书摘 | 谁是“物联网“的受益者？
Rise of the machines: who is the ‘internet of things’ good for?
本文节选自《尖端技术：日常生活的设计》，作者：亚当·格林菲尔德，Verso出版社出版。
In San Francisco, a young engineer hopes to “optimise” his life through sensors that track his heart rate, respiration and sleep cycle. In Copenhagen, a bus running two minutes behind schedule transmits its location and passenger count to the municipal traffic signal network, which extends the time of the green light at each of the next three intersections long enough for its driver to make up some time. In Davao City in the Philippines, an unsecured webcam overlooks the storeroom of a fast food stand, allowing anyone to peer in on all its comings and goings.
在旧金山，一位年轻工程师希望通过传感器跟踪心率、呼吸和睡眠周期“优化”自己的生活。在哥本哈根，晚点两分钟的公共汽车将位置和乘客人数发送到交通信号网，该网络将公共汽车接下来经过的三个路口的绿灯时间适当延长，让司机把延误的时间弥补回来。在菲律宾达沃市，一台开放网络摄像头监视着某快餐店的储物间，任何人都能看到货物进出的情况。
What links these wildly different circumstances is a vision of connected devices now being sold to us as the “internet of things”. The technologist Mike Kuniavsky, a pioneer of this idea, characterises it as a state of being in which “computation and data communication [are] embedded in, and distributed through, our entire environment”. I prefer to see it for what it is: the colonisation of everyday life by information processing.
将这些完全不同的情境联接起来的是对联网设备的愿景，如今这些设备被打上‘物联网“的标签。技术专家马克·库涅夫斯基是该理念的先锋，他将其归纳为一种状态，即“计算与数据通讯被植入并遍分在我们整个环境中”。我更愿将其称为：信息处理控制日常生活。
Though it can often feel as if this colonisation proceeds of its own momentum, distinct ambitions are being served wherever and however the internet of things appears. The internet of things isn’t a single technology. About all that connects the various devices, services, vendors and efforts involved is the end goal they serve: capturing data that can then be used to measure and control the world around us.
尽管常常让人感觉这种控制自行其是，但物联网无论出现在何地、如何出现，它都实现着不同的抱负。物联网并非一种独立的技术。它将各种设备、服务、供应商和有关活动连接起来，服务于一个终极目标：获取数据来测量并控制我们周围的世界。
Whenever a project has such imperial designs on our everyday lives, it is vital that we ask just what ideas underpin it and whose interests it serves. Although the internet of things retains a certain sprawling and formless quality, we can get a far more concrete sense of what it involves by looking at how it appears at each of three scales: that of our bodies (where the effort is referred to as the “quantified self”), our homes (“the smart home”) and our public spaces (“the smart city”). Each of these examples illuminates a different aspect of the challenge presented to us by the internet of things, and each has something distinct to teach us.
一旦某个项目对我们的日常生活有如此高高在上的设计时，我们有必要问问什么理念支撑了它以及它服务于谁的利益，这至关重要。尽管物联网在无序扩张，没有定形，但审视以下三个方面，即我们的身体（所谓“数量化的自己”）、我们的家（“智能家居”）和我们的公共区域（“智慧城市”），我们可以对物联网拥有更加具体的认识。每个例子都从不同侧面展现了物联网带来的挑战，每个都教会我们一些特别的东西。
At the most intimate scale, the internet of things is visible in the form of wearable biometric sensors. The simplest of these are little more than networked digital pedometers, which count steps, measure the distance a person has traversed, and furnish an estimate of the calories burned in the course of this activity. More elaborate models measure heart rate, breathing, skin temperature and even perspiration.
最个人的层面，物联网是可穿戴的生物信息传感器。最简单的不过是联网的数字计步器，计算步数、测量一个人行走的距离，估算在活动中消耗的卡路里，更精致的型号能测量心率、呼吸、皮表温度甚至排汗。
If wearable biometric devices such as Fitbits and Apple Watches are, in theory, aimed at rigorous self-mastery, the colonisation of the domestic environment by similarly networked products and services is intended to deliver a very different experience: convenience. The aim of such “smart home” efforts is to short-circuit the process of reflection that stands between having a desire and fulfilling that desire by buying something.
