硅谷不止造钱造技术被评为造梦工厂

Coming to San Francisco for the first time in a few years brings home how much it has been transformed. Whatever you call what is happening — a boom, a bubble or a flood of money into what was known as new technology before the “new” became redundant — has augmented the city’s reality.

有些年没来过旧金山，这次来到这里，我意识到这座城市发生了巨大的变化。不管你怎么形容这里正在发生的事情——繁荣、泡沫或者大量资金流入技术（以前曾被称为“新”技术，现在“新”字可以省略了），这座城市的现实状况因此而提升。
硅谷不止造钱造技术被评为造梦工厂

Once, there was a gaping divide between southern and northern California — between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. To the south was the dream factory of fantasy and imagination; in the north was science, hardware such as the transistor and chino-clad venture capitalists who worked in business parks on Sand Hill Road and lived in sprawling suburbia. San Francisco was a pretty, but unexciting tourist town.

过去，加利福尼亚州的南部和北部——好莱坞和硅谷——之间存在巨大的鸿沟。南部是制造幻想和想象的梦想工厂；北部则属于科学，属于晶体管等硬件，以及那些在沙山路(Sand Hill Road)商业园工作、在不断扩张的广大郊区居住、衣着休闲的风险资本家。旧金山那时是一个美丽，但也平淡乏味的旅游城市。
It feels more like Hollywood now, full of people writing scripts and honing pitches. “Brave new world companies create something that was not there before. They do not just save somebody money,” a middle-aged man told a young entrepreneur at a nearby table in a diner on Monday morning. The ingénu should portray his venture as more than “faster, better, cheaper”.
现在这里给人感觉更像好莱坞了，满是写“脚本”和打磨推介词的人。那个周一的早上，餐馆邻桌的一名中年男子对一名年轻创业者说：“这些建造‘美丽新世界’的企业创造过去不存在的事物。它们不仅仅是帮某些人省了钱。”这个生涩的小伙子应该将他的项目描述为不只是“更快、更好、更便宜”。
Later that day one venture capitalist described his own firm’s decision to turn down Uber when it was first raising money as “a lamentable failure of imagination”. The partners should have realised that the pitch for a smartphone limousine service in San Francisco implied a platform to revolutionise global transport. Instead of thinking of the legal obstacles, they ought to have suspended their disbelief.
当天晚些时候，一名风险资本家讲述了他自己的企业在优步(Uber)首次募集资金时拒绝了它的事情，称那个决定是“一次令人惋惜的想象力失灵”。他的合伙人们当时应该意识到，那场关于一款旧金山智能手机叫车软件的推介活动，预示着一个将为全球交通出行带来变革的平台。他们本不应考虑法律方面的障碍，而应暂时放下自己的怀疑。
The old things are shrunken — the San Francisco Chronicle is thin and full of wire stories — and others are exploding. An entire district has sprung up around China Basin on the edge of the city; Apple, which used to carve its stores into old buildings, has levelled a building by Union Square to build a Foster + Partners retail temple; the city’s bars are sleek and vibrant.
陈旧的东西正在萎缩——旧金山的编年史不长，充满了新鲜事物——其他的东西则在爆炸。在这座城市的边缘，围着China Basin，一整片城区拔地而起；过去曾将门店挤进老旧建筑中的苹果(Apple)，拆除了联合广场(Union Square)上的一栋大楼，建造了一座由Foster + Partners建筑事务所设计的标志性零售门店；这座城市的酒吧既时髦又充满活力。
Silicon Valley is at one of those historic moments when a set of technologies start to work — and to work together — in unexpected ways. In this case, the interaction of mobile, robotic and artificial intelligence is producing a wave of applications and devices, from voice-activated software to self-driving cars. The machine knows what you want and where you are, and is steadily learning how to serve you.
硅谷正处在这样一个历史性时刻：一系列技术开始以一种意想不到的方式发挥作用——并且协同并进。在这种情况下，移动智能、机器智能和人工智能的互动产生了大批应用和设备，从语音激活软件到自动驾驶汽车。机器知道你想要什么，身处何地，并且不断地学习如何为你服务。