Everything That Doesn’t Work Yet—— 一切还没有运行完好的事物

Alan Kay, a brilliant polymath who has worked at Atari, Xerox, Apple, and Disney, came up with as good a definition of technology as I’ve heard.

艾伦·凯是个聪明的全才，曾在雅达利公司、施乐公司、苹果公司和迪斯尼公司工作。他提出了一个关于技术的定义，这是我听到过的最好的定义。

“Technology,” Kay says, “is anything that was invented after you were born.”

“技术，”他说，“是你出生后发明的任何东西。”

By that clever reckoning, automobiles, refrigerators, transistors, and nylon are not technologies in our eyes -- just plain old stuff.

在这个定义下，汽车、冰箱、晶体管、尼龙，这些在我们的眼中都不是技术——只是普通的旧事物。

But they were once technologies for my grandfather. By the same logic, CDs, the web, Mylar, cell phones, and GPS are authentic technologies for me – but not my kids!

但它们曾经是我祖父眼中的技术。同样的逻辑，光盘、网络、聚酯薄膜、手机和GPS对我来说是真正的技术——但不是我孩子眼中的技术！

They’ll have their own technologies, invented in the last five minutes.

他们将有自己的技术，刚刚发明出来的技术。

 

Danny Hillis, another polymath who used to work with Alan Kay, refined Kay’s definition a bit further in the 1990s, and a bit more usefully.

丹尼·希利斯也是一个全才，曾与艾伦·凯一起共事。在20世纪90年代，他把艾伦·凯的定义进一步精炼，使之更具实用性。

"Technology," Hillis says, "is everything that doesn’t work yet." Buried in this sly definition is the insight that successful inventions disappear from our awareness.

“技术，”希利斯说，“就是一切都还未起作用的事物。”这个定义蕴含着这样的洞见：成功的发明将从我们的意识中消失。

Electric motors were once technology – they were new and did not work well.

电动马达曾经被称为技术——它们那时很新，还没有运行那么完好。

As they evolved, they seem to disappear, even though they proliferated and were embedded by the scores into our homes and offices.

随着电动马达的发展，它们似乎消失了，即使它们数量上激增饿，并嵌入到了我们的家庭和办公室里。

They work perfectly, silently, unminded, so they no longer register as “technology.”

它们完美地、默默地、不起眼地运行着。所以，它们不再称之为“技术”。

 

The satirist and novelist Douglas Adams further evolved Hillis and Kay’s definitions by suggesting a natural lifecycle for technologies.

讽刺作家和小说家道格拉斯·亚当斯通过提出技术的自然生命周期，进一步发展了丹尼·希利斯和艾伦·凯的定义。

In a short essay in 1999 he proposed the world works like this:

在1999年的一篇小短文里，他这样看待世界：
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

1）在你出生时，世界上已经存在的一切，仅仅是正常的；
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

2）在你30岁之前，任何被发明的事物都会难以置信地令人兴奋和附有创造性。运气好的话，你还可以用它们做出一番事业来；
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

3）在你30岁之后，任何被发明的事物正如我们所知违反了自然秩序，成为文明终结的开端。直到它存在了十年左右，才逐渐变得真正令人满意。

Then with a very Doug Adams flourish, he adds:

然后道格·亚当斯用他惯用的说法补充道：

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

把上述三条应用于电影、摇滚音乐、文字处理器和移动电话，可以推断出你有多大年纪。

 

We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs.

我们不再认为椅子是科技，我们只是把他们看作是椅子。

But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them.

但是，曾几何时，我们还没有制定出椅子到底应该有多少只腿、它们应该多高。当我们试图使用它们时，它们经常会出现散架的情况。

Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things.

可过不了多久，电脑也将像椅子一样，成为微不足道的饿到处都有的事物（之后再过数十年，电脑就跟一张纸或沙粒一样了），我们将不再意识到电脑的存在。

 

Adams is deliberately flip, but the German philosopher Heidegger suggested, in all seriousness, that “technology is not technological or machine-like.”

