar response which is largely ineffective and arguably, probably almost certainly, has made the problem worse. So we can't fight the thing with a million-to-one cost, one-to-a-million cost-benefit ratio.
在那之后所有人都开始谈论这件事情, 成千上万的人开始动笔写这件事情。 我最终放弃了那本书的写作,接着克里斯给我打电话 让我在这个大会上发言。我实在是不想再讨论这件事情, 因为我们都知道,周围已经有足够多让我们沮丧和忧郁的事情了。 但我还是答应来这里讲几件与此相关的事情。 我要说:我们不能放弃 对抗这种不对称威胁的原则, 我们也正在做着, 因为当前的状况, 目前的当权者 因为他们在放弃人类文明的保障。 我们也不能使用愚蠢的方法来赢得这场战争, 因为一个百万美元的提案 可能引发一亿美元的损失,继而引发一万亿美元的响应救援, 而这些救援大部分是低效而有争议的,基本上可以肯定地说, 会让原有的问题雪上加霜。 也就是说,我们不能用1百万比1的付出和 1比1百万的收益来解决问题。
So after giving up on the book -- and I had the great honor to be able to join Kleiner Perkins about a year ago, and to work through venture capital on the innovative side, and to try to find some innovations that could address what I saw as some of these big problems. Things where, you know, a factor of 10 difference can make a factor of 1,000 difference in the outcome. I've been amazed in the last year at the incredible quality and excitement of the innovations that have come across my desk. It's overwhelming at times. I'm very thankful for Google and Wikipedia so I can understand at least a little of what people are talking about who come through the doors.
在我放弃了写那本书的计划之后,我很荣幸 在大约一年前开始跟Kleiner Perkins一起 致力于一些创新发明的风险投资, 希望能找到一些创新项目来帮助解决 一些在我看来是大问题的问题。 对于这些问题,我们都知道的,方法上哪怕只有十分的差异 都可能导致在结果上千分的差异。 过去一年里我不断地被送到我桌面上来的 创新成果的质量和让人兴奋的程度感到惊讶, 有时候甚至让我彻底折服。感谢Google和Wikipedia, 至少能帮助我理解那些来找我的 人们所说的是什么。
But I wanted to share with you three areas that I'm particularly excited about and that relate to the problems that I was talking about in the Wired article. The first is this whole area of education, and it really relates to what Nicholas was talking about with a $100 computer. And that is to say that there's a lot of legs left in Moore's Law. The most advanced transistors today are at 65 nanometers, and we've seen, and I've had the pleasure to invest in, companies that give me great confidence that we'll extend Moore's Law all the way down to roughly the 10 nanometer scale. Another factor of, say, six in dimensional reduction, which should give us about another factor of 100 in raw improvement in what the chips can do. And so, to put that in practical terms, if something costs about 1,000 dollars today, say, the best personal computer you can buy, that might be its cost, I think we can have that in 2020 for 10 dollars. Okay? Now, just imagine what that $100 computer will be in 2020 as a tool for education.
但我今天想要分享让我最为兴奋的 三个领域,这三个领域跟我给Wired写的文章里 提到的事情是相关的。 第一个领域是教育。 这个领域跟Nicholas所提到的”百元电脑“密切相关。 也就是说摩尔定律其实还有很大的发展空间 如今最先进的晶体管只有65纳米, 我们也看到,事实上我甚至有幸投资这样的一些公司, 这些公司让我确信我们可以将摩尔定律加以扩展, 一直扩展到大约10纳米左右的范围。 尺寸每缩小6倍, 就能使芯片的效率提高大约100倍。 说的实际一些: 今天成本是一千元的东西, 比如说现在能买到的最好的个人电脑大约就是这个价钱, 那么到了2020年它的成本就变成了10块钱,对吧? 那么设想一下到那个时候用一百元的电脑 作为教育工具将会是什么样的情形。
I think the challenge for us is -- I'm very certain that that will happen, the challenge is, will we develop the kind of educational tools and things with the net to let us take advantage of that device? I'd argue today that we have incredibly powerful computers, but we don't have very good software for them. And it's only in retrospect, after the better software comes along, and you take it and you run it on a ten-year-old machine, you say, God, the machine was that fast? I remember when they took the Apple Mac interface and they put it back on the Apple II. The Apple II was perfectly capable of running that kind of interface, we just didn't know how to do it at the time. So given that we know and should believe -- because Moore's Law's been, like, a constant, I mean, it's just been very predictable progress over the last 40 years or whatever. We can know what the computers are going to be like in 2020. It's great that we have initiatives to say, let's go create the education and educate people in the world, because that's a great force for peace. And we can give everyone in the world a $100 computer or a $10 computer in the next 15 years.
