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.
什麼樣的科技能讓我們真正減少全球的貧窮問題? 我發現了令人驚訝的答案。 我們自二十世紀開始觀察死亡率, 也研究如何降低死亡率,我們發現了一些很簡單的事情。 你或許會認為抗生素比乾淨水源來得重要, 但結果恰恰相反。 就是這麼簡單的事,這種現成的科技, 隨手可得,還用不著網路, 就能顯著地改善問題。
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.
但我同時也在注意一些更具威力的科技、 奈米科技、基因工程和其他新興事物 像是數位科技等,我非常擔心這些科技 會流於濫用。 如果你去回想很久以前,在過往的歷史中, 當我們看到有一個人虐待另一個人的時候, 我們就設立了像是十誡的東西來告誡人們:你不可以殺人。 這像是一對一的機制。 後來城市發展起來,人數變多了, 而為了防止多數欺凌少數, 我們設置了像是保護個人自由的觀念。 而後,為了處理更大的族群, 像是國家或州的層級, 我們必須讓雙方協議互不侵略, 或是在經歷一連串的衝突後, 才能達成國際間的協議以維持和平。
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.
但是現在我們面臨了一個新的情況,就是人們所謂的 非對稱情況,運用科技這種強而有力的工具, 就可以超越國家界限。 具有這種潛在巨大毁滅力的 不是國家,而是個人。 而這就是新科技數位化的結果。 我們看過基因序列, 如果你想要,你可以從網路上下載這些 基因序列或是病原體資料, 最近有人說--我從一本科學雜誌上看到-- 若將1918年的流感病毒四處傳播的話,將是一件很危險的事。 假如有人想在他的實驗室裡研究1918年流感病毒, 只要靠自己就可以重建當時的傳染狀況, 因為,這可能會因迅速傳播而爆發開來。 而這種可能性已是不可避免的了。
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.
所以,如果有一群有心人誤用了某些科技資訊, 從而自行複製出像是生化或是其他威力強大的科技, 對我們的世界而言明顯是種威脅。 其中的危險就在於他們可能釀成流行病。 由於我們處理流行疾病的經驗不足, 我們在面對從未接觸過的疾病時, 也顯得應變能力不足, 所以我們根本就不知道該如何去防範。 而這種情況下,再多的科技也是無濟於事, 因為這只會讓有心人更加誤用科技而已。
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.
想像一下像羅素和愛因斯坦等人, 如果他們能在二十世界初期, 進行一段精彩的對話, 他們提出的解決方案就不會只是治標,而是要治本。 隨著公共政策和道德觀的進步, 現代人得以享有現代文明社會的條件,就是不能使用武力。 社會賦予我們每個人權利去保護我們自己, 不是為所欲為的權利,但只要是合法的,都可以去做。 我們必須控制新科技可能帶來的危險, 我們終究必須限制個人 探取引發流行疾病的力量。 同時我們也必須要有合理的防禦, 因為沒有什麼能限制得了一個瘋狂的人做些什麼。 如你所知,麻煩的就是 使壞比去防堵壞事發生 來得容易得多, 因此進攻的人的確具有一種不對等的優勢。
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.
所以這些就是我在1999年到2000年間的一些想法, 那時我的朋友們說我太過沮喪, 他們真的很擔心我。 而後我簽了一紙合約,著手撰寫更陰鬱想法的書籍, 然後搬到紐約的一家飯店, 住進了一間塞滿災難禍患書籍的房間, 像是原子彈投在紐約, 我可能會受牽連這類的書。 那時我正好碰上911事件, 我和每個人一樣站在街頭, 那種經驗真是難以令人忘懷。 隔天清晨我外出散步, 所有的清潔車都停在休士頓街, 準備開始清理善後。 我走到中間去,上了火車月台, 14大街以下全都關閉。 那是一個很令人深思的經驗,但是我認為, 對一個房間充滿了陰鬱書籍的人而言,我不會太驚訝。 對人們來說,這種偶發事件是很令人驚訝沒錯, 但這種事終究是會發生的,沒什麼好驚訝的。
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.
