On March 10, 2011, I was in Cambridge at the MIT Media Lab meeting with faculty, students and staff, and we were trying to figure out whether I should be the next director.
在2011年的三月十日, 我人在美國麻省劍橋的MIT媒體實驗室, 見了許多教授、學生與員工, 我們想要知道 我是否是下一任主任的適合人選。
That night, at midnight, a magnitude 9 earthquake hit off of the Pacific coast of Japan. My wife and family were in Japan, and as the news started to come in, I was panicking. I was looking at the news streams and listening to the press conferences of the government officials and the Tokyo Power Company, and hearing about this explosion at the nuclear reactors and this cloud of fallout that was headed towards our house which was only about 200 kilometers away. And the people on TV weren't telling us anything that we wanted to hear. I wanted to know what was going on with the reactor, what was going on with the radiation, whether my family was in danger.
那天的半夜, 強度高達九級的地震 重創了鄰近日本的太平洋沿岸, 我的妻子和家人當時都在日本。 當新聞開始湧入, 我感到非常恐慌。 我一邊看著新聞快報, 一邊聽著政府 與東京電力公司 官方的記者會轉播。 我知道某一個核電廠反應爐爆炸了, 而這些外洩的輻射雲 正朝著我們 僅兩百公里以外的家襲來, 轉播單位全然沒有提供 我們所希望得知的資訊。 我想知道反應爐的狀況, 以及輻射外洩的程度。 我的家人是否身處危險之中?
So I did what instinctively felt like the right thing, which was to go onto the Internet and try to figure out if I could take matters into my own hands. On the Net, I found there were a lot of other people like me trying to figure out what was going on, and together we sort of loosely formed a group and we called it Safecast, and we decided we were going to try to measure the radiation and get the data out to everybody else, because it was clear that the government wasn't going to be doing this for us.
所以我循著自己的直覺, 那是當時我認為我該做的: 上網搜尋。 我想知道是否有辦法靠自己找到解答。 在網路上,我發現有許多人也和我一樣, 想知道現在的情況, 我們這群人就這樣形成了一個團隊, 我們自稱為「安全人員」(Safecast) 我們決定要嘗試去 測量輻射量 並把所得到的資料提供給社會大眾。 因為很明顯的政府 並沒有想提供資訊給我們的意思。
Three years later, we have 16 million data points, we have designed our own Geiger counters that you can download the designs and plug it into the network. We have an app that shows you most of the radiation in Japan and other parts of the world. We are arguably one of the most successful citizen science projects in the world, and we have created the largest open dataset of radiation measurements.
三年之後, 我們有一千六百萬筆的資料, 我們設計了自己的 蓋革計數器 (測量輻射的儀器), 你自行下載那些設計, 然後連上系統。 我們有自行開發的APP顯示 日本大部分地區 與世界其他地方的輻射指數。 我們可以說是最全球成功的 由公民參與的自然科學計畫之一, 我們也創造了 最大的輻射測量的公開資料庫。
And the interesting thing here is how did — (Applause) — Thank you. How did a bunch of amateurs who really didn't know what we were doing somehow come together and do what NGOs and the government were completely incapable of doing? And I would suggest that this has something to do with the Internet. It's not a fluke. It wasn't luck, and it wasn't because it was us. It helped that it was an event that pulled everybody together, but it was a new way of doing things that was enabled by the Internet and a lot of the other things that were going on, and I want to talk a little bit about what those new principles are.
有趣的是, (鼓掌) 謝謝, 是我們一群外行人, 完全不懂自己在幹嘛, 但能團結在一起, 做到那些非政府組織和政府單位, 完全做不到的事情。 我認為這必須歸功於 網路的力量。這不是僥倖, 也不是幸運,也不是因為個人, 因為一個災難事件, 讓我們連繫在一起沒錯, 但不一樣的是因為有網路, 讓我們有新的方法可以完成事情。 還有許多事情也正在發生, 我想談一下 這些新的準則。
So remember before the Internet? (Laughter) I call this B.I. Okay? So, in B.I., life was simple. Things were Euclidian, Newtonian, somewhat predictable. People actually tried to predict the future, even the economists. And then the Internet happened, and the world became extremely complex, extremely low-cost, extremely fast, and those Newtonian laws that we so dearly cherished turned out to be just local ordinances, and what we found was that in this completely unpredictable world that most of the people who were surviving were working with sort of a different set of principles, and I want to talk a little bit about that.
