我们翻译这篇文章的理由
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驾驶的自由
作者：BRYAN APPLEYARD
译者：郭嘉宁 & 张煜成
校对：李蕾
策划：郭嘉宁
The freedom of driving
驾驶的自由
How driverless cars curtail our joy and autonomy to serve Silicon Valley’s voracious surveillance capitalism.
自动驾驶汽车剥夺了我们的快乐和自主权，以满足硅谷野心勃勃的监控资本主义
Approaching the end of this strange and absorbing book Matthew Crawford considers the last scene of the movie Thelma and Louise. Cornered by police cars and a helicopter, the two heroines commit suicide by driving their turquoise Ford Thunderbird convertible into the Grand Canyon. They decide, writes Crawford, to “exit the whole shit-show by driving off a cliff”. Then he adds, “Try that in your Waymo.”
在这本奇异又吸引人的书末尾，马修·克劳福德(Matthew Crawford)提到了电影《末路狂花》的最后一幕。在警车与直升飞机的包围下，两个女主角开着青绿色的福特雷鸟折篷轿车，从科罗拉多大峡谷一跃而下，结束了自己的生命。克劳福德写道，她们决定要“开下悬崖，离开这个操蛋的世界。”然后他又加了一句：“试试用你的维莫汽车(Waymo)能不能做到。”
A Waymo is – or, rather, will be – the opposite of that glorious T’Bird. It is a self- driving car powered by Google technology. The Waymo website boasts that its monstrous array of sensors and computers constitute “the world’s most experienced driver”. There is no way this thing would let you drive off a cliff. Your exit from the shit-show has been slammed shut, your freedom has been curtailed. And trivially curtailed in the name of advertising and consumer control, for Google is an advertising company, nothing more, nothing less. It cannot let its targets kill themselves either by accident or design. People must be saved from their free selves in the name of surveil-lance capitalism.
可以想见，维莫汽车将与优秀的雷鸟轿车截然相反。这是一款由谷歌研发出的自动驾驶汽车，维莫汽车的网站宣称，其数量庞大的传感器与电脑堪比“世界上经验最丰富的司机。”这台机器是绝对不会让你开下悬崖的。你离开这个操蛋的世界的门已被砰地关上，你的自由已被剥夺。谷歌之所以要限制人们那部分微不足道的自由，是为了进行广告宣传，进一步控制用户，毕竟谷歌就是一家广告公司，仅此而已。谷歌不可以让目标用户的生命受到威胁，不论是意外身亡还是主动自杀。为了监控资本主义，谷歌必须将人们从自由中解救出来。
Crawford is a Virginia-based physicist turned political philosopher. But, most of all, he is a petrolhead, a gearhead, who believes in working with his hands and driving – cars and motorbikes – to the limit. Speeding tickets rain down on him like confetti. This is risky in Virginia, where a few mph over the legal speed can land you in jail. In the prelude to this book he mentions four trips to the emergency room in 12 months. He feels, nevertheless, “existentially justified”. “Is risk,” he asks, “somehow bound up with humanising possibilities?” You know his answer is going to be yes indeed.
克劳福德居住在弗吉尼亚州，过去是一名物理学家，后来成为了政治哲学家。最重要的是，克劳福德是一名汽车发烧友，他所信奉的是用双手掌控车辆，挑战轿车与摩托车的速度极限，因而收到的限速罚单不计其数。在弗吉尼亚州，飙车的风险颇高，时速略微高于法定限速就可能被送进监狱。在这本书的前言中，克劳福德提到自己在1年中曾进过4次急诊室。然而，他认为“从人的存在本质来看，这样的受伤是合情合理的。”他的问题是：“是否出于某种原因，风险与人生的可能性是紧密相连的？”你知道他的答案一定是肯定的。
He loves taking his machines to the edge – “There is a certain tonic in being scared shitless” – and he likes to challenge the law. “This is not mayhem, Officer,” he says to himself about a moment of perilous oversteer, “this is control.”
克劳福德喜欢极限驾驶，“在极度的恐惧中有一种令人兴奋的东西”，他也喜欢挑战法律。说起一次十分危险的过度转向，他自言自语道：“警官先生，这不是混乱，这是控制。”
On the other hand, you might reasonably say it is a good idea to stop Thelmas and Louises killing themselves and to make cars as safe as possible. The world, since 1965, has taken this view. That was the year Ralph Nader, an American attorney, published Unsafe at Any Speed. It’s a title Crawford adapts for his own purposes – “Unsafe at any speed” but also “fun at every speed”. Cars that are bad for your average driver are pure joy for the true petrolhead.