然後每個人都開始寫些關於這件事的文章, 成千上萬的人們都在寫。 我後來放棄了那本書的撰寫,之後克里斯打電話給我, 要我在研討會上演講,但我已經不再講這類議題了, 因為你知道,世上讓人挫敗和氣餒的事已經夠多了。 但我同意來這跟大家說說這些, 我想跟大家說我們不能放棄 我們目前正在做的事,就是去對抗這種不對稱的威脅, 因為現狀很危急,也因為我們有能力去做, 更因為我們不做就表示我們要放棄現代文明。 而我們不能用我們現在的笨方法去對抗這種威脅, 因為你以數百萬美元去對抗, 就會造成數十億美元的傷害,還需要花上數兆美元去修補, 這是很沒有效率的事,而且很有可能 只會讓問題更糟。 所以我們不能以百萬的成本來對抗這種事, 因為獲利率可能只有百萬分之一。
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.
所以在放棄寫書之後,我很榮幸的 在一年前有機會加入美國KPCB風險投資公司, 從創新的一面去從事風險投資, 並且試著去找出一些創新方法來解決我所觀察到的 一些重大問題。 一件事如果有十個不同的潛在因素, 就可能衍生出一千種不同的結果。 去年我看到一些創新方案, 這些方案的品質讓我感到驚嘆、興奮不已, 有時也會佩服得五體投地。我很感謝Google和維基百科, 所以我至少能知道這些來來往往的人們, 都在談論些什麼。
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.
但我想跟各位分享三個領域, 這些是我特別感興趣的領域,而且也跟我前面說的重大問題有關, 也就是我在Wired雜誌裡談到的問題。 首先是關於教育, 而這真的和尼可拉斯提出的百元電腦概念有關, 也就是說根據摩爾定律還有很大的成長空間。 現今最先進的電晶體是65奈米, 我們已經看到有公司能做得更小,而我個人也很榮幸參與投資, 我有信心這些公司將會把摩爾定律擴充 到約莫十奈米那麼小。 舉例來說,如果我們縮減六個維度, 就能為晶片帶來百倍的改善, 因此,應用在實際上, 就是如果現在有某樣東西價值一千美元, 例如最頂級的個人電腦,我認為將來 或許在2020年就能以十美元買到。可以嗎? 現在,想像一下現在做為教育工具的百元電腦, 在2020年會是什麼樣子。
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.
我認為我們的挑戰是-- 我認為非常有可能會發生,我們的挑戰就是, 我們能否發展出某項配有網路的教育工具, 讓我們能夠善加利用? 我可以說我們今天擁有了不起的電腦設備, 但我們沒有足夠的軟體。 但這只是過去的情形,現在我們已經有了較好的軟體, 你把它放在一台十年的機器上跑,你會問說, 天啊,這機器能跑這麼快? 我還記得當他們把蘋果電腦麥金塔界面, 放回到蘋果二代時, 蘋果二代在跑這種界面時表現完美, 我們那時只是不知道該如何使用它而已。 所以既然我們已經知道,而且我們應該相信-- 因為摩爾定律已是一個恆律, 我是指,摩爾定律在過去四十多年來 一直具有很高的預測能力, 所以我們可以得知在2020年的電腦會是什麼樣子。 我很高興我們能起風潮之先,呼籲大家, 讓我們教育全世界的人們, 因為這是一股偉大的和平力量。 而且我們可以給世上每個人一台百元電腦, 或是在十五年後給他們一人一台十元電腦。
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.
第二個領域是著重在環保議題, 因為很明顯地這將會對世界造成壓力, 很快地我們會從高爾的演講中得知更多細節。 就像摩爾定律的趨勢,能驅動我們提昇能力一樣, 我們現在會去注意到環保問題, 乃是因為有許多新的物質出現。 我們的挑戰是,由於都市人口激增, 本世紀的都市人口已在很短的時間內, 從20億成長到60億。人們都遷入都市, 他們需要乾淨的水源、能源、交通工具, 而我們希望他們能用環保的方式解決這些需求。 我們在工業方面是很有效率的, 我們在能源和資源的有效利用上,已做了大幅改善, 但是在消費方面,尤其是在美國,還是很沒有效率的。 但是這些新的物質帶來了非常大的創新概念, 大家強烈希望這些東西 能為市場帶來巨大的利益。
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.
