I want to try and persuade you that there are reasons why we should be optimistic in general. And that’s a very difficult thing to do today because we are confronting tremendous problems in this world. Things like global climate change, which seem almost impossible to solve, or social inequality, which seems endemic and difficult to eliminate. The scale of these problems though is even more reason why we should be optimistic. Because what we know is that in the past, every great and difficult thing that has been accomplished, every breakthrough, has in fact required a very strong sense of optimism that it was possible. Think of the first airplanes. It’s hard enough to create something good and great deliberately and with intention. And it’s no guarantee, just because we believe something will happen that it will happen, but we do know that unless we believe that something can happen, it’s not going to happen inadvertently by itself. And so it becomes really important that we imagine a world that we want, that we imagine solutions we want and believe that we can make them happen. And that belief in making something impossible happen is what has shaped our future so far.
我想试着说服你 为什么我们总该保持乐观。 现如今,这是一件很难的事, 因为我们要面临 世界上的一大堆问题。 比如全球气候变化, 看起来根本无法被解决, 或者社会不平等问题, 看起来普遍存在又无法根除。 但正因为这些问题大规模地存在, 我们更应该保持乐观。 因为我们知道过去的 每一个伟大壮举、 每一个突破, 实际上都需要 非常强大的乐观精神 才能做到。 想想第一架飞机。 刻意地创造 优秀且伟大的发明 是多难的一件事。 没有人可以保证, 只是因为我们相信 该来的总会来的, 但是我们也知道, 除非我们坚信这件事会发生, 它是不会自己偶然发生的。 所以这就可以体现出 我们想象着一个向往的世界, 想象出一个向往的解决方法, 并坚信我们能让它们成真 是多么的重要。 这种让不可能成为可能的信念 一直塑造着我们的未来。
So our own history has been basically shaped by optimists, and if we want to shape the future, we need to be optimistic. That world that we’re shaping is not a world that’s perfect. It’s not perfection, there’s no lack of problems, there’s no absence of bad things. It is totally not utopia. It’s what I would call pro-topia: a world in which things are a little bit better. And that sense of optimism is a perspective where we expect the world to yield a little bit more good than bad, to have a few more reasons to hope than to fear. And optimism definitely is not just a sunny temperament, a kind of a blindness to the realities of the world's problems or some kind of Pollyanna self-delusion. Instead, optimism is based on the fact of historical progress, that if we transcend anecdote and look at data in a scientific, rational way, that we can see that the evidence says that on average, on a global scale over time, over the last 500 years, there has been incremental improvement over time.
我们自己的历史基本上 都由乐观主义者塑造, 如果我们想要塑造未来, 我们得保持乐观。 我们要塑造的世界 不是完美的世界。 它不完美, 问题重重, 坏事频现。 它完全不是个乌托邦。 我想称之为“进托邦(pro-topia)”: 事情略微变得好起来的世界。 这种乐观精神是一种 我们希望世界上可以 发生更多好事而不是坏事、 让人更愿意充满希望 而不是恐惧的态度。 乐观精神绝对不只是乐天的性格, 不是对世界现实问题的无视, 或者波丽安娜式的自我欺骗。 相反,乐观主义需要 基于历史进程的事实, 我们得撇开奇闻轶事, 用科学理性的方式看待数据, 我们希望可以看到这样的结果: 在过去的半个世纪,全球范围内 总体一直有改善的趋势。
If it’s real then why don’t we see more of it? Why are so many people pessimistic? And I think there are three reasons why. One is that most of what progress is about is about what does not happen. It’s about all the things that could have happened that didn’t happen today. It’s about the two-year-old child who did not die of smallpox. It’s about the family farmers whose year of surplus food was not stolen by raiders. They don't make the headlines.
如果这是真的, 为什么我们没看到更多这样的情况? 为什么这么多人都如此悲观? 我觉得有三个原因。 首先,“进步”一般指的是 没发生的事。 它只是可能会发生, 但是现在又没发生的事。 它是一名两岁孩童没有 死于天花这样的事; 它是农户的余粮 没有被强盗偷走这样的事; 而这些事不会成为爆款头条。
And the second reason is that bad things happen faster than good things. Good things take time. When we are compressing our news cycle to the last five minutes and the next five minutes, all the things that have changed in the last five minutes are kind of bad stuff because good stuff takes longer. If we were to make newspapers and websites to be updated every 100 years, we’d have a very different set of headlines.
