The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

15世纪古腾堡的印刷厂也曾让人恨得咬牙切齿。意大利人文主义者Hieronimo Squarciafico担 心书籍随便可以得到会导致智力懒惰，使人们“不那么用功”，从而削弱人们的脑力。另有一些人则认为，这些花费颇少印刷出来的书籍和大开本报纸会削弱宗教的 权威，贬低学者和书吏的工作，散布煽动性和不道德的言论。正如纽约大学教授克雷·谢奇所说：“反对印刷厂的大部分观点都是正确的，甚至是很有先见之明。” 但是，再一次，这些灾难预言者没能想到印刷能够给人们带来的无数福祉。

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

因此，对，你应该对我的怀疑论调持怀疑态 度。也许那些认为互联网的批评者不过是阻碍技术进步的勒德分子或者怀旧主义者的人会被证明是正确的，从我们超级活跃、填饱数据的大脑将会涌现一个知识发现 与普遍智慧的黄金时期。然而还有一点，网络不是字母，尽管它也许会取代印刷术，网络产生全然不同的东西。那种一页一页的印刷纸张所带来的深入阅读是很有价 值的，不仅仅是因为我们从作者的话语中获取到了知识，而是因为这些话语在我们大脑中所激起的知识共鸣。在持续且不受干扰的阅读一本书籍、或者任何沉思活动 所给我们打开的那一片宁静空间中，对于作者所陈之事，我们进行自己的联想，做出自己的类比和推断，形成我们自己的思想。正如玛丽安妮·沃尔夫所说，深入阅 读跟深入思考密不可分。

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

如果我们失去那些宁静的空间，或者用“内容“将它们填满，我们将牺牲掉不仅我们自身还有我们文化中一些非常重要的东西。在最近的一篇文章里，剧作家理查德·福尔曼非常雄辩地刻画了面临的风险：

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

我所受的熏陶是西方文化传统，在这种传统中理想（我的理想）是教育程度非常高的、能说会道的人所构成的十分复杂、浓厚、像教堂一样的结构——男人或者女人，其内心都有一个他/她所构建的整个西方传统的独特版本。[但是现在]我在我们中间（包括我自己）看到我们内心那种复杂的浓厚系统已经被一种新的自我所取代，这种自我在信息过载和立等可得的技术压力下不断演化。

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

当我们“内在的浓厚文化传承库藏”被排干后，福尔曼总结道，我们就在冒成为“‘薄饼人’的风险——在我们仅需轻点鼠标按键就跟庞大的信息网络相连的时候铺得太广太薄”。

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

《2001：太空奥德赛》里的那个场景让我备受煎熬。这场景之所以如此深刻、如此怪异，是那台计算机对其大脑被拆解所做出的情感反应：当一个接一个电路断电时它所表现出来的深深绝望，它在宇航员戴夫面前那孩童般的恳求­——“我能感觉得到！我能感觉得到！我害怕！”——还有它最终回复到只能称为纯真的状态。HAL的情感发泄跟电影里人的那种冷漠无情形成鲜明对照，那些人以机器人般的效率干着手头的活计。他们的思想和行为让人感觉到是在遵循预先设定的指令，好像在按照一个算法的步骤在行事。在2001年的世界，人们已经变得如此像机器，以至于大多数人物结果都成了机器。斯坦利·库布里克黑色预言的实质在于：当我们依赖电脑作为理解世界的媒介时，实际上是我们自己的智能蜕变成了人工智能。

原文链接：http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

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