双语 | 比尔盖茨2023年书单

Not the End of the World, by Hannah Ritchie. Hannah Ritchie used to believe—as many environmental activists do—that she was “living through humanity’s most tragic period.” But when she started looking at the data, she realized that’s not the case. Things are bad, and they’re worse than they were in the distant past, but on virtually every measure, they’re getting better. Ritchie is now lead researcher at Our World in Data, and in Not the End of the World, she uses data to tell a counterintuitive story that contradicts the doomsday scenarios on climate and other environmental topics without glossing over the challenges. Everyone who wants to have an informed conversation about climate change should read this book.

汉娜·里奇曾经认为——就像许多环保主义者一样——她“正经历着人类最悲惨的时期”。但当她开始查看数据时，她意识到情况并非如此。情况是很糟糕，而且比很久以前更糟，但实际上每一项指标都在好转。里奇现在是Our World in Data的首席研究员，在《不是世界末日》一书中，她用数据讲述了一个反直觉的故事，与有关气候和其他环境话题的末日预言相矛盾，同时又不掩饰所面临的挑战。每个想要就气候变化进行深入对话的人都应该读一读这本书。

When Hannah Ritchie arrived at the University of Edinburgh in 2010, she was eager to learn how to solve the world’s biggest challenges. But over the next four years, she became convinced—through college lectures and keeping up with the news—that the most existential environmental issues were only getting worse. Like so many people, including many climate activists today, she believed she was “living through humanity’s most tragic period.” By the time she graduated with a degree in environmental geoscience, Ritchie was ready to find a new career path entirely.

当汉娜·里奇（Hannah Ritchie）于2010年进入爱丁堡大学时，她渴望学习如何解决世界上最大的挑战。然而，在接下来的四年里，通过大学课程和新闻关注，她逐渐确信，环境领域最为紧迫的问题正在恶化。与许多人一样，包括今天的许多气候活动家，她相信自己正在“经历人类最悲惨的时期”。在取得环境地球科学学位时，里奇已经准备好寻找一条全新的职业道路。

Fortunately, she found Hans Rosling first. A Swedish physician and statistician, Rosling was renowned for using data to prove that by so many metrics of human well-being, despite such common misconceptions otherwise, the world was making progress. His life and work have influenced my own tremendously—and just a few pages into Ritchie’s essential and hopeful new book, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, it became clear that she was carrying on his tremendous legacy.

幸运的是，她先遇到了汉斯·罗斯林。作为一名瑞典医生和统计学家，罗斯林使用数据证明，尽管存在常见的误解，但从许多衡量人类福祉的指标来看，世界正在取得进展，他也因此广为人知。他的生活和工作极大地影响了我的思想——而在里奇这本重要而充满希望的新书《不是世界末日：我们如何成为第一代建设可持续星球的人》（中文名暂译）中的前几页，很明显她继承了罗斯林的伟大遗产。

Like Rosling, Ritchie has a perspective shaped less by the news than by the facts—something she’s refined through her work as lead researcher at Our World in Data, an online platform that publishes some of my favorite data-driven articles and graphics on global issues today. (The Gates Foundation is a funder.) Also like Rosling, she uses those facts to tell a surprisingly optimistic and often counterintuitive story, one that completely contradicts the doomsday-ism in most climate change conversations.

与罗斯林一样，里奇的观点更多地基于事实而非新闻——这是通过她在Our World in Data担任首席研究员的工作得以完善的。Our World in Data是一个在线平台，发布了一些我最喜欢的关于当今全球问题的数据驱动文章和数据图表（盖茨基金会是资助方之一）。与罗斯林一样，她利用这些事实来讲述了一个出人意料地乐观、又常常违背直觉的故事，这与大多数气候变化对话中的末日主义观点完全相反。

After reading her whole book, I can confidently say that Ritchie has done for the environment what Rosling spent his life doing for public health and global development.

