科技公司为何需要员工担任科幻小说作家

大技术 (Big Technology)

One night last spring, my apartment’s buzzer went off. Meg Elison, an award-winning science fiction writer, was waiting downstairs. She’d agreed to come by for a strange experiment.

ØNE夜去年春天，我家的蜂鸣器响起。 屡获殊荣的科幻小说作家梅格·埃里森(Meg Elison)在楼下等候。 她同意来一个奇怪的实验。

I was nearly finished with my book, Always Day One, when I asked Elison to visit for dinner. Wael Ghonim, a leader of the social media–fueled Arab Spring, would join as well. Over falafel and kebab, the three of us would discuss the technology I planned to cover in the book and imagine it taken to its most dystopian ends. We’d go full Black Mirror.

当我要求艾莉森去吃饭时，我的书《 永远的第一天》几乎完成了。 社交媒体推动的阿拉伯之春的领导者Wael Ghonim也将加入。 通过沙拉三明治和烤肉串，我们三个人将讨论我计划在书中介绍的技术，并想象将其应用到最反乌托邦的目的。 我们要去装满黑镜了 。

Always Day One covers the tech giants’ work culture, so we weren’t talking about killer robots; this was more about collaboration tools and process automation technology. But still, I came away from the experience believing every tech company should hire a science fiction writer, at least if they’re interested in keeping their products safe.

Always D ay One涵盖了科技巨头的工作文化，因此我们并不是在谈论杀手级机器人。 这更多地是关于协作工具和过程自动化技术的。 但是，尽管如此，我仍然相信每家科技公司都应聘请科幻小说作家，至少在他们有兴趣确保其产品安全的情况下，我的经历与我不同。

A void of creative, dystopian thinking has caused serious problems in the tech world, especially among the tech giants. Filled with techno-optimists, these companies routinely miss problems they should anticipate. Google didn’t imagine YouTube would radicalize users, Facebook didn’t expect a foreign power would exploit its service, Amazon didn’t think its “Amazon’s Choice” label would recommend malfunctioning thermometers, and so on.

缺乏创造性的反乌托邦思想在科技界尤其是科技巨头中引起了严重的问题。 这些公司充满了技术优化专家，通常会错过他们应该预期的问题。 Google没想到YouTube会激怒用户，Facebook没想到外国会利用它的服务，Amazon没想到其“ Amazon's Choice”标签会建议温度计出现故障​​，等等。

More than product problems, these are planning problems. Some dark thinking could help the tech giants anticipate where things can go wrong, enabling them to prepare before their crises explode. But instead, they build for the best-case scenario. (Amazon employees, for instance, write up ideas for new products in six-page narratives that always end happily.) So, when things break down, they get bad quickly.

除了产品问题外，这些都是计划问题。 一些黑暗的想法可以帮助科技巨头预测出哪里可能出问题，使他们能够在危机爆发前做好准备。 但是，它们是为最佳情况而构建的。 (例如，亚马逊员工在六页的叙述中总是写着新产品的主意，总是很幸福地结束。)因此，当事情崩溃时，他们很快就会变得糟糕。

Elison, Ghonim, and I gathered that night to poke holes in my largely optimistic assessment of the tech giants’ internal technology and processes (apologies for the narrative violation). These systems have helped Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft dominate our economy, and I was about to recommend that the rest of us co-opt them. But first, it was important to see where they could go wrong.

那天晚上，我和Elison，Ghonim聚集在一起，对我对科技巨头的内部技术和流程(对违反叙述的歉意)进行了大致乐观的评估。 这些系统帮助亚马逊，苹果，Facebook，谷歌和微软主导了我们的经济，我将建议我们其他人选择它们。 但是首先，重要的是要知道它们可能在哪里出错。

As we let our imaginations run wild, our attention turned toward Google’s internal collaboration tools. Google has built an array of technology that helps its employees know what’s going on everywhere. It has an internal meme board, an active network of listservs, a tool called Dory (named after the forgetful fish in Finding Nemo) to ask questions of company leadership, and unprecedented transparency for a company its size. These tools help its employees effectively build products across divisions (see: Google Assistant).

随着我们的想象力狂奔，我们的注意力转向了Google的内部协作工具。 Google建立了一系列技术，可帮助其员工了解各地的情况。 它有一个内部模因委员会，一个活跃的列表服务器网络，一个名为Dory(以“ 海底总动员”中的健忘鱼命名)的工具来询问公司领导力的问题，以及其规模公司的前所未有的透明度。 这些工具可帮助其员工有效地跨部门构建产品(请参阅：Google Assistant)。

In the heady days of 2018, Google’s employees also used these tools to organize and protest. They spoke out against the company selling artificial intelligence technology to the military and walked out over its bungling of sexual misconduct claims. Their actions changed Google for the better.

