外刊文章目录（点击直达）

1、ChatGPT can tell jokes, even write articles. But only 8、Memory study induces sleeping people to forget
humans can detect its fluent bullshit word associations
ChatGPT 可以讲笑话，甚至写文章。但只有人类才能发现其 研究发现，睡觉时播放音频可能会削弱某些回忆
流畅的废话
9、A new book argues that decency pays off in
2、The AI boom: lessons from history business as well as in life
人工智能热潮：历史的经验 一本新书无论是做生意还是生活中，诚以待人都将获得回报

3、The link between personality and success 10、Crypto-miners are probably to blame for the
性格与成功之间的联系 graphics-chip shortage
加密货币矿工或许是显卡芯片短缺的罪魁祸首
4、Some 19m years ago the world’s sharks almost
disappeared 11、The first planet beyond the solar system confirmed
大约 1900 万年前，地球上的鲨鱼几乎灭绝 to have water
太阳系外首颗被证明有水存在的行星
5、The legacy of Victorian-era pollution still shapes
English cities 12、Motorists using touchscreens in cars are being
维多利亚时代遗留的污染问题仍影响着英国的城市 distracted
使用触摸屏会使驾驶员分心
6、Driverless cars are stuck in a jam
无人驾驶汽车陷入了困境 13、The search for extraterrestrial intelligence moves

7、Happiness on just a day a week up a gear

每周只需工作一天便能带来快乐
探寻外星生命的步伐正在加快
1、ChatGPT can tell jokes, even write articles. But only humans 笔记区
can detect its fluent bullshit

ChatGPT 可以讲笑话，甚至写文章。但只有人类才能发现其流畅的废话

As the capabilities of natural language processing technology

continue to advance, there is a growing hype around the potential
of chatbots and conversational AI systems. One such system,
ChatGPT, claims to be able to engage in natural, human-like
conversation and even provide useful information and advice.
However, there are valid concerns about the limitations of
ChatGPT and other conversational AI systems, and their ability to
truly replicate human intelligence and interaction.

随着自然语言处理技术的能力不断进步，人们对聊天机器人和对话式人
工智能系统的潜力有越来越多的炒作。ChatGPT 就是这样一个系统，其
开发者声称它能够进行自然的、类似人类的对话，甚至还能提供有用的
信息和建议。然而，针对于 ChatGPT 和其他对话式 AI 系统的局限性，
以及它们完全复制人类智能和交互的能力，人们存在合理的担忧。

No, I didn’t write that. It was actually written by ChatGPT itself, a

conversational AI software program, after I asked it to create “an
opening paragraph to an article skeptical about the abilities of
ChatGPT in the style of Kenan Malik”. I might quibble about the
stolid prose but it’s an impressive attempt. And it is not difficult to
see why there has been such excitement, indeed hype, about the
latest version of the chatbot since it was released a week ago.

不，上面这些不是我写的。在我要求 ChatGPT“以 Kenan Malik 的风

格，为一篇对 ChatGPT 的能力表示怀疑的文章写一段开头”后，这一
段实际上是 ChatGPT(一个对话式人工智能软件程序)自己写的。我可能
会对 ChatGPT 写出的乏味散文吹毛求疵，但这是一次令人印象深刻的
尝试。自一周前该最新版聊天机器人发布以来，人们对它如此兴奋，甚
至是大肆炒作，这其实也不难理解。

Fed huge amounts of human-created text, ChatGPT looks for

statistical regularities in this data, learns what words and phrases
are associated with others, and so is able to predict what words
should come next in any given sentence, and how sentences fit
together. The result is a machine that can persuasively mimic
human language.

在大量人类创造的文本中，ChatGPT 在这些数据中寻找统计规律，学习
哪些单词和短语与另外一些单词和短语相关，因此它能够预测任何给定
句子中接下来应该出现哪些单词，以及句子如何组合。结果就是，
ChatGPT 是一台能够令人信服的模仿人类语言的系统。

This capacity for mimicry allows ChatGPT to write essays and

poetry, think up jokes, formulate code, and answer questions
whether to a child or an expert. And to do it so well that many over
the past week have been both celebrating and panicking. “Essays
are dead,” wrote the cognitive scientist Tim Kietzmann, a view
amplified by many academics. Others claim that it will finish off
Google as a search engine. And the program itself thinks it may be
able to replace humans in jobs from insurance agent to court
reporter.

这种令人信服的模仿能力，使 ChatGPT 能够写文章和诗歌、想出笑话、

编写代码、并能回答孩子或专家的问题。而且它做得非常好，以至于许
多人在过去一周既庆祝又恐慌。认知科学家 Tim Kietzmann 写道：“散
文已经死了”，这一观点被许多学者放大了。其他人则声称谷歌将作为
一个搜索引擎而消亡。而 ChatGPT 程序本身认为，它可能会取代人类
从事的一些工作，如从保险代理人到法庭记录员。

And yet the chatbot that can write grade A essays will also tell you
that if one woman can produce one baby in nine months, nine
women can produce one baby in one month; that one kilo of beef
weighs more than a kilo of compressed air; and that crushed glass
is a useful health supplement. It can make up facts and reproduce
many of the biases of the human world on which it is trained.

但是，这个能写出 A 级文章的聊天机器人也会告诉你，如果一个女人
能在九个月内生一个孩子，那么九个女人也能在一个月内生一个孩子；
一公斤牛肉比一公斤压缩空气还重；碎玻璃是一种有益的健康补充剂。
它可以编造事实，和重现训练它的人类世界中的许多偏见。

ChatGPT can be so persuasively wrong that Stack Overflow, a

platform for developers to get help writing code, banned users
from posting answers generated by the chatbot. “The primary
problem,” wrote the mods, “is that while the answers which
ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they
typically look like they might be good.” Or, as another critic put it,
it’s a fluent bullshitter. Some of these problems will be ironed out
over time. Every conversation involving ChatGPT becomes part of
the databank used to improve the program. The next iteration,
GPT-4, is due next year, and will be more persuasive and make
fewer errors.

ChatGPT 有太多令人信服的错误答案，导致为开发人员提供编写代码
帮助的 Stack Overflow 平台禁止用户发布由聊天机器人生成的答案。
mods 写道：“主要的问题是，虽然 ChatGPT 生成的答案有很高的错误
率，但这些答案通常看起来可能是正确的”。或者，正如另一位评论家
所说，ChatGPT 写出的是一个流利的胡诌。随着时间的推移，其中一些
问题会得到解决。每一次与 ChatGPT 的对话都成为其数据库的一部分，
用于改进程序。下一个迭代版本，GPT-4，预期将于明年发布，它将更
令人信服，出错更少。

Nevertheless, beyond such incremental improvement also lies a

fundamental problem that faces any form of artificial intelligence.
A computer manipulatessymbols. Its program specifies a set of
rules with which to transform one string of symbols into another,
or to recognise statistical patterns. But it does not specify what
those symbols or patterns mean. To a computer, meaning is
irrelevant. ChatGPT “knows” (much of the time at least) what
appears meaningful to humans, but not what is meaningful to
itself. It is, in the words of the cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, a
“mimic that knows not whereof it speaks”.

然而，在这种渐进式的改进之外，还有一个任何形式的人工智能都面临
的根本问题。计算机处理符号。它的程序指定了一组规则，用于将一组
字符串转换为另一组字符串，或识别统计模式。但这些规则并没有具体
说明这些符号或图案的含义。对于计算机来说，这种意义是无关紧要的。
ChatGPT“知道”(至少大部分时间)什么对人类来说是有意义的，但不
知道什么对它自己是有意义的。用认知科学家 Gary Marcus 的话来说，
它是一个“不知道自己在说什么的模仿者”。

Humans, in thinking and talking and reading and writing, also

manipulate symbols. For humans, however, unlike for computers,
meaning is everything. When we communicate, we communicate
meaning. What matters is not just the outside of a string of
symbols but its inside too, not just the syntax but the semantics.
Meaning for humans comes through our existence as social
beings, embodied and embedded in the world. I only make sense
of myself insofar as I live in, and relate to, a community of other
thinking, feeling, talking beings.

人类在思考、说话、阅读和写作时，也会使用符号。但是与计算机不同，
对人类来说，符号中的意义才是一切。当我们交流时，我们传达的是意
义。重要的不仅仅是一串符号的外延，还有它的内涵，不仅仅是语法，
还有语义。人类的意义来自于我们作为社会人的存在，体现和嵌入在我
们的世界中。只有当我生活在一个由其他有思想、有感情、有交流的人
组成的群体中，并与之相联系时，我才能理解自己。

Of course, humans lie, manipulate, are drawn to and promote

conspiracy theories that can have devastating consequences. All
this is also part of being social beings. But we recognise humans
as being imperfect, as potentially devious, or bullshitters, or
manipulators. Machines, though, we tend to view either as
objective and unbiased, or potentially evil if sentient. We often
forget that machines can be biased or just plain wrong, because
they are not grounded in the world in the way humans are, and
because they need to be programmed by humans and trained on
human-gathered data.

