抱歉年的世界只會更混亂,更瘋狂

Happy new year to you and yours, of course, but I’m going to have to put a halt to the festivities and play Frowning Farhad for a minute: You’re fooling yourself if you think 2018 is going to be any different, sanity- or anxiety-wise, from the roller coaster of the year just concluded.

當然，首先祝你和你的朋友們新年快樂，但我得先停止一下節日歡慶，暫時扮演一個眉頭緊蹙的傢伙：剛剛結束的那一年猶如過山車一樣，如果你覺得2018年會有什麼不同，那你就是在自欺欺人，不論從理性還是從焦慮水平方面來說。

Sure, as in any year, a lot of good things could happen in 2018, and perhaps lots of bad things will happen, too. (How’s that for a prediction?) But there is a deeper and more unsettling certainty about the ride upon which we’ve all just embarked: A lot of probably very crazy things will happen in 2018.

沒錯，和往年一樣，2018年會發生許多好事，也可能會發生許多壞事。（這個預測怎麼樣？）但在我們大家剛剛開始的這個旅程之中，還存在另一種更深刻、更令人不安的必然性：2018年很可能會發生許多非常瘋狂的事。

Get ready for even more events that don’t follow the rational course, and narratives that appear unmoored from the laws of politics, business and science. The background sensation of uncertainty that has pervaded much of the last two years isn’t going to abate. Just the opposite — my columnist’s Spidey sense tells me it’s only going to get worse. Strap in.

準備好迎接更多不合常理的事情吧，還有種種看起來脫離了政治、商業、科學規律的敘事。在過去兩年中的大多數時候，我們都能察覺到空氣中瀰漫着不確定感，如今這個大背景不會消散。剛好相反——作爲專欄作家，蜘蛛俠般的敏銳感覺告訴我，一切只會更糟糕。請繫好安全帶。

Just a few years ago, there was a dawning sense that technology would give us a peek around the corner. Thanks to reams of information — sensors and surveillance everywhere, and computing capacity to make sense of it all — it looked as if we were entering a “Minority Report”-type world, where much of the future could be foretold in our numbers. Google could predict flu trends, election-stats nerds could predict political outcomes, and predictive policing algorithms were going to give us a handle on crime.

僅在幾年前，人們纔剛剛產生一種感覺：科技會在角落裏窺看我們。由於大量的信息——無處不在的傳感器和監視器，以及讓這一切產生意義的計算能力——我們似乎進入了一種《少數派報告》(Minority Report)式的世界，在這個世界裏，我們的數據可以預言大部分的未來。谷歌能預計流感趨勢，熱衷選舉統計的人可以預測政治選舉結果，預測式的監控算法將會幫助我們解決犯罪問題。

Yet what has happened is rather quite different. Instead of revealing unseen order and predictability in the world, technology has unleashed a cascade of forces that have made the world more volatile — and thus made the future hazier and more open to out-of-the-blue results.

不過，實際發生的情況卻與預測大相徑庭。科技非但沒有揭示世界上看不見的秩序和可預見的後果，反而釋放出巨大的力量，使世界變得更不穩定，令未來變得更爲模糊，更可能出現意外的結果。

Some of this isn’t news. In 2016 and 2017, the world began to appreciate how smartphones and social networks can upend what we once considered the natural order. Tech has helped undercut the power of incumbent institutions — governments, political parties, the media, the patriarchy — and it has created a new class of geopolitical actors whose presence and ricocheting power we’re all still getting used to: trolls, terrorists, conspiracy theorists, social-media activists, hackers and cyptocurrency bugs, among others.

有些情況不是新聞。在2016年和2017年，全世界開始意識到，智能手機和社交網絡可能會顛覆我們曾經奉爲天經地義的東西。科技幫助削弱了現有機構的力量（包括政府、政黨、媒體和父權體系）；創造了一個新的地緣政治羣體：噴子、恐怖分子、陰謀論者、社交媒體活動分子、黑客和加密貨幣盜竊者等，我們仍在適應他們的存在，乃至他們急劇增長的力量。

These dynamics aided many of the biggest and most surprising stories in the last couple of years — Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the emergent resistance movement against him, the #MeToo avalanche, the decline of Uber, the rise of Bitcoin.