如果Fitbits和苹果手表等可穿戴生物信息设备在理论上旨在实现精确的自我掌控，那么类似联网产品和服务控制家居环境，其目的在于提供一种不同的体验：便捷。“智能家居”旨在让人购物不用思考，产生购买欲望后马上就可以实现。
Right now, the perfect example of this is a gadget being sold by Amazon, known as the Dash Button. Many internet-of-things devices are little more than some conventional object with networked connectivity tacked on. The Dash Button is the precise opposite, a thing in the world that could not have existed without the internet. I cannot improve on Amazon’s own description of this curious object and how it works, so I’ll repeat it here: “Amazon Dash Button is a Wi-Fi-connected device that reorders your favourite item with the press of a button. To use Dash Button, simply download the Amazon app from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Then, sign into your Amazon Prime account, connect Dash Button to Wi-Fi, and select the product you want to reorder. Once connected, a single press on Dash Button automatically places your order.”
目前，亚马逊销售的电子产品“轻触按钮”堪称完美。许多物联网设备不过是传统的东西增加了联网功能。“轻触按钮”正好相反，它是没有互联网就不能存在的东西。对这一神奇产品的描述和工作原理，我无法比亚马逊做得更好，所以摘录如下：“亚马逊的轻触按钮是一个无线联网设备，只需轻触按钮就能对自己喜欢的商品再次下单。为使用轻触按钮，只需从苹果应用商店或谷歌在线商店下载亚马逊应用，登录亚马逊贵宾账户，连上无线网，选择你要再次下单的商品。一旦连接，简单按一下“轻触按钮”就会自动下单。
An Amazon Dash button
In other words: single-purpose electronic devices, each dedicated to an individual branded item, that you press when you’re running low. Pressing a Dash Button specific to your preferred pet food, washing powder or bottled water automatically composes an order request to Amazon for that one product.
换句话说，这是单一目的的电子设备，每个设备对应一个品牌的产品，你缺货时，只需按一下。想要你喜欢的宠物食物、洗衣粉或瓶装水，按下专属的“轻触按钮”就会自动生成包含商品的订单请求发送给亚马逊。
I don’t for a second want to downplay the value of such a product for people who have ageing parents to look after, or kids to drop off at daycare, or for whom simply getting in the car to pick up some cat food may take an hour or more out of their day. But the benefit to the individual customer is tiny compared with what Amazon gains. Sure, you never run out of cat food. But Amazon gets data on the time and place of your need, as well as its frequency and intensity, and that data has value. It is an asset, and you can be sure that Amazon will exploit it in every way its terms and conditions permit – including by using it to develop behavioural models that map our desires in high resolution, so as to target them with even greater efficiency in the future.
对那些双亲年老需要照顾、孩子要接送去幼儿园，或只是在车里选购猫粮就要花上一个多小时的人而言，我无意贬低这种产品的价值。但与亚马逊的收益相比，个体消费者获取的好处是微不足道的。当然，你不会等猫粮用光了才去购买，但亚马逊获取了你的购买时间和位置信息及购买次数和强度，这些数据是有价值的。这些数据都是一种资产，亚马逊肯定会在条款允许的范围内以各种方式对其加以利用，包括使用它们开发行为模型，能精确绘制我们的需求，在将来更高效地利用它们。
Again, the aim of devices such as the Dash Button is to permit the user to accomplish commercial transactions with as little conscious thought as possible – not even the few moments it takes to tap out commands on the touchscreen of a phone or tablet. The data on what the industry calls “conversion” is as clear as it is unremitting: with every box to tick or form to fill, the percentage of users that make it all the way to checkout tumbles. The fewer steps there are in a transaction, the more likely people are to spend their money.
另外，像”轻触按钮“这样的设备，其目的是让用户在完成交易时有尽可能不要仔细思考，甚至不及在手机或平板电脑的触摸屏上敲几个指令花上的功夫。业界称为“转换率”的数据一目了然、从不出错：每勾选一个选项或填写一个表单，一路填完结账的用户比例就会降低。交易操作步骤越少，人们花钱的可能性就越大。
Manufacturers, enticed by the revenue potential of conquering the domestic environment, keep trying to eliminate these steps, in the hope that one of their connected products will become as essential to everyday life as the smartphone. The recent industry push toward the “smart home” is simply the latest version of this.
