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Beware online "filter bubbles"
小心网路的“过滤气泡”
Mark Zuckerberg, a journalist was asking him a question about the news feed. And the...the journalist was asking him, "you know, why is this so important?" And Zuckerberg said, "a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa." And I wanna talk about what a Web based on that idea of relevance might look like.
祖克柏，一名记者问他关于动态通知的问题。然后...这名记者问他：“你知道，为什么这个这么重要呢？”而祖克柏说：“现在，一只你前院里即将死去的松鼠也许比在非洲垂死的人还更和你的兴趣有关。”而我想聊聊关于一个建构在那种关联的理念之上的网站看上去可能是什么样子。
So when I was growing up in a really rural area in Maine, you know, the Internet meant something very different to me. It meant a connection to the world. It meant something that would connect us all together. And I was sure that it was gonna be great for democracy and for our society. But there's this kind of shift in how information is flowing online, and it's invisible. And if we don't pay attention to it, it could be a real problem.
所以当我以前在缅因州一个非常乡下的地区长大时，你知道的，网路对我来说意义非凡。它代表着一个和全世界的连结。它意味着一个把我们都连结起来的东西。而且我确信它对于民主及我们的社会将是很棒的。但是在资讯是如何在网路上串流方面，有个这样的转变，而且它是看不见的。而如果我们不关注它，它会是个真正的问题。
So I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time: my Facebook page. I'm progressive, politically, big surprise, but I've always, you know, gone out of my way to meet conservatives. I like hearing what they're thinking about. I like seeing what they link to. I like learning a thing or two. And so I was kinda surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed. And what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that, actually, I was clicking more on my liberal friends' links than on my conservative friends' links. And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. They disappeared.
所以在一个我花了很多时间的地方第一次注意到这个：我的脸书页面。我在政治方面是革新派的，很吃惊吧，但是我一直，你知道的，努力去接触保守者。我喜欢听他们在想什么。我喜欢看看他们和什么有所联系。我喜欢学点东西。而因此我有点惊讶，当有一天我发现那些保守者已经从我的脸书动态消息失踪了。结果所发生的事情是脸书在注意我点过哪些连结，而它注意到了，其实，比起我保守派朋友们的连结，我更常点击我自由主义朋友们的连结。而没有询问过我，脸书就已经将他们的消息给删除掉了。它们消失了。
So Facebook isn't the only place that's doing this kind of invisible, algorithmic editing of the Web. Google's doing it too. If I search for something, and you search for something, even right now at the very same time, we may get very different search results. Even if you're logged out, one engineer told me, there are fifty-seven signals that Google looks at: everything from what kind of computer you're on to what kind of browser you're using to where you're located that it uses to personally tailor your query results. Think about it for a second: there is no standard Google anymore. And you know, the funny thing about this is that it's hard to see. You can't see how different your search results are from anyone else's.
脸书并不是唯一在做这种看不见的、运用演算法的网路编辑的地方。Google也在这么做。如果我搜寻某个东西，然后你也搜寻某个东西，即使现在、就在同一时刻，我们可能会得到非常不一样的搜寻结果。即使假如你已经登出了，一位工程师告诉我，有五十七个信号Google会审视：用来量身打造你的搜寻结果的每件事情，从你用什么样的电脑，到你正在使用哪一种浏览器，到你所处位置。想一下：再也没有标准的Google了。你知道，关于这件事有趣的地方在于它很难发现。你无法了解你的搜寻结果和别人的有多么不一样。
But a couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of friends to Google "Egypt" and to send me screenshots of what they got. So here's my friend, Scott's screenshot. And here's my friend, Daniel's screenshot. When you put them side by side, you don't even have to read the links to see how different these two pages are. But when you do read the links, it's really quite remarkable. Daniel didn't get anything about the protests in Egypt at all in his first page of Google results. Scott's results were full of them. And this was the big story of the day at that time. That's how different these results are becoming.