当然，人类会撒谎、操纵、被阴谋论所吸引并推动这些阴谋论可能会带
来毁灭性的后果。所有这些也是社会人的一部分。但我们认识到人类是
不完美的，可能是不正直的、胡说八道的，或者是幕后操纵者。然而，
人们倾向于认为机器要么是客观和公正的，要么如果有知觉的话，可能
是邪恶的。我们经常忘记，机器也可能是有偏见的，或者是完全错误的，
因为它们并不像人类那样扎根于这个世界，因为它们需要由人类编程，
并使用人类收集的数据进行训练。

We also live in an age in which surface often matters more than

depth of meaning. An age in which politicians too often pursue
policy not because it is necessary or right in principle but because
it fares well in focus groups. An age in which we often ignore the
social context of people’s actions or speech and are bedazzled by
literalness. An age in which students are, in the words of the writer
and educator John Warner, “rewarded for… regurgitating existing
information” in a system that “privilege[s] surface-level
correctness” rather than “develop[ing] their writing and critical
thinking skills”. That ChatGPT seems so easily to write grade A
essays, he suggests, “is mainly a comment on what we value”.

我们也生活在一个表面往往比意义的深度更重要的时代。在这个时代，
政客们追求政策往往不是因为它在本质上是必要的或正确的，而是因为
它在焦点群体中很受欢迎。在这个时代，我们经常忽视人们行为或言语
所处的社会背景，被其字面意思所迷惑。用作家和教育家 John Warner
的话来说，在这个时代，学生们“因……机械性重复现有信息而受到奖
励”，而这个时代的体系“重视表面的正确性”，而不是“培养他们的写
作和批判性思维技能”。他认为，ChatGPT 似乎很容易写出 A 级文章，
而“这主要是对我们所看重的内容的评价”。

None of this is to deny the remarkable technical achievement that

is ChatGPT, or how astonishing it feels to interact with it. It will
undoubtedly develop into a useful tool, helping to enhance both
human knowledge and creativity. But we need to maintain
perspective. ChatGPT reveals not just the advances being made in
AI but also its limitations. It also helps to throw light on both the
nature of human cognition and the character of the contemporary
world.

这并不是要否认 ChatGPT 卓越的技术成就，也不是要否认与它交互的

感觉是多么惊人。毫无疑问，它将发展成为一种有用的工具，帮助提高
人类的知识和创造力。但我们需要保持远见。ChatGPT 不仅揭示了人工
智能的进步，也揭示了其局限性。还有助于揭示人类认知的本质和当代
世界的特征。

More immediately, ChatGPT raises questions, too, about how to

relate to machines that are far better at bullshitting and at
spreading misinformation than humans themselves. Given the
difficulties in tackling human misinformation, these are not
questions that should be delayed. We should not become so
mesmerised by ChatGPT’s persuasiveness that we forget the real
issues that such programs may pose.

更紧急的问题是，ChatGPT 还增加了如何与那些比人类更擅长扯谎和
传播错误信息的机器打交道的问题。鉴于在应对人为错误信息时的困难，
这些问题不应拖延。我们不应该被 ChatGPT 的说服力所迷惑，而忘记
了这些程序可能带来的真正问题。

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2、The AI boom: lessons from history

人工智能热潮：历史的经验

It can take a little imagination to see how some innovations might

change an economy. Not so with the latest AI tools. It is easy—from
a writer’s perspective, uncomfortably so—to think of contexts in
which something like Chatgpt, a clever chatbot which has taken
the web by storm since its release in November, could either
dramatically boost a human worker’s productivity or replace them
outright. The gpt in its name stands for “generative pre-trained
transformer”, which is a particular kind of language model. It
might well stand for general-purpose technology: an earth-
shaking sort of innovation which stands to boost productivity
across a wide-range of industries and occupations, in the manner
of steam engines, electricity and computing. The economic
revolutions powered by those earlier gpts can give us some idea
how powerful AI might transform economies in the years ahead.

想要看到一些创新如何改变经济，可能需要一些想象力。但最新的人工
智能工具却并非如此。从作家的角度来看，想象一个像 ChatGPT 这样
的智能聊天机器人（自去年 11 月发布以来就席卷网络）可以显著提高
人类工作者的工作效率，或完全取代人类工作者的情景，是很容易的，
但这却令人不安。其名称中的 GPT 表示“生成式预训练转换器”，这是
一种特殊的语言模型。它很可能代表通用技术的：一种翻天覆地的创新，
这将提高广泛行业和职业的生产力，就像蒸汽机、电力和计算机一样。
由这些早期“GPTS”推动的经济革命，可以让我们了解未来几年人工智
能将如何强大地改变经济。

In a paper published in 1995, Timothy Bresnahan of Stanford

University and Manuel Trajtenberg of Tel Aviv University set out
what they saw as the characteristics of a general-purpose
technology. It must be used in many industries, have an inherent
potential for continued improvement and give rise to
“innovational complementarities”—that is, induce knock-on
innovation in the industries which use it. AI is being adopted
widely, seems to get better by the day and is being deployed in
ever more r&d contexts. So when does the economic revolution
begin?

在 1995 年发表的一篇论文中，斯坦福大学的 Timothy Bresnahan 和

特拉维夫大学的 Manuel Trajtenberg，阐述了他们所认为的通用技术
的特征。这种技术必须在许多行业中使用，具有持续改进的内在潜力，
并产生“创新互补性”——也就是说，在使用这种技术的行业中诱导连锁
创新。我们现在正广泛采用人工智能，似乎一天比一天好，并把这种技
术部署在越来越多的研发环境中。那么经济革命何时开始呢？

The first lesson from history is that even the most powerful new
tech takes time to change an economy. James Watt patented his
steam engine in 1769, but steam power did not overtake water as
a source of industrial horsepower until the 1830s in Britain and
1860s in America. In Britain the contribution of steam to
productivity growth peaked post-1850, nearly a century after
Watt’s patent, according to Nicholas Crafts of the University of
Sussex. In the case of electrification, the key technical advances
had all been accomplished before 1880, but American
productivity growth actually slowed from 1888 to 1907. Nearly
three decades after the first silicon integrated circuits Robert
Solow, a Nobel-prizewinning economist, was still observing that
the computer age could be seen everywhere but in the
productivity statistics. It was not until the mid-1990s that a
computer-powered productivity boom eventually emerged in
America.

历史给我们的第一个经验是，就算是最强大的新技术，也需要时间来改
变经济。詹姆斯·瓦特在 1769 年为他的蒸汽机申请了专利，但是直到
19 世纪 30 年代的英国和 19 世纪 60 年代的美国，蒸汽动力才取代了
水成为工业动力的来源。据苏塞克斯大学的尼古拉斯·克拉夫特称，在
英国，蒸汽机对生产力增长的贡献，在 1850 年后达到顶峰，也就是瓦
特获得专利的近一个世纪之后。以电气化为例，关键的技术进步都在
1880 年之前完成，但实际上在 1888 年到 1907 年，美国的生产率增长
有所放缓。在第一个硅集成电路问世近 30 年后，诺贝尔经济学奖得主
罗伯特•索洛仍在观察，计算机时代这些集成电路无处不在，但在生产
率统计数据中却看不到。直到 20 世纪 90 年代中期，计算机驱动的生
产力繁荣才最终在美国出现。

The gap between innovation and economic impact is in part

because of fine-tuning. Early steam engines were wildly inefficient
and consumed prohibitively expensive piles of coal. Similarly, the
stunning performance of recent ai tools represents a big
improvement over those which sparked a boomlet of AI
enthusiasm roughly a decade ago. (Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant,
was released in 2011, for example.) Capital constraints can also
slow deployment. Robert Allen of New York University Abu Dhabi
argues that the languid rise in productivity growth in
industrialising Britain reflected a lack of capital to build plants and
machines, which was gradually overcome as capitalists
reinvested their fat profits.

创新和经济影响之间的差距部分是由于微调。早期的蒸汽机效率极低，
并且消耗大量昂贵的煤。同样，最近人工智能工具的惊人表现，与大约
10 年前引发人工智能热潮的工具相比，已经有了很大的进步。（比如，
苹果的虚拟助手 Siri 于 2011 年发布）。资本的限制也会减缓技术部署
速度。纽约大学阿布扎比分校的罗伯特·艾伦认为，英国工业化过程中
生产率增长的缓慢，反映了建造工厂和机器所需资本的缺乏，而这一问
题随着资本家将他们丰厚的利润进行再投资而逐渐被克服。

More recent work emphasises the time required to accumulate

what is known as intangible capital, or the basic know-how
needed to make effective use of new tech. Indeed, Erik
Brynjolfsson of Stanford University, Daniel Rock of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Chad Syverson of the
University of Chicago suggest a disruptive new technology may be
associated with a “productivity J-curve”. Measured productivity
growth may actually decline in the years or decades after a new
technology appears, as firms and workers divert time and
resources to studying the tech and designing business processes
around it. Only later as these investments bear fruit does the J
surge upward. The authors reckon that ai-related investments in
intangible capital may already be depressing productivity growth,
albeit not yet by very much.