在過去幾年裏，這些力量幫助促成了很多最重大、最令人驚訝的故事——英國退歐；唐納德·特朗普當選；對特朗普的緊急抵制運動；#MeToo（我也是）標籤的大量使用；優步(Uber)的衰落；以及比特幣的崛起。

Yet even as a barrage of surprising stories plays out, many of us have yet to come to grips with the permanence of this chaos. People seem to have a latent, hopeful sense that things are going to calm down, that we’re on the cusp of a more normal news cycle. I suspect that’s wrong. Chaos is the new normal; the apprehension you feel every time you get a notification on your phone — the fear that you don’t know what fresh horror it could bring — isn’t an overreaction but an adaptation. Thanks to phones and Facebook, anything really could happen tomorrow.

不過，儘管出現了一連串令人驚訝的故事，我們中的許多人還沒有意識到這種混亂的持久性。人們似乎暗地裏希望事態會慢慢平息，希望我們正在步入一個更爲正常的新聞週期。我覺得這是一種錯覺。混亂已成爲新常態。你每次收到手機通知時所感受到的憂慮——你不知道它會帶來什麼可怕的新消息——不是過度反應，而是一種適應。由於電話和Facebook，明天真的什麼事都有可能發生。

“I will tell you that as someone who does this professionally, my job has become a lot harder in the last few years,” said Amy Webb, a futurist who runs the Future Today Institute, a firm that helps big companies think about the possibilities of tomorrow.

“我要告訴你，作爲一名專業人士，我的工作在過去幾年裏變得更加困難，”經營Future Today Institute公司的未來學家艾米·韋伯(Amy Webb)說。該公司幫助大公司思考未來的各種可能性。

“There are just a lot more variables in play,” Ms. Webb said. “Think about how a single tweet from Donald Trump can have all these strange reverberations across the world. You can almost apply chaos theory to Donald Trump’s Twitter account.”

“出現了許多新的變量，”韋伯說。“想想唐納德·特朗普的一條推文能在全世界產生多少奇怪的後果，你就知道了。你幾乎可以把混沌理論應用到唐納德·特朗普的Twitter賬戶上。”

One of the touchstone ideas of chaos theory, which is the study of dynamic systems, is the “butterfly effect” — the idea that small changes in initial conditions can lead to huge differences in outcomes, like how a butterfly flapping its wings in Peru can cause a hurricane in Houston.

混沌理論是研究動態系統的學說，它的一個基本觀點是“蝴蝶效應”，也就是說，初始條件下的微小變化會導致結果的巨大差異，比如，祕魯的一隻蝴蝶扇動翅膀會在休斯敦引起颶風。

Nowadays, because we’re hyperconnected, we see butterfly effects everywhere. A single confessional blog post by Susan Fowler, a former employee of the ride-hailing company Uber, led to a swirling online campaign that eventually brought down Travis Kalanick, Uber’s once indomitable chief executive — an outcome that, as far as I can tell, not a single observer of Uber predicted would happen long before it did.

現在，由於我們被非常緊密地聯繫在一起，我們發現蝴蝶效應無處不在。叫車公司優步的前僱員蘇珊·福勒(Susan Fowler)發佈了一篇自白性質的博客，在網上引發了一場龐大的運動，最終導致優步首席執行官特拉維斯·卡蘭尼克(Travis Kalanick)下臺，他的地位曾是那樣不可動搖。據我所知，沒有一個優步的觀察者能在很久之前預測到這樣的結果。

But it’s not just that one-off stories cause huge cascades; it’s that in a connected world, there are now so many one-off stories capable of setting off cascades, and no one knows which ones will hit.

但這不只是一個偶然事件造成巨大連鎖反應的故事；如今，在這個相互聯繫的世界裏，有很多偶然事件都能引發連鎖反應，沒有人知道哪些事件會產生重大後果。

Note how Mr. Trump was not brought down by the series of sexual harassment claims against him during the presidential campaign — and yet just a few months later, claims against a host of other powerful men spiraled into a culture-shaping movement that has upended many parts of the economy.

請注意，特朗普並沒有因爲總統競選期間的一連串性騷擾指控而被打倒，但是僅在數月之後，對另一羣有權勢的人的指控就演變成了一場文化塑造運動，顛覆了經濟的很多領域。

To continue the butterfly-effect analogy: “It used to be that there were a trillion butterflies each in their own weather system, but we have now connected all those butterflies into one planetary weather system — and you never know which one is going to have some kind of autocatalytic effect, and which one isn’t,” said Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now Foundation, an organization that aims to promote a long-term outlook on the world.

