Source text in English | Translation by Xueyang Niu (#25915) |
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. | 繁荣的时代又回到了硅谷。沿101号高速公路的办公园区再次装饰着充满希望的初创企业的徽章。租金飙升,对太浩湖等度假城镇的豪华度假屋的需求也在增加,这是财富积累的标志。湾区是半导体产业的发源地,随之而来的计算机和互联网公司快速成长。这里的奇才创造出许多让世界感到充满未来感的奇迹,从触摸屏手机到即时搜索大型图书馆,再到千里之外操控的无人机。自2010年以来其业务活动的复苏表明进展正在推动。 因此,如果硅谷内部有些人认为这个地方停滞不前,并且几十年来创新速度一直在放缓,这会大大出人意表。 PayPal的创始人,Facebook的第一个外部投资者Peter Thiel表示,美国的创新“处于可怕的困境和死亡之间”。各种领域的工程师都有类似的失望感。小众但支持者正在增长的经济学家认为,与过去相比,今天创新的经济影响或许显得苍白无力。 [...] 全球背景下,廉价处理能力推动的创新正在蓬勃发展。计算机开始理解自然语言。人们通过身体运动来控制视频游戏 - 这种技术很快就会在商业世界中找到应用。三维打印能够产生越来越复杂的物体阵列,并且可能很快转移到人体组织和其他有机材料上。 一个创新的悲观主义者可能会认为这是“明天的果酱”。但是,技术主导的增长必须继续有增无减或稳步下降,而不是消退和流动,这与历史不一致。芝加哥大学的Chad Syverson指出,电气化时代的生产力增长是微不足道的。在19世纪末20世纪初的重要电气创新时期,生产力增长缓慢;后来又陡然飙升。 |