最近的研究强调了，积累所谓的无形资本或有效利用新技术所需的基本
知识所需的时间。的确，斯坦福大学的 Erik Brynjolfsson、麻省理工学
院的 Daniel Rock 和芝加哥大学的 Chad Syverson 认为，颠覆性的新
技术可能与“生产力 J 形曲线”有关。在一项新技术出现后的几年或几
十年里，由于企业和员工将时间和资源用于研究这项技术，并围绕该新
技术设计业务流程，衡量的生产率增长实际上可能会下降。只有在这些
投资取得成果之后，J 曲线上才会大幅上升。作者认为，与人工智能相
关的无形资本投资可能已经在抑制生产率增长，尽管还不是很大。

Of course for many people, questions about the effects of ai on

growth take a back seat to concerns about consequences for
workers. Here, history’s messages are mixed. There is good news:
despite epochal technological and economic change, fears of
mass technological unemployment have never before been
realised. Tech can and does take a toll on individual occupations,
however, in ways that can prove socially disruptive. Early in the
Industrial Revolution, mechanisation dramatically increased
demand for relatively unskilled workers, but crushed the earnings
of craftsmen who had done much of the work before, which is why
some chose to join machine-smashing Luddite movements. And
in the 1980s and 1990s, automation of routine work on factory
floors and in offices displaced many workers of modest means,
while boosting employment for both high- and low-skilled
workers.

当然，对许多人来说，人工智能对经济增长的影响问题，被置于对工人
影响的担忧之后。在这里，历史给我们的信息是好坏参半的。好消息是：
尽管发生了划时代的技术和经济变革，但对大规模技术性失业的担忧从
未成为现实。然而，科技可以也确实会对个人职业造成影响，其影响方
式可能会对社会造成破坏。在工业革命早期，机械化极大地增加了对相
对无技能工人的需求，但减少了以前做过大部分工作的工匠的收入，这
就是为什么一些人选择加入粉碎机器的勒德运动。在 20 世纪 80 年代
和 90 年代，工厂和办公室日常工作的自动化，取代了许多中等收入的
工人，同时促进了高技能和低技能工人的就业。

AI might well augment the productivity of workers of all different

skill levels, even writers. Yet what that means for an occupation as
a whole depends on whether improved productivity and lower
costs lead to a big jump in demand or only a minor one. When the
assembly line—a process innovation with gpt-like characteristics—
allowed Henry Ford to cut the cost of making cars, demand surged
and workers benefited. If AI boosts productivity and lowers costs
in medicine, for example, that might lead to much higher demand
for medical services and professionals.

人工智能很可能提高所有不同技能水平的工人的生产力，甚至是作家。
然而，这对一个职业整体来说意味着什么，这取决于生产率的提高和成
本的降低，是否会导致需求的大幅增长，还是说只是小幅增长。当流水
线——一种具有 gpt 特征的工艺创新——可以让亨利·福特削减汽车制造
成本时，需求激增，工人受益。例如，如果人工智能提高了生产力并降
低了医疗成本，这可能会导致对医疗服务和专业人员的需求大幅增加。

There is a chance that powerful ai will break the historic mould. A

technology capable of handling almost any task the typical person
can do would bring humanity into uncharted economic territory.
Yet even in such a scenario, the past holds some lessons. The
sustained economic growth which accompanied the steam
revolution, and the further acceleration which came along with
electrification and other later innovations, were themselves
unprecedented. They prompted a tremendous scramble to invent
new ideas and institutions, to make sure that radical economic
change translated into broad-based prosperity rather than chaos.
It may soon be time to scramble once again.

强大的人工智能有可能打破历史模式。一项几乎可以处理我们普通人能
做的任何任务的技术，将把人类带入未知的经济领域。然而，即使在这
种情况下，过去也有一些经验可循。伴随着蒸汽革命而来的持续经济增
长，以及伴随着电气化和其他后来的创新而来的进一步加速增长，本身
就是前所未有的。这些创新促使人们争相发明新思想和新制度，以确保
重大的经济变革转化为广泛的繁荣，而不是混乱。也许很快就会是再次
变革的时候。

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3、The link between personality and success

性格与成功之间的联系

The modern manager has to play the role of coach in charge of

their team. And that requires an understanding of the different
personality types they may be managing, and indeed the role their
own personality may play in the way they manage.

现代经理必须扮演教练的角色来管理他们的团队。这就需要了解他们可
能会面对的不同性格类型，以及他们自己的性格在管理方式中可能扮演
的角色。

Karl Moore, an associate professor at McGill University in Canada,

has written two recent articles on the role of different personality
types in business. One of the most common divides is between
introverts and extroverts.

加拿大麦吉尔大学副教授卡尔·摩尔最近写了两篇关于不同性格类型在
商业中所起作用的文章。最常见的是内向者和外向者之间的区别。

Mr Moore estimates that around 40% of the population are

introverts, 40% are extroverts and 20% are “ambiverts” who can
display both characteristics.

摩尔估计，大约 40%的人属于内向型，40%的人属于外向型，还有 20%

的人属于“中间性格”（这类人可以同时表现出这两种性格） 。

It is easy to assume that the extroverts are most likely to go far in

business. An academic study* found that extroverts were 25%
more likely to be in a high-earning job than those who were less
outgoing.

人们总是认为，外向的人最有可能在商业上顺风顺水。一项学术研究发
现，外向的人从事高收入工作的可能性比不那么外向的人高出 25%。

The chain of causation is not clear. It is possible that working in a

high-paid job makes people more confident and outgoing,
although personality traits tend to develop early in life.

其中的因果关系链尚不清楚。高收入工作可能会让人更有自信、更外向，
尽管性格特征往往在生命早期就已形成。

The study also found that the children of professionals were more
likely to be extrovert. It could simply be that children who grow up
in more prosperous homes are less likely to face the kind of
stressful events that undermine self-confidence.

研究还发现，专业人士的孩子更有可能性格外向。这或许只是因为在富
裕家庭长大的孩子不太可能面对那种摧毁自信的压力事件。

People with higher self-confidence may apply for more

prestigious jobs and may be more likely to believe that their efforts
will be rewarded; those with a negative self-image may feel it is
not worth trying too hard.

更有自信的人可能会申请更有声望的工作，也更有可能相信自己的努力
会得到回报；那些自我形象消极的人可能会觉得不值得太努力。

So introverts should not give up hope of climbing the greasy pole.

A study in 2017 found that introverts were slightly more likely than
extroverts to surpass the expectations of boards and investors
when appointed as chief executive.

所以内向的人不应该放弃勇攀高峰的希望。2017 年的一项研究发现，
当被任命为首席执行官时，内向者比外向者更有可能超出董事会和投资
者的预期。

Ambiverts can be good salespeople because they are able to

listen to their clients and understand their needs but also have the
energy to sell their firms’ goods and services. Mr Moore thinks that
successful executives have to become ambiverts at times in order
to succeed.

中间性格者更有可能成为优秀的销售人员，因为他们能够倾听客户的意
见，了解他们的需求，同时也有精力销售公司的产品和服务。摩尔认为，
高管们有时想要成功就必须变成中间性格。
Introverts must try to show enthusiasm, or make a stirring speech,
when the situation calls for it. And extroverts need to shut up and
listen to their teams—not least because when the boss speaks first,
subordinates will be reluctant to disagree.

当形势需要时，内向的人必须努力表现出热情，或者发表一场激动人心
的演讲。外向的人则需要闭嘴并倾听他们的团队——尤其是因为当老板
先说话时，下属将不愿提出异议。

By the same token, managers need to think about the different

personality types when conducting meetings. It is easy for
meetings to be dominated by extroverts, who have a tendency to
speak the loudest and most often.

同理，管理者在主持会议时需要考虑与会者不同的性格类型。外向的人
很容易在会议中占据主导地位，他们往往说话最大声、最频繁。

Introverts may never contribute to the discussion. In his book,

“Running Meetings That Make Things Happen”, Jon Baker says
that one answer is to circulate materials well in advance.

内向的人可能永远不会参与讨论。乔恩·贝克在他的著作《开会来解决
问题》中说，解决这一问题的一个办法是提前分发材料。

Introverts, he writes, “don’t debate something as effectively if

they’re still learning about it. If you want the views of the more
detail-conscious members in your team, give them time to absorb
the information.”

他写道，内向的人“如果还在学习，就不会对某事进行有效的讨论。如
果你想听取团队中更注重细节的成员的意见，那就请给他们时间吸收信
息。”

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4、Some 19m years ago the world’s sharks almost disappeared

大约 1900 万年前，地球上的鲨鱼几乎灭绝

Sharks may not be the best-loved creatures on Earth, but they are
an important part of marine ecology and many of the larger
species are in serious decline. That threat, though, may be nothing
compared with what happened 19m years ago, during the
Miocene epoch—for then, it seems, the whole group came
perilously close to extinction.

鲨鱼可能并非地球上最受人喜爱的动物，但它们却是海洋生态的重要一
环，许多大型海洋生物的数量正在急剧减少。然而，与 1900 万年前中
新世时期发生的情况相比，如今这种威胁可能算不了什么——因为在那
时，整个鲨鱼种群几近灭绝。

The fossil record is a patchy reflection of the past, and rocks from
the deep ocean, in particular, only rarely end up on dry land, and
thus accessible to the palaeontologist’s hammer.

化石记录是对过去情况零碎的反映，尤其是那些来自深海的化石，它们
最终往往难以重见天日，因此古生物学家也很难对其展开研究。

Recent decades have, however, seen a number of drilling

expeditions which have collected samples from the ooze that
accumulates on the ocean floor. And a few years ago Elizabeth
Sibert, a palaeoecologist now at Yale University, came up with a
clever way to use these to gain information about life in the seas
of the past.