受抢占家居市场利润前景的驱使，制造商不断尝试削减交易环节，希望某款联网产品能像智能手机一样成为日常生活必需品。最近业界推动的“智能家居”就是这种努力的最新版本。
For the moment, this strategy is centred on so-called smart speakers, a first generation of which have now reached the market. These products include the Amazon Echo and Google Home, each of which is supposed to function as the command hub of a connected domestic environment. Amazon’s Echo is a simple cylinder, while the Google Home is a bevelled ovoid. But the physical form of such speakers is all but irrelevant, as their primary job is to function as a branded “virtual assistant”, providing a simple, integrated way to access the numerous digital controls scattered throughout the contemporary home – from lighting and entertainment to security, heating, cooling and ventilation systems.
目前，该策略聚焦在所谓的智能音箱，第一代的智能音箱已经投放市场。这些产品包括亚马逊Echo和谷歌Home，它们被设计成为联网家居的指令中枢。亚马逊Echo是个简洁的圆柱体，谷歌Home是个斜切卵圆体。其实音箱的物理形状无关紧要，其主要功能是有品牌的虚拟助理，通过简单、集成的方式操控现代家居中的大量数控系统，从灯光、娱乐到安防、供热、制冷和排风系统。
Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple each offer their own such assistant, based on natural-language speech recognition. Most are given female names, voices and personalities, presumably based on research indicating that users of all genders prefer to interact with women. Apple’s is called Siri and will, according to reports, soon be getting its own device, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana, while one simply addresses Google’s Home offering as “Google.”
谷歌、微软、亚马逊和苹果各自开发了基于自然语言识别的助理系统。它们大多数有女性的名字、声音和性格。据推测，研究表明所有性别的用户都喜欢与女性打交道。苹果助理叫Siri, 据报道将不久会有自己的设备；亚马逊是Alexa，微软是Cortana，而谷歌Home就叫“谷歌”。
At first, such devices seem harmless enough. They sit patiently and quietly at the periphery of our awareness, and we only speak to them when we need them. But when we consider them more carefully, a more problematic picture emerges.
起初这些设备看起来没有什么危害。他们耐心安静地坐在能够感知我们声音的地方，当我们需要时只需发号指令，可认真想想，问题就随之而来。
This is how Google’s assistant works: you mention to it that you’re in the mood for Italian food, and then, in the words of one New York Times article, it “will then respond with some suggestions for tables to reserve at Italian restaurants using, for example, the OpenTable app”.
谷歌助理是这样工作的：你告诉它你想吃意大利餐，然后，用《纽约时报》一篇文章的话说，“它会建议你使用比如OpenTable应用预订意大利餐厅的座位”。
This example shows that though the choices these assistants offer us are presented as neutral, they are based on numerous inbuilt assumptions that many of us would question if we were to truly scrutinise them.
这个例子说明尽管这些助理向我们提供的选择看起来没有倾向性，如果认真审视，大多数人能对这些选择的大量内在假设提出质疑。
Ask restaurateurs and front-of-house workers what they think of OpenTable, for example, and you will swiftly learn that one person’s convenience is another’s accelerated pace of work, or worse. You’ll learn that restaurants offering reservations via the service are, according to the website Serious Eats, “required to use the company’s proprietary floor-management system, which means leasing hardware and using OpenTable-specific software”, and that OpenTable retains ownership of all the data generated in this way. You’ll also learn that OpenTable takes a cut on reservations per seated diner, which obviously adds up to a significant amount on a busy night.
你询问餐厅经理或前台员工他们对OpenTable应用的看法，他们会立马告诉你：一个人方便了，别人却要加紧工作，甚至更糟。你会发现餐馆通过这样的服务提供预订，根据Serious Eats网站的说法，“需要使用该公司专属大堂管理系统，这意味要租用硬件，使用OpenTable定制软件“，OpenTable通过这种方式控制了所有数据。你还会发现，OpenTable对每单预订收取一定费用，显而易见，在晚餐高峰期这是一笔不菲的收入。
Conscientious diners have therefore been known to bypass the ostensible convenience of OpenTable, and make whatever reservations they have to by phone. By contrast, Google Home’s frictionless default to making reservations via OpenTable normalises the choice to use that service.
