1.So anyway, who am I?
好，我们开始吧。首先我是谁？
2.I usually say to people, when they say, “What do you do?”
别人问起我做什么的时候，我通常会跟别人讲
3.I say, “I do hardware,”
“我是做硬件的”
4.because it sort of conveniently encompasses everything I do.
因为那样可以很直接的涵盖我现在做的几乎所有东西
5.And I recently said that to a venture capitalist casually at some Valley event, to which he replied, “How quaint.”
最近在硅谷的一次活动上 我就是这么跟一位风投说的。他说，这么怪！
6.(Laughter) And I sort of really was dumbstruck.
（笑声） 我当时真的是傻呆了
7.And I really should have said something smart.
本来应该说点其他有趣的东西
8.And now I’ve had a little bit of time to think about it, I would have said, “Well, you know, if we look at the next 100 years and we’ve seen all these problems in the last few days,
后来想了一下 我现在可以这么回答 要是我们往前看100年 我们过去几天看到了各种各样的问题
9.most of the big issues — clean water, clean energy — and they’re interchangeable in some respects — and cleaner, more functional materials —
那些大的问题，包括清洁饮水、清洁能源 ——这两者某种程度上是可以相互转换的 以及更干净更具功能化的材料
10.they all look to me to be hardware problems.
在我看来，这些都是硬件层面的问题
11.This doesn’t mean we should ignore software, or information, or computation.
这不是说我们要忽视软件 或者信息或者计算
12.And that’s in fact probably what I’m going to try and tell you about.
这就是我今天演讲的内容
13.So, this talk is going to be about how do we make things and what are the new ways that we’re going to make things in the future.
我要告诉大家我们怎么制造东西 以及未来我们将怎么制造东西
14.Now, TED sends you a lot of spam if you’re a speaker about “do this, do that” and you fill out all these forms, and you don’t actually know how they’re going to describe you,
假如你是一位演讲嘉宾，TED会给你发来大量的垃圾邮件 告诉你，要这么做，不要那么做，你还要填写大量的表格 你甚至也不知道他们会怎么描述你
15.and it flashed across my desk that they were going to introduce me as a futurist.
我刚才想到，似乎TED要将我描绘成为一个未来学家
16.And I’ve always been nervous about the term futurist, because you seem doomed to failure because you can’t really predict it.
一听到未来学家这个词，我一向是很紧张的 因为事实上未来是不可预测的，所以你注定是要失败的
17.And I was laughing about this with the very smart colleagues I have, and said, “You know, well, if I have to talk about the future, what is it?”
我和我的一位很聪明的同事在笑 我说，假如你要讲未来，那你会讲什么呢？
18.And George Homsey, a great guy, said, “Oh, the future is amazing.
我的同事George Homsey是个很聪明的家伙，他说，“未来是很美好的
19.It is so much stranger than you think.
比你想象的要美好得多
20.We’re going to reprogram the bacteria in your gut, and we’re going to make your poo smell like peppermint.”
我们将有可能给细胞重新编排他们的基因序列 也可以让你的粪便闻起来想薄荷一样
21.(Laughter) So, you may think that’s sort of really crazy, but there are some pretty amazing things that are happening that make this possible.
（笑声） 也许你会认为那是有点夸张的 但确实在这些方面我们取得了相当可喜的进展，使得那样的故事 有可能变为现实
22.So, this isn’t my work, but it’s work of good friends of mine at MIT.
这不是我的作品。是我的好朋友的作品
23.This is called the registry of standard biological parts.
它叫标准生物部件组
24.This is headed by Drew Endy and Tom Knight and a few other very, very bright individuals.
它是由Drew Endy以及 Tom Knight主导的团队开发的 还要其他几个非常非常优秀的人
25.Basically, what they’re doing is looking at biology as a programmable system.
他们所做的，就是将生命看作是一个可编程的系统
26.Literally, think of proteins as subroutines that you can string together to execute a program.
真的， 你可以把蛋白质看成是 可以组合在一起形成一个程序的单元
27.Now, this is actually becoming such an interesting idea.
这样的想法正变得非常有趣
28.This is a state diagram. That’s an extremely simple computer.
这是一个状态图。是很简单的一部计算机。
29.This one is a two-bit counter.
这是个双字节的计算器
30.So that’s essentially the computational equivalent of two light switches.
或者从计算的角度来讲，那就相当于一个灯的开关
31.And this is being built by a group of students at Zurich for a design competition in biology.
瑞士的一班学生 在一个生物学竞赛上制作出了这个东西
32.And from the results of the same competition last year, a University of Texas team of students programmed bacteria so that they can detect light and switch on and off.