我想对我们来说真正的挑战, 我相当肯定这是会发生的,真正的挑战就是, 我们能否开发出合适的教育工具,在互联网的帮助下, 能让我们充分发挥硬件的效率? 我个人认为:我们有强大得让人难以置信的计算机硬件, 但我们还没有很好的软件来充分利用这些计算机。 每次都是当新的软件出来以后, 我们把它装在十年前的机器上,然后你惊讶的发现 天啊,那台机器原来有那么快啊? 我记得当他们把Apple Mac的界面 重新装到Apple II上去, Apple II 能够完全正常的运行那样的界面, 我们当时只是不知道该怎么去做。 所以我们知道,并且应该相信, 由于摩尔定律就像是个常数, 也就是说受它影响,技术的进步在过去的40年左右的时间里 是相当有预知性的。 我们可以预测出2020年的计算机会是什么样子。 如果我们能够争取主动, 致力于教育发展,努力去教育周围的人们, 这将会是一件大好事,因为教育是制造和平的强有力工具。 而且我们能够在15年后给每个人一台 一百块钱或者10块钱的电脑。
The second area that I'm focusing on is the environmental problem, because that's clearly going to put a lot of pressure on this world. We'll hear a lot more about that from Al Gore very shortly. The thing that we see as the kind of Moore's Law trend that's driving improvement in our ability to address the environmental problem is new materials. We have a challenge, because the urban population is growing in this century from two billion to six billion in a very short amount of time. People are moving to the cities. They all need clean water, they need energy, they need transportation, and we want them to develop in a green way. We're reasonably efficient in the industrial sectors. We've made improvements in energy and resource efficiency, but the consumer sector, especially in America, is very inefficient. But these new materials bring such incredible innovations that there's a strong basis for hope that these things will be so profitable that they can be brought to the market.
第二个领域是对环境问题的关注, 因为很明显这个问题将给这个世界施加很多压力。 我们马上将会听到Al Gore来谈论这个问题。 在这个领域能遵循摩尔定律来 提高我们解决环境问题的能力 的技术则是新兴材料的应用。 然而我们有个严峻的挑战,因为在本世纪 短短的一段时间内,城市人口已经从 20亿增加到了60亿。人们在往城市迁徙。 城市需要干净的水源,需要能量,需要便利的交通, 而我们希望这些都能在”绿色“的基础上发展起来。 我们在工业界的环保做的还是相对有效的, 在能源和资源的有效利用方面取得了不少进步, 然而在消费领域,尤其是在美国,能源利用效率很低。 但这些新材料的出现带来了令人难以置信的革新, 从而让我们很有理由相信这些新生事物将会 带来很大的收益,从而很快被市场化。
And I want to give you a specific example of a new material that was discovered 15 years ago. If we take carbon nanotubes, you know, Iijima discovered them in 1991, they just have incredible properties. And these are the kinds of things we're going to discover as we start to engineer at the nano scale. Their strength: they're almost the strongest material, tensile strength material known. They're very, very stiff. They stretch very, very little. In two dimensions, if you make, like, a fabric out of them, they're 30 times stronger than Kevlar. And if you make a three-dimensional structure, like a buckyball, they have all sorts of incredible properties. If you shoot a particle at them and knock a hole in them, they repair themselves; they go zip and they repair the hole in femtoseconds, which is not -- is really quick. (Laughter) If you shine a light on them, they produce electricity. In fact, if you flash them with a camera they catch on fire. If you put electricity on them, they emit light. If you run current through them, you can run 1,000 times more current through one of these than through a piece of metal. You can make both p- and n-type semiconductors, which means you can make transistors out of them. They conduct heat along their length but not across -- well, there is no width, but not in the other direction if you stack them up; that's a property of carbon fiber also. If you put particles in them, and they go shooting out the tip -- they're like miniature linear accelerators or electron guns. The inside of the nanotubes is so small -- the smallest ones are 0.7 nanometers -- that it's basically a quantum world. It's a strange place inside a nanotube.