因此有心的用餐者会无视OpenTable表面上的便利，一切都通过电话预订。相反，谷歌Home通过OpenTable，使用无障碍缺省方式预订，让使用这项服务正常化了。
This is not accidental. It reflects the largely preconscious valuations, priorities and internalised beliefs of the people who devised Google Home. As throughout the industry, that is a remarkably homogeneous cohort of young designers and engineers. But more important than the degree of similarity they bear to one another is how different they are from everyone else.
这并非意外，很大程度上反映了谷歌Home设计人员事先持有的价值评估、优先性选择和内心理念。整个业界就是由年轻设计师和工程师组成的一群有相同理念的人。但与他们拥有的相似性比起来，更重要的是他们之间会有多大差异性。
Internet-of-things devices are generally conceived by people who have completely assimilated services such as Uber, Airbnb and Apple Pay into their daily lives, at a time when figures from the Washington DC-based Pew Research Center suggest that a significant percentage of the population has never used or even heard of them. For the people who design these products, these services are normal, and so, over time, they become normalised for everyone else.
总体而言，物联网设备会获得日常生活中完全依赖Uber、Airbnb和Apple Pay等服务的人的信赖，而来自华盛顿特区皮尤研究中心研究表明，有相当一部分人从来没有使用或听说过这些服务。对设计物联网产品的人来说，这些服务再正常不过了，因此随着时间推移，对其他人也会变得司空见惯。
There are other challenges presented by this way of interacting with networked information. It’s difficult, for example, for a user to determine whether the options they are being offered by a virtual assistant result from what the industry calls an “organic” return – something that legitimately came up as the result of a search process – or from paid placement. But the main problem with the virtual assistant is that it fosters an approach to the world that is literally thoughtless, leaving users disinclined to sit out any prolonged frustration of desire, and ever less critical about the processes that result in gratification.
这种与网络信息互动的方式会带来其它挑战。举个例子，对用户来说，很难判断虚拟助理提供的选项是否是业界所谓“有机”回馈，即来自正常的搜寻结果而非付费排名。但虚拟助理的主要问题是其主张的处事哲学: 不要动脑子，让用户想有就有，无需久等，对带来满足感的过程也不假思索。
Virtual assistants are listening to everything that transpires in their presence, and are doing so at all times. As voice-activated interfaces, they must be constantly attentive in order to detect when the “wake word” that rouses them is spoken. In this way, they are able to harvest data that might be used to refine targeted advertising, or for other commercial purposes that are only disclosed deep in the terms and conditions that govern their use. The logic operating here is that of preemptive capture: the notion that companies such as Amazon and Google might as well trawl up everything they can, because no one knows what value might be derived from it in the future.
虚拟助理倾听发生在面前的任何事情，无时不在倾听。作为语音激活接口，助理必须时刻竖起耳朵，捕获“唤醒词”。通过这种方式采集的数据被用于对目标广告进行细化或其它商业目的，只在条款允许使用的范围内公开。其运营逻辑是先行获取：亚马逊和谷歌等公司搜集能搜集到一切数据，因为没人知道未来会从这些数据挖掘出哪些有价值的信息。
This leads to situations that might be comical, were it not for what they imply about the networking of our domestic environments. These stories circulate as cautionary tales: one of the best-known was the time the US National Public Radio network aired a story about the Amazon Echo, and various cues spoken on the broadcast were interpreted as commands by Echos belonging to members of the audience, causing domestic chaos.
若非他们暗示家居环境联网了，这会导致喜剧场面。有不少流传的故事堪为警示：最著名的一次是美国全国公共广播电台播送了一个关于亚马逊Echo的故事，广播中各种说法让听众的Echo解读为指令，引发家居系统的混乱。
Put aside for one moment the question of disproportionate benefit – the idea that you as the user derive a little convenience from your embrace of a virtual assistant, while its provider gets everything – all the data about your life and all its value. Let’s simply consider what gets lost in the ideology of convenience that underlies this conception of the internet of things. Are the constraints presented to us by life in the non-connected world really so onerous? Is it really so difficult to wait until you get home before you preheat the oven? And is it worth giving away so much, just to be able to do so remotely?