在阅读了她的整本书之后，我可以自信地说，里奇在环境领域所做的就像罗斯林为公共卫生和全球发展所做的那样。

A key way she does this is by tackling a word I don’t usually love, sustainability, head-on. As she explains it, there’s a misconception that the world was once sustainable, and that it’s been getting less and less so over time. But from the UN’s definition—“meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”—it’s clear that there are two parts to this concept. Sustainability requires making sure everyone today can live a good, healthy life and not degrading the environment in a way that takes away opportunities from people tomorrow.

她实现这一点的关键方式是直面我通常不太喜欢的一个词——可持续性。正如她所解释的，有一种误解，认为世界曾经是可持续的，而随着时间的推移变得越来越不可持续。但从联合国的定义来看——“满足当前世代需求的同时，不损害未来世代满足自身需求的能力”——可以清楚地看出，这个概念有两个方面。可持续性要求确保今天每个人都能过上良好、健康的生活，同时不破坏环境，剥夺未来世代的机会。

Ritchie makes the case, convincingly, that the world has never been sustainable because both halves of the definition have never been achieved simultaneously.

里奇有力地提出了这样的观点，即世界从未实现过可持续性，因为这个定义的两个方面从未同时实现。

The first half has never been achieved, period: For most of human history, half the population died before adulthood; while that statistic has improved drastically, five million kids a year still don’t make it to their fifth birthday.

第一个方面从未被实现，的确如此：在人类历史的大部分时间里，半数人口在成年之前就死亡；尽管这一统计数据有了显著改善，但每年仍有五百万儿童无法迎来他们的第五个生日。

Still, the progress that has been and will continue to be made on child mortality—along with six other measures of human well-being including hunger, maternal mortality, life expectancy, education, extreme poverty, and access to basic resources like clean water, energy, and sanitation—is why Hannah argues there is no better time to be alive than the present. That doesn’t negate the violence and instability we see around the world. But compared to the past, we’re closer than we’ve ever been to meeting the needs of people today and achieving the first half of the definition.

然而，对儿童死亡率以及包括饥饿、孕产妇死亡率、预期寿命、教育、极端贫困以及获得清洁水、能源和卫生设施等基本资源的六项人类福祉指标的取得和将要取得的进展，正是汉娜认为现在是人类有史以来最好的时代的原因。这并不是否认我们在世界各地看到的暴力和不稳定。但与过去相比，我们比以往任何时候都更接近满足今天人们的需求，实现可持续性定义的第一个方面。

As for the second half, Ritchie analyzes seven big environmental problems we face today: air pollution, climate change, deforestation, food, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics, and overfishing. On most of these fronts, things are worse today than they were in the distant past. But on all of them, progress has been made recently, and we’re on a better trajectory than most people assume—even though that rarely makes the end-of-the-world headlines dominating the news.

至于第二个方面，里奇分析了我们今天面临的七个重大环境问题：空气污染、气候变化、森林砍伐、食物问题、生物多样性丧失、海洋塑料和过度捕捞。在这些问题的大多数方面，今天的情况比过去更糟糕。但在所有这些问题上，最近都取得了进展，我们正走在比大多数人认为的更好的轨迹上——尽管这很难阻止有关世界末日的新闻占据头版头条。

In the United Kingdom, where Ritchie lives, individual carbon footprints are down to 1850s levels after peaking in the 1960s thanks to much more energy-efficient technologies and much less coal. In rich countries, per capita emissions are falling, and worldwide, we hit peak per capita emissions in 2012. The other “peaks” that people have been told to dread—peak population, peak fertilizer and agricultural land use, peak whaling, peak deforestation of the Amazon—are either already behind us or will be soon. Across many regions, threatened wildlife species are repopulating. Electricity, which too many of the world’s poorest live without, was cheaper across the board in 2019 than it was in 2009—and in that decade, solar and wind went from the priciest per unit to the cheapest. And on, and on, and on.