我想跟各位分享一个十五年前发现的 新物质的具体例子。 大家都知道碳纳米管是lijima在1991年发现的。 这种材料有着优秀的特性, 这些特性是技术发展到 纳米级的时候才能发现的。 这些材料的优势是:它们几乎是最强壮的, 在已知的伸张力材料中最强的。 它们非常僵硬,拉伸程度非常非常小。 在二维情况下,比如说用它们来做布料, 它们要比纤维B坚固30倍。 如果你要用它们来做三维物体,比如说巴基球, 它们则拥有各种令人难以置信的优秀特性。 如果你用一个颗粒物质在它们表面上射一个洞, 它们会进行自我修复。它们会在几个飞秒之内 完成修复,即便不是飞秒,那速度也够快的 (笑声) 如果你用光照射它们,它们则会产生电流。 事实上,如果你用照相机的闪光灯照,它们会起火。 如果你给它们通电,它们会发光。 如果你让它们导电,它们可以携带的电流 是一块金属所携带电流的1000倍。 你可以用它们来做p型或n型半导体, 也就是说你可以用它们来制造晶体管。 它们在长度方向上导热,而不是纵向 事实上它们并没有宽度,如果你把它们堆起来 它们不会朝另一个方向导热。这也是碳纤维的一个特性。 如果你把颗粒物质放到它们里面,颗粒们就会从一端射出, 就像一个小型的线性加速器或者电子枪。 纳米管的内部是非常小的, 最小的也就0.7纳米, 这基本上就是个量子世界。 纳米管内部的确是个奇怪的地方。
And so we begin to see, and we've seen business plans already, where the kind of things Lisa Randall's talking about are in there. I had one business plan where I was trying to learn more about Witten's cosmic dimension strings to try to understand what the phenomenon was going on in this proposed nanomaterial. So inside of a nanotube, we're really at the limit here. So what we see is with these and other new materials that we can do things with different properties -- lighter, stronger -- and apply these new materials to the environmental problems. New materials that can make water, new materials that can make fuel cells work better, new materials that catalyze chemical reactions, that cut pollution and so on. Ethanol -- new ways of making ethanol. New ways of making electric transportation. The whole green dream -- because it can be profitable. And we've dedicated -- we've just raised a new fund, we dedicated 100 million dollars to these kinds of investments. We believe that Genentech, the Compaq, the Lotus, the Sun, the Netscape, the Amazon, the Google in these fields are yet to be found, because this materials revolution will drive these things forward.
于是我们开始看到一些商业计划已经开始形成, 就像是Lisa Randall的演讲中所提到的那些。 在我的一个商业计划中,我试图了解更多关于 Witten的宇宙弦维理论,从而更好的理解 这些纳米材料内部究竟发生的是什么现象。 对纳米管内部的情况我们了解的很有限。 对于这些以及其他一些新材料我们所能看到的是 我们能利用它们的一些特殊性质,比如更轻、更坚固,来做一些事情, 然后把这些新材料应用到解决环境问题上来。 比如可以合成水的材料, 可以提高燃料电池性能的材料, 可以催化化学反应,从而 减少污染的材料,等等。 还有乙醇,制造乙醇的新方法, 实现电子交通工具的新方法, 整个的这个”绿色梦想“,因为它是有利可图的。 而且我们已经开始这方面的努力了:我们刚刚建起一项新的基金, 投入了1亿美元对这类项目进行投资。 我们相信这些领域中类似Genetech,Compaq,Lotus,Sun, Netscape, Amazon以及Google 这样的(具有带头羊作用)公司尚待建立,因为这些新材料的革新® 会推动这些领域的各项事业向前发展
The third area that we're working on, and we just announced last week -- we were all in New York. We raised 200 million dollars in a specialty fund to work on a pandemic in biodefense. And to give you an idea of the last fund that Kleiner raised was a $400 million fund, so this for us is a very substantial fund. And what we did, over the last few months -- well, a few months ago, Ray Kurzweil and I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about how publishing the 1918 genome was very dangerous. And John Doerr and Brook and others got concerned, [unclear], and we started looking around at what the world was doing about being prepared for a pandemic. And we saw a lot of gaps.
