第2737期:The multidimensional magic of modern maps(1)

I'm a digital cartographer by trade, and honestly, the last two, three, four presentations have been incredible. Maps, historically, they do really two things, and we've really seen an amazing amount of the first: understanding our world. But historically, maps weren't just about understanding. They were also about creating, about building, about shaping the built environment around us. They help us plan cities, do trade, fight wars and maintain peace. And as we've digitized these maps, you've seen them fit into our pocket. Things that used to take entire libraries, reams of paper, are now in our pocket or in our eyes.我的职业是数字制图师，说实话，过去两三四场的演讲都令人惊叹。历史上，地图主要有两个作用，我们刚刚看到的大部分内容都集中在第一个：帮助我们理解这个世界。但从历史上看，地图并不仅仅是用来理解的，它们也是用来创造、建设以及塑造我们周围的人造环境的。它们帮助我们规划城市、发展贸易、打仗与维持和平。随着地图的数字化，它们已经从纸张变成了装进口袋的东西。曾经需要整座图书馆和成堆纸张的内容，如今就在我们的口袋里，甚至就在我们眼前。But as we move from the information age into the cybernetic age, an era dominated by the application of robotics and artificial intelligence to the physical world, cartography needs to change. It's not enough to collaborate in a digital world. The challenge in front of us is really to take those technologies and to use them to build physically. And for the first time in history, we have the remote sensing capacity on orbit and the technology to process all of the data into a dynamic, living replica of the physical Earth inside of a computer -- what we call the “Living Globe.” You can think of this as a sandbox, a place where you can take the digital representation of our Earth and combine it with a physical representation on the ground, and go back and forth so that sensors can show you what’s actually happening in real-time.但当我们从信息时代迈入控制论时代——一个以机器人和人工智能应用于物理世界为主导的时代——制图学也必须随之改变。仅在数字世界中协作已经不够了。我们面临的真正挑战，是将这些技术用于现实世界的物理建设。历史上第一次，我们拥有了在轨遥感能力，以及处理所有数据的技术，能在计算机中构建一个动态、活生生的地球复制体——我们称之为“活地球”。你可以把它想象成一个沙盒，一个能将数字地球与地面实景相结合、并实现实时互联的空间，让传感器告诉我们现实中正在发生什么。Let's make that real. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles wildfires devastated Southern California. Many of us were personally impacted or know someone who was. Satellite imagery and mapping played a critical role in understanding the impact of that devastation, guiding first responders and shining a spotlight on the destruction that happened. But it's not enough just to look, to observe, to react. What's been nagging me since then is that what LA needed, it wasn't satellite imagery, it was water. Large-scale infrastructure projects, megaprojects, rapid response systems with firefighting robots that would be able to take out the fire before it started.让我们回到现实。今年早些时候，洛杉矶的野火重创了南加州。我们当中许多人都受到影响，或认识受灾的人。卫星图像和地图在理解这场灾难的破坏程度、引导救援人员、聚焦受灾区域方面发挥了关键作用。但仅仅观测、记录、反应是远远不够的。从那时起，一直让我耿耿于怀的是：洛杉矶真正需要的不是卫星图像，而是水。是大型基础设施项目，是可以在火灾爆发前就扑灭火势的消防机器人组成的快速响应系统，是超级工程。This used to be how we thought. 200 years ago, we were a civilization of builders with a culture of action. We built the Erie Canal, the transcontinental railroad, the Hoover Dam -- megaprojects that fundamentally reshaped our Earth, our physical world. But these projects had devastating ramifications. Unable to predict their impact and know what the results would be, we retreated into the virtual world, a world of iPhones and personal computers dominated by individualism. The problem is: the problems of the 21st century, they're fundamentally physical. They're problems of moving atoms. When you think about climate change, energy abundance,housingaffordability, global security, these are problems that require regaining a builder's spirit and starting to act upon the physical world once again.过去我们就是这样思考的。200年前，我们是一个建设型文明，拥有行动至上的文化。我们修建了伊利运河、横贯大陆的铁路、胡佛大坝——这些超级工程从根本上改造了地球和物理世界。但这些工程也带来了毁灭性的后果。由于无法预测它们的影响和后果，我们退缩到了虚拟世界，一个被iPhone和个人电脑主导的个人主义世界中。问题是：21世纪的问题本质上是物理性的，是关于如何移动原子的难题。无论是气候变化、能源充足、住房可负担性，还是全球安全，这些问题都需要我们重新找回建设者的精神，重新在现实世界中采取行动。What we've done is we've taken dozens and dozens of different data sets. We've fused them together into a dynamic and living representation of the Earth. By pulling these into an ontology so that computers and people can interact with them together, we can programmatically start identifying patterns so that we can delegate the monitoring of those patterns to a computer.我们所做的是把几十种不同的数据集合并在一起，融合成一个动态的、活生生的地球表示。通过将这些数据整合进一个本体系统，让计算机与人类共同理解和交互，我们就可以通过程序识别出其中的模式，并将这些模式的监测任务交由计算机完成。