在里奇居住的英国，个人碳足迹在20世纪60年代达到峰值后，现在已经下降到19世纪50年代的水平，这要归功于节能技术的发展和煤炭用量的减少。在富裕国家，人均排放量正在下降，在全球范围内，我们在2012年达到了人均排放量的峰值。人们被告知要担心的其他“峰值”——人口峰值、化肥和农业用地峰值、捕鲸峰值、亚马逊森林砍伐峰值——要么已经过去，要么即将到来。在许多地区，受威胁的野生动物物种正在重新繁衍。世界上许多最贫困的人口仍然缺乏电力，但电力在2019年总体上比2009年更便宜——而在那个十年里，太阳能和风能的价格从每单位最贵变为最便宜……

That doesn’t mean things aren’t bad, or there is no reason to worry. For example, air pollution globally still kills nine million people a year. And if we don’t get serious about combating climate change and dramatically reducing emissions, the consequences for people and the planet will be disastrous. The world is bad, but much better: Those two things can be true at once. So can a third: “The world can be much better.”

这并不意味着情况不糟糕，或者没有担忧的理由。例如，全球空气污染仍然每年导致九百万人死亡。如果我们不认真对抗气候变化并大幅减少排放，对人类和地球的后果将是灾难性的。世界的状况很糟，但已经取得了很大进步：这两者可以同时成立。同样可以成立的是第三种视角：“世界可以变得更好。”

In each chapter, Ritchie provides tangible action that people, companies, and governments can take to build that better world—one where trade-offs between human well-being and environmental protection, between life today and life tomorrow, no longer have to be made. She also assigns responsibility to rich countries, the ones that built their wealth on fossil fuels, to continue investing in clean energy, making it cheaper, eliminating Green Premiums, and deploying those innovations to poor countries that otherwise can’t be expected to “leapfrog a long fossil-powered development path.” I couldn’t agree more.

在每一章中，里奇提及了人们、公司和政府可以采取的具体行动，以建设一个更美好的世界——一个不再需要在人类福祉与环境保护之间、今天的生活与明天的生活之间进行权衡的世界。她还将责任分配给富裕国家，那些以化石燃料为基础建立财富的国家，继续投资清洁能源，使其变得更便宜，消除绿色溢价，并将这些创新部署到贫穷国家，否则就无法指望这些国家“跨越漫长的化石燃料发展道路”。我对此表示完全赞同。

I’ve written my own book on climate change, and I work on clean solutions daily with Breakthrough Energy. Still, I was surprised by how much Ritchie’s book—filled with all the numbers and charts a math nerd could dream of—managed to surprise me. I think everyone who reads it will feel the same, even those who consider themselves tuned in to environmental issues.

我写了一本关于气候变化的书，我每天都在突破能源（Breakthrough Energy）研究清洁解决方案。尽管如此，我还是很惊讶，里奇这本充满数字和图表的书竟然给了我一个数学呆子梦寐以求的惊喜。我想每个读过这本书的人都会有同样的感受，即使是那些自认为关注环境问题的人。

The reality is that it’s easier to track breaking news than trend lines. But if we don’t zoom out and look at the larger picture, we don’t just miss out on learning that progress has been made. We miss out on learning how. That’s why so many people’s intuitions on issues like lab-grown meat, dense cities, and nuclear energy—all pretty good for the planet—are, in Ritchie’s words, “so off.”

现实情况是，追踪突发新闻比追踪趋势线更容易。但是，如果我们不放大视野，放眼全局，我们不仅会错过了解那些已经取得的进步的机会。我们还会错过了解当下的机会。这就是为什么人造肉、高密度城市和核能都对地球有益，但很多人在这些问题上的直觉“如此脱节”——用里奇的话来说。

Perhaps that’s also why so many people believe the world is ending—and why even those who do believe we can build a better one don’t know where to start.

也许这也是为什么那么多人认为世界正在走向终结，以及为什么即使那些相信我们可以创造一个更好的世界的人也不知道从哪里着手开始。

My recommendation? This book.

我的建议？读一读这本书。

Invention and Innovation, by Vaclav Smil. Are we living in the most innovative era of human history? A lot of people would say so, but Smil argues otherwise. In fact, he writes, the current era shows “unmistakable signs of technical stagnation and slowing advances.” I don’t agree, but that’s not surprising—having read all 44 of his books and spoken with him several times, I know he’s not as optimistic as I am about the prospects of innovation. But even though we don’t see the future the same way, nobody is better than Smil at explaining the past. If you want to know how human ingenuity brought us to this moment in time, I highly recommend Invention and Innovation.