你作为用户因拥有虚拟助理而获得稍许便利，而它的供应商却获取了一切：所有关于你生活的数据以及其价值，我认为这是不成比例的收益，可先把这一问题放一边。让我们简单思考一下：在支撑物联网这一概念给人带来便利的理念中，我们失去了什么。在非联网世界里，我们生活中诸多限制果真难以克服吗？你真的等不到回家后再预热烤炉吗？为了远程完成这些事，真的值得放弃这么多吗？
Most of us are by now aware that our mobile phones are constantly harvesting information about our whereabouts and activities. But we tend to be relatively ignorant of the degree to which the contemporary streetscape has also been enabled to collect information. This development is often called the “smart city”. If the ambition beneath the instrumentation of the body is ostensible self-mastery, and that of the home is convenience, the ambition at the heart of the smart city is nothing other than control – the desire to achieve a more efficient use of space, energy and other resources.
现在大家都知道手机能不停搜集我们的位置和活动信息，相比我们忽视了当代街景也能搜集信息，这被称为“智慧城市”。如果说身体仪表化背后的动机是表面看起来的自我掌控，家居仪表化是为了方便，那么智慧城市的核心动机是为了控制，体现了高效利用空间、能源和其它资源的愿望。
A broad range of networked information-gathering devices are increasingly being deployed in public space, including CCTV cameras; advertisements and vending machines equipped with biometric sensors; and the indoor micropositioning systems known as “beacons” that, when combined with a smartphone app, send signals providing information about nearby products and services.
联网信息采集设备正越来越多地部署在公共区域，包括闭路电视摄像头、配备了生物信息传感器的广告和自动售卖机、被称作“信标”的室内微定位系统，该系统如果与智能手机应用结合，能够提供附近的产品和服务的信息。
The picture we are left with is that of our surroundings furiously vacuuming up information, every square metre of seemingly banal pavement yielding so much data about its uses and its users that nobody yet knows what to do with it all. And it is at this scale of activity that the guiding ideology of the internet of things comes into clearest focus.
可以想像，我们周围的信息被搜集得一点不剩，每平方米稀松平常的人行道也会产生大量关于人行道的使用和行人的数据，而没人知道它们有什么用。正是在这种规模的行为上，物联网的指导思想变得再清晰不过了。
The strongest and most explicit articulation of this ideology in the definition of a smart city has been offered by the house journal of the engineering company Siemens: “Several decades from now, cities will have countless autonomous, intelligently functioning IT systems that will have perfect knowledge of users’ habits and energy consumption, and provide optimum service ... The goal of such a city is to optimally regulate and control resources by means of autonomous IT systems.”
对智慧城市的定义中，关于这一思想最权威、最明确的表述非工程公司西门子的家居期刊莫属：“今后几十年，城市将拥有无数自治、能够智能运作的IT系统，这些系统能完全了解用户习惯和能源消耗 并提供最优服务……这样一个城市的目标就是通过自治IT系统最大程度地监管和控制资源。
There is a clear philosophical position, even a worldview, behind all of this: that the world is in principle perfectly knowable, its contents enumerable and their relations capable of being meaningfully encoded in a technical system, without bias or distortion. As applied to the affairs of cities, this is effectively an argument that there is one and only one correct solution to each identified need; that this solution can be arrived at algorithmically, via the operations of a technical system furnished with the proper inputs; and that this solution is something that can be encoded in public policy, without distortion. (Left unstated, but strongly implicit, is the presumption that whatever policies are arrived at in this way will be applied transparently, dispassionately and in a manner free from politics.)