我想舉一個十五年前發現的 新的物質做為例子, 如果我們採用奈米碳管,這是飯島博士在1991年發現的, 他們有很棒的特質。 而這類的事物就是我們將來要去發掘的, 就像當時我們開始設計奈米尺度一樣。 它們的優點在於,它們幾乎是最強的材料, 是目前已知抗張強度最強的材料。 他們非常非常堅硬,很難延伸。 在二維空間裡,如果你用它來做像是纖維的東西, 它們的強度是凱拉維纖維(防彈衣)的三十倍。 而如果你用它來做像巴克球(硬度較鑽石還硬)這種三維構造, 它們有各種很棒的特質。 如果你用粒子在它中間射穿一個洞, 它們能自我修護;他們會把洞修補起來, 即便不是飛秒--也是夠快了。 (笑聲) 如果你用光照射,它們就能產生電。 事實上,如果你用相機的閃光燈照射,他們就會著火。 如果你讓它們通電,他們就會產生光照。 如果你引水穿過它們,和引水穿過金屬相比, 你將得到快一千倍的流速。 你同時可以製造P型和N型的半導體, 也就是說你可以用這種材質製作電晶體。 它們可以直向傳導熱能,而不是橫向傳導-- 雖然這種東西沒有寬度,但就算你把它們堆疊起來, 也不會是從另一個方向傳導。它們也具有碳纖維的特質。 如果你放粒子進去,它們可以射穿尖端-- 它們就像是線性加速器或是微型電子槍。 奈米管內觀非常的小-- 最小的只有0.7奈米-- 這基本上是一個量子的世界。 在奈米管裡面是一個奇妙的世界。
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.
所以我們開始去看,而且我們也已經看過營運計劃, 在裡頭有著麗莎.蘭德爾所說的東西。 我正試著研究著手頭上的一項營運計劃, 這是一項由惠頓所提出的宇宙弦論, 在這推論的奈米物質會發生什麼現象。 所以如果你以奈米管內部來看,我們的確受限於此。 所以我們在這裡要找的就是其它新的物質, 讓我們可以以不同的特質來因應事情--或許更輕便、或更強靭-- 並且運用這些新的物質去解決環境問題。 新的物質可以創造水源, 新的物筫可以使石化分子運作得更好, 新的物質可以催化化學反應, 來阻絕污染等等。 乙醇--用新的方式來產生乙醇。 用新的方式來產生電氣運輸工具。 這整個綠化夢想--由於這本身可以獲利, 所以我們已經致力其中--我們已經籌募新的資金, 並已挹注一億美元於這些投資上。 我們相信綠化產業裡的基因科技公司、康柏電腦、 蓮花軟體、昇陽電腦、網景、亞馬遜、Google等, 還沒有出現,但這次的物質革命 將會驅動這些公司出現。
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.
我們所要探討的第三個領或, 也就是我們上禮拜在紐約宣布的消息。 我們籌募到二億美元的專門基金 來研究傳染疾病的抗體。 在此給大家一個概念,上次KPCB公司募集到的金額 是四億美元的基金,所以這對我們而言是一項龐大的資金。 而我們過去幾個月所做的--嗯,幾個月前, 雷.克茲維爾和我在紐約時報共同發表了一篇特稿, 內容是關於發表1918年流感基因的危險性。 而約翰.多爾和布魯克和其他人有一些考量, 所以我們開始去查看這世界了做什麼 來預防大規模傳染,而我們看到了很多缺口。
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.