第三个让我们感兴趣的领域, 我们上周刚刚在纽约宣布的, 我们募集了2亿美元建立了一个 用来对付生物防御系统流行疾病的特殊基金。 Kleiliner最近募集的一笔基金是4亿美元, 这对我们来说是一笔很重要的资金。 我们近几个月来,实际上是几个月之前,所做的事情, Ray Kurzweil 和我为纽约时报写了一篇特稿, 是关于1918年公布基因组序列这件事是多么的危险。 John Doerr,Brook和其他一些人变得担忧起来, 然后我们开始检视当时的人们是如何 为流行病做准备的。我们发现了很多纰漏。
And so we asked ourselves, you know, can we find innovative things that will go fill these gaps? And Brooks told me in a break here, he said he's found so much stuff he can't sleep, because there's so many great technologies out there, we're essentially buried. And we need them, you know. We have one antiviral that people are talking about stockpiling that still works, roughly. That's Tamiflu. But Tamiflu -- the virus is resistant. It is resistant to Tamiflu. We've discovered with AIDS we need cocktails to work well so that the viral resistance -- we need several anti-virals. We need better surveillance. We need networks that can find out what's going on. We need rapid diagnostics so that we can tell if somebody has a strain of flu which we have only identified very recently. We've got to be able to make the rapid diagnostics quickly. We need new anti-virals and cocktails. We need new kinds of vaccines. Vaccines that are broad spectrum. Vaccines that we can manufacture quickly. Cocktails, more polyvalent vaccines. You normally get a trivalent vaccine against three possible strains. We need -- we don't know where this thing is going. We believe that if we could fill these 10 gaps, we have a chance to help really reduce the risk of a pandemic. And the difference between a normal flu season and a pandemic is about a factor of 1,000 in deaths and certainly enormous economic impact. So we're very excited because we think we can fund 10, or speed up 10 projects and see them come to market in the next couple years that will address this.
然后我们开始问自己,我们能否找到新的方法 来填补这些漏洞呢?Brooks有一次在Ted大会的间歇告诉我说, 他发现了很多让他睡不着觉的东西, 有很多很好的技术已经出现, 我们实际上已经被它们淹没了。而我们的确需要它们。 有一种抗病毒药是人们一直以来考虑囤积, 也是至今依然发挥效用的,它就是Tamiflu。 但是病毒对Tamiflu是有抗药性的。 在爱滋病的研究中我们已经发现鸡尾酒疗法的效果不错, 就是说我们需要若干种抗病毒物质共同发挥作用。 我们需要更好的监控系统, 我们需要能发现事情征兆的网络。 我们需要快速的诊断,这样我们就可以判断患者 是否感染了最近才被发现的新的流感病毒。 我们必须能够进行快速的诊断。 我们需要新的抗病毒药和鸡尾酒配方。我们需要新的疫苗类型。 更加通用的疫苗, 生产得更快的疫苗, 多价态的鸡尾酒疫苗。 你通常能见到三价的疫苗,用来抵抗三种疾病感染。 我们还不知道以后将会如何, 但我们相信如果我们能够填补10个这样的空白, 我们就有机会真正降低流行病的风险, 正常的季节性流感和一场流行病带来的死亡率 的差别大约在1000这个数量级上, 这当然伴随着经济上的巨大影响。 因此在接下来的几年努力中,如果我们能为10个项目进行投资, 或者帮助10个项目尽快投入市场, 这将会让我们非常兴奋。
So if we can address, use technology, help address education, help address the environment, help address the pandemic, does that solve the larger problem that I was talking about in the Wired article? And I'm afraid the answer is really no, because you can't solve a problem with the management of technology with more technology. If we let an unlimited amount of power loose, then we will -- a very small number of people will be able to abuse it. We can't fight at a million-to-one disadvantage. So what we need to do is, we need better policy. And for example, some things we could do that would be policy solutions which are not really in the political air right now but perhaps with the change of administration would be -- use markets.