在2018年的繁忙时期，谷歌的员工还使用这些工具进行组织和抗议。 他们表示反对该公司向军队出售人工智能技术，并因其对性不端行为的指控而陷入困境。 他们的行为使Google变得更好。

But when we started to imagine how this type of technology could be used for harm, things got dark. Led by Elison, we settled on a scenario where a government plants an operative inside a company with similar tools. The operative uses the tools to rally colleagues against one of the government’s enemies. Inspired by the movement, another employee with access to sensitive information exposes the enemy’s location. Then the government kills its adversary.

但是，当我们开始想象如何将这种技术用于危害时，事情变得一片黑暗。 在埃里森(Elison)的领导下，我们解决了一个方案，即政府在公司内部使用类似工具来组织一个操作人员。 该特工使用该工具召集同事对抗政府的敌人之一。 受这次运动的启发，另一名有权获取敏感信息的员工暴露了敌人的位置。 然后政府杀死了对手。

Unbeknownst to us, a similar scenario was unfolding inside Twitter. A few months after our dinner, the FBI alleged that people close to the Saudi royal family recruited two Twitter employees who then accessed Saudi dissidents’ private data without authorization. What happened to those dissidents is unclear.

我们不知道的是，Twitter内部正在发生类似的情况。 晚餐后的几个月，联邦调查局声称，与沙特王室关系密切的人们招募了两名Twitter员工，然后他们未经授权访问了沙特持不同政见者的私人数据。 这些持不同政见者怎么了还不清楚。

Not expecting foreign entities to infiltrate its workforce, Twitter left its systems open for abuse. Then, after the fact, it patched up its vulnerabilities. “We have made changes to our backend systems, our employee training, and our security and infrastructure to guard against this type of situation,” a Twitter spokesman told me earlier this year.

Twitter并不指望外国实体会渗透其员工，而是让其系统易于滥用。 然后，事实发生后，它修补了漏洞。 Twitter发言人在今年早些时候告诉我： “我们已经对后端系统，员工培训以及我们的安全性和基础架构进行了更改，以防范此类情况。”

These types of fixes don’t have to come too late. Perhaps having someone like Ellison on staff would’ve prevented the ugly scenario, or at least mitigated the harm.

这些类型的修复不必太晚。 也许让像埃里森这样的人成为工作人员会避免这种丑陋的情况，或者至少减轻了伤害。

本周在“大技术”播客上：前亚马逊副总裁蒂姆·布雷 (This week on the ‘Big Technology’ podcast: Ex-Amazon VP Tim Bray)

Former Amazon VP Tim Bray joins the Big Technology podcast this week. In May, Bray published a stunning blog post saying he would no longer work for Amazon after it fired employees who spoke up for its workers’ rights. “Firing whistleblowers,” he wrote, is “evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison.”

亚马逊前副总裁Tim Bray本周加入了Big Technology播客。 今年5月，布雷(Bray)发表了一篇惊人的博客文章，称他在解雇了为工人权利辩护的员工之后，将不再为亚马逊工作。 他写道：“向举报者开火是“贯穿公司文化的一种证据。 我既不服役也不喝这种毒药。”

We cover a good deal of ground in the conversation, including what it felt like to leave a job he loved, how white- and blue-collar workers are treated differently, and why Bray wants to break up the tech giants (yes, including his former employer). For someone who was so senior inside a tech giant, Bray was refreshingly candid and open.

我们在谈话中涵盖了很多基础，包括离开他喜欢的工作的感觉，对白领和蓝领工人的待遇有何不同，以及布雷为何想分拆科技巨头(是的，包括他的前雇主)。 对于一个在科技巨头中如此资深的人来说，布雷令人坦率地坦率而开放。

You can listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Overcast. And you can read the transcript on OneZero. Bray also just started his own podcast. Box CEO Aaron Levie is up next week.

您可以收听和订阅Apple Podcast ， Spotify和Overcast 。 您可以在OneZero上阅读成绩单。 布瑞还刚刚开始了他自己的播客 。 Box首席执行官亚伦·莱维(Aaron Levie)下周上班。

OneZero is publishing this story in an exclusive syndication partnership with Big Technology, a newsletter by Alex Kantrowitz. You can sign up here.

OneZero 将与Alex Kantrowitz的时事通讯Big Technology独家联合发布该故事。 您可以 在这里注册 。

翻译自: https://onezero.medium.com/why-tech-companies-need-science-fiction-writers-on-staff-430f16c233ff