TED | 每个人都有一根善良神经

演讲精彩片段（节选）欣赏

Well, I’ve been thinking. For one thing, there’s a new electronic tagging technology that allows any store to know the entire history of any item on the shelves in that store. You can track it back to the factory. Once you can track it back to the factory, you can look at the manufacturing processes that were used to make it, and if it’s virtuous, you can label it that way.

嗯，我一直在思考这一点。有一项新的电子标签技术可以让任何商铺了解到该商铺货架上任一商品的完整历史。可以追踪其生产工厂。一旦你能追踪到其工厂，你就能了解其生产过程，并知道它是否符合道德标准，可以用此方式进行标签。

Or if it’s not so virtuous, you can go into - today, go into any store, put your scanner on a palm onto a bar code, which will take you to a website. They have it for people with allergies to peanuts. That website could tell you things about that object. In other words, at point of purchase, we might be able to make a compassionate choice.

若其不符合道德标准，你可去任一家商铺，将你手上的扫描仪放在条形码上该条形码将引领你进入一家网站。有人对花生过敏。这网站可以告诉你关于该物品的情况。也就是说，在购买时，我们也就能够做出一个有同情心的选择。

There’s a saying in the world of information science: ultimately everybody will know everything. And the question is: will it make a difference? Some time ago when I was working for The New York Times, it was in the ‘80s, I did an article on what was then a new problem in New York - it was homeless people on the streets.

在信息科学界有一种说法：最终每一个人都会了解一切。然而问题是：这有什么不同么？有段时间我在《纽约时报》工作，那是80年代的事情了，我写了一篇文章谈到纽约的新问题——大街上无家可归的人们。

And I spent a couple of weeks going around with a social work agency that ministered to the homeless. And I realized seeing the homeless through their eyes that almost all of them were psychiatric patients that had nowhere to go. They had a diagnosis. It made me - what it did was to shake me out of the urban trance where, when we see, when we’re passing someone who’s homeless in the periphery of our vision, it stays on the periphery. We don’t notice and therefore we don’t act.

我花了数周的时间与一家为无家人员服务的社会工作机构一起工作。我意识到这些无家可归的人大多数都是精神病人他们无处可去。他们有诊断的结论。这使我从城市人的恍惚中惊醒，当我们经过一个无家可归的，一个处在我们视野边缘的人，我们没有注意到，我们也就没有采取任何行动。

One day soon after that - it was a Friday - at the end of the day, I went down - I was going down to the subway. It was rush hour and thousands of people were streaming down the stairs. And all of a sudden as I was going down the stairs I noticed that there was a man slumped to the side, shirtless, not moving, and people were just stepping over him - hundreds and hundreds of people.

在那不久后的一天，这是一个周五，工作完后，我正要走下地铁站。正值下班高峰期上万人的人流涌下台阶。突然，正当我走下梯子时我注意到有一个人倒在一边没穿上衣，一动不动，人们从他身上跨过成百上千的人们从他身上跨过。

And because my urban trance had been somehow weakened, I found myself stopping to find out what was wrong. The moment I stopped, half a dozen other people immediately ringed the same guy. And we found out that he was Hispanic, he didn’t speak any English, he had no money, he’d been wandering the streets for days, starving, and he’d fainted from hunger. Immediately someone went to get orange juice, someone brought a hot dog, someone brought a subway cop. This guy was back on his feet immediately. But all it took was that simple act of noticing, and so I'm optimistic.

因为我的这种“城市人的恍惚”已经减弱，我停下来了解出了什么问题。我刚停步，六七个路人也注意到了他。我们发现他是西班牙人，他不说英语，他身无分文，已经在街上游荡了数天，饥肠辘辘，最终饿晕了。有人立刻去买了橘子汁，有人拿来了热狗，有人带来了地铁警察。不一会儿，这个人就能站起来了。所需要做的仅仅只是去注意罢了。所以我还是乐观的。