然而，近几十年来，许多钻探探险队开始从堆积在海底的软泥中采集样
本。几年前，耶鲁大学古生物学家伊丽莎白·西伯特想出了一个巧妙的
方法以利用这些样本获取有关过去海洋中生命的信息。

This was to look at microscopic, mineral-rich objects shed by

sharks (mainly bits of protective skin-covering, known as denticles,
pictured) and bony fish (mainly teeth). Counting and classifying
these so-called ichthyoliths gives a sense of both the abundance
and the diversity of the animals in question.

该方法是通过观察鲨鱼(主要是一些被称为肤齿的保护性皮肤覆盖物)
和硬骨鱼(主要是牙齿)脱落的富含矿物质的微小物质。研究人员通过对
这些所谓的鳞片进行计数和分类，即可对所研究动物的数量和多样性有
所了解。

Her latest investigation of the matter has yielded a shock. She and
Leah Rubin, of the State University of New York, have been
perusing two sediment cores collected thousands of kilometres
apart in the north and the south of the Pacific Ocean.
她最新的研究发现令人震惊。她和纽约州立大学的研究者利亚·鲁宾一
直对太平洋北部和南部相距数千公里的两个沉积物岩芯进行仔细的研
究。

As they write in Science, they discovered that, in a span of at most

100,000 years, the ratio of shark denticles to bony-fish teeth
changed radically. Before this geological eyeblink, both cores
yielded about one denticle for every five teeth—a ratio that had
been stable for 40m years. After it, that ratio dropped to one to
100.

正如她们在《科学》杂志上所描述的那样，她们发现，在时间跨度长达
10 万年的时期内，鲨鱼肤齿和硬骨鱼牙齿的比例发生了天翻地覆的变
化。在处于该时期的岩芯化石中，每 5 个鳞片中就有一个鲨鱼肤齿或硬
骨鱼牙齿，这一比例在 4000 万年的时间跨度里一直保持稳定。但随后，
这一比例便降至百分之一。

The mixture of denticles changed, too. Modern shark species often

have only one or two types of denticle, and these can be
characteristic of the species or family in question, so it is
reasonable to assume that something similar pertained during the
Miocene.

鳞片的种类也发生了变化。现代鲨鱼通常只有一种或两种肤齿，这些肤
齿可能代表的是所研究物种或种群的特征，因此我们有理由认为这一规
律在中新世时期同样适用。

Dr Sibert and Ms Rubin saw a 70% reduction in the number of types

of denticle after the ratio changed, indicating a loss of many entire
species as well as a reduction in shark numbers.

西伯特和鲁宾发现，在齿片比例发生变化后，肤齿的种类减少了 70%，
这表明许多鲨鱼种群的消亡以及鲨鱼数量的减少。

What happened is obscure. For sharks as a group, this was a mass

extinction twice as bad as the one at the end of the Cretaceous
period, when Earth was hit by an asteroid and the dinosaurs and
many other types of animals vanished. In this case, though, as far
as it is possible to tell from the rocks, only sharks were affected.
And that really is a mystery.

我们尚不清楚当时究竟发生了什么。那次大灭绝事件对于整个鲨鱼种群
造成打击的严重程度是白垩纪末期（当时，恐龙和其他许多物种大规模
灭绝）小行星撞击地球时的两倍。不过，通过化石可以看出，那次大灭
绝事件仅对鲨鱼造成了影响。这真是个谜。

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5、The legacy of Victorian-era pollution still shapes English
cities

维多利亚时代遗留的污染问题仍影响着英国的城市

The east end of London was long an epitome of industrial squalor.

Today its smokestacks are gone, but it remains the city’s poorest
area. This lopsided distribution of poverty is typical in England,
where the western halves of metropolitan areas tend to be richer
than the eastern ones.

长期以来，伦敦东区一直是英国工业污染的一个缩影。如今，矗立在那
里的烟囱消失了，但它仍是这座城市最贫穷的地区。这种地区贫富分布
不平衡的现象在英国很常见，英国大都市的西部往往比东部更富裕。

What accounts for this pattern? In London the most intuitive reason
is the River Thames. Historically, it carried wastewater from west
to east, and its banks downstream from the city centre were lined
with docks, which might have drawn low-earning workers to the
area.

究竟是什么原因导致了这种分布模式？在伦敦，最直观的原因是泰晤士
河。从历史上看，泰晤士河自西向东输送着废水，市中心下游的河岸边
布满了码头，这些码头吸引了许多低收入工人前来。
But if the river were the cause, fluvial currents would probably
point towards rough parts of other cities too. Instead, the east is
poorer even in Bristol and Manchester, where rivers flow west.

但如果真的是河流的原因，那么污水也会奔涌向其他城市的低处。然而，
即使在河流自东向西流动的布里斯托尔和曼彻斯特，也是城市的东部更
贫穷。

A newly published paper, by Stephan Heblich, Alex Trew and

Yanos Zylberberg, argues instead that wind was the culprit, by
blowing air pollution east and causing the rich to flee in the
opposite direction.

斯蒂芬·赫布利希、亚历克斯·特鲁和亚诺斯·齐尔伯格最近发表的一篇论
文认为，风才是导致这一分布模式的罪魁祸首，风将受污染的空气吹向
了东边，导致富人们朝着相反的方向逃离。

To solve a 19th-century mystery, their study used 21st-century

wizardry. First, it applied an image-recognition algorithm to maps
of 70 English cities in 1880-1900, pinpointing the sites of 5,000
industrial chimneys.

为了解开 19 世纪的这个谜团，他们利用 21 世纪的技术展开了研究。

首先，该研究团队将一种图像识别算法应用到 1880-1900 年间 70 个
英国城市的地图上，精确定位了 5000 个工业烟囱的位置。
Next, using census and baptism data, it estimated labourers’
average skill levels over time in 5,500 local areas. By 1881
chimneys were often ringed by working-class homes. Before coal
power, the low-skilled share of those areas was unremarkable.

接下来，该团队利用人口普查和浸礼数据，从而对 5500 个地区的劳动

者随时间推移的平均技能水平进行了评估。1881 年那会，烟囱周围通
常都是工人阶级的房子。在煤电出现之前，这些地区低技能人员的比例
并没有显著更高。

But which came first, the factories or the proletariat? To find an

answer, the authors drew concentric circles around each
smokestack, and measured the share of working-class labourers
in different parts of each ring, which all had similar travel times to
a given factory. They also used atmospheric-dispersion models to
estimate where each chimney’s exhaust would wind up, based on
local topography.

但工厂和工人阶级究竟哪个更早出现呢？为了找到答案，研究者在每个
烟囱周围画了同心圆，并统计了每个圆环不同部分的工人阶级所占的比
例，这些工人距离相应工厂的路程都差不多。他们还利用大气扩散模型，
根据当地地形来估计每个烟囱排出的废气会飘向何处。

In 1817 low-skilled workers were evenly spread around these rings.

But by 1881 they clustered in the direction of the prevailing wind,
which carried noxious fumes. This implies either that factory staff
moved into newly polluted areas, or that richer people fled them.
And because English winds tend to blow from the south-west,
these areas were mostly north-east of the chimneys.

1817 年，低技能工人平均分散在这些圆环周围。但到了 1881 年，他

们便顺着携带有毒烟雾的盛行风的方向聚集在了一起。这意味着要么工
厂的工人搬到了新污染地区，要么是富人逃离了那里。由于英国的风通
常是从西南方向吹来的，因此这些地区大多位于烟囱的东北方向。

This pattern is remarkably durable. Among otherwise similar

regions of a city like Manchester, the share of blue-collar workers
in 2011 was 16 percentage points higher in areas in the top decile
of pollution in 1880-1900 than in those in the bottom decile. House
prices were 40% lower. England cut back on coal decades ago, but
Victorian smog casts a long shadow.

这种分布模式非常普遍。其他城市情况类似，在曼彻斯特，2011 年污
染最严重地区的蓝领工人比例比 1880-1900 年间高 16%。这一地区的
房价则下降了 40%。英国早在几十年前就削减了煤炭的用量，但维多
利亚时代雾霾的阴影仍长期笼罩着英国。

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6、Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

无人驾驶汽车陷入了困境

Few ideas have enthused technologists as much as the self-

driving car. Advances in machine learning, a subfield of artificial
intelligence (AI), would enable cars to teach themselves to drive
by drawing on reams of data from the real world.

很少有像无人驾驶汽车这样能够激发技术人员热情的理念了。机器学习
是人工智能（AI）的一个分支，它的发展能够使汽车利用从现实世界获
取的大量数据自主学会驾驶。

The more they drove, the more data they would collect, and the
better they would become. Robotaxis summoned with the flick of
an app would make car ownership obsolete.

它们跑的路越多，收集到的数据就越多，行驶技术也会变得越好。我们
只需轻点一下应用程序，便可以召唤一辆机器人出租车到面前，私家车
或将成为过去式。

Best of all, reflexes operating at the speed of electronics would

drastically improve safety. Car- and tech-industry bosses talked of
a world of “zero crashes”.

最重要的是，电子设备速度下的反应操作将大大提高车辆的安全性。汽
车行业和科技行业的老板们甚至已经在构想一个“零事故”的世界了。

And the technology was just around the corner. In 2015 Elon Musk,
Tesla’s boss, predicted his cars would be capable of “complete
autonomy” by 2017. Mr Musk is famous for missing his own
deadlines. But he is not alone.