第二个原因是 坏事比好事发生得更快。 好事多磨。 当我们把新闻滚动时限 压缩到过去五分钟 和接下来五分钟时, 过去五分钟里发生改变的所有事 都只会是坏事, 因为好事要花更多的时间。 如果我们每 100 年更新一次 报纸和网页, 我们会有截然不同的头条内容。
The third reason is that because societies that are capable of creating just a few percent more good than they destroy every year, if you have a society that’s capable of making just a few percent more than it destroys, then over time, that few percent is compounded. And that is what civilization is. So that one percent, few percent, is almost invisible in the noise of the 49-percent crap and destruction around it. So we don’t see it unless we turn around and look back into the past.
第三个原因是,如果这个社会可以 每年创造比毁掉的多一点点的好事, 如果这个社会可以 去创造好事比去毁灭多一点点, 那么随着时间的流逝, 那么一点点好事也会叠加, 这就是文明。 那百分之一,百分之几 在它周围 49% 的垃圾和破坏的 衬托下简直是沧海一粟。 所以除非我们 回头审视过去, 我们就无法发现它。
So it’s possible that after 500 years of progress, it could stop tomorrow. But it’s unlikely and very, very probable that that long-term trend will continue, at least for the rest of your lives. So this optimism makes us realists in aligning ourselves with this long history of historical progress. And that’s the first reason we should be optimistic.
因此,在半个世纪的发展后, 明天戛然而止也是有可能的。 但是这不太可能, 很有可能的是 这个长期的趋势会持续下去, 至少在你的余生里持续下去。 这样的乐观主义让我们现实主义者 将自己与历史长河中的 历史进程保持一致。 这就是我们应该 保持乐观的第一个原因。
And the second reason is that civilization is a mechanism to make these improvements that relies on the fact that we’re optimistically trusting others. We have total strangers that we can collaborate, and that collaboration allows us to make things beyond ourselves that are bigger than just what we can do. That requires trust, and trust is a type of optimism. But in addition to kind of cooperating with the eight billion total strangers on this planet accomplishing great things, we can also trust future generations. The billions of people yet unborn into the future. Right now, today, we are benefiting from the work of previous generations who undergone to create infrastructure -- roads canals, skyscrapers, telephone networks -- that we are now enjoying. In fact, we may be enjoying more benefits than they have back in the past when they began. So they have been acting as good ancestors for us, and sometimes even sacrificing what could have been immediate yields and benefits and postponing them until future generations. We also want to be good ancestors, and being good ancestors trying to move benefits to the future generations is an act of optimism. One, because we believe that there will be future generations, and two, because we are willing to sacrifice immediate gains in order to postpone -- have more gains into the future -- that investment. Being a good ancestor enables us to actually accomplish things not just beyond what we can do individually in the present, but what we can do over time.
第二个原因是文明是一个 做出改善的机制, 这些进步依靠的是 我们乐观地互相信任的事实。 我们可以和完全不认识的人合作, 这样的合作让我们 可以做到超越自己的事, 比我们个人的力量更强大的事。 这需要信任, 信任是一种乐观。 除了有与地球上 80 亿陌生人 一起成事的合作, 我们也可以信任我们的后代。 这几亿还未出生的人。 今时今日, 我们从前辈的成果中获益, 他们努力建设了基础设施: 道路、运河、摩天大楼、通信网络, 我们现在享福于其中。 实际上,我们现在享受的成果可能 多于那个开拓的时代。 他们是我们优秀的前辈, 他们有时甚至需要牺牲 可以有即刻成效的成果和福祉, 把它们推后,造福后代。 我们也想成为优秀的前辈, 成为把福祉带给后辈的优秀前辈, 这也是一种乐观的行为。 首先,因为我们相信 我们会有后代, 其次,我们愿意牺牲眼前的成果, 把它延后, 在未来产生更多的成果, 现在是一种投资。 成为优秀的前辈 让我们可以真正做到 不只是超越我们现在能做的事, 而是延续至未来的事。
So when we trust the future, one of the things that we are understanding is that future generations not only have better living standards because of progress, but they also have more capability to solve problems because there’s more knowledge and because they have better tools. And so we can trust that. We can trust the fact that in the future, future generations will be able to solve problems that we cannot solve ourselves. So that means that we should be optimistic not because we believe that our problems are smaller than we thought. We should be optimistic because we believe that our capacity to solve problems is greater than we thought. So that’s a second reason to be optimistic.