但是从另一个角度来看，你可能会说，能够阻止塞尔玛与露易丝们自杀，尽可能提高车辆的安全性，这是一件好事。这种观点合情合理。事实上，自1965年起，这种观点便席卷全球。那一年，美国律师拉尔夫·纳德出版了新书《任何速度都不安全》。就这一题目，克劳福德进行了自己的改编——“任何速度都不安全”，但是同时，“任何速度都充满乐趣。”有些汽车对于普通司机是危险的，但对于真正的汽车迷来说却完全是快乐源泉。
A car was the star of Nader’s book – the Chevrolet Corvair, first released in 1960. It was rear-engined and it had swing-axle rear suspension. It was, said Nader, lethal – as were many of the products of Detroit in the Sixties. The swing axle allowed the Corvair’s wheels to cope better with bumps and potholes, but there was a downside – it could cause the car to overturn. This became even more likely if the car happened to have a rear engine. In fact, later investigations showed the Corvair was not as bad as Nader claimed but, in general, he was right.
在书中，纳德重要讨论的一款车是雪弗莱的阔威尔牌轿车(Chevrolet Corvair)。这款车于1960年开始生产，拥有后置发动机与后方摆动车轴式悬吊系统。纳德声称，阔威尔牌轿车是致命的——在六十年代，底特律生产的许多产品都是如此。有了摆动车轴式悬吊系统，雪弗莱轿车的车轮可以在遇到路面隆起与凹坑时拥有更好的表现，但它也存在弊端——可能会导致轿车仰翻。而且，由于这款车的发动机也是后置的，仰翻的风险进一步上升。事实上，后来的研究显示，阔威尔牌并没有纳德宣称的那么糟糕，但总体而言，纳德的担忧是正确的。
Detroit was humbled and cars had to be tamed. Compulsory seat belts, air bags, anti- lock brakes all followed and, for the most part, fatalities began to fall. But then something changed. New proactive safety devices – lane control, automatic braking systems, speed limiters – appeared. Drivers were being incrementally disempowered; we were on a one-way street to the driverless car.
底特律市意识到了事情的严重性，决定必须要对汽车的设计进行管制。于是安全带、安全气囊与防抱死系统都成为了强制性要求，总体上来看，死亡人数确实开始下降。但是之后，事情的走向变了。汽车中出现了新的预防性安全装备——车道管制装置，自动刹车系统与车辆限速器。司机对汽车的掌控权被不断削减，按照这个趋势，自动驾驶汽车就是未来的发展方向，对此我们无计可施。
But autonomous cars, Crawford argues, are not primarily a caring, humane project to save lives, rather they are a scam designed to make our lives less interesting, less surprising and more profitable to the Silicon Valley monopolists.
然而，克劳福德表示，从根本上来说，自动驾驶汽车并不是一个充满关怀的人道主义项目，初衷也不是为了拯救生命。相反，这是一场骗局，削减了我们生活中的乐趣与刺激，而为垄断市场的硅谷巨头们带来更多的利益。
“The most authoritative voices in commerce and technology,” he writes, “express a determination to eliminate contingency from life as much as possible, and replace it with machine-generated certainty.”
克劳福德写到，“商业与科技领域的垄断者们态度强硬，要尽可能地消除生活中的不确定性，用机器产生的确定性取而代之。”
Driverless cars are catnip for the Silicon Valley monopolists. The average commute is dead space because their target is too busy driving to take in advertising or interact with any information-gathering devices. But what if the car becomes one of those devices? Crawford groans. “Do we want to make getting from point A to point B something you do, not in car, but in a device, that is, a portal to overlapping bureaucracies?” What do you do on your commute instead of driving? You stare at your laptop, tablet or phone. Safer possibly, but definitely less free.
对于这些硅谷的垄断企业来说，无人驾驶汽车具有特别的吸引力。普通的通勤路程是它们无法利用的死角，因为目标用户正忙着开车，不可能留心广告，或是使用任何收集信息的设备。但是假设，汽车本身变成了这类设备的一员呢？克劳福德对此感到不满。“搭载我们从A地到B地的不再是车，而是一台设备，一个通向工作的入口，让人回到了层次重叠、流程繁琐的辛苦工作中，这是我们想要的吗？”在通勤的路上，不去驾驶，那么你做什么呢？盯着电脑、平板或手机。可能确实更加安全了，但是绝对不再那么自由了。
This book is a defence of felt life against the intrusions of the technocrats – a running theme in Crawford’s work, from The Case for Working with Your Hands (2010) to The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction (2015).