无人驾驶技术似乎近在咫尺。特斯拉的老板埃隆·马斯克在 2015 年曾
预测，到 2017 年，特斯拉的汽车将会实现“完全自主驾驶”。马斯克
以超期而闻名。但并不只有他一个人。

General Motors said in 2018 that it would launch a fleet of cars

without steering wheels or pedals in 2019; in June it changed its
mind. Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary widely seen as the industry
leader, committed itself to launching a driverless-taxi service in
Phoenix, where it has been testing its cars, at the end of 2018.

通用汽车曾在 2018 年表示，将在 2019 年推出一系列没有方向盘或脚

踏板的汽车；它却在今年 6 月改了主意。Alphabet 的子公司 Waymo
是公认的无人驾驶行业的领导者，它承诺将于 2018 年底在凤凰城推出
无人驾驶出租车服务，Waymo 此前一直在凤凰城对其无人驾驶汽车进
行测试。

The plan has been a damp squib. Only part of the city is covered;
only approved users can take part. Phoenix’s wide, sun-soaked
streets are some of the easiest to drive on anywhere in the world;
even so, Waymo’s cars have human safety drivers behind the
wheel, just in case.

计划最终以失败告终。其无人驾驶出租车仅覆盖了城市的部分地区；并
且只有获得批准的用户才能参与。凤凰城有着宽阔、阳光普照的街道，
是世界上最容易驾驶汽车的地方；即便如此，Waymo 为了以防万一还
是在汽车上配备了人类安全驾驶员。

Jim Hackett, the boss of Ford, acknowledges that the industry

“overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles”. Chris
Urmson, a linchpin in Alphabet’s self-driving efforts (he left in
2016), used to hope his young son would never need a driving
licence.

福特汽车的总裁吉姆·哈克特承认，汽车行业“高估了无人驾驶汽车到
来的步伐”。Alphabet 公司无人驾驶业务的关键人物克里斯·厄姆森曾
希望自己的小儿子永远都用不上驾照。

Mr Urmson now talks of self-driving cars appearing gradually over

the next 30 to 50 years. Firms are increasingly switching to a more
incremental approach, building on technologies such as lane-
keeping or automatic parking.

如今，厄姆森却认为，无人驾驶汽车将在未来 30 至 50 年逐步实现。
越来越多的公司正在转向一种基于车道保持系统和自动停车等技术的
更为渐进的方式来实现无人驾驶。

A string of fatalities involving self-driving cars have scotched the

idea that a zero-crash world is anywhere close. Markets are
starting to catch on. In September Morgan Stanley, a bank, cut its
valuation of Waymo by 40%, to $105bn, citing delays in its
technology.

一系列涉及无人驾驶汽车的死亡事故让零事故世界即将到来的想法彻
底幻灭。市场的反应也随之而来。今年 9 月，摩根斯坦利以技术延误为
由将 Waymo 的估值下调了 40%至 1050 亿美元。

The future, in other words, is stuck in traffic. Partly that reflects the
tech industry’s predilection for grandiose promises. But self-
driving cars were also meant to be a flagship for the power of AI.
Their struggles offer valuable lessons in the limits of the world’s
trendiest technology.

换句话说，无人驾驶的未来被堵在了路上。这在一定程度上也反映了科
技行业喜欢做出夸大的承诺。但无人驾驶汽车也被认为是人工智能技术
应用的一个典范。无人驾驶汽车的困境为我们提供了宝贵的经验教训，
让我们看到了世界上最时髦技术的局限性。

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7、Happiness on just a day a week

每周只需工作一天便能带来快乐

People’s relationship with work is complex. For all the complaining

about the tedium and bureaucracy, the power-crazed bosses and
recalcitrant colleagues, individuals need the security of a job.

人与工作的关系很复杂。虽然人们总是抱怨工作单调乏味、充满官僚主
义作风、老板迷恋权力、同事顽固不化，但每个人都需要一份工作所带
来的安全感。

A century of research has shown that unemployment is bad for

mental health, leading to depression, anxiety and reduced self-
esteem. On average, it has an even greater effect than divorce.

一个世纪以来的研究表明，失业有害心理健康，会导致抑郁、焦虑以及
自尊心的丧失。平均而言，失业对人们的影响更甚于离婚。

But how much work do you need to do? A recent paper* by the
Centre for Business Research at Cambridge University took the
opportunity of the pandemic to examine the impact of reduced
working hours on well-being.

但是你究竟需要多少工作量呢？近日，剑桥大学商业研究中心发表的一
篇论文，该机构借新冠肺炎疫情之机就工作时间的减少对幸福感的影响
展开了研究。

Many British employees were placed in a furlough scheme, under

which their hours were reduced and their wages were subsidised
by the government. “We found that people working reduced
working hours or being furloughed do not have poorer mental
health,” the authors conclude.

疫情爆发之际，许多英国人被强制安排了休假，他们的工作时长缩短了，
而工资则由政府补贴。该论文的作者总结称：“我们发现，那些工作时
长缩短或被强制安排休假的人的心理健康状况并没有变差。”

This suggests that social welfare would be improved if

governments adopted furlough schemes in future recessions,
even when they are not triggered by a virus.

这表明，如果政府在未来的经济衰退中采取此类强制休假措施，那么社
会福利将会得到提升，即使衰退并非由病毒所致。

What was particularly surprising is how little work was needed to

keep people happy. The threshold for good mental health was just
one day a week—after that, it seemed to make little difference to
individuals’ well-being if they worked eight hours or 48 hours a
week.
尤其令人惊讶的是，只需很少量的工作就能让人感到快乐。保持良好的
心理健康的工作量临界值是每周工作一天，此后，不管是每周再工作 8
小时还是 48 小时，其对个人幸福感的影响似乎都微乎其微。

The boost from working clearly comes from the feeling of purpose,
from the social status it creates and from the camaraderie of
colleagues engaged in the same tasks.

工作的推动力显然来自于使命感、它所带来的社会地位以及与并肩奋斗
的同事之间的情谊。

Clearly, economies cannot prosper if everyone works one day a

week. But the need to limit excessive working hours was realised
back in Victorian times. For much of the 20th century the length of
the average working week fell while output continued to climb.

如果每个人每周只工作一天，经济显然不可能繁荣。但早在维多利亚时
代，人们就已经认识到限制过长工作时间的必要性。在 20 世纪的大部
分时间里，人们平均每周的工作时长都在缩短，但产出却在持续增多。

There will be occasions when people have to work late or rise early
to finish a project (Bartleby writes this on a day when the needs of
The Economist required him to get up at 5am).

有时，人们会为了完成一个项目而不得不起早贪黑（为了能及时交稿，
巴托比在撰写这篇文章时就是早上 5 点起床的）。

Day after day, however, a long-hours lifestyle is bad for workers’

health. Some organisations may see the appetite for slogging it
out as a sign of an employee’s willingness to put their job ahead
of their families and friends. If so, they don’t need to have better
employees. They need better managers.

然而，日复一日的长时间工作方式对员工的健康造成了损害。一些雇主
可能会认为，员工努力工作的表现是把工作的重要性排在了家人和朋友
之前。如果真是这样，这些公司需要的不是更好的员工，而是更好的管
理者。

点击返回目录
8 、 Memory study induces sleeping people to forget word
associations

研究发现，睡觉时播放音频可能会削弱某些回忆

Playing sounds while you slumber might help to strengthen some

memories while weakening others, research suggests, with
experts noting the approach might one day help people living with
traumatic recollections. Previous work has shown that when a
sound is played as a person learns an association between two
words, the memory of that word association is boosted if the same
sound is played while the individual sleeps. Now researchers have
found fresh evidence the approach could also be used to weaken
such memories.

研究表明，睡觉时播放声音可能有助于增强一些记忆，同时会削弱其他
记忆。专家指出，这种方法有朝一日可能会帮助那些有创伤回忆的人。
之前的研究表明，当一个人在学习两个字词之间的联系时播放某一个声
音，如果在这个人睡觉时播放同样的声音，那么这个人对这个单词联系
的记忆就会增强。现在，研究人员发现了新的证据，证明这种方法也可
以用来削弱一些这样的记忆。

“We can an actually induce forgetting of specific material whilst

people are asleep,” said Dr Aidan Horner, co-author of the study
from the University of York. Writing in the journal Learning &
Memory, Horner and colleagues report how 29 participants were
shown pairs of words on a computer screen, one of which was an
object word, such as bicycle, while the other was either a place
word, such as office, or a person, such as David Beckham.

这项研究的联合作者、来自约克大学的 Aidan Horner 博士说：“我们

实际上可以诱导人们在睡觉时忘记特定的内容”。在《学习与记忆》杂
志上，Horner 和他的同事报告了如何在电脑屏幕上向 29 名参与者展
示成对的单词，其中一个是物体词，如自行车，另一个是地点词，如办
公室，或人物词，如大卫·贝克汉姆。

The process was repeated for 60 different object words, and in the
course of the process both possible pairings were shown,
resulting in 120 associations. As the pairs flashed up, participants
heard the object word being spoken out loud. The team tested the
participants on a subset of the associations, presenting them with
one of the words and asking them to select a paired word from a
list of six options. Participants then spent a night in the team’s
sleep laboratory. Once they had entered a particular sleep state –
as judged by electrodes placed on their heads – they were played
audio of 30 of the object words.这个过程重复了 60 个不同的物体词，
在这个过程中，与之对应的两个可能的配对都被显示出来，一共产生了
120 个联想组合。当配对出现时，参与者大声说出听到的物体词。该团
队测试了参与者的一个小组，向他们展示其中一个单词，并要求他们从
六个选项列表中选择一个配对单词。然后，参与者在团队的睡眠实验室
里度过了一晚。当他们进入一种特定的睡眠状态(通过放置在他们头上
的电极来判断)时，就会播放 30 个物体词的音频。

The team tested participants on the word associations the next

day. The results reveal participants’ ability to recall the first word
they had learned to pair with an object word was boosted if audio
of the latter was played as they slept, compared with if it was not
played. However, their ability to recall the second word they
learned to associate with the same object decreased relative to
the audio-free scenario.