同样是在去年举办的这个竞赛上 来自得克萨斯大学的学生通过给细菌 编程 使得细菌可以感知灯光并且控制开灯或关灯
33.So this is interesting in the sense that you can now do “if then for” statements in materials, in structure.
这是很有意思的 因为这意味着我们可以为实物铸入像 “if then for” 这样的口令了
34.This is a pretty interesting trend.
这是一个很有趣的趋势
35.Because we used to live in a world where everyone’s said glibly, form follows function, but I think I’ve sort of grown up in a world
我们过去所生活的世界是一个模糊的世界 先有功能，后有形态，但我相信，我正在一个
36.– you listened to Neil Gershenfeld yesterday, I was in a lab associated with his — where it’s really a world where information defines form and function.
——像尼尔·歌申费尔德教授所描绘的世界 我就在一个跟尼尔教授有关系的实验室工作 在那里，信息决定了形态与功能
37.I spent six years thinking about that, but to show you the power of art over science — this is actually one of the cartoons I write. These are called Howtoons.
我有六年的时间就在想这个 但为了向你展示艺术相对于科学带给人们的震撼力—— 这是我画的一幅漫画，我管这样的漫画叫“好图画”
38.I work with a fabulous illustrator called Nick Dragotta.
那是我跟一个非常优秀的叫Nick Dragotta的漫画家一起完成的
39.Took me six years at MIT, and about that many pages to describe what I was doing, and it took him one page. And so this is our muse Tucker.
一共花去了我在MIT的六年时间 以及如此多的页数来描述当时我做的事情 但对于这位漫画家而言，他只需要一页就够了。Tucker是我们的灵感之源
40.He’s an interesting little kid — and his sister, Celine — and what he’s doing here is observing the self-assembly of his Cheerios in his cereal bowl.
他是个很有趣的孩子，这是他的妹妹Celine 他现在在做的 就是观察在他的饭碗里的燕麦圈的自组合过程
41.And in fact you can program the self-assembly of things, so he starts chocolate dipping edges, changing the hydrophobicity and the hydrophylicity.
事实上，你可以通过编程，来使得物品进行自我组合 于是他从巧克力开始做 改变其抗水性以及亲水性
42.In theory, if you program those sufficiently, you should be able to do something pretty interesting and make very complex structure.
从理论来说，只要你的程序有足够的完整性 你可以做出任何有意思的东西 创造出很复杂的结构出来
43.In this case, he’s done self-replication of complex 3D structure.
他对三维的复杂结构很喜欢，现在是业余做这个。
44.And that’s what I thought about for a long time, because this is how we currently make things.
我很久以来在思考的正是这个 因为这正是我们现在制造东西的方式
45.This is a silicon wafer, and essentially that’s just a whole bunch of layers of two-dimensional stuff, sort of layered up.
这是一个硅晶圆 它实际上就是很多重的二维结构的材料堆积起来
46.The feature side is — you know, people will say, [unclear] down around about 65 nanometers now.
它的侧面 65纳米
47.On the right, that’s a radiolara.
右边的是放射虫
48.That’s a unicellular organism ubiquitous in the oceans.
它是一种在海洋里大量存在的单细胞生物
49.And that has feature sizes down to about 20 nanometers, and it’s complex 3D structure.
它的直径为20纳米 并且它有复杂的三维结构
50.We could do a lot more with computers and things generally if we knew how to build things this way.
我们还可以用电脑制造很多其他的东西 假如我们懂得像放射虫那样去搭建起三维结构的话
51.The secret to biology is, it builds computation into the way it makes things. So this little thing here, polymerase, is essentially a supercomputer designed for replicating DNA.
生物之奥秘，在于它在造物的时候就把 一套计算的程式装进去了。这是一个聚合酶 它事实上就是一台专门用来复制DNA的超级计算机
52.And this ribosome, here, is another little computer that helps in the translation of the proteins.
而那些一个个突起的核糖体又是另外一种功能的计算机 它可以帮助实现蛋白质的合成
53.I thought about this in the sense that it’s great to build in biological materials, but can we do similar things?
我一直在想 用生物材料可以搭建起非常有趣的东西 但用物理材料是否同样可行呢？
54.Can we get self-replicating-type behavior?
我们能否设计出具备自复制能力的机器呢？
55.Can we get complex 3D structure automatically assembling in inorganic systems?
我们能否让复杂的三维结构 在一个非生物的系统里自行组合起来呢？
56.Because there are some advantages to inorganic systems, like higher speed semiconductors, et cetera.
因为非生物系统有些很好的优势 比如更高速的半导体等等
57.So, this is some of my work on how do you do an autonomously self-replicating system.