当我们相信未来的时候, 我们会理解的一件事是 我们的后代不仅会由于进步获得 更好的生活条件, 他们还会拥有 更强的解决问题的能力, 因为他们有更多的知识、 更多的工具。 所以我们可以相信它。 我们可以相信在未来, 我们的后代会有能力解决 我们自己无法解决的问题。 这意味着我们需要保持乐观, 不是因为问题比我们想象的要小。 我们需要保持乐观,是因为 我们解决问题的能力 比我们想象的要强。 这就是第二个 我们需要保持乐观的原因。
The third one has to do with problems which are really disguised as opportunities. OK, so optimists don’t shun problems. Optimism is about embracing problems, because it’s problems that make solutions and solutions that make problems. So I believe that most of the problems we have today are generated by the solutions of the past. And the great one is this climate change. The solution in the past was artificial power -- “Where do we get it?” “OK, here it is.” But now it makes the problem now. That means that today, most of the solutions that we have will be generating the problems of the future. And there will be more problems because new solutions create many more problems. In the same way, when science answers a question, that answer will generate two or three new questions -- things that we didn’t even know we didn’t know. And so, in a peculiar way, science is expanding our ignorance faster than our knowledge.
第三个原因是一些 通常会伪装成是“机会”的问题。 好吧,乐观主义者不会逃避问题。 乐观主义是说迎难而上, 因为问题产生解决方法, 解决方法产生问题。 我相信我们现在很多的问题 都源自以前的解决方法。 一个显著的例子就是气候变化。 过去的解决方法是发明人工智能—— “怎么实现人工智能?” “好的,现在我们有了。” 但是现在这成了个问题。 意味着现在 我们用的很多方法 都会为未来造成问题。 而且会有更多的问题, 因为现在的新方法 会产生更多的问题。 同样地,如果用科学回答一个问题, 这个答案将会产生两三个新问题, 我们都不知道 我们还不知道的事。 所以,科学在以一种特殊的方式 比拓宽我们的知识 更快地拓宽我们的无知。
So we have an unlimited pool of questions and problems. But problems don’t impede progress. Problems are the conduit of progress. No problems, no progress. That is why I reject utopia, because there are no problems there. So even bad things that happen are basically possibilities that yield new solutions and better opportunities. So in that way, problems are unlimited. There is no limit for improvement. So we can improve ourselves in all directions.
我们有无数的问题和麻烦。 但是问题不会阻碍进步。 问题引领着进步。 没有问题,就不会有进步。 这就是为什么我反对乌托邦, 因为那里没有问题。 就算坏事发生了, 也为新方法和好机会提供了可能。 这样的话,问题是无限的。 进步也是无限的。 我们就可以全方位地让自己进步。
So we have a choice about optimism. It’s not a temperament. No matter what your temperament is you can still choose to be optimistic. And gigantic problems require gigantic optimism. We have a moral obligation to be optimistic, because when we’re optimistic, we can shape the future, we can become better ancestors, we can expand our reach -- create things bigger than ourselves. And we can be a realist in aligning ourselves with this long arc of history and embracing problems as opportunities. With optimism, we can use it as a power to kind of create the future that we want. This is the way.
我们有了选择乐观的权利, 它不是一种性格。 无论你的性格如何, 你都可以选择保持乐观。 更大的问题需要更多的乐观。 我们有保持乐观的义务, 因为当我们保持乐观时, 我们会塑造未来, 我们会成为更好的前人, 我们会拓展可能, 创造出比我们自己更庞大的东西。 我们会成为与历史长河 携手共进的现实主义者, 把问题看作机会。 有了乐观精神, 我们可以将它化作一股力量, 来创造我们想要的未来。 就是如此。
Thank you.
谢谢。
(Applause)
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