在这所有的背后是一个哲学态度，甚至可以称为世界观：世界原则上是完全可知的，它包含的内容可以枚举，其间的关系可以毫无偏差或扭曲地在技术系统中进行有意义的编码。应用到城市事务中，对每一个确定需求，有且只能有一个正确解决方案，这是一个有力的论断论。该解决方案利用获取足够数据的技术系统操作，运用算法得以实现。该解决方案可用于公共决策，不失真。（虽未明说，但强烈暗示的假定是：以这种方式制定的任何政策都是透明的，不带有感情色彩，不受政治影响。）
Every aspect of this argument is questionable. Perhaps most obviously, the claim that anything at all is perfectly knowable is perverse. However thoroughly sensors might be deployed in a city, they will only ever capture what is amenable to being captured. In other words, they will not be able to pick up every single piece of information necessary to the formulation of sound civic policy.
其实这个论据无论怎么说都是有问题的。最显而易见的是，所有事情都是完全可知，这个论断有悖常理。当然传感器可以在城市全面部署，但是只能搜集传感器覆盖范围内的数据。换言之，它们无法得到用于制定健全城市政策所需的每一条信息。
Other, all-too-human distortions inevitably colour the data collected. For instance, people may consciously adapt to produce metrics favourable to them. A police officer under pressure to “make quota” may focus on infractions that she would ordinarily overlook, while conversely, her precinct commander, under pressure to present the city as ever-safer, may downwardly classify a felony assault as a simple misdemeanour. This is the phenomenon known to viewers of The Wire as “juking the stats,” and it is particularly likely to occur when financial or other incentives depend on achieving a performance threshold.
另外，太多人为因素不可避免影响数据猜忌。例如，人们会有意识地设计对自己有利的指标。一个背负压力的女警官为“完成定额“会特别关注她平时忽视的违规行为，相反，她所在辖区的长官同样也受到压力，为了让城市看起来比任何时候更安全，他可能采用相反的做法，将刑事案件归类为一个简单的失当行为。这种现象对电视剧《火线》的观众而言就是“虚假统计”，当金融或其它利益诉求依赖一个业绩指标来实现时，这尤其可能发生。
There is also the question of interpretation. Advocates of smart cities often seem to proceed as if it is self-evident that each of our acts has a single, salient meaning, which can be recognised, made sense of and acted upon remotely by an automated system, without any possibility of error. The most prominent advocates of this approach appear to believe that no particular act of interpretation is involved in making use of any data retrieved from the world in this way.
还有如何解读的问题。倡导智慧城市认为我们的行为不言而喻都有单一、明确的含义，可以通过一个远程自动化系统准确无误地加以识别、利用并据此采取措施。这一方法最坚定的倡导者可能相信，使用这种方式获取的任何数据不涉及特定的解读行为。
But data is never “just” data, and to assert otherwise is to lend inherently political and interested decisions an unmerited gloss of scientific objectivity. The truth is that data is easily skewed, depending on how it is collected. Different values for air pollution in a given location can be produced by varying the height at which a sensor is mounted by a few metres. Perceptions of risk in a neighbourhood can be transformed by slightly altering the taxonomy used to classify reported crimes. And anyone who has ever worked in opinion polling knows how sensitive the results are to the precise wording of a survey.
但数据从来不“仅“是数据，说它不过是数据，让本质上是政治和涉及利益的决策戴上了科学客观的虚假光环。事实是数据很容易被扭曲，这取决于数据是如何被采集的。通过变更传感器的安装高度，只要数米，在同一地点采集的空气污染数据就大不一样。对社区存在的风险的认识，只要稍加改变对犯罪的分类方法，就将产生很大变化。任何曾经有过民意调查工作经验的人都知道，调查中具体如何提问，会对结果产生多大的影响。
The bold claim of “perfect” knowledge appears incompatible with the messy reality of all known information-processing systems, the human individuals and institutions that make use of them and, more broadly, with the world as we experience it. In fact, it is astonishing that any experienced engineer would ever be so unwary as to claim perfection on behalf of any computational system, no matter how powerful.
大胆宣称掌握了“完美“知识，看起来这与所有个体和组织使用的已知信息处理系统带来的混乱现实不相称，更广泛地讲，与我们经历的世界也不相称。事实上，不管计算系统如何强大，任何有经验的工程师声称系统是完美的都显得不够谨慎。
The notion that there is one and only one solution to urban problems is also deeply puzzling. Cities are made up of individuals and communities who often have competing preferences, and it is impossible to fully satisfy all of them at the same time.
