TED学院 | 自然、科技和社会交汇的未来（音频-视频-文稿）|生物学|ted|生物技术|with|work

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演讲题目：Possible futures from the intersection of nature, tech and society

In 1998, my friends and I won a national art competition. The prize was a week in Disneyland Paris, with hundreds of other children from across the world, as delegates to UNESCO's International Children's Summit. Now this was no ordinary trip to Disneyland. Between running riot in the park and making friends, we workshopped the future of this planet. How could we overcome the problems of pollution and their threats to human and environmental health?

1998年，我和我的朋友在一个国家艺术比赛中胜出了。比赛的奖品是去巴黎的迪士尼乐园游玩一周，和从世界各地来的几百个孩子们一起，作为联合国教科文组织国际儿童峰会的代表。这不是一次普通的迪士尼之旅。在到处乱跑和交朋友之间，我们设计着这个星球的未来。我们该怎么解决污染问题和他们对人类和环境的威胁呢？

How could we guarantee universal human rights of equality, justice and dignity? Towards the end of the summit, we created a 20-year time capsule, with each country planting a vision of the future they hoped for. But as I look around today, it's clear to me that those visions have not come true yet. We're confronted by the same crises, made infinitely worse through decades of geopolitical inaction.

我们如何保证普罗大众平等，正义，尊严的人权呢？在峰会结束时，我们创建了一个长达二十年的胶囊，里面有各个国家对未来的美好幻想。但是当我今天环顾四周时，很明显，我们的目标并没有达成。我们面临着同样的危机，数十年的地缘政治不作为使情况变的更加糟糕。

We now face global existential risks as a result of the climate emergency, with the world's least-resourced and most disenfranchised made more vulnerable despite having contributed least to the problem. That trip to Disneyland taught me that art and design had the power to imagine other possible futures. The question is: "How do we actually build them?" Today, I lead a design agency called Faber Futures, and my team and I design at the intersection of biology, technology and society.

作为气候紧急情况的结果，我们正在面对全球生存风险，尽管这世界上资源最少，和被剥夺最多权力的人变得更加的脆弱，尽管对问题的贡献最小。那次去迪士尼乐园的旅程教会了我美术和设计有能力去想象另外的未来。问题是：“我们怎么去做呢？”今天，我领导着一个设计小组，叫法伯未来，我和我的组员们正在设计生物、科技和社会的交集。

Through research and development collaborations, partnerships, and other strategies, we model a future in which both people and planet can thrive and where the role that biotechnology plays is shaped through plural visions. Our design work prototypes the future. We have developed toxin-free, water-efficient textile dye processes with a pigment-producing bacterium, pioneering new ways of thinking about circular design for the textile and fashion industries.

通过调查研究，深入推进，合作和其他方法，我们模拟了一个未来在那里人类和星球都可以繁荣，通过多元愿景塑造生物技术所扮演的角色。我们设计的是未来的原型。我们研发了无毒、节约水的，纺织染料工艺，其中包含了一种生产颜料的细菌，开创了纺织和时尚行业业内循环设计的新思维方式。

You've probably already heard of data surveillance, but what if it was biological? Using open-source data on the human microbiome, we've created experiential artworks that engage with the ethics of DNA mining. How can we embed a culture of multidisciplinary codesign from within the industry of biotechnology? To find out, we designed the Ginkgo Creative Residency, which invites creative practitioners to spend several months developing their own projects from within the Ginkgo Bioworks foundry.

你可能已经听说过数据监控了，但如果它是生物学的呢？使用人类微生物的开源数据，我们创造了与挖掘伦理相关的实验艺术品。我们如何才能在生物技术行业内嵌入多学科协同设计的文化呢？为了找到答案，我们设计了银杏创意基地，并邀请富有创造力的从业者在银杏生物工程公司的生物工厂里花上几个月去开发自己的项目。

We also generate and publish unique and expansive dialogues between people with different types of knowledges --Afrofuturists with astrobiologists, food researchers with Indigenous campaigners. The stories that they and others tell give us the tools we need to imagine other biological futures. Design deeply permeates all of our lives, and yet we tend to recognize things and not the complex systems that actually produce them.

