his book is about the future of technology. In it we will examine some of the many recent developments in a few key fields and try, in a limited way, to forecast where they will take us in the next fifteen years or so.

  这本书是关于科技的未来的。在这本书中我们将要回顾近年来一些主要科技领域的发展，并且试着稍微预测一下在未来的十五年后科技将要有哪些新的发展。

  If that sounds like a modest goal, it’s not.

  也许这个目标听起来有些谦虚，然而却不是。

  (Technology is the dominant force of our time and probably of all time to come. It appears in more varieties than we can count).

  It changes so rapidly that no scientist or engineer can keep up with his own field, much less with technology in general.

  科技发展得如此之快，以至于科学家或者工程师都跟不上他们自己领域的科技发展，更不用说广泛意义上的科技了。

  (It permeates and shapes our lives at every turn.)

  We live in technology as fish live in the sea, and we have only a little better chance of forecasting the details of its changes.

  我们生活在科技之中，正如同鱼生活在海洋之中一样。而且我们很难详细地预测科技未来的发展。

  (Yet the task is well worth undertaking. Whatever hints we can glean about the future will help us prepare for the changes to come. Modest forecasts, evidence of trends, a few concrete developments to be expected all are better than no warning at all. And though technology has made the present much less stable than the past, and surely will make the future more turbulent still, there is good reason to hope that our lives, in sum and on average, will be better as a result.)

  In an age of uncomfortable challenges, this is reassurance we all can use.

  在这个充满了令人紧张的挑战的时代，科技是我们都能够放心使用的。

  For an idea of what is to come—in magnitude if not in specifics—look to the past. In the last ninety years, the world has shrunk, while human experience has expanded almost beyond the recognition of those who grew up in our grandparents’ generation.

  要预测未来——是宏观上的，而不是细节上的——就要回顾过去。在过去的90年里，整个世界在不断缩小，而人类的探索却在不断扩大，几乎超过了我们祖父辈那一代的人们对于整个世界的认识。

  (A century after America’s founders conceived their agrarian democracy, nearly all their descendents still lived on small farms. Since World War I, technology has extracted us from behind horse-drawn plows and plugged us into assembly lines and offices. Today it is removing many of us from offices and letting us work at home or compelling us to work on the road.)

  (As recently as 1920, the average American baby could expect to live only fifty-four years. By the early 1990s, average life expectancy in the United States had climbed to seventy-five years, seventy-two for men and neatly seventy-nine for women. In the next twenty years, life expectancy may well rise again, even more steeply. This time it will climb, not only for the newborn but for those already well into adulthood).

  In transportation and communications, the changes have been even more pronounced.

  在交通和通信方面的变化就更加显著了。

  (As recently as World War two, the average American lived and died within 38 miles (61 kilometers) of his birthplace. For New Yorkers, the radius was only 17.5 miles (28 kilometers), as far as the subway ran. Information from the outside came by newspaper, radio, or word from the traveler’s mouth; it moved intermittently and often arrived only after long delay).

  In 1945, when the first atomic bomb fused the sand of Alamogordo，New Mexico, the shot was not heard around the world; rumors of a massive explosion in the desert were easily contained. Only a half century later, someone born in Massachusetts is more likely than not to attend college in Chicago, find a job in Seattle, vacation in Mexico, and retire in Florida. (News from London, Moscow, Sarajevo, and Pyongyang arrives instantly on CNN and, for growing numbers of people, on personal computers fed by the Internet.) From our offices in suburban Virginia and rural New Hampshire, Paris, Singapore, Buenos Aires, and Sydney are all as close as Washington and Boston, none more distant than the few steps to the computer. Around the globe, we will spend the rest of our lives finding things to say to people we will never meet in person. (Thus far, shared interests have proved easy to find).

  1945年，当第一颗原子弹融化了新墨西哥州的阿拉莫戈多的沙子的时侯，这个令人震惊的消息并没有传遍世界。有关这次沙漠中的巨大爆炸的消息是很容易保密的。仅仅半个世纪之后，马萨诸塞州出生的人却很有可能在芝加哥上大学，在西雅图工作，去墨西哥度假，于佛罗里达退休。不论我们的办公室是在佛吉尼亚的郊区、新汉普郡的乡村，还是在巴黎、新加坡，布宜诺斯艾利斯或者悉尼，亦或是近在华盛顿或波士顿，我们之间的距离也不过是走到计算机的那几步。在全球各个地方，我们都有可能会在我们的后半生中去和我们永远不会见面的人谈论我们生活中的事情.