本帖最后由 桔子susan 于 2010-2-22 20:27 编辑
The proposer's opening remarks
Feb 26th 2008 | Mr Richard Szafranski
Standing back, we now can be fairly certain that the science and engineering that enabled humans to create today's engines（再次看到这个用法） of industrialisation, electrification, physics, medicine, genetics and the appliances of the information age also added significant complexity to our lives. Technology warmed the planet, added pollutants to the atmosphere and oceans, affected life forms by changing the background magnetic field (including adding increased extremely low-frequency radiation), enabled nuclear weapons and created thousands of chemical compounds that can help or hurt life. （这一大段，都是technology的危害部分，又是排比）One cannot conclude that the convergent effects（怎么翻译呢？核心影响？）—social, environmental, political, economic, legal, psychological—of these technological developments simplified living or our lives. Technology has failed to simplify our lives.
作者先论证了technology使我们的生活复杂的现象，又从反面来说还没人能总结出technology使我们的生活简单化的convergent effects来论证technology未能使我们的生活简单。（其实个人认为后面的这个论证还是有点单薄，如果我来反驳他，可不可以说还没人能总结出technology使我们的生活复杂化的convergent effects，没人总结出来并不一定代表没有简单化，呵呵，看看作者后面的论述）
Coping with the challenges caused by a warming planet will not be simple. Knowing the health effects—the effects on humans and other living organisms—of various pollutants and combinations of pollutants and appropriately dealing with them will not be simple. Understanding the biological consequences of changed magnetic fields and increased point and area sources of radiation is not uncomplicated. The problems associated with nuclear weapons' proliferation are only less complex than the problems that would arise from the use of such weapons.（处理起来并不比运用它简单） And it becomes increasingly difficult to assay the interactions, the lag times and the health consequences of the chemicals we ingest, even those we consume intentionally. Simpler lives? No.
具体论述了前一段的排比叙述
Dealing with any one of these challenges is not simple; they are multi-dimensional and have converged and co-exist. "Technology"—shorthand for the fruits of science and engineering—and its convergent unintended and intended consequences have complicated our lives.（这里就先部分解答了我上面的疑惑，不过它怎样convergent…? 还是有点蒙，）
Take some familiar but trivial examples. The technologies that enable mass customisation（制度化）, the internet and wireless devices and their applications, but a small sample, cause humans two problems that complicate our lives immensely. First, over-choice. Second, surplus complexity.（举例与前面对应） Over-choice describes the human response to alternatives and variations so numerous, so potentially satisfying and so complex that humans can no longer decide easily. "Surplus complexity" is unnecessary and unwanted complexity.
We—hundreds of millions of us and growing—embrace（再次见到，就是喜欢这个词）the very technologies that make our lives and our relationships more difficult and fill many of our waking moments with activity. We love—to the point of gluttony—to communicate, play, invent, learn, imagine and acquire. Information technology has given us tools to do all of those anywhere and round the clock. We are awash in the benefits that high-bandwidth fixed and mobile wireless communications, email, text messages, pictures, games, data and information give us, including instant access to thousands of products. The seductive ease with which we can engage in any and all of those activities, or quests or endeavours makes it difficult and stressful to not be overwhelmed by choices. Choosing takes time and our time is not unlimited. Devices and applications that save us labour in one area may merely allow us, and sometimes seem to compel us, to invest labour in other areas.（这个理由好）
We say or hear, "I must do my email tonight, or by tomorrow I'll have over 600 to read." We want to buy a pot. Search on "pottery" and get 254,000,000 results. We want to find the John Li we met at a conference. Search on "John Li" and get 8,600,000 results. Do I do email, narrow the searches, eat dinner, pick up my laundry or call a friend? Because technology has spawned numerous complex variations I must repeatedly go through the act of evaluating and choosing — a labour of deciding. Technology has imposed the encumbrance of over-choice on us.
Over-choice is made more likely and burdensome by the complexity resident in each of the choices that are presented to us. There are hundreds of choices within the seemingly simple one of getting a cellular telephone and choosing a provider and a plan. Some phones also are Pocket PCs with CDMA and GSM, video-players, music-players, web browsers, calculators and so forth.（这个用来形容手机的多功能） One must decide where and when the complexity becomes surplus. Choosing ring tones from among the surplus complexity evident in the thousands of tones available is almost unfathomable over-choice.
Businesses know that solutions to over-choice, on the one hand, and engineered surplus complexity, on the other, can produce revenue. Their solutions may complicate the problems. It may be that few consumers have or take the time to read a website's terms of services, privacy policy or licensing agreement before hitting "I agree." The willing or inadvertent disclosure of information about behaviour and the data bases that record past searches create the potential for precise marketing. Behavioural marketing, for example, uses data from multiple sources, including data in the public domain and data acquired by a target's past web searches, to push tailored products and services. More choices. When surplus complexity is engineered into a product—of a product's, say, 41 features, the consumer only wanted two—consumers pay for unnecessary and unused features. Unbundling is seen by some businesses or some industries as such radical customisation that it is priced prohibitively. We live in the multifaceted bundles that technology has enabled.（这段的举例，赞）
The system as a whole, the system we create and sustain and live in, now has so many and so complex separate parts that understanding consequential interactions, potential outcomes—intended and unintended—and long-term effects is more difficult than ever in human history. One might argue that the genesis of problems like over-choice and surplus complexity is in human frailty or human wants satisfied by technology, but, without technology, more simplicity would endure.（貌似我有文章就是这样声称的，看来很容易被反驳）
Technology is the beneficial culprit that allowed us to do this.One cannot conclude that humans making bad choices are the real culprit unless one ascribes to the unborn—past and future—the ability to choose. Technology, personified as defendant, could probably prove "I made no promises." Just so, but the issue under consideration is less any specific promise asserted than it was the promising possibilities of making our lives simpler that lured us, as we humans employed technology to solve problems and create opportunities.
嗯，这里作者把他人可能反驳点，又点出来进行反驳
It did not work.
文章的结构不是很突出，不过例证真的很赞，值得学习。 | 
发表于 2010-2-2 17:59:06
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