这就是我的工作 研究怎么去建立一个可以实现自行复制的系统
58.And this is sort of Babbage’s revenge.
有点像是巴贝奇最初设计的计算机
59.These are little mechanical computers.
这些是微型机械电脑
60.These are five-state state machines.
这些是五状态的状态机
61.So, that’s about three light switches lined up.
可以看到有三个并排的电灯开关
62.In a neutral state, they won’t bind at all.
在自然状态下，它们不会自行接合
63.Now, if I make a string of these, a bit string, they will be able to replicate.
但假如我做了一串这样的东西 它们就可以实现自我复制
64.So we start with white, blue, blue, white.
我们不妨从白色、蓝色、蓝色、白色开始
65.That encodes; that will now copy. From one comes two, and then from two comes three.
它们经过编码后，就可以实现复制，从一个到两个 再有两个到四个
66.And so you’ve got this sort of replicating system.
于是我们就得到了这样一种自复制的系统
67.It was work actually by Lionel Penrose, father of Roger Penrose, the tiles guy.
它最初是由Lionel Penrose发现的 也就是Roger Penrose的父亲
68.He did a lot of this work in the ’60s, and so a lot of this logic theory lay fallow as we went down the digital computer revolution, but it’s now coming back.
他在1960年代的时候做了很多这方面的研究 但是他的很多关于逻辑的理论没有被重视 因为我们走向了数字计算机革命，但今天我们又一次见到了这一理论重新发光的可能
69.So now I’m going to show you the hands-free, autonomous self-replication.
接下来我会给大家看一个不经过人工干预的，全自动的复制过程
70.So we’ve tracked in the video the input string, which was green, green, yellow, yellow, green.
输入的初始状态是 绿色、绿色、黄色、黄色、绿色
71.We set them off on this air hockey table.
我们把它放到桌上冰球游戏的桌面上
72.You know, high science uses air hockey tables — (Laughter) — and if you watch this thing long enough you get dizzy, but what you’re actually seeing is copies of that original string
——很多科学家都爱玩这个游戏 （笑声） 假如你长时间看的话也会感觉疲惫 因为事实上你看到的是原先的链条的复件
73.emerging from the parts bin that you have here.
都是从零件出来的
74.So we’ve got autonomous replication of bit strings.
我们看到了比特串的自复制
75.So, why would you want to replicate bit strings?
但为什么要让比特串实现自复制呢？
76.Well, it turns out biology has this other very interesting meme, that you can take a linear string, which is a convenient thing to copy,
因为生物有个特性 你拿一个 线性的一串细胞，它可以很容易实现复制
77.and you can fold that into arbitrarily complex 3D structure.
你可以将它折叠成复杂的三维结构
78.So I was trying to, you know, take the engineer’s version: Can we build a mechanical system in inorganic materials that will do the same thing?
于是我就想 我们能否用非生物材料来建一个机械的系统 并且使之实现同样的过程？
79.So what I’m showing you here is that we can make a 2D shape — the B — assemble from a string of components that follow extremely simple rules.
大家看到的是，我们可以将二维的结构 图上的 B ——它是由一串基础元素 依据非常简单的规律组合而成的
80.And the whole point of going with the extremely simple rules here, and the incredibly simple state machines in the previous design,
而我们之所以要设置非常简单的规律 以及非常简单的初始状态
81.was that you don’t need digital logic to do computation.
是因为我们不需要通过数字逻辑来实现计算
82.And that way you can scale things much smaller than microchips.
这样我们可以将那些比微型芯片更小的东西规模化
83.So you can literally use these as the tiny components in the assembly process.
所以你完成可以用这些作为基础原料来组合出更复杂的东西
84.So, Neil Gershenfeld showed you this video on Wednesday, I believe, but I’ll show you again.
我想Neil Gershenfeld周三的时候就给大家看过了这个视频 不过我还是想给你们再看一遍
85.This is literally the colored sequence of those tiles.
这就是那些已经被染色的砖块的照片
86.Each different color has a different magnetic polarity, and the sequence is uniquely specifying the structure that is coming out.
每一种颜色都有不同的磁力 序列可以准确的规定生成的结构
87.Now, hopefully, those of you who know anything about graph theory can look at that, and that will satisfy you that that can also do arbitrary 3D structure,
假如你懂得一点点的图论知识 不妨看看这里，你会感到很舒服 因为它还能演化为任意的三维结构
88.and in fact, you know, I can now take a dog, carve it up and then reassemble it so it’s a linear string that will fold from a sequence. And now
事实上，我可以绘画出一条狗 而后将其重新组合，使之成为一个线性的长串 它最后可以实现复制
89.I can actually define that three-dimensional object as a sequence of bits.
我还能将三维的物体变成一串比特
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