還記得網路發明之前的生活嗎? (笑聲) 我就稱之 B. I. (網路元年前) 所以在 B.I. 時,生活很簡單, 事物在歐式空間,遵循著牛頓定律, 非常好預測。 人們甚至嘗試預測未來, 甚至經濟學家也是。 但突然有了網路, 世界突然變得非常複雜、 非常低廉、非常快速。 而那些我們奉為圭臬的 牛頓定律, 只能解釋日常的規則, 但在這個不可預測的世界中 我們發現, 大部分的人都在 用截然不同的定律準則在生活。 這就是我想討論的。
Before the Internet, if you remember, when we tried to create services, what you would do is you'd create the hardware layer and the network layer and the software and it would cost millions of dollars to do anything that was substantial. So when it costs millions of dollars to do something substantial, what you would do is you'd get an MBA who would write a plan and get the money from V.C.s or big companies, and then you'd hire the designers and the engineers, and they'd build the thing. This is the Before Internet, B.I., innovation model. What happened after the Internet was the cost of innovation went down so much because the cost of collaboration, the cost of distribution, the cost of communication, and Moore's Law made it so that the cost of trying a new thing became nearly zero, and so you would have Google, Facebook, Yahoo, students that didn't have permission — permissionless innovation — didn't have permission, didn't have PowerPoints, they just built the thing, then they raised the money, and then they sort of figured out a business plan and maybe later on they hired some MBAs. So the Internet caused innovation, at least in software and services, to go from an MBA-driven innovation model to a designer-engineer-driven innovation model, and it pushed innovation to the edges, to the dorm rooms, to the startups, away from the large institutions, the stodgy old institutions that had the power and the money and the authority. And we all know this. We all know this happened on the Internet. It turns out it's happening in other things, too. Let me give you some examples.
在網路紀元之前,如果你記得的話, 當我們想要提供服務, 你必須提供硬體、 系統,和軟體層, 可能得花上好幾百萬。 才能做的基本服務。 所以當要做任何事 都必須好幾百萬美元, 你會去讀個工商管理碩士、 寫個計畫書、 從創投公司 或大公司找資金, 然後雇用設計師和工程師, 來製造產品。 這是網路紀元之前,B.I 的創業模型。 但有了網路之後, 創新的代價變低許多, 因為合作與分配的成本、 通訊的成本,以及摩爾定律, 讓嘗試新事物的代價 變得幾乎是零了。 所以才會有谷歌、臉書、雅虎等公司, 由那些根本沒按照規矩來的學生創立, 沒人同意他們可以創新—— 不用任何人首肯,不需要別人講解, 他們只是一股腦的做出東西來, 賺到一些錢, 然後從中摸索出商業經營的方法, 或許之後再雇用一些工商管理碩士。 所以網路的產生 讓在軟體服務的創新, 從以往由MBA主導的創業模式, 變成由設計師與工程師主導。 並把創新帶到了一個新的境界。 從學校宿舍到新創公司, 不需要大企業的介入。 那些無聊老舊的大企業,曾經擁有金錢, 能力和權力,現在不然。 我都知道這些網路公司的故事。 但同樣的事情,這也發生在其他地方。 讓我舉個例子,
So at the Media Lab, we don't just do hardware. We do all kinds of things. We do biology, we do hardware, and Nicholas Negroponte famously said, "Demo or die," as opposed to "Publish or perish," which was the traditional academic way of thinking. And he often said, the demo only has to work once, because the primary mode of us impacting the world was through large companies being inspired by us and creating products like the Kindle or Lego Mindstorms. But today, with the ability to deploy things into the real world at such low cost, I'm changing the motto now, and this is the official public statement. I'm officially saying, "Deploy or die." You have to get the stuff into the real world for it to really count, and sometimes it will be large companies, and Nicholas can talk about satellites. (Applause) Thank you. But we should be getting out there ourselves and not depending on large institutions to do it for us.