第二天，研究小组对参与者进行了单词联想测试。研究结果显示，与不
播放录音相比，在受试者睡觉时播放单词录音，他们回忆起与物体词配
对的第一个单词的能力得到了提高。然而，与没有声音的情景相比，他
们回忆起与同一物体词相关的第二个单词的能力下降了。

“Just looking at the actual raw scores, the performance goes

down from about 50% to just over 40%,” said Horner. However,
the team found the effects were only present when the pairings
had not been tested pre-sleep – suggesting other instances of
recall are also important. Horner said the findings backed up
previous studies that found repeatedly triggering participants’
memories of one word pairing while awake led them to forget the
second association with the same word.

Horner 说：“仅仅看实际的原始分数，表现从 50%下降到 40%多一点”。

然而，研究小组发现，只有在睡前没有对配对进行测试时，这种效果才
会出现，这表明其他情况下的回忆也很重要。Horner 说，这一发现支
持了之前的研究，即在清醒时反复触发参与者对其中一个单词配对的记
忆，会让他们忘记与同一单词的第二个关联。

“What we’re doing here is essentially setting up a situation where

there are two competing memories, and that interference is
leading to forgetting one of those memories,” he said. While the
mechanism at play remains unclear, Horner said it might
eventually be possible to harness the approach to tackle painful
recollections of traumatic events. But, he added: “There’s a lot of
steps that we need to take to see whether we can actually induce
this forgetting for real world memories.”他说：“我们在这里所做的
基本上是设置一个情境，在这个情境中有两个相互竞争的记忆，而这种
竞争的干扰会导致我们遗忘掉其中一个记忆”。虽然起作用的机制尚不
清楚，但 Horner 表示，最终可能利用这种方法来处理创伤事件的痛苦
回忆。但是，他补充说：“我们需要采取很多步骤，来看看我们是否真
的可以诱导人们这种对现实世界记忆的遗忘”。

点击返回目录
9、A new book argues that decency pays off in business as well
as in life

一本新书认为，无论是做生意还是在生活中，诚以待人都将获得回报

Nice guys finish last. That pithy motto was coined by Leo Durocher,
a baseball manager noted for exulting at injuring his opponents
and for cheating his players at cards.

好人没好报。这句至简格言出自棒球经理里奥·杜罗切之口，他以伤害
对手时狂喜以及与球员打牌时作弊而闻名。

In 1969 his Chicago Cubs had a big lead in the closing weeks of
the season, but he so alienated his squad (and the umpires) that
the team failed to make it to the World Series. In his case, nasty
guys finished behind.

1969 年，他所带领的芝加哥小熊队在赛季末的最后几周占据着巨大的
领先优势，但由于他与球员（以及裁判）关系处得太差，以至于球队最
终未能进入世界大赛。我们从他身上可以看到，坏人是没有好报的。

This is one of the tales told by David Bodanis, a writer best known
for his science books, who has turned his attention to the issue of
how leaders should exercise their authority. The core message in
his book, “The Art of Fairness”, can be found in the subtitle: “The
power of decency in a world turned mean”.

这是大卫·博达尼斯（一位以科学著作而闻名的作家）讲述的故事之一，
他将话题转向了领导者应该如何行使职权的问题上。从他撰写的《公平
的艺术》一书的副标题中，我们可以看到他想要表达的核心观点：“在
这个卑鄙的世界里，诚以待人所具有的力量。”

The Empire State Building was constructed in just 13 months, and

that included the dismantling of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel that sat
on the site. Paul Starrett, the builder, treated his workers rather
well by the standards of the time, paying much attention to safety
and paying employees on days when it was too windy to work.
Daily wages were more than double the usual rate and hot meals
were provided on site.

帝国大厦的建造仅仅用了 13 月的时间，其中还包括拆掉原址上华尔道
夫酒店的时间。以当时的标准来衡量，承建商保罗·斯塔雷特给予工人
以优厚的待遇，他非常注意安全问题，即使在风大无法施工时也会给工
人们发工资。这些工人拿到的工资是他们平日里的两倍多，此外工地上
还会供应热乎的饭菜。

The concept is known as “efficiency wages”. Companies that

compensate workers well and treat them fairly can attract better,
more motivated staff. Unlike most construction projects, the
Empire State Building had low staff turnover, and workers
suggested productivity improvements such as building a
miniature railway line to bring bricks to the site.

这一概念被称为“效率工资”。那些给予员工优厚报酬和公平待遇的公
司能够吸引更优秀、更有干劲的员工前来。不同于大多数工程建设项目，
帝国大厦项目有着很低的工人流动率，工人们甚至还会提出建议以提高
生产率，例如，有人建议修建一条微型铁路，以便将砖块运送至工地。

But Starrett was not naively generous; he hired accountants to

patrol the works, checking that all materials were accounted for,
and staff attendance was recorded four times a day.

但斯塔雷特并不是个傻大粗老板；他雇用了会计师在工地巡查，核查材
料与账目是否对得上，并对工人每天 4 次出勤情况进行记录。

The author contrasts Starrett’s story with the tale of Eastern Air
Travel, an airline built by Eddie Rickenbacker, a pioneer aviator
who had granted mechanics a 40-hour week, profit-related pay
and a pension.

波达尼斯将斯塔雷特的故事与美国东方航空公司的故事进行了对比。东
方航空是由飞行先驱埃迪·瑞肯巴克创立的一家航空公司，他只要求机
修工每周工作 40 个小时，并为他们提供了与利润挂钩的工资和退休金。

But when Frank Lorenzo took over the company in the 1980s, he
cut wages, alienated the staff and pursued a policy of asset-
stripping the company. The workers went on strike in protest and
Eastern went bankrupt.

但随着弗兰克·洛伦佐在上世纪 80 年代接管东方航空后，洛伦佐削减了
员工工资，与员工逐渐疏远，并推行了剥离公司资产的政策。于是，工
人们开始罢工抗议，东方航空最终破产。

Another contrast cited by the author is that between Steve Ballmer,

the hard-charging chief executive of Microsoft notorious for his
towering rages, and his more emollient successor, Satya Nadella.

作者还提到了另一个例子，即微软前首席执行官（生性强硬、以大发雷
霆而闻名的史蒂夫·鲍尔默）与他的继任者（性格相对温和的萨蒂亚·纳
德拉）之间的对比。

Mr Ballmer so disliked Apple that he seized an iPhone from a

subordinate in full view of the humiliated employee and
pretended to stomp on it. On his watch Microsoft missed out on
several promising business opportunities.

鲍尔默非常厌恶苹果公司，他甚至会一把夺过员工手中的苹果手机，假
装用脚踩，以对其羞辱。在他的带领下，微软错过了几个颇有前途的商
业机会。
On the day Mr Ballmer announced his departure the share price
jumped by 7.5%. Under Mr Nadella, Microsoft has successfully
shifted its attention to cloud-based services and even briefly
regained the title of the world’s most valuable listed company.

在鲍尔默宣布辞去首席执行官一职的当天，微软的股价上涨了 7.5%。
而在纳德拉的领导下，微软成功地将业务重心转向了云服务，甚至一度
重新成为全球市值最高的上市公司（虽然只保持了短暂的一段时间）。

点击返回目录
10、Crypto-miners are probably to blame for the graphics-chip
shortage

加密货币矿工或许是显卡芯片短缺的罪魁祸首

The past year has been rough for gamers. Just as covid-19 brought
in-person entertainment to a halt, the cost of graphics processing
units (GPUs) needed to run computer games soared. Graphics
cards like Nvidia’s RTX 3080, with a suggested price of $699, have
fetched up to $2,400. When bricks-and-mortar stores get a few in
stock, buyers queue up overnight.

过去的一年对游戏玩家来说是艰难的一年。就像新冠肺炎疫情导致线下
娱乐活动的中断一样，运行电脑游戏所必备的图形处理器（GPU）的价
格也在一路飙升。像英伟达 RTX 3080 这样一款官方指导价为 699 美元
的显卡如今已经涨到了 2400 美元。即便如此，一旦某家实体店有货时，
买家都会通宵排队抢购。

Prices for all types of chips have risen of late, for myriad reasons.
Silicon wafers are scarce. Manufacturers have suffered disruptions.
Scalpers use bots to buy up inventory. Chinese-made chips face
American tariffs. And demand for personal computers is the
highest since 2010.

由于种种原因，各类芯片的价格近来都在上涨。硅片（制造芯片的材料
基石）非常稀缺。制造商也受到了干扰。黄牛党利用机器人来买断库存。
中国制造的芯片面临着美国的高额关税。人们对个人电脑的需求也达到
了自 2010 年以来的最高水平。

Nonetheless, data from Keepa, a website that tracks Amazon

listings, show that asking prices for GPUs have risen faster than
have those for central processing units (CPUs). The data also
suggest that miners of Ethereum, the second-largest
cryptocurrency, are to blame for gamers’ woes.