我们还会发起独特且广泛的对话，并发表拥有多种多样的知识的人之间的对话内容——非洲未来主义者和天体生物学家对话，食品科学家和土著活动家对话。他们还有其他人所讲述的故事，让我们能够畅想生物未来更多的可能性。设计深深地渗透进了我们所有人的生活，但我们还是倾向于认识事物本身而非创造事物的复杂系统。

My team and I explore these systems, connecting fields like culture and technology, ecology and economics. We identify problems, and where value and values can be created. We like to think about a design brief as an instruction manual, mapping the context of the problem, and where we might find solutions. Getting there might involve establishing new networks, building new tools, and even infrastructure.

我的团队和我探究这些系统，把不同领域联系起来，比如文化和技术，生态学和经济学。我们找到问题所在，以及能创造价值和价值观念的地方。做出一份设计简介，作为介绍手册，反映出问题的内容，这样我们或许能找到解决办法了。要做到这一步，我们或许要建立新的网络系统，创设新工具，甚至基础设施。

How all of these pieces interact with one another can determine research and development, material specification, manufacturing and distribution. Who ultimately benefits, and at what environmental cost. So you can start to imagine the kinds of systems that might drive the design of your smartphone or even a rideshare service. But when it comes to the design of biology, things become a little bit more abstract. Organism engineers design microbes to do industrially useful things, like bioremediate toxic waste sites or replace petroleum-based textiles with renewable ones.

各个部分如何交互运作能决定研究与发展，材料处理的原则，制造与分配。最终受益者以及环境成本。所以你可以想象得到，这种系统或许能够促进智能手机的设计，甚至是共乘服务。当提到生物学意义上的设计的时候，问题可能会变得有点抽象。生物工程师利用微生物在工业上做有益的东西，像是生物修复有毒废物堆积场，或者用可再生原料取代以石油为原料的织物。

To architect this level of biological precision and performance at scale, tools like DNA sequencing, automation and machine learning are essential. They allow the organism engineers to really zoom in on biology, asking scientific questions to solve deep technical challenges. Successful solutions designed at a molecular scale eventually interact with those at a planetary one. But if all of the research and development focuses on the technical question alone, then what do we risk by excluding the broader context?

要大规模达成这种水平的生物学精度和表现效果，像基因测序，自动化和机器学习这样的技术是必要的。它们能使生物工程师在生物学领域大放异彩，并提出科学性问题以解决深层次技术难题。从分子层面设计成功的解决方案最终会和行星层面设计的方案实现成功交互。但是，倘若研究与发展都只局限于技术层面的话，那通过将更多的问题置之不顾，我们又是冒着什么样的风险呢？

We've all spent over a year now living at an unprecedented intersection between biology, technology and society. We've witnessed, with the rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccine, that although techno-fixes offer us a critical remedy, they don't always provide a panaceum, and that's because the real world is a complex social and economic one, where dominant systems determine the distribution of benefits. It will be another two years before hundreds of millions across the world receive their emergency vaccines, which, in a globalized world, risks undermining its efficacy on all our communities.

我们已经在生物学，科技与社会，这一前所未有的十字路口徘徊了一年多的时间。随着新冠疫苗的快速研发，我们已经看到尽管技术修复提供了至关重要的解决方案，但他们不总是灵丹妙药，因为现实世界是复杂的社会经济体，统治阶级决定了利益流向。距救急疫苗真正惠及世界成百上千民众还需要大概两年的时间，在一个全球化的世界里，这一点会逐渐消解社群里的效益。

Scientific endeavors have long been considered separate to real-world contexts, an idea that places profound limitations on the promises of biotechnology. By missing the full scope of design, we may think we're solving problems and realize later that actually, not much has changed. And a similar logic is emerging in biotechnology for consumer goods and industry. So far, it offers innovations for commodities markets, drop-in replacements that change problematic ingredients, and yet sustain prevailing mindsets and dynamics of power.

科学界的努力长期被视为跟真实世界是分开的，正是这种观点极大局限了生物科技的美好愿景。如果没有全面的构想的话，我们在当时可能会以为能够解决问题，但后来会认识到，这种做法并没有很大的作用。类似的逻辑也出现在面向消费者的商品和工业的生物技术领域。到目前为止，这种逻辑能为商品市场带来创新，通过替代实现改变有问题的成分，同时保持主流的心态和力量的动向。

Again, technically sound solutions that unwittingly reinforce social and ecological inequities. Addressing these asymmetries requires us to take a more revolutionary approach, one that begins by asking "What kind of a world do we wish for?" So what if we could do both? What if we could design at the molecular scale, with the real world in mind? A more integrated approach to designing with biology requires us to ask more nuanced questions; not "What will people buy," but "What if we put communities, rather than commodities, first."