在媒體實驗室,我們不只有做硬體, 我們從事各方面的研發。 我們做生物、硬體, 尼葛洛龐帝教授的名言所說 「不展示成果就死」, 這是相對於傳統學術領域 的格言「不出版就死」。 他也常說,展示的成果 只需要成功一次即可。 因為我們做出的初始模型 可以激發那些大公司 進而影響這個世界,創造出 像Kindle電子閱讀器和 樂高Mindstorms機器人等產品。 但今日,我們有能力 以非常低廉的成本創造出產品。 我想要改寫這個格言, 而且這是正式的官方聲明, 我要說:「不創造產品就死」。 你必須把東西做出來讓這世界看到, 那才算數。 有時會是由大公司做出, 然後另一位講者尼葛洛龐帝教授 就能講講衛星的事。 (掌聲) 謝謝 但我們是可以靠自己達成的, 不需要靠大企業的幫助。
So last year, we sent a bunch of students to Shenzhen, and they sat on the factory floors with the innovators in Shenzhen, and it was amazing. What was happening there was you would have these manufacturing devices, and they weren't making prototypes or PowerPoints. They were fiddling with the manufacturing equipment and innovating right on the manufacturing equipment. The factory was in the designer, and the designer was literally in the factory. And so what you would do is, you'd go down to the stalls and you would see these cell phones. So instead of starting little websites like the kids in Palo Alto do, the kids in Shenzhen make new cell phones. They make new cell phones like kids in Palo Alto make websites, and so there's a rainforest of innovation going on in the cell phone. What they do is, they make a cell phone, go down to the stall, they sell some, they look at the other kids' stuff, go up, make a couple thousand more, go down. Doesn't this sound like a software thing? It sounds like agile software development, A/B testing and iteration, and what we thought you could only do with software kids in Shenzhen are doing this in hardware. My next fellow, I hope, is going to be one of these innovators from Shenzhen.
去年,我們送了一群學生去深圳 他們與當地的創業家 一起坐在工廠的地板 真是很棒的經驗。 在那裏, 有生產製造的儀器, 他們不是在做 初始模型或投影片簡報, 他們在微調那些製造的器材, 直接在製造的器材上實現創新。 工廠由那些設計師操控, 設計師就在工廠之中。 所以你可以 走到小賣場, 馬上看到完成的手機。 所以不像在矽谷Palo Alto的孩子, 忙著架設新的網站。 在深圳地孩子在製作新的手機, 他們研發新手機就像矽谷的孩子 造新網站一樣。 所以在那手機的創新之蓬勃, 有如熱帶雨林。 他們就是製造手機, 到小賣場賣一些手機。 再看看別人的產品,調整, 再做一千多個,拿去賣。 這跟軟體業不是很像嗎? 這很像是一個很敏捷的軟體開發模式, 測試,重新來過, 當你以為這只能適用於軟體, 深圳的孩子已經將他應用在硬體了。 我實驗室下一個研究人員,我希望 就是來自那些深圳的研發人員之一。
And so what you see is that is pushing innovation to the edges. We talk about 3D printers and stuff like that, and that's great, but this is Limor. She is one of our favorite graduates, and she is standing in front of a Samsung Techwin Pick and Place Machine. This thing can put 23,000 components per hour onto an electronics board. This is a factory in a box. So what used to take a factory full of workers working by hand in this little box in New York, she's able to have effectively — She doesn't actually have to go to Shenzhen to do this manufacturing. She can buy this box and she can manufacture it. So manufacturing, the cost of innovation, the cost of prototyping, distribution, manufacturing, hardware, is getting so low that innovation is being pushed to the edges and students and startups are being able to build it. This is a recent thing, but this will happen and this will change just like it did with software.