我们生活在人类历史上最具创新精神的时代吗？很多人会这么说，但斯米尔不这么认为。事实上，他写道，当前时代显示出“技术停滞和进步放缓的明显迹象”。我不同意他的观点，但这也不奇怪——我读过他所有的44本书，也和他聊过几次，我知道他对创新的前景不像我那么乐观。尽管我们对未来的看法不尽相同，但没有人比斯米尔更善于阐释过去。如果你想知道人类的智慧是如何把我们带到这个时代的，我强烈推荐《发明与创新》这本书。

There is one writer whose books I’ve reviewed on Gates Notes more than anyone else: Vaclav Smil. I’ve read all of his 44 books, which cover everything from the role of energy in human life to changes in the Japanese diet. I find his perspective to be super valuable. Although sometimes he’s too pessimistic about the upside of new technologies, he’s almost always right—and informative—when it comes to the complexities of deploying those technologies in the real world.

有一位作家的书我在盖茨笔记上评论的次数超过其他任何人：瓦茨拉夫·斯米尔（Vaclav Smil）。我已经阅读了他的所有44本书，涵盖了从能源在人类生活中的作用到日本饮食变化等各个方面。我觉得他的观点非常有价值。尽管有时他对新技术的潜在好处过于悲观，但当涉及将这些技术应用于现实世界的复杂性时，他几乎总是正确且博学。

In his newest book, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure, Smil looks skeptically at the notion that we’re living in an unrivaled era of innovation. Based on his analysis of fields including agriculture, transportation, and pharmaceuticals, he concludes that our current era is not nearly as innovative as we think. In fact, he says, it shows “unmistakable signs of technical stagnation and slowing advances.”

在他的新书《发明与创新：炒作与失败简史》（中文名暂译）中，斯米尔对我们生活在一个无与伦比的创新时代的观念提出了质疑。基于他对农业、交通和制药等领域的分析，他得出结论说，我们当前的时代远没有我们想象的那般富有创新。事实上，他说，这显示出“明显的技术停滞和进展减缓的迹象”。

This conclusion feels especially counterintuitive at a time when artificial intelligence and deep learning are advancing so fast. But to Smil, AI researchers only have managed “to deploy some fairly rudimentary analytical techniques to uncover patterns and pathways that are not so readily discernible by our senses” and produced “impressive achievements on some relatively easy tasks.”

这个结论在人工智能和深度学习飞速发展的时候尤其令人费解。但对于斯米尔来说，人工智能研究人员仅仅是设法“运用了一些相当初级的分析技术，以揭示我们的感官不那么容易识别的模式和途径”，并在“一些相对容易的任务上取得了令人印象深刻的成就”。

Smil believes there was only one real period of explosive innovation in the past 150 years: 1867-1914. During those years, inventors created internal combustion engines, electric lights, the telephone, inexpensive methods of producing steel, aluminum smelting, plastics, and the first electronic devices. Humanity also gained revolutionary insights in the fields of infectious disease, medicine, agriculture, and nutrition.

斯米尔认为在过去的150年里只有一个真正的爆炸性创新时代：1867年至1914年。在那段时期，发明家们创造了内燃机、电灯、电话、廉价的钢铁生产方法、铝冶炼、塑料和第一批电子设备。人类还在传染病、医学、农业和营养领域取得了革命性的见解。

Smil argues that the ensuing years have been lackluster, with far more “breakthroughs that are not” than important inventions that achieve scale and stick in the marketplace. One of his iconic examples of a false breakthrough is leaded gasoline, which helped internal combustion engines operate much more smoothly but produced devastating cognitive declines and millions of premature deaths.

斯米尔认为，随后的几十年相形见绌，“没有意义的突破”远远多于那些实现规模化并在市场上站稳脚跟的重要发明。他关于虚假突破的一个标志性例子是含铅汽油，它帮助内燃机运行得更加平稳，但却导致了毁灭性的认知能力下降和数百万人的过早死亡。

One thing that I agree with him about is how the exponential growth in computing power over the past several decades has given people a false idea about growth and innovation in other areas. Smil acknowledges “the much-admired post-1970 ascent of electronic architecture and performance,” but he concludes that this growth “has no counterpart in … other aspects of our lives.” It’s misguided to assume that anything else will grow as fast as computing power has.

