Source text in English | Translation by Randy Wong (#26567) — Winner |
Boom times are back in Silicon Valley. Office parks along Highway 101 are once again adorned with the insignia of hopeful start-ups. Rents are soaring, as is the demand for fancy vacation homes in resort towns like Lake Tahoe, a sign of fortunes being amassed. The Bay Area was the birthplace of the semiconductor industry and the computer and internet companies that have grown up in its wake. Its wizards provided many of the marvels that make the world feel futuristic, from touch-screen phones to the instantaneous searching of great libraries to the power to pilot a drone thousands of miles away. The revival in its business activity since 2010 suggests progress is motoring on. So it may come as a surprise that some in Silicon Valley think the place is stagnant, and that the rate of innovation has been slackening for decades. Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, and the first outside investor in Facebook, says that innovation in America is “somewhere between dire straits and dead”. Engineers in all sorts of areas share similar feelings of disappointment. And a small but growing group of economists reckon the economic impact of the innovations of today may pale in comparison with those of the past. [ … ] Across the board, innovations fueled by cheap processing power are taking off. Computers are beginning to understand natural language. People are controlling video games through body movement alone—a technology that may soon find application in much of the business world. Three-dimensional printing is capable of churning out an increasingly complex array of objects, and may soon move on to human tissues and other organic material. An innovation pessimist could dismiss this as “jam tomorrow”. But the idea that technology-led growth must either continue unabated or steadily decline, rather than ebbing and flowing, is at odds with history. Chad Syverson of the University of Chicago points out that productivity growth during the age of electrification was lumpy. Growth was slow during a period of important electrical innovations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; then it surged. | 硅谷,再次呈现出一派繁荣的景象。朝气蓬勃的初创公司纷纷入驻,让 101 高速公路旁的办公园区重新焕发了生机。房屋租金开始飞涨,在太浩湖度假村这样的热门地段,豪华客房供不应求,硅谷的吸金能力由此可见一斑。湾区曾是半导体产业以及随之兴起的计算机和互联网公司的发源地。从触屏手机到即时所搜大型图书馆,乃至操控千里之外的无人机,行业精英们用颠覆性创新让全世界感受到了科技的超前性。2010 年以来,硅谷的商业活动显露出复苏迹象,这表明振兴经济的引擎已经开启。 尽管如此,一部分硅谷人却认为当下的硅谷仍然深陷泥潭,在几十年的创新之路上也是渐行渐缓。PayPal 联合创始人、Facebook 首位外部投资者彼得·蒂尔声称,美国的创新产业正处于“困境和死局之间”。各个领域的工程师同样为此感到失落。越来越多的经济学家相信,现如今创新对经济的影响力已经不比从前。 [ … ] 纵观全局,由廉价处理能力推动的技术创新已是大势所趋。计算机开始理解自然语言。电子游戏所采用的体感技术有望在不久的将来大规模用于商业领域。3D 打印能够制作出一系列复杂的结构,可能很快被用于人体组织和其他有机材料。 在对创新持悲观态度的人眼里,这些不过是“美好的幻想”而已。然而,认为技术导向型发展只能一味地平稳增长或持续衰退而没有波折起伏,这种观点其实有悖于历史规律。芝加哥大学查德·西弗森指出,电气化时代的生产力发展带有曲折性。在 19 世纪末至 20 世纪初的电气技术重大创新时期,生产力发展较为缓慢,直到后来才发生了巨大飞跃。 |