尽管如此，追踪亚马逊商品清单的网站 Keepa 的数据显示，GPU 的价

格涨势要比中央处理器（CPU）更快。数据还表明，第二大加密货币以
太坊的矿工是造成游戏玩家困境的罪魁祸首。

GPUs and CPUs both perform calculations, but they are used for
different purposes. GPUs are specialised chips that excel at matrix
algebra, which is required for 3D graphics and machine-learning
tasks like translating languages. They are also the best tool for
mining Ethereum (though not bitcoin). In contrast, CPUs are more
versatile, and handle most everyday operations.

GPU 和 CPU 都有执行计算的功能，但两者的用途不同。GPU 是一种擅

长矩阵代数的专用芯片，矩阵代数是完成 3D 图形和机器学习任务(如
翻译语言)所必需的。同时，它们也是挖掘以太币（虽然不是比特币）的
最佳工具。相比之下，中央处理器更加通用，可以用于处理大多数日常
操作。

In general, chips lose value over time as new, more powerful ones
are developed. Technological gains have slowed since the 1990s,
but CPUs still obey this trend. For example, a nine-year-old CPU
like Intel’s Core i7-3770 sells for a third of its release price.

一般来说，随着新的、更强大的芯片被开发出来，芯片的价值会随着时
间的推移而下降。自上世纪 90 年代以来，虽然技术进步有所放缓，但
CPU 仍然遵循这一趋势。例如，像英特尔酷睿 i7-3770 这样一款有着 9
年历史的 CPU，其目前的售价仅为发行价的三分之一。

However, prices for GPUs have risen so much that even geriatric
graphics cards, such as AMD’s RX580, have gained value. It was
released in 2017 at a suggested price of $229, and is now listed at
more than $700.

然而，GPU 的价格却在一路飙升，甚至像 AMD RX580 这样的老显卡也

在涨价。这款发布于 2017 年的显卡的官方指导价为 229 美元，而目前
的售价已经超过 700 美元。

In theory, such appreciation could reflect the growing popularity

of gaming and machine learning. However, secondhand market
data suggest a different cause.
从理论上讲，这种升值或许反映了游戏和机器学习的日益普及。然而，
二手市场的数据则反映了另一个原因。

Since 2015 asking prices for six GPUs tracked by Keepa have
moved in lockstep with Ethereum’s value. In late 2017 the
currency’s first big rally coincided with a surge in listed GPU prices.
Once the crypto bubble burst, GPU costs fell back to earth.

自 2015 年以来，Keepa 跟踪的 6 款 GPU 的价格走势一直与以太币保

持一致。2017 年底，以太币首次大幅上涨，与此同时，GPU 的价格也
在飙升。一旦加密货币的泡沫破裂，GPU 的价格就会有所回落。

Another boom began last year. As Ethereum’s price rose from

$107 in March 2020 to $4,400 last month, the value of mining
hardware once again followed suit. In six months, the six GPUs’
listed prices climbed by 150%. Those of CPUs barely budged.

另一轮涨势始于去年。随着以太币的价格从 2020 年 3 月的 107 美元

上涨至上个月的 4400 美元，采矿硬件的价格再次随着上涨。六个月内，
这六款 GPU 的价格上涨了 150%，而 CPU 的价格几乎没有变化。

The GPU shortage has hurt data scientists and computer-aided-

design users as well as gamers. Some relief may be on the way.
Ethereum’s price is now 40% below its record high. GPU prices
have yet to fall, but if history is any guide, they probably will soon.
GPU 的短缺不仅伤害了游戏玩家，也伤害了数据科学家、计算机辅助
设计工作者。情况在不久的未来或许会有所缓解。以太币如今的价格比
历史最高点低 40%。GPU 的价格却仍未下降，但如果以过去作为参考，
其价格或许很快就会下降。

Moreover, Nvidia has tried to cripple its GPUs’ mining power, while
promising to sell new cards targeted at miners. It is also cutting
back on its output of older products to focus on newer ones.

此外，英伟达还试图削弱其 GPU 的挖矿能力，同时承诺销售专为矿商

设计的新显卡。英伟达还会削减老产品的产量，并专注于新产品。

However, without greater production, customising chips will not

end the shortage. Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Ti, one of its first cards with
reduced mining power, is listed on Amazon at double its
suggested price.

然而，如果无法提高产量，定制芯片的短缺问题将不会得到解决。英伟
达的 RTX 3080 Ti 是其首批降低采矿能力的显卡之一，该显卡在亚马逊
上的售价仍是官方指导价的两倍。

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11、The first planet beyond the solar system confirmed to have
water

太阳系外首颗被证明有水存在的行星

Since its discovery by astronomers in 2015, the exoplanet K2-18b

has elicited much excitement.

自从 2015 年天文学家发现了 K2-18b 以来，这颗系外行星就让许多人

为之兴奋。

Swirling around a red-dwarf star about 110 light-years away from

Earth, the distant world sits in a so-called Goldilocks zone—not
close enough to its host star to be too hot and not far enough away
to be too cold—that could allow liquid water to flow across its
surface. That is a crucial condition for life as we know it.

这颗遥远的行星围绕着一颗距地球约 110 光年的红矮星旋转，它处于

该星系所谓的“宜居带”上（距离其恒星不算太近，因而不会太热；也
不算太远，因而不会太冷），这使其表面有了存在液态水的可能。众所
周知，水是孕育生命的关键条件。

Now astronomers have cranked up the speculation. Follow-up

images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope suggest K2-18b has
an atmosphere containing large amounts of water vapour—the
first exoplanet in a habitable zone to have this confirmed.

如今，天文学家们开始进行更大胆的推测了。哈勃太空望远镜所拍摄的
后续图像显示，K2-18b 的大气层中含有大量的水蒸气——这是首颗被证
实有水存在的处于宜居带上的系外行星。

Most exoplanets previously found with atmospheres have been

gas giants, similar to Neptune or Jupiter. K2-18b instead looks like
it could be a rocky planet twice as big as Earth, perhaps covered
in vast ice-covered seas.

以前发现的大多数有大气层的系外行星都是类似于海王星或木星的气
态巨行星。而 K2-18b 看起来像是一颗地球两倍大小的岩质行星，其表
面可能被广阔的冰雪海洋所覆盖。

Writing this week in Nature Astronomy, Dr Tsiaras describes how

his team wrote software that could analyse the data collected by
Hubble to try to do the same job—up to a point. They were not able
to pinpoint the exact form and amounts of the water they found.

席亚拉博士本周发表在《自然天文学》杂志上的文章描述了他的团队如
何编写软件对哈勃望远镜所收集的数据进行分析的，利用软件在一定程
度上完成重复性的工作。他们无法得出所发现的水的确切形态和含量。

Instead they used computer models to simulate the most likely

scenarios, and concluded that as much as half of the atmosphere
of K2-18b could be water vapour. They also found evidence of
large amounts of hydrogen and helium gas.

于是，他们利用计算机模型来模拟最有可能的情况，最终得出结论：K2-
18b 大气中高达一半的成分是水蒸气。此外，他们还发现了存在大量氢
气和氦气的证据。

This is just the start of such study of planets beyond our solar
system. Astronomers plan to launch two new orbiting telescopes
in the next decade—the American James Webb Space Telescope
and the European ARIEL survey—that will be powerful enough to
peer into the atmospheres of exoplanets more closely. Powerful
enough, perhaps, to detect telltale molecular signatures of life.

这只是对太阳系外行星探索的开端。天文学家计划在未来十年发射两架
新的轨道望远镜（美国的詹姆斯·韦伯太空望远镜和欧洲的阿里尔太空
望远镜），这两架望远镜足以让人们更近距离地观察系外行星的大气层。
它们说不定强大到足以探测生命的分子特征。

With Dr Tsiaras’s analysis, K2-18b is now the best candidate for a

life-supporting exoplanet out there. The temperature on the
surface could be about the same as Earth and there could be
similar clouds hanging in the sky.
据席亚拉博士分析，K2-18b 目前是适宜生命生存的系外行星的最佳候
选者。其表面温度可能和地球差不多，天空上可能也有类似的云。

However, the planet’s adjacency to the star—it whizzes around

once every 33 days—could produce intense space weather from
the stellar activity. And it would be advisable to pack sun cream:
the ultraviolet radiation would be off the scale.

然而，由于它离恒星比较近（每 33 天绕恒星一圈），可能会因为恒星活
动而导致强烈的空间气象。此外，如果前去最好把防晒霜带上，那边的
紫外线辐射可能会超标！

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12、Motorists using touchscreens in cars are being distracted

使用触摸屏会使驾驶员分心

Step inside most modern cars and instead of all the dials and
switches that used to clutter the dashboard you are likely to find it
dominated by a touchscreen. Often there is more than one screen,
and some are bigger than those on a laptop. But, though
touchscreens provide a convenient way to operate a multitude of
controls and settings, the latest research shows they can also
be dangerous distraction.

坐进大多数现代汽车，你或许会发现，中控台那里不再是各种旋钮和开
关，而是一块触摸屏。有些车往往具有不止一块触摸屏，有的触摸屏甚
至比笔记本电脑的屏幕还要大。虽然使用触摸屏进行各种操作和设置很
方便，但最新的研究发现，它们也会使驾驶员分心，从而造成危险。

To discover how badly touchscreens distract drivers, Neale

Kinnear and his colleagues at the Transport Research Laboratory,
a former British-government agency now run as an independent
test facility, arranged a series of experiments.