有一件事我同意他的观点，那就是过去几十年计算能力的指数级增长给人们带来了对于其他领域增长和创新的错误观念。斯米尔认可了“1970年后电子体系结构和性能的提升令人钦佩”，但他得出结论说这种增长“在生活中的其他方面没有相对应的情况”。假设其他任何事物都会像计算能力一样迅速增长是错误的。

On the other hand, I think Smil underestimates accomplishments in AI. The past two years of AI improvement, particularly large language models, have surprised all of us. In fact, we’re starting to see early signs that machines can produce human-like reasoning—moving beyond just producing answers to questions they were programmed to solve. AI is going to become smart, not just fast. When it achieves what researchers call “artificial general intelligence,” that will give humanity incredible new tools for problem solving in almost every domain, from curing disease to personalizing education to developing new sources of clean energy. And as I wrote earlier this year, we will have to develop strict guidelines and protocols to curtail negative outcomes.

但反过来说，我认为斯米尔低估了人工智能领域的成就。过去两年人工智能的进步，特别是大语言模型，让我们所有人都叹为观止。事实上，我们开始看到一些早期迹象表明机器可以产生类似人类推理的能力——而不仅仅只是回答它们被设定要解决的问题。不止是快，人工智能还将变得聪明。当它实现研究人员所谓的“通用人工智能”时，这将为人类在几乎每个领域的问题解决提供令人难以置信的新工具，从治愈疾病到个性化教育再到开发新的清洁能源来源。正如我今年早些时候所写的，我们将不得不制定严格的准则和协议来限制负面结果。

Smil also neglects to account for the convergence of new technologies. In the work I do with the Gates Foundation and Breakthrough Energy, I have a great vantage point for observing innovation driven not just by advances in one area (AI, for example) but by the compounding effects of many different technologies advancing at the same time, like digital simulations, storage capacity, mobile communications, and domain-specific tools such as gene sequencing.

斯米尔还忽略了新技术的融合。在我与盖茨基金会和突破能源（Breakthrough Energy）一起进行的工作中，我有很好的视角来观察创新，这种创新不仅仅是由某个领域（例如人工智能）的进步推动的，而是由许多不同的技术同时推进的复合效应，如数字模拟、存储容量、移动通信以及基因测序等领域特定工具。

Smil is also pessimistic about many green technologies, including some approaches that I’m investing in. For example, he describes sodium-cooled nuclear fission reactors as pie in the sky. And yet in May I walked on the ground that will soon be broken for just such a reactor. Thanks to advances in digital simulation as well as ample risk capital, TerraPower has designed a sodium-cooled reactor that could be delivering power to the grid by 2030. Even if it takes longer to get running, I’m optimistic that sodium-cooled reactors are not just technically possible but will also prove to be economically viable, safe, and helpful for achieving net-zero carbon emissions.

斯米尔对许多绿色技术也持悲观态度，包括一些我正在投资的方法。例如，他将钠冷核裂变反应堆描述为空中楼阁。然而，在五月份，我就走在了不久将动工建设的这种反应堆的工地上。多亏了数字模拟的进步以及充足的风险资本，泰拉能源（TerraPower）已经设计出了一种可以在2030年之前为电网提供电力的钠冷堆。即使要花更长的时间才能运行，我依然对于钠冷堆不仅在技术上可行，而且在经济上可行、安全且有助于实现零碳排放的目标感到乐观。

Every Smil book that I own is marked up with lots of notes that I take while reading. Invention and Innovation is no exception. Even when I disagree with him, I learn a lot from him. Smil is not the sunniest person I know, but he always strengthens my thinking.

我拥有的每一本斯米尔的书都有很多我在阅读时做的笔记，《发明与创新》也不例外。即使我不全然同意他的观点，我也从他那里学到了很多。斯米尔并不是我认识的最乐观的人，但他总是能够加深我的思考。

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