所以我們自問,我們能否找到創新的方法 來填補這些缺口?布魯克有一次到這裡休假時跟我說, 他說有很多事讓他擔心得睡不成眠, 因為外面有好多偉大的科技, 都被我們給埋没了,但這些正是我們需要的。 目前有一個大概還具有效力的抗病毒物質, 就是目前正在儲備存量的克流感。 但是病毒對克流感有抗藥性。 我們發現要對抗愛滋病,我們需要雞尾酒療法來好好處理; 所以對抗這些抗藥性病毒,我們就需要好幾種抗病毒物質。 我們需要更好的檢查機制; 我們需要能發現事情徵兆的網絡; 我們需要快速診斷,我們才能得知某人得的是 我們最近確認的哪一種流感。 我們必須要能夠快速立即地診斷; 我們需要新的抗病毒物質和雞尾酒療法;我們需要新品種的疫苗、 可以涵蓋多個層面的疫苗、 能夠快速製造的疫苗。 雞尾酒療法,含更多價染色體的疫苗。 你大概已有三價疫苗來對抗三種可能的品種。 我們尚不知事情會如何進展, 但我們相信如果我們能填補這十個缺口, 我們就有機會真正地去降低流行病的危機。 而一般季節流感與流行病的差別在於, 死亡人數的差距是以千倍計算, 並且在經濟上帶來巨大衝擊。 我們非常興奮,因為我們認為我們能籌措到十項基金, 或是加速十個專案的推行,並在數年之後 看到他們真正上市。
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.
所以如果我們能利用科技來幫助解決教育問題, 幫助解決環境問題,幫助解決大規模傳染問題, 這不就能解決當年我在Wired雜誌上 所提到那些大問題了嗎?恐怕不會, 因為你不能光只靠科技 來解決一個問題。 如果我們輕忽了某一個強大的力量,那將會讓 一小群人濫用這個力量, 我們不能以要耗費百萬倍精力的劣勢去對抗。 所以我們應該要做的是,我們需要更好的政策。 舉例來說,我們能做的一些事, 就是擬定解決方案的政策,這並不一定是目前政府的政策, 但我們可以改變管理的機制,就是利用市場。
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.
市場本身具有強大的力量, 例如,與其試著去規範問題, 而且通常成效不彰,不如讓我們透過價格機制 來讓使用者付費,像是災難的成本, 那麼當人們在從事具有高災難成本的事時, 他們就要購買保險以降低風險。 所以如果你想要讓一種藥在市面流通,你可以去試試看, 雖然這種藥不一定要經由政府核准通過, 但你得先說服精算師你的藥品是安全的。 而如果你將保險的概念應用得更廣泛些, 你就可以運用更有力的市場機制力量, 來提供你回饋資訊。 你要如何維持法律運作? 我認為法律是我們值得我們維持的一個好東西。 你必須要讓人民負責, 法律必須要有誠信。 今天科學家、科學技術人員、商人、工程師, 對他們所做所為可能帶來的後果, 完全沒有任何個人的責任感。 所以你必須用法律來加以約束。
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.
最後,我想我們必須去做一些事-- 這種說法幾乎是不太能被接受的-- 就是我們必須要開始著手規劃未來。 我們不能選擇未來,但我們可以駕馭未來。 我們為防範傳染病所做的投資, 有可能影響一些未來的發展。 我們或許無法去阻擋, 但如果我們專注在問題上的話,那它就比較不能對我們造成影響。 因此,如果我們可以選擇我們希望發生的和不希望發生的事, 我們就可以規劃未來, 並把自己的風險降低。 副總統高爾將會與我們談談如何去掌控氣候變遷, 讓它釀成災難的風險可能性降低。
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)
但最終,我們要做的就是去幫助好人, 幫助這些站在防禦陣線的人, 讓他們能防堵那些想使壞的人們。 為了達到這個目的,我們要做的, 就是要限制某些特定資訊的存取。 而對於像我們這樣年紀的人,我們對言論自由 抱持很高的價值,這是一件難以接受的事-- 對我們所有人來說都是。 對科學家而言特別是難以接受, 因為他們還記得伽俐略曾遭囚禁, 他們之中還有些人仍在與教廷抗戰。 不過這就是文明的代價, 這就是維繫法治社會的代價, 我們不得不去限制人們,不得探取那些偉大且無法拘束的力量。 謝謝。 (鼓掌)