必须重申，技术层面上良好的解决办法可能加剧社会和生态不平等。为了解决这种不平衡状态，我们需要采取一种改革措施，第一步就是得先弄明白，“我们希望有一个什么样的世界？”如果我们两个都能做到呢？如果我们既能在分子层面上进行设计，又能时时考虑到真实世界的需求呢？生物学设计上需要更具整合性的方案，这需要我们考虑更多细微的问题；这不是指“人们会买什么”，而是“如果我们先考虑的是社会而不是商品的话呢？”

"Could distributed biotechnology enable people to find local solutions to local problems?" "Can we move beyond a biotechnology that creates monocultures to one which, like nature itself, embraces a multiplicity of adaptations?" "How do we equip the next generation with the tools, spaces and communities they need to broaden their skills, knowledge and ideas?" An incredible amount of work that begins to address these questions is already underway. The Open Bioeconomy Lab, which has nodes in the UK, Ghana and Cameroon, designs open-source research tools to expand geographies of innovation into resource-constrained contexts.

“分布式生物技术能使人们找到因地制宜的解决方法吗？”“我们是否能超越一种只能创造单一文化的生物科技并创造一种像自然界，一样能包容各种生态的技术呢？”“我们如何为下一代提供他们拓宽技能、知识和想法，所需的工具、空间和社区呢？”为解决这些问题，大量有条不紊的工作正在进行。在英国、加纳和喀麦隆都拥有节点的开放式生物经济实验室，设计了开源研究工具，并将创新领域扩展到资源受限的环境。

Over thousands of years, we've domesticated plants to make them edible, creating nutrient-rich, diverse and delicious food cultures. MicroByre wants to do the same, but for microbes. The San Francisco based start-up assembles diverse microbial libraries for a more resilient biological toolkit. Imagine the expanded color palettes and different applications, from different types of pigment-producing bacteria. And from London's famed art school, Central Saint Martins, students from different disciplines are generating new sustainable design practices from biological medium.

数千年以来，人类驯化了植物，使它们能被食用，创造了营养价值丰富，璀璨多姿的饮食文化。微拜（MicroByre)也正用微生物做着同样的事。这家总部位于旧金山的初创公司组装了多种多样的微生物文库来创造一个更有韧性的生物工具箱。想象一下不同类型的产色素细菌的扩展调色板和不同的应用。来自伦敦著名的艺术学校中央圣马丁的，不同专业的学生正在从生物媒介中实践新的可持续设计。

You'll find them at work in a wet lab, nested between historic fashion textiles and architecture departments, a radical reunification of the arts and sciences in education. Many examples of this type of systemic design work in biotechnology exist -- piece them together, and you start to glimpse different visions of our biological futures. I don't know what happened to the time capsule we left behind in Paris, but I do remember wishing for a more just and meaningful world, where all of nature can thrive.

他们将在潮湿的实验室里工作，置身于历史时尚织物和建筑之间，这是教育事业上文理学科的大一统。生物技术中有许多这种系统设计工作的例子——把它们拼凑在一起，就能看见生物学未来的不同景象。我不知道我们留在巴黎的时间胶囊发生了什么，但是我记得，我们为一个更公平正义的世界祈愿，在那里，世间万物欣欣向荣。

In their own significant ways, technology and design have played their role in denying us this, but it's in our power to change that. Fundamentally, this means recognizing that the design of, with and from biology is designing systems and not stuff, and that with a truly ambitious design proposition, one that's based on values that center flourishing, caretaking and equity.

技术和设计以它们自己重要的方式，在否认这一点上发挥了作用，但改变这一点是我们力所能及的。基本上，这意味着认识到生物学的设计、与生物学的结合以及生物学的产生，是设计系统而不是物件，这是一个真正有抱负的设计主张，这是一种以繁荣、关怀和公平为中心的价值观。

We have the opportunity to build truly transformative systems, systems that open up holistic measures of value and impact, and how we think about scaling innovation and doing business for the futures we now need.

我们有机会建立真正具有变革性的系统，它能衡量价值和影响的整体，以及影响我们如何看待扩展创新，并为我们现在希望得到的未来作出贡献。

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