從剛剛的例子, 我們看到把研發推到一個新的境界。 我們討論3D列印等新技術, 那很棒,但這是Limor 她是我們最好的研究生之一, 她正站在一個三星泰科 自動電路板設計機 這玩意能在一小時內把2萬3千的零組件 焊接到電路板上。 這是盒裝的工廠, 以往需要滿工廠的工人 用手工組裝完成的工作, 她只需要這個位於紐約的小盒子, 就可輕易完成。 她不需要去到深圳, 就可以生產產品。 她只要買下這個盒子就可以生產, 所以生產、創新的成本、 製造初始模型的成本、分配、製造、硬體, 都變得非常低廉。 創新已經被推往這個新的境界, 學生與新創公司就可以自行製造。 這東西還很新,但一定會變成主流, 也會產生許多改變, 就像網路改變了軟體業。
Sorona is a DuPont process that uses a genetically engineered microbe to turn corn sugar into polyester. It's 30 percent more efficient than the fossil fuel method, and it's much better for the environment. Genetic engineering and bioengineering are creating a whole bunch of great new opportunities for chemistry, for computation, for memory. We will probably be doing a lot, obviously doing health things, but we will probably be growing chairs and buildings soon. The problem is, Sorona costs about 400 million dollars and took seven years to build. It kind of reminds you of the old mainframe days. The thing is, the cost of innovation in bioengineering is also going down. This is desktop gene sequencer. It used to cost millions and millions of dollars to sequence genes. Now you can do it on a desktop like this, and kids can do this in dorm rooms. This is Gen9 gene assembler, and so right now when you try to print a gene, what you do is somebody in a factory with pipettes puts the thing together by hand, you have one error per 100 base pairs, and it takes a long time and costs a lot of money. This new device assembles genes on a chip, and instead of one error per 100 base pairs, it's one error per 10,000 base pairs. In this lab, we will have the world's capacity of gene printing within a year, 200 million base pairs a year. This is kind of like when we went from transistor radios wrapped by hand to the Pentium. This is going to become the Pentium of bioengineering, pushing bioengineering into the hands of dorm rooms and startup companies.
Sorona是杜邦發展出的一個程序, 使用基因工程改造的微生物, 將玉米轉製成聚酯纖維, 這製程的效率比 化石燃料方法增進了30%, 且對環境更為友善。 基因工程和生物工程, 創造出了許多 很好的嶄新機會。 在化學、計算、記憶體上都有應用。 應用層面很廣,很明顯地在醫學方面也是, 但或許我們也可以應用在生產 與製造方面。 可是問題是,Sorona的研發 投入了四億美金, 耗費了七年才完成。 這似乎讓你想起古早的 大型主機那個年代, 但事實上,在生物工程領域, 創新的成品也在降低中。 這是一個桌上型的基因測序儀, 曾經,要定序基因需要 花上好幾百萬的資金。 現在你只需要一個桌機, 孩子們在學校宿舍就可以做。 這是一個名叫"Gen9"的基因組合器, 現在當你試圖合成一個基因時, 某個在工廠的人, 會以手動的方式使用吸量管將材料混合, 在一百個鹼基對中就會出現一個錯誤, 而且需要投注很長的時間以及可觀的金錢。 這個嶄新的儀器, 在一個晶片上組裝基因, 不會在一百個鹼基對中就出現一個錯誤, 而是在一萬個鹼基對中才會有一個錯誤。 在這個實驗室裡,我們將具有全世界 一年的基因合成容量, 一年兩億鹼基對。 這有點類似我們從手工製的 電晶體收音機, 到英特爾的奔騰處理器。 這將會成為生物工程界的奔騰處理器。 將生物工程帶到 學校宿舍與新創公司伸手可及之處。
So it's happening in software and in hardware and bioengineering, and so this is a fundamental new way of thinking about innovation. It's a bottom-up innovation, it's democratic, it's chaotic, it's hard to control. It's not bad, but it's very different, and I think that the traditional rules that we have for institutions don't work anymore, and most of us here operate with a different set of principles. One of my favorite principles is the power of pull, which is the idea of pulling resources from the network as you need them rather than stocking them in the center and controlling everything.
所以這個現象我們在軟體、硬體, 也在生物工程領域發生。 所以當我們想到創新, 這會是一個新的基本方法。 由基層出發,人人都有機會, 會很混亂,很難控制。 這並不是件壞事,但和以往截然不同。 我認為過往適用於大型機構的 的原則將不再適用。 現在大部分的人將會在不同的 原則下運作。 《拉力,讓好事更靠近》這本書中, 我最喜歡的原則 是它提出從網路中 提取出(Pull)你所需的資源的概念。 這樣一來我們不須處理所有雜務, 不須將資源集中存放。
So in the case of the Safecast story, I didn't know anything when the earthquake happened, but I was able to find Sean who was the hackerspace community organizer, and Peter, the analog hardware hacker who made our first Geiger counter, and Dan, who built the Three Mile Island monitoring system after the Three Mile Island meltdown. And these people I wouldn't have been able to find beforehand and probably were better that I found them just in time from the network.