如果我们能利用技术来解决教育问题, 环境问题和流行病问题, 那么我们能否解决我在Wired文章中 提到的更大的问题呢?答案恐怕是”不能“。 因为你不能用技术来解决 由于技术管理而产生的问题。 如果我们放松对权力的控制,赋予个人无限制的权力, 那么一小部分人将会滥用这些权力。 我们无法打赢一场1百万比1这样的劣势的战争, 所以我们需要的就是更好的政策。 例如,我们能做的一件事情就是利用市场规律 来建立起一些政策法规。这样的法规现在并不存在, 但也许下一届政府能够加以实施。
Markets are a very strong force. For example, rather than trying to regulate away problems, which probably won't work, if we could price into the cost of doing business, the cost of catastrophe, so that people who are doing things that had a higher cost of catastrophe would have to take insurance against that risk. So if you wanted to put a drug on the market you could put it on. But it wouldn't have to be approved by regulators; you'd have to convince an actuary that it would be safe. And if you apply the notion of insurance more broadly, you can use a more powerful force, a market force, to provide feedback. How could you keep the law? I think the law would be a really good thing to keep. Well, you have to hold people accountable. The law requires accountability. Today scientists, technologists, businessmen, engineers don't have any personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions. So if you tie that -- you have to tie that back with the law.
市场是一个很强大的力量, 举个例子,与其禁止一些行为的发生, 这样做往往没有好的效果,如果我们能够 把灾难后果引发的成本附加到做生意的成本中, 这样人们在做事情的时候就要承担更高的风险成本, 那么他们就会为那些风险进行投保。 如果你想让一种新药上市,你可以这么做, 你不需要通过监察机构的鉴定, 但你需要说服你的保险师它是安全的。 如果你把保险的概念推而广之, 你可以利用一个更加强有力的力量,市场的力量 来取得反馈。 我们如何才能让法律作用常在? 我认为法律确实是我们应该保持并遵守的。 你必须保证人们是可以信赖的。 法律规定了每个人的责任和义务。 如今科学家、科技人员、商人、工程师 对他们的行为产生的后果 不需要负什么个人责任。 你必须把这些责任重新定义在法律中。
And finally, I think we have to do something that's not really -- it's almost unacceptable to say this -- which, we have to begin to design the future. We can't pick the future, but we can steer the future. Our investment in trying to prevent pandemic flu is affecting the distribution of possible outcomes. We may not be able to stop it, but the likelihood that it will get past us is lower if we focus on that problem. So we can design the future if we choose what kind of things we want to have happen and not have happen, and steer us to a lower-risk place. Vice President Gore will talk about how we could steer the climate trajectory into a lower probability of catastrophic risk.
最后,我认为我们必须, 说起来几乎让人难以接受, 我们必须开始设计我们的未来。 我们不能选择未来,但我们可以掌握和操纵未来。 我们在预防流行性疾病上所进行的投入 将会影响将来可能产生的结果的分布。 我们也许无法完全消除它们,但如果我们付出努力, 这些疾病从我们眼皮底下溜走的几率将会降低。 因此如果我们能够选择什么是我们希望发生的, 什么不是,然后引导未来向低风险的方向去发展, 那么我们就可以设计未来了。 副总统戈尔将会谈到我们如何去影响气候的变化, 从而降低灾难发生的几率。
But above all, what we have to do is we have to help the good guys, the people on the defensive side, have an advantage over the people who want to abuse things. And what we have to do to do that is we have to limit access to certain information. And growing up as we have, and holding very high the value of free speech, this is a hard thing for us to accept -- for all of us to accept. It's especially hard for the scientists to accept who still remember, you know, Galileo essentially locked up, and who are still fighting this battle against the church. But that's the price of having a civilization. The price of retaining the rule of law is to limit the access to the great and kind of unbridled power. Thank you. (Applause)
但最重要的是,我们必须帮助那些好人, 那些处在防御位置的人们, 去赢得优势从而战胜那些滥用技术的人们。 要做到这一点, 我们就必须控制对特定信息的访问权限。 在我们这个环境下长大,言论的自由被赋予着极高的价值, 想做到这一点并不容易, 想让所有人接受并不容易。 尤其是对于科学家来说,他们还记得 伽利略是如何被关起来,以及那些 今天还在与教会进行斗争的科学工作者。 但这些都是人类文明进程中做付出的代价。 维护基本法则的代价就是 对一些影响过大的权力进行权限控制。 谢谢大家。 (掌声)