但几个礼拜前，我请一些朋友去Google“埃及”，并寄给我他们得到的荧幕截图。这是我朋友Scott的荧幕截图。而这是我朋友Daniel的荧幕截图。当你将它们并排，你甚至不必去阅读那些连结就可以知道这两个页面有多么的不同。但是当你真去阅读那些连结，它是真的非常引人注意的。Daniel在他第一页的Google搜寻结果里完全没有得到任何有关埃及抗议事件的东西。Scott的搜寻结果里满满都是它们(抗议事件)。而这(抗议事件)在那时是当天的头条故事。这些搜寻结果变得那么的不同。
So it's not just Google and Facebook either. You know, this is something that's sweeping the Web. There are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalization. Yahoo News, the biggest news site on the Internet, is now personalized: different people get different things. Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the New York Times: all flirting with personalization in various ways. And where this...this moves us very quickly toward a world, in which the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see. As Eric Schmidt said, "It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them."
所以也不是只有Google和脸书。你知道的，这是某件正在横扫网际网路的事。有一堆公司都在进行这种个人化。Yahoo新闻，网路上最大的新闻网站，现在也个人化了：不同的人得到不同的东西。哈芬顿邮报、华盛顿邮报、纽约时报：全都以不同的方式玩弄个人化。而这个...这非常快速地将我们运往一个世界，在那儿网路正在展示给我们看它认为我们想要看到的东西，但不必然是我们得要看到的东西。如同Eric Schmidt (Google董事长)所言：“对于人们来说，去观看或是去消费在某些感觉上未曾为他们量身订做的东西，将会是非常困难的。”
So I do think this is a problem. And I think, if you take all of these filters together, if you take all these algorithms, you get what I call a filter bubble. And your filter bubble is kind of your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. And what's in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don't decide what gets in. And more importantly, you don't actually see what gets edited out.
所以我的确认为这是个问题。而且我想，如果你用全部这些过滤器，如果你用所有这些演算法，你会得到一个我所谓的过滤气泡。而你的过滤气泡有点像是你在网路上所处的，你自己私人、独特的资讯宇宙。而你的过滤气泡中有什么，取决于你是谁，也取决于你的所做所为。但重要的是，你并不会决定什么东西可以进来。而且更重要的，你并不会真正看到什么东西被删掉了。
So one of the problems with the filter bubble was discovered by some researchers at Netflix. And they were looking at the Netflix queues, and they noticed something kind of funny that a lot of us probably have noticed, which is there are some movies that just sort of zip right up and out to our houses: they enter the queue; they just zip right out. So "Iron Man" zips right out, right? And "Waiting for Superman" can wait for a really long time.
所以过滤气泡其中一个问题被Netflix(美国最大DVD影音租售企业)的某些研究人员给发现了。他们注视着Netflix的影片候选清单，注意到某件我们很多人可能也已经注意到了的有点有趣的事情，那就是，有一些电影就好像立刻被封入信封而送出到我们的家里：它们进入候选清单；它们就立刻封好寄出。所以“钢铁人”立刻封好寄出，对吧？而“等待超人(教育纪录片)”会等上很长一段时间。
What they discovered was that in our Netflix queues there's kind of this epic struggle going on between our future aspirational selves and our more impulsive present selves. You know, we all want to be someone who has watched "Rashomon," but right now we want to watch "Ace Ventura" for the fourth time. So the best editing gives us a bit of both. It gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber and a little bit of Afghanistan. It gives us some information vegetables; it gives us some information dessert. And the challenge with this kind of algorithmic filters, these personalized filters, is that because they're mainly looking at what you click on first. You know, you don't...it can throw off that balance. And instead of a balanced information diet, you can end up surrounded by information junk food.