旨在促進世界長期前景的組織Long Now Foundation的執行董事亞歷山大·羅斯(Alexander Rose)也使用了蝴蝶效應的類比，他說：“過去，有一萬億隻蝴蝶存在於各自的天氣系統裏，但現在我們把所有這些蝴蝶聯繫起來，放到了一個行星天氣系統裏——你永遠不知道哪隻蝴蝶會產生某種自動催化效應，而哪隻又不會。”

As if all that weren’t enough, there’s another complication to fold into the chaos: Technology isn’t stopping. The pace of technological change is in many cases too fast for anyone of us to comprehend or get used to; as a result, just as the world seems to get its head around one new force unleashed by tech, another comes along to discombobulate our efforts to respond to it.

所有這些似乎還不夠，另一個複雜因素也加入了這場混亂之中：技術發展並沒有停止。在很多情況下，技術變革的步伐太快了，我們任何人都無法理解或適應，因此，就在世界似乎剛搞清科技釋放的一股新力量時，又出現了另一股力量，攪亂了我們應對之前那股力量的努力。

For example, in the past year and a half, social networks have tried several ways to tamp down the misinformation flowing online. Their efforts have been fitful at best, but already they risk being outdated. Soon artificial intelligence and augmented reality software will make it trivially easy to create not just text-based misinformation but entirely fake audio and video, too.

例如，在過去一年半的時間裏，社交網絡已經嘗試了幾種壓制網上錯誤信息傳播的方式。它們的努力充其量只是斷斷續續的，但已經有了過時的風險。不久後，人工智能和加強版虛擬現實軟件將使創建完全虛假的音頻和視頻變得非常容易，而不僅是虛假的文本信息。

Last year, researchers at the University of Washington used A.I. to scan through footage of Barack Obama speaking, giving them a way to put just about any words into the former president’s mouth. Someone else thought up a more vulgar way to show off similar tech — a fake pornographic video of the actress Gal Gadot.

去年，華盛頓大學(University of Washington)的研究人員使用人工智能掃描了貝拉克·奧巴馬的講話片段，這種技術可以讓這位前總統的嘴巴說出任何言論。還有人想出了一個更低俗的方式炫耀此類技術——他製作了一段女演員蓋爾·加朵(Gal Gadot)的假色情視頻。

In the run-up to the 2018 election, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks have vowed to take on the kinds of misinformation and trolling that ran amok in 2016. But what if social media is hit with a wave of explosive, realistic-looking viral videos whose authenticity can’t be confirmed? It’s highly unlikely that the social networks, the news media or the political class will know how to respond to such a situation.

在2018年選舉前的準備階段，Facebook和Twitter等社交網絡承諾要對2016年肆意氾濫的虛假信息和惡意挑釁採取行動。但是，如果社交媒體被一大波爆炸性的、看似真實的病毒視頻淹沒、而且它們的真實性無法得到證實，那該怎麼辦呢？屆時社交網絡、新聞媒體或政治階層很可能並不知道應當如何應對這種情況。

Mr. Rose pointed out that in the long span of human history, periods of turbulence aren’t unusual; technological change often prompts social and political instability and unpredictability. What is unusual now is that many of us aren’t used to this sort of chaos.

羅斯指出，在人類歷史的長河中，動盪時期並不罕見，技術變革往往會引發社會和政治的不穩定和不可預測。現在的不同尋常之處在於，我們中的許多人不習慣於這種混亂。

“I’m 39, about to turn 40, and people like me who came of age in America in the ’80s and ’90s, we got used to a fairly predictable world,” said Nate Silver, the founder of the data-news site FiveThirtyEight, whose uncannily accurate forecast of the 2012 presidential election while at The New York Times set off wide interest in data-based journalistic predictions.

“我39歲了，馬上奔四了，像我這樣在美國的八九十年代長大的人習慣於一個非常可預測的世界，”數據新聞網站FiveThirtyEight的創始人納特·西爾弗(Nate Silver)說。他在《紐約時報》期間對2012年總統大選的驚人準確預測引發了人們對基於數據的新聞預測的廣泛興趣。

“So I do think people are now realizing the world is less predictable than we thought it was,” Mr. Silver said. “But in some ways that’s a return to normal.”

“所以，我確實認爲，人們現在意識到，世界比我們以爲的更難預測，”西爾弗說。“但從某些方面講，這是迴歸正常。”