为了弄清楚触摸屏究竟会对驾驶员造成多大的干扰，英国交通运输研究
实验室（一家前英国政府机构）的尼尔·金尼尔和他的同事开展了一系
列实验。
They recruited two groups of 20 drivers. One consisted of regular
users of Google’s Android Auto, a popular “infotainment” app
which lets drivers interact with their phone through a car’s
touchscreen. The others were partisans of Android Auto’s main
rival, Apple CarPlay.

他们招募了两组各 20 名驾驶员。其中一组是谷歌 Android Auto（一款

广受欢迎的车载“信息娱乐”应用程序，使驾驶员可以通过触摸屏与手
机互动）的老用户，另一组则是苹果 CarPlay（Android Auto 的主要竞
争对手）的忠实粉丝。

Each participant completed three 15 minute journeys along a set

virtual route using the laboratory’s sophisticated driving simulator.
On one of these trips they had to carry out tasks using only the
touchscreen.

每位参与者都会使用实验室最先进的驾驶模拟器沿着设定好的虚拟路
线行驶三段各 15 分钟的路程。在第一段行程中，参与者只能使用触摸
屏完成任务。

These tasks included navigating to a restaurant, playing a

particular song on Spotify (a music service), changing radio
channels, getting the system to read out a text message, and
making a “hands-free” telephone call. On the second trip they
had to do the same, but using only the car’s voice-activated
controls instead. The third journey was a control, with no assigned
tasks.

任务包括导航至一家餐厅、在 Spotify（一个音乐服务平台）上点播一
首特定的歌曲、切换广播频道、让系统朗读一条短信以及拨打一通“免
提”电话。在第二段行程中，他们需要完成同样的任务，但只能使用语
音控制系统来完成。作为对照，第三段行程没有任何任务。

Whenever a red bar flashed on the windscreen the researchers

measured how long it took a driver to react by pulling the indicator
stalk to flash the car’s lights. As they expected, drivers using touch
controls on the screen took longer to respond to the flashing bar
than did those using voice controls. Though the difference might
be less than a second, at motorway speeds this would result in an
increased stopping distance of up to 25 metres.

每当挡风玻璃上的红色条带闪烁时，驾驶员会拨动指示杆以控制车灯闪
烁，研究人员便会记录下驾驶员做出反应所需的时间。正如研究人员所
料，相比语音控制，驾驶员在使用触摸屏进行操作时对闪烁的条带做出
反应所需的时间更长。虽然相差可能不到一秒，但如果行驶在高速公路
上，这将使刹车距离增加 25 米。

Dr Kinnear was, however, surprised by the amount of time drivers’

attention was diverted by the series of glances needed to operate
the screen. Among the worst outcomes were a mean of 20
seconds of cumulative glances using Android Auto to play a song
on Spotify, and of 16 seconds to set up the route to a restaurant
with CarPlay. For voice commands those means fell to four and
three seconds respectively.

然而，司机因不断瞥向屏幕进行操作致使注意力分散的时间之久令金尼
尔感到惊讶。结果中耗时最长的分别是，使用 Android Auto 在 Spotify
上点播一首歌平均累计耗时 20 秒，使用 CarPlay 设置前去一家餐厅的
导航耗时 16 秒。而使用语音控制分别仅需 4 秒和 3 秒。

The researchers calculated that reaction times to the red bar when
the touchscreen was being employed were more than 50% longer
than standard for some tasks. This was worse than the 46%
impairment found in a previous simulator study looking at the
effects of using a hand-held mobile phone while driving, which is
banned in many countries.

研究人员经计算发现，，驾驶员在使用触摸屏完成某些任务时，对红色
条带做出反应的时间比对照组长 50%以上。此前的一项模拟研究发现，
驾驶员在驾驶途中使用手机会使反应时间增加 46%，因此许多国家禁
止驾驶员在驾驶途中使用手机，而触摸屏对驾驶员造成的影响比手机更
严重。

Dr Kinnear and his colleagues have urged vehicle-safety bodies to

impose standards that limit the use of overly distracting tasks on
a car’s touchscreen.

金尼尔和他的同事已经敦促有关车辆安全机构制定相关标准，以限制使
用汽车触摸屏完成会使驾驶员过度分心的任务。

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13、The search for extraterrestrial intelligence moves up a gear

探寻外星生命的步伐正在加快

In 1990, a year into the journey to Jupiter of an American

spacecraft called Galileo, Carl Sagan, a well-known astronomer,
turned the probe’s instruments back towards Earth. He wanted to
find out whether it was possible to detect evidence of life on the
planet from a distance.

1990 年，在美国航天器伽利略号启程飞往木星的一年后，著名的天文
学家卡尔·萨根将航天器上的探测仪转而对准了地球。他想知道是否有
可能从远处探测到地球上的生命迹象。

Galileo took spectrographic measurements of sunlight streaming

through Earth’s atmosphere and found methane and oxygen,
both indicators of living processes.

伽利略号航天器对穿过地球大气层的阳光进行了光谱测量，发现了甲烷
和氧气，这两种物质是生命活动的指示物。

The probe also took photographs of Earth at different

wavelengths and uncovered something called the “red edge”—a
sharp change in the reflectance of the planet at red wavelengths,
which Sagan ascribed to the presence of photosynthetic plant life
on the surface.

探测器还捕捉到了不同波长的地球影像，并发现了所谓的“红边现象”，
即在红外波长下，地球的反射率会发生急剧变化，萨根认为这是由于地
球表面存在着能够进行光合作用的植物。

There was, however, a third clue—and an indicator that life not

only exists on Earth, but has also developed intelligence. This
came from the narrowband electromagnetic radiation that was
streaming from Earth’s surface—in other words television and
radio channels leaking into space.

然而，还存在着第三项指标，它不仅能够指示地球上是否存在生命，还
能指示生命是否存在智慧。它就是从地球表面发出的窄带电磁辐射，换
句话说就是泄露到太空的电视和广播频道。

“That, as far as we know, is an unmistakable indicator of

technology and an unmistakable indicator of life,” says Andrew
Siemion, an astrophysicist at the Berkeley SETI Research Centre in
California. “And indeed, it is the most detectable signature of life
on this planet as viewed from a distant vantage.”

加州伯克利地外智慧研究中心的天体物理学家安德鲁·西米恩说：“据
我们所知，这是一项明确无误的技术指标，也是一项明确无误的生命指
标。”事实上，这是从远处探测地球上生命特征最明显的指标。
Sagan’s experiment thus confirmed what those engaged in the
search for extraterrestrial intelligence (which is what SETI stands
for) had suspected—that the best way to find aliens is to look for
unnatural radio signals.

因此，萨根的实验证实了那些试图搜寻地外文明（SETI 的含义）者的猜
测——探寻外星人的最佳方法是寻找非自然的无线电信号。

That search is accelerating. As Dr Siemion told this year’s meeting

of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
(AAAS), in Seattle, better telescopes, faster computers, the
discovery of thousands of planets circling stars other than the sun,
and an influx of money and scientific talent are transforming the
field.

探索的步伐正在加快。正如今年于西雅图举行的美国科学促进会上西米
恩所说的那样，更好的望远镜、更快的计算机、数以千计的围绕非太阳
恒星运动的行星的发现，以及大量资金和科学人才的涌入正在改变这一
领域。

What was once a fringe activity has now become mainstream. The
next decade, he reckons, will allow astronomers to improve their
search for signals from outer space a thousandfold.

曾经的边缘领域如今成为了主流。他认为，在未来十年，天文学家对来
自外太空信号的搜索能力将提高 1000 倍。

SETI began 60 years ago with Project Ozma. This was led by Frank
Drake, an astronomer at Cornell University. It was an attempt to
listen for radio waves that might be coming from intelligent life in
the vicinity of two nearby sun-like stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon
Eridani.

搜寻地外文明最早始于 60 年前的奥兹玛计划。这项计划由康奈尔大学
天文学家弗兰克·德雷克所领导。这是一次试图接收来自太阳系附近两
颗类太阳恒星（Tau Ceti 和 Epsilon Eridani）的智慧生命发出的无线
电波的尝试。

Further projects along this line followed, but no little green men
were detected. By the turn of the 21st century people were starting
to lose interest and financial support for the endeavour was
dwindling.

随后沿着这条路线又开展了更多的项目，但始终没能发现外星人。在 21
世纪来临之际，人们渐渐对这项研究失去了兴趣，同时财政支持也在减
少。

The tide turned, though, in 2009 with the launch of Kepler, an

American probe designed to look for planets orbiting other stars.
It found them. In spades. Astronomers have now confirmed the
existence of more than 4,000 such exoplanets.

不过，随着 2009 年美国开普勒号探测器（旨在探寻围绕其他恒星运动

的行星）的发射，这一趋势得以扭转。开普勒号发现了它们。确凿无疑。
天文学家现已证实超过 4000 颗这样的系外行星的存在。

Moreover, their models suggest that virtually every star has a

planetary system. With so many potential habitats, and more
being discovered every month, the prospects of finding alien life
suddenly brightened.

此外，他们的模型表明，几乎每一颗恒星都有一个行星系统。随着这么
多潜在生命栖息地的发现（而且每个月都有更多的行星被发现），搜寻
外星生命的前景突然变得光明起来。

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