这本书旨在捍卫充满感知的生活，反对科技巨头的侵入——这一主题始终贯穿于克劳福德的作品中，从2010年的《为什么体力劳动是重要的》(The Case for Working with Your Hands)，到2015年的《外部的世界：如何在充满干扰的时代下获得幸福》(The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction )。
His argument against the cult of safety is twofold. First, he thinks it imprisons us and compromises the human experience of free mobility. Second, he believes many safety measures are not what they seem.
克劳福德反对目前关于安全的狂热推崇，原因有两点。第一，这种过度谨慎是一种束缚，对于人类自由出行的体验造成了威胁。第二，克劳福德认为，许多的安全措施并不像表面上看起来那么简单。
The theft of human experience is a “moral reduction”. It deploys a form of automated utilitarianism, a superhuman calculus that delivers machine-readable moral demands, the sort of things that are now being fed into the development of driverless cars – do you avoid hitting the baby and knock over a few old people instead? Like all forms of utilitarianism this involves a removal of human agency since all judgements are mathematised, leaving nothing for the would-be moral individual to do except obey.
人类驾驶体验的流失代表着其道德地位的降级。它内嵌了一套自动化的功利主义，用迥异于人类情感的算式产出具有机器可读性的“道德”指令——一个初生婴儿的生命价值大于若干位迟暮老人？这就是无人驾驶汽车的发展趋势。像其他功利主义理论一样，当所有选项都被量化，准道德个体的意义不复存在，留给我们的只剩服从。
We are denied “our original, animal genius for learning about the world by acting directly on it” and “at the end of this trajectory… the world becomes a techno-zoo for defeated people”. Crawford sees resistance movements like the gilet jaunes, who destroyed 60 per cent of the radar speed traps in France, as first responders to this crude machine-made moralism.
我们“与生俱来的，从实践中认知世界的天赋”被驳回，“而最终，失败者生活在这赛博朋克般的世界里”。克劳福德将黄马甲们，那些破坏了法国60%雷达限速装置的抗议者，视为率先反抗残酷机器道德的先驱。
But his real heroes seem to be London’s black cabbies who, he notes with awe, pursue with monk-like devotion the “Knowledge” of the 25,000 streets within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. The Knowledge is embodied within the drivers, it is not served up by the US military satellite system we know as GPS. That is, of course, what is used by one of Crawford’s – and the cabbies’ – prime villains, Uber.
但他心中真正的英雄似乎是伦敦的黑车司机，在他充满赞叹的注解中，这些司机像僧人一样追求着“真知”，也就是查林十字方圆六英里以内25000条街道的分布。这些信息被刻在的哥脑中，而不是由美国军方卫星系统—GPS提供。克劳福德眼中的恶棍—Uber，使用的就是后者。
Uber loses billions by subsidising its fares and flooding the streets with empty cars, a business model “made possible by diverting attention from the massive fare subsidies (supplied by investors) responsible for its growth”. The long-term goal, he thinks, is to attain market dominance, then ditch the drivers and replace all those Priuses with driverless cars.
对乘客的补贴和其充满街道的空车使Uber损失了数十亿，这种经营模式“只能通过将注意力从那些本该带来营收的巨额乘客补贴上转移”才得以延续。他认为Uber的长期目标是取得市场垄断地位，然后抛弃司机，用无人驾驶汽车取代那些丰田普锐斯。
But there is hope for the humans and the gearheads. It lies in the misalignment between the technocratic imagination and lived experience. Technocrats are “easily tempted into a moral-intellectual space that floats free of the empirical, and has more in common with the non-falsifiable commitments of religious faith”, he says. They dream of “smart cities” which, they say, are “the next trillion-dollar frontier for Big Tech” but which would, in fact, be modern panopticons, dystopias of surveillance and consumption. This, we are told, is the future, but nobody with a soul can possibly want it.
而人类和计算机迷们的希望在于技术统治论的幻想和现实的失准。他认为，技术统治论者会“轻易得陷入缺乏实证经验的智能道德空间，类似于皈依无法证伪的宗教信仰。”他们憧憬“智能城市”——“大型科技公司下一个价值连城的技术前沿”，可这个概念实际上，却是现代监狱，充斥着监视和消费的反乌托邦世界。这被称作未来，可每个有灵魂的人都不会愿意置身其中。
Crawford has even more fun in his catalogue of ways in which safety measures don’t work. This seems to be especially true of the various add-ons to cars on the way to driverlessness. One effect of these is to lull drivers into a false sense of security while stripping them of the driving skills they would need when the gizmos go wrong – which, as any Boeing 737 Max pilot will tell you, they often do.
