Coming to San Francisco for the first time in a fewyears brings home how much it has beentransformed. Whatever you call what is happening— a boom, a bubble or a flood of money into whatwas known as new technology before the “new”became redundant — has augmented the city’sreality.
Once, there was a gaping divide between southern and northern California — betweenHollywood and Silicon Valley. To the south was the dream factory of fantasy and imagination; inthe north was science, hardware such as the transistor and chino-clad venture capitalists whoworked in business parks on Sand Hill Road and lived in sprawling suburbia. San Francisco wasa pretty, but unexciting tourist town.
過去,加利福尼亞州的南部和北部——好萊塢和硅谷——之間存在巨大的鴻溝。南部是制造幻想和想象的夢想工廠;北部則屬于科學,屬于晶體管等硬件,以及那些在沙山路(Sand Hill Road)商業園工作、在不斷擴張的廣大郊區居住、衣著休閑的風險資本家。舊金山那時是一個美麗,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 newworld companies create something that was not there before. They do not just save somebodymoney,” a middle-aged man told a young entrepreneur at a nearby table in a diner on Mondaymorning. The ingénu should portray his venture as more than “faster, better, cheaper”.
Later that day one venture capitalist described his own firm’s decision to turn down Uberwhen it was first raising money as “a lamentable failure of imagination”. The partners shouldhave realised that the pitch for a smartphone limousine service in San Francisco implied aplatform to revolutionise global transport. Instead of thinking of the legal obstacles, theyought to have suspended their disbelief.
The old things are shrunken — the San Francisco Chronicle is thin and full of wire stories — andothers are exploding. An entire district has sprung up around China Basin on the edge of thecity; Apple, which used to carve its stores into old buildings, has levelled a building by UnionSquare to build a Foster + Partners retail temple; the city’s bars are sleek and vibrant.
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, roboticand artificial intelligence is producing a wave of applications and devices, from voice-activatedsoftware to self-driving cars. The machine knows what you want and where you are, and issteadily learning how to serve you.
Andrew McAfee, co-author of The Second Machine Age, describes the experience of beingtransported in one of Google’s self-driving cars as going “from terrifying to thrilling to boring in15 minutes”. The machine not only drives competently but with tedious predictability, alwaysobserving the speed limit and slowing at every obstacle, as if constantly trying to pass adriving test.
《第二次機器革命》(The Second MachineAge)的合著者安德魯•麥卡菲(Andrew McAfee)稱自己乘坐谷歌(Google)自動駕駛汽車的心路歷程是“15分鐘內從害怕到興奮到索然無味”。機器不僅能勝任駕駛,還開得極為標準,其駕駛表現毫無懸念到令人厭煩的地步——總能觀察到限速標志,在每一個障礙物前都會減速,就像總在參加路考一樣。
Behind innovations that have suddenly come to feel routine, such as facial and voicerecognition, lie rapid ad-vances in pattern recognition and emerging forms of artificialintelligence. The capacity of computers to sift through databases and comprehend whatpeople are saying, what they mean and what they desire is evolving faster than manyresearchers had anticipated.
As a result, plenty of investors are eager to throw money at start-ups that look as if theypossess a piece of technology and a business idea that will form at least part of the brave newworld. The fear of missing out is overwhelming the fear of losing money, as Bill Gurley ofBenchmark Capital warned recently.
History’s famous investment bubbles often formed around such combinations of easy moneyand fantastical inventions, and some of today’s venture capitalists suffered through thedotcom bust of 2000. Prod them about that and the optimists respond that the $48bninvested by US venture capital funds last year is only half the amount sloshing around at thelast peak 15 years ago.
This ignores the fact that a lot of the new money is coming not from venture funds but fromother investors, including mutual funds such as T Rowe Price and Fidelity. Three-quarters ofrecent fundraising rounds by “unicorns” — start-ups valued at $1bn or more — were led by“non-traditional” investors, according to a recent study by Fenwick & West, a SiliconValley law firm.
One is Carl Icahn, the activist investor, who this week put $100m into Lyft, a rival to Uber. MrIcahn often makes life difficult for his investment targets but is as enamoured as everyone elsewith his Silicon Valley picks. “We’ll be the first to admit that you are more knowledgeable inthese areas than we are,” he wrote fulsomely to Apple this week.