亚当斯故意做出了如此草率的论述，但德国哲学家海德格尔提出，严肃说来，“技术并不像机器一样”。

For him technology was an “unhiding” – a revealing – of an inner reality that is revealed by mechanical embodiment.

他认为技术是“取消隐藏”，是显示，是机械体现出的一种内在真实。

Further befuddlement can be found in the works of the French philosopher-poet Bernard Stiegler, who says that technology is “organized inorganic matter.”

在法国哲学家诗人伯纳德·施蒂格勒的作品中，出现的定义更令人困惑。他说，技术是“组织无机物。”

That doesn’t quite cover the brave new world of genetic engineering and GMOs, so we still lack a good working definition of the term.

这并没有完全囊括基因工程和转基因生物这个全新的领域。所以对这个词，我们仍然缺乏良好可行的定义。

 

When the Greeks used the word techne it meant something like art, skill, craft, or even crafty.

当希腊人使用“技艺”这个词时，它表示艺术、技术、工艺，甚至是某种巧妙的东西。

Ingenuity would be close. But there wasn’t much interest in techne in ancient times and there’s not a single treatise on techne in the Greek corpus – with one exception.

“灵巧”一词可能接近它的意思。不过，在远古时代，人们对技艺并没有很大的兴趣。在希腊文献里，没有任何关于这个词的论述——只有一个例外。

To the best of our knowledge the word techne was first joined to logos to yield the single term technelogos inAristotle’s treatise on Rhetoric.

就我们对技艺一词的了解，它最早出现在亚里士多德的《修辞学》中，并加上了词缀“-logos”，成为了一个术语“technelogos”。

Four times in this essay, Aristotle talks about technelogos, but in all four instance his meaning is unclear.

亚里士多德在这篇文章中四次提到了“technelogos”这个词，但他的表意并不明确。

Is he concerned with the “skill of words” or the  “speech about art”? The term essentially disappeared after that.

人们不明白他值得是“语言的技巧”还是“关于艺术饿论述”。在这以后，这个词基本上就消失了。

 

In 1829, Jacob Bigelow, an engineering professor at Cambridge University in Boston, thought it a good idea to round up all the “applied arts” courses being taught at his school and synthesize them into a unified curriculum.

雅各布·毕格罗是哈佛大学的工程学教授。在1829年，他提出把他所在学校里的所有“应用艺术”的课程结合起来，综合成一个统一的课程，并认为这将会是一个不错的想法。

He gathered the studies of the sciences and techne of architecture, chemistry, metalwork, masonry, manufacturing and the like into one textbook.

他把科学研究与建筑、化工、金属加工、砖石、制造的技艺结合起来，编成一本教科书。

He gave this syllabus the title: Elements of Technology; taken chiefly from a course of lectures delivered at Cambridge of the Application of the Sciences to the Useful Arts. Now published for the use of seminaries and students.

他给这个课程提纲的标题是：《技术的要素》，主要取自于一门剑桥大学的课程，叫“科学对实用艺术的应用”。这本书现已出版，供学院和学生使用。

Jacob Bigelow coined the word technology, as it is used in its modern meaning. (We don’t know if he picked it up from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, or merely constructed it from the Greek roots.)

雅各布·毕格罗创造了“技术”这个词，我们现在使用的就是这个词的现代含义。（他是从亚里士多德的《修辞学》里借鉴的，还是仅仅从希腊词根里选出来构造的，我们不得而知。）

 By the time he did in 1829, however, his world was chock full of things that had been invented after he was born, and that did not work well. There was technology but nobody knew it.

然而，在1829年的时候，他的世界就已经充满了刚刚发明的事物，这些事物还并没有完美的运行起来。那时候存在着技术，但没有人知道。

In fact for many centuries in Europe and China inventors and engineers had been creating what we would label technology, but didn’t possess a word to describe the place of these inventions in their world.

事实上，许多世纪以来，在欧洲和中国的发明家和工程师已经创造了我们视之为技术的事物。但在他们的世界里，还不具备一个词来形容这些发明。

 

Today, we still aren’t sure what this stuff is. We only know there is more of it.
今天，我们仍然不知道这些事物是什么。我们只知道，还会出现更多这样的事物