克劳福德更加乐意阐述安全装置无效的原因。这对于汽车自动化过程中带来的种种附加条件来说尤其准确。其中之一就是给司机带来了虚假的安全感，因为当装置失效时，司机已经丧失了处理紧急情况的能力，而波音737Max驾驶员则经常需要应对这种情况。
On the way to driverlessness we find ourselves with “a dysfunctional hybrid of human control that makes little use of the exquisite connections between mind and body, plus a crude interface of symbols”. On top of that, touch screen “infotainment” controls are actually very dangerous – they take your eyes off the road for a surprisingly long time. And I shudder to think how many have died or been maimed by people operating mobile phones while driving.
在驾驶无人化的过程中，“我们对于自身手脑结合能力的精细运用在控制汽车方面无所作为，并需要和一个原始的人机交互界面为伍。”除此以外，触摸屏的娱乐信息控制通常十分危险，使你的注意力长时间游离于路况以外。想起由于驾驶中使用手机导致的事故死伤人数，我不寒而栗。
At this point you may be growing a little wary of this book. Where is this guy coming from? Is he a redneck-loving Republican with his insistence on the centrality of the individual when set against the state? Or is he a leftish monopoly-buster waging war on the tyrannies of Silicon Valley?
看到这里，你可能对这本书有所顾忌。这家伙是谁？是个偏爱红脖子的共和党，带着他对个体自主权利的执拗反对政府干预？还是个左派的反垄断者，想对硅谷的科技巨头们宣战？
Crawford is neither of those. He simply loves real cars. Indeed, he loves them so much that he even loves traffic. His passage on road rage is plain funny. He quotes one study of drivers in Los Angeles that found that being pissed off is “an infinitely recurring experience”. Road rage is “analytical work” involving anger at “Prius drivers who want you to know they ‘buy local’. Meth-head rednecks in jacked-up pickups. Blow-dried douchebags in BMWs. Vindictive fat people in Pontiac Aztecs…” and so on.
克劳福德两者都不是。他只是简单地热爱汽车，喜欢到连熙来攘往的通勤车流都觉得可爱的程度。他有关“路怒症”的文章很有意思，文章引用了有关洛杉矶司机的愤怒的一篇研究。研究提出，愤怒是“循环往复、永不停歇的情绪”，路怒症源于“对他人的认知：开丰田普锐斯的想让你知道他们支持本地货，沉迷毒品的红脖子们开高高的皮卡，表面光鲜的人都买宝马，彭迪亚克里坐得都是小肚鸡肠的胖子…”，类似的偏见还有很多。
This love of cars spills over into his philosophy and his politics, which are neither of the right nor the left and certainly not of the centre. But he is a conservative in the mould of his hero, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, “One of the most beautifully austere thinkers of the 20th century.” From him he derives an “affection for the present”, cherishing what actually exists rather than mourning the past or aspiring to the future. And nothing has more actually existed for the past 130 years than the car.
克劳福德对汽车的喜爱之情也洋溢在他的哲学与政治见解里，这些观点既非左也非右，更不中立。但他对自己的偶像，迈克尔·欧克肖特（Michael Oakeshott）的观点十分保守，后者在他眼中是“20世纪最优美且简朴的思想家之一”。从其身上克劳福德推演出“珍重当下”的思想：与其沉湎过去，奢望将来，不如把握真正拥有的东西。而在过去的130年中，没有什么比汽车更加真实。
The internal combustion-powered car is, for the moment, the loveable present. The car-killers are gathering; they now even claim that the pandemic will be another nail in the coffin of automobilism. Crawford also senses it has not long to go and fears that, in the end, the technocrats will have their way. He imagines a driverless future in which the great old “dumb” cars – “vintage Ferraris with six smelly Italian carburettors and a set of ignition points living inside a grimy centrifugal-advance distributor” – have been bought up by the bosses of Google to provide themselves with “the undisturbed head space they need to do their deep thinking while commuting”. No Waymos for them – they’re for losers, the safe but enslaved underclass of surveillance capitalism, the shit-show from which there is no exit.
当下，内燃机汽车就是美好的现实。而那些反汽车者正在宣扬，这次的疫情将会是压死人工驾驶的最后一根稻草。克劳福德感觉到，在不久的将来，科技统治论者将如愿以偿。在无人驾驶的未来里，那些伟大、古老又“蠢笨”的汽车，那些“拥有六套难闻的意大利制造化油器和放置在一件污秽不堪的离心式提前分配器中的点火器的古典法拉利们”，将负责为谷歌的老板们提供“通勤时不受打扰的思考空间”。而自动驾驶汽车，将成为失败者们的选择，奴役着看似安全的底层民众，在监视性资本主义社会里，无处可逃。
本文原载于 NewStatesman
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