以我們的安全人員(Safecast)的故事為例, 在地震發生時我毫無相關的知識, 但我找到了尚恩, 尚恩是駭客空間社群的管理者, 還有彼得,是類比硬體的駭客, 製造了我們第一個蓋格計數器。 還有丹,在三浬島核災之後, 製造了三浬島監視系統。 這些我在事件發生之前 根本找不到的人才, 但我卻在網路上即刻的 網羅到他們,這樣或許更好。
I'm a three-time college dropout, so learning over education is very near and dear to my heart, but to me, education is what people do to you and learning is what you do to yourself.
我本身從大學輟學三次, 所以我非常感同身受, 學習比教育更重要。 對我來說,教育是別人給予你的, 但學習是你為自己所做的。
(Applause)
(掌聲)
And it feels like, and I'm biased, it feels like they're trying to make you memorize the whole encyclopedia before they let you go out and play, and to me, I've got Wikipedia on my cell phone, and it feels like they assume you're going to be on top of some mountain all by yourself with a number 2 pencil trying to figure out what to do when in fact you're always going to be connected, you're always going to have friends, and you can pull Wikipedia up whenever you need it, and what you need to learn is how to learn. In the case of Safecast, a bunch of amateurs when we started three years ago, I would argue that we probably as a group know more than any other organization about how to collect data and publish data and do citizen science.
我可能有點主觀,但那感覺就好像, 他們總要你記下所有百科全書的內容 才能讓你自己摸索跟玩樂。 對我來說,我手機裡就有維基百科, 但感覺它們預設 你在某山峰的頂端, 只有你自己和一隻二號鉛筆, 然後嘗試解決問題。 但事實上你永遠都會有網路連線。 你也永遠都會有朋友幫忙。 你可以在需要的時候 隨時查詢維基百科。 你所需要學習的就是「如何去學習」。 在安全人員的例子,三年前 由一群外行人所組成。 現在我敢說我們的團隊 比任何其他組織, 更了解如何收集跟 發佈數據和 做公民的科學研究。
Compass over maps. So this one, the idea is that the cost of writing a plan or mapping something is getting so expensive and it's not very accurate or useful. So in the Safecast story, we knew we needed to collect data, we knew we wanted to publish the data, and instead of trying to come up with the exact plan, we first said, oh, let's get Geiger counters. Oh, they've run out. Let's build them. There aren't enough sensors. Okay, then we can make a mobile Geiger counter. We can drive around. We can get volunteers. We don't have enough money. Let's Kickstarter it. We could not have planned this whole thing, but by having a very strong compass, we eventually got to where we were going, and to me it's very similar to agile software development, but this idea of compasses is very important.
羅盤比地圖更有用。 這個概念是因為撰寫計畫, 和建構藍圖是非常高成本的, 而且並不是非常精確或實用。 在安全人員的故事中,我們知道必須收集數據。 我們知道想要公布數據。 我們並沒有嘗試提出任何具體方案, 我們先想:喔! 我們得有一些蓋格計數器。 喔! 蓋格計數器不夠用了。 那我們來製造吧。探測器不夠, 那我們可以做一些行動的蓋格計數器, 我們有志願者可以載運那些計數器。 我們資金不夠,那我們到 資金籌募網站Kickstarter籌錢。 我們當時並沒有全盤規劃, 但我們有一個非常強的羅盤指引方向。 我們最終達到了我們的目標。 對我來說,這和敏捷軟體開發非常類似。 但這羅盤的概念非常重要。
So I think the good news is that even though the world is extremely complex, what you need to do is very simple. I think it's about stopping this notion that you need to plan everything, you need to stock everything, and you need to be so prepared, and focus on being connected, always learning, fully aware, and super present.
所以我認為好消息是 雖然現今世界非常的複雜, 但你所需做的卻非常簡單。 我認為必須停止認為: 你必須計畫周全, 你必須有足夠的庫存, 你需要做好足夠的準備。 你所需的是專注在彼此連結, 持續學習, 保持覺察, 和活在當下。
So I don't like the word "futurist." I think we should be now-ists, like we are right now.
我不喜歡「未來主義者」這字眼, 我認為我們必須成為「現在」主義者, 就像我們現在這樣。
Thank you.
謝謝。
(Applause)
(掌聲)