解决城市问题有且只能有一个方案，这种观念也让人深感困惑。城市由许多个体和社区组成，同时完全满足他们的不同偏好是不可能的。
That such a solution, if it even existed, could be arrived at algorithmically is also implausible. Assume, for the sake of argument, that there did exist a master formula capable of balancing the needs of all of a city’s competing constituencies. It certainly would be convenient if this golden mean could be determined automatically and consistently. But the wholesale surrender of municipal management to an algorithmic toolset seems to place an undue amount of trust in the party responsible for authoring the algorithm.
一个通过算法就能实现的方案，即使存在，也令人难以置信。为了讨论方便，假设存在神奇的公式能够平衡某城市中所有选区的需求，如能自动且始终能确定一个绝佳方法，当然是很方便的。但市政管理完全依靠一个算法工具，这看起来过度信任负责设计算法的团队。
If the formulas behind this vision of future cities turn out to be anything like the ones used in the current generation of computational models, life-altering decisions will hinge on the interaction of poorly defined and subjective values. The output generated by such a procedure may turn on half-clever abstractions, in which complex circumstances resistant to direct measurement are reduced to more easily determined proxy values: average walking speed stands in for the “pace” of urban life, while the number of patent applications constitutes an index of “innovation”, and so on.
如果未来城市愿景背后的规则不过就是目前这一代计算模型，那么改变生活的决策将维系于定义模糊且主观的数据间的相互作用。这种过程产生的结果可能建立在自认为聪明的抽象之上，在这种情况下，对无法直接衡量的复杂情况，只能偷工减料使用更加容易获得的替代数据：平均步行速度替代城市生活节奏，专利使用数量构成“创新”指数等。
Quite simply, we need to understand that creating an algorithm intended to guide the distribution of civic resources is itself a political act. And, at least for now, nowhere in the current smart-city literature is there any suggestion that either algorithms or their designers would be subject to the ordinary processes of democratic accountability.
简单地说，我们需要明白，创建一个旨在指导分配城市资源的算法，本身就是一个政治行为。至少当前智慧城市的文献里，没人指出算法或其设计人员须遵从民主问责的一般程序。
And finally, it is difficult to believe that any such findings would ever be translated into public policy in a manner free from politics. Policy recommendations derived from computational models are only rarely applied to questions as politically sensitive as resource allocation without some intermediate tuning taking place. Inconvenient results may be suppressed, arbitrarily overridden by more heavily weighted decision factors, or simply ignored.
最后，把如是研究结果不受政治干扰地转化为公共政策，这是难以令人相信的。计算模型制定的政策建议，如不进行一定程度调整，几乎不可能解决政治敏感的资源分配问题。难以令人满意的结果会受到压制，或被权重更大的决策因素随意推翻，或是干脆被视而不见。
As matters now stand, the claim of perfect competence that is implicit in most smart-city rhetoric is incommensurate with everything we know about the way technical systems work. It also flies in the face of everything we know about how cities work. The architects of the smart city have failed to reckon with the reality of power, and the ability of elites to suppress policy directions that don’t serve their interests. At best, the technocratic notion that the analysis of sensor-derived data would ever be permitted to drive municipal policy is naive. At worst, though, it ignores the lessons of history.
照目前的情况，大多数智慧城市的说辞中隐含的完美能力论断，与我们所知的技术系统运转的方方面面都是不相称的，也与我们了解的城市是如何运作的方方面面截然不同。智慧城市的设计师没有考虑权力现实及社会精英阻止不符合其利益的政策的能力。说好一点，以传感器数据分析推动市政政策的技术理念不过是一厢情愿的，说糟糕点，就是忽视了历史的教训。
So, yes: the internet of things presents many new possibilities, and it would be foolish to dismiss those possibilities out of hand. But we would also be wise to approach the entire domain with scepticism, and in particular to resist the attempts of companies to gather ever more data about our lives – no matter how much ease, convenience and self-mastery we are told they are offering us.
因此，没错：物联网呈现了许多新可能性，摒弃那些可能是愚不可及的。但我们也该持有怀疑态度，理智地对待整个领域，尤其要抵制试图搜集我们生活数据的公司，无论我们被告知他们能为我们提供多少轻松、方便和自我掌控。
译者 龙海