他们所发现的是，我们的Netflix候选清单中，在我们对未来期许的自我跟现在更有冲劲的自我之间有着好像这史诗般巨大的挣扎。你知道的，我们都想当已经看过“罗生门”的人，但现在我们想看第四次的“王牌威龙”。所以最棒的资讯编辑方式两者都给我们一点。它给我们一点点小贾斯汀和一点点的阿富汗讯息。它给我们一些蔬菜资讯；它给我们一些甜点资讯。而对这种演算法过滤器、这些个人化过滤器的挑战，是因为它们主要是观察你首先点击的东西。你知道，你并不...它是会破坏那平衡的。你最终会被一堆垃圾食物资讯给包围，而不是个平衡的资讯餐点。
So, what this suggests is actually that we may have the story about the Internet wrong. In a broadcast society...you know, this is how the founding mythology goes, right? In a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors, and they controlled the flows of information. And along came the Internet, and it swept them out of the way, and it allowed all of us to connect together, and it was awesome. But that's not actually what's happening right now. What we're seeing is more of a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones. And the thing is that the algorithms don't yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did. So if algorithms are going to curate the world for us, if they're gonna decide what we get to see and what we don't get to see, then we need to make sure that they're not just keyed to relevance. We need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important (This is what TED does, right?) other points of view.
所以说，这事实上暗示的是我们关于网路所拥有的真相也许是错误的。在一个广播时代的社会中...你知道，网路兴起的神话是就是这样子流传的，对吧？在广播时代的社会中，有着这么一些守门员，编辑，而他们控制着资讯流。然后网际网路来临了，它将这些人一扫而空，并且让我们所有人连结在一起，而这是非常赞的。但那其实并不是现在正在发生的事。我们正在目睹的东西更像是将火把从人类守门员传递给电脑演算器守门员。而重点是，演算器尚未拥有编辑者所拥有的那种内建伦常。所以如果演算器要为我们策展这世界，如果它们要来决定我们可以看到些什么、我们不能看到些什么，那我们就必须确保他们不是只朝着关联性调整。我们必须确保他们也会展示给我们看令人不舒服或具挑战性或是重要的东西(这就是TED在做的，对吧？)，其它的观点。
And the thing is, we've actually kind of been here before as a society. In 1915, it's not like newspapers were sweating a lot about their civic responsibilities. Then people kind of noticed that they were doing something really important; that, in fact, you couldn't have a functioning democracy if citizens didn't get a good flow of information; that the newspapers were critical because they were acting as the filter, and then journalistic ethics developed. It wasn't perfect, but it got us through the last century. And so now, we're kind of back in 1915 on the Web. And we need the new gatekeepers to encode that kind of responsibility into the code that they're writing.
问题是，以社会而言我们其实好像之前已经历过这些了。在1915年，报纸并不像是很忧心于它们的公民责任。接着人们有点像是发现了他们正在做某件很重要的事；发现了，事实上，如果公民得不到有效流通的资讯，你便无法拥有一个起作用的民主；发现了报纸很关键，因为它们扮演着过滤器的角色，于是新闻伦理发展出来了。它并不完美，但它让我们渡过了上个世纪。所以现在，我们在网路方面有点像是回到了1915年。而我们需要新的守门员，将那样的责任编进他们正在撰写的程式码中。
You know, I know that there are a lot of people here from Facebook and from Google (Larry and Sergey), who, you know, people who have helped build the Web as it is, and I'm grateful for that. But we really need you to make sure that these algorithms have encoded in them a sense of the public life, a sense of civic responsibility. We need you to make sure that they're transparent enough that we can see what the rules are that determine what gets through our filters. And we need you to give us some control so that we can decide what gets through and what doesn't. Because I think we really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. And it's not gonna do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one.
你知道的，我知道这里有很多人是来自脸书跟Google (赖瑞跟塞吉：Google创办人)，这些人，你知道的，那些曾帮忙将网路建构成如今样貌的人们，而我对此非常感激。但我们真的很需要你们去确保这些演算法在其中有编入公众生活的概念、公民责任的意识。我们需要你们去确保它们够透明，以让我们可以看见决定什么可以通过我们过滤器的规则是什么。而且我们需要你们给予我们一些控制权，以便我们可以决定什么可以进来，什么不行。因为我认为我们真的需要网际网路成为那个我们全都梦想它实现的那个东西。我们需要它将我们彼此全都连结起来。我们需要它跟我们介绍新的想法、新的面孔以及不同的观点。而如果它让我们通通被隔绝在一个单人网络之中，它将无法做到那样。
Thank you.
谢谢你们。
