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演讲者：Adam Ostrow

演讲题目：After your final status update

By the end of this year, there'll be nearly a billion people on this planet that actively use social networking sites. The one thing that all of them have in common is that they're going to die. While that might be a somewhat morbid thought, I think it has some really profound implications that are worth exploring.

截止今年年底，这个星球上将有接近十亿人口在很活跃地使用社交网站。他们有一个共同点，就是他们终将死去。也许这是个有点病态的想法，但是我认为它有一些深远的意义值得探究。

What first got me thinking about this was a blog post authored earlier this year by Derek K. Miller, who was a science and technology journalist who died of cancer. And what Miller did was have his family and friends write a post that went out shortly after he died. Here's what he wrote in starting that out.

第一次让我思考这个问题，是今年早些时期，戴瑞克·米勒发布的一个博客。他曾是一名科学和科技记者，死于癌症。米勒让他的家人和朋友在他去世不久后写一个通知。这是他最初写的。

He said, "Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote -- the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive."

他说，“这个时刻还是到了。我已经死了，这是我在博客上的最后一条信息。在此之前，我已恳请我的家人和朋友，一旦我的身体因为癌症的折磨而停止运转，他们将发布这条我事先写好的信息－－这是把一个活跃的网站转变成一种档案的第一部分。”

Now, while as a journalist, Miller's archive may have been better written and more carefully curated than most, the fact of the matter is that all of us today are creating an archive that's something completely different than anything that's been created by any previous generation.

现在，作为一名记者，米勒的档案或许可以比其他人更好地被记录，更好地被展示，事情的真相是今天我们所有的人都在创造一种档案，一种完全不同于任何被前辈们创造出的事物。

Consider a few stats for a moment. Right now there are 48 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every single minute. There are 200 million Tweets being posted every day. And the average Facebook user is creating 90 pieces of content each month.

请大家来看看这些数据。此时此刻，每分钟有48个小时的视频正在被上传到Youtube上。每天，有2亿条的微博被发布。平均每个脸书用户每月产生90条的内容。

So when you think about your parents or your grandparents, at best they may have created some photos or home videos, or a diary that lives in a box somewhere. But today we're all creating this incredibly rich digital archive that's going to live in the cloud indefinitely, years after we're gone. And I think that's going to create some incredibly intriguing opportunities for technologists.

所以，当你回想你的父母或曾父母们时，他们至多制作了一些照片或家庭视频，或者一本躺在某处箱子里的日记。但是今天，我们正在创造这个丰富到不可思议的数码档案，甚至在我们离开世界的若干年之后，它们仍然可以在世界上永恒地存在。我想，那将为技术专家创造很多有趣到难以置信的机会。

Now to be clear, I'm a journalist and not a technologist, so what I'd like to do briefly is paint a picture of what the present and the future are going to look like. Now we're already seeing some services that are designed to let us decide what happens to our online profile and our social media accounts after we die. One of them actually, fittingly enough, found me when I checked into a deli at a restaurant in New York on foursquare.

我先声明，我是一个记者，而不是技术专家，所以我主要想做的是描绘一幅画面，一幅关于现在和未来将会怎样的画面。目前，我们已经看到一些服务，它们被设定好以便让我们决定，我们网上的个人主页和社交媒体的账户在我们去世之后会发生什么。事实上，它们中的一个，很合时宜地，当我在纽约四方区的一家餐馆买熟食时发现了我。

(Recording) Adam Ostrow: Hello. Death: Adam? AO: Yeah. Death: Death can catch you anywhere, anytime, even at the Organic. AO: Who is this? Death: Go to ifidie.net before it's too late.

（录音）Adam Ostrow：你好。死亡：亚当？AO：是的。死亡：死亡可以随时随地捕捉到你，甚至在有机物上。AO：这是谁？死亡：在为时已晚之前去ifidie.net。

Adam Ostrow: Kind of creepy, right? So what that service does, quite simply, is let you create a message or a video that can be posted to Facebook after you die. Another service right now is called 1,000 Memories. And what this lets you do is create an online tribute to your loved ones, complete with photos and videos and stories that they can post after you die. But what I think comes next is far more interesting.

Adam Ostrow：有点令人毛骨悚然，对吧？所以，该服务的功能很简单，就是让你创建一条消息或视频，可以在你死后发布到Facebook。现在的另一项服务称为1,000 Memories。这可以让你做的就是为你所爱的人创造一个在线致敬，包括你死后可以发布的照片和视频以及故事。但我认为接下来会更有趣。

Now a lot of you are probably familiar with Deb Roy who, back in March, demonstrated how he was able to analyze more than 90,000 hours of home video. I think as machines' ability to understand human language and process vast amounts of data continues to improve, it's going to become possible to analyze an entire life's worth of content --

现在，你们中的很多人可能都很熟悉戴·罗伊他在3月份的演讲中，演示了他是如何解析那长于9万小时的家庭录影。我想既然机器有能力去理解人类的语言，并处理大量的数据，如果持续地改进，很有可能，它们将可以解析一个人的一生－－

the Tweets, the photos, the videos, the blog posts -- that we're producing in such massive numbers. And I think as that happens, it's going to become possible for our digital personas to continue to interact in the real world long after we're gone. Thanks to the vastness of the amount of content we're creating and technology's ability to make sense of it all.

微博，照片，视频，博客－－所有我们产生的，大量的信息。并且我认为，如果那真的发生了，我们的数码角色就很有可能在我们离开很久之后持续地与现实世界互动。 这要归功于我们创造的大量的内容和科技的力量，让它们得以付诸实践。

Now we're already starting to see some experiments here. One service called My Next Tweet analyzes your entire Twitter stream, everything you've posted onto Twitter, to make some predictions as to what you might say next. Well right now, as you can see, the results can be somewhat comical.

现在我们已经开始在这里看到一些实验。一项名为My Next Tweet的服务会分析您的整个Twitter流，即您发布到Twitter上的所有内容，以便对您接下来会说些什么做出一些预测。那么现在，正如你所看到的，结果可能有些滑稽。

You can imagine what something like this might look like five, 10 or 20 years from now as our technical capabilities improve. Taking it a step further, MIT's media lab is working on robots that can interact more like humans. But what if those robots were able to interact based on the unique characteristics of a specific person based on the hundreds of thousands of pieces of content that person produces in their lifetime?

您可以想象，随着我们的技术能力的提高，从现在开始的5年，10年或20年后，这样的事情可能会如此。更进一步，麻省理工学院的媒体实验室正在研究能够像人类一样进行互动的机器人。但是，如果这些机器人能够根据特定人物的独特特征进行交互，这些特征基于人们一生中产生的数十万件内容？

Finally, think back to this famous scene from election night 2008 back in the United States, where CNN beamed a live hologram of hip hop artist will.i.am into their studio for an interview with Anderson Cooper. What if we were able to use that same type of technology to beam a representation of our loved ones into our living rooms -- interacting in a very lifelike way based on all the content they created while they were alive?

最后，让我们的思绪回到这个著名的一幕，2008年的选举之夜，在美国，CNN发送了一张嘻哈歌手”我是威尔“的现场全息图去他们的演播室，那是为安德森·库珀的采访准备的。如果我们可以用同样的科技发送一个我们亲人的重现影像到我们的客厅，非常逼真地互动，基于他们活着时候创造的内容，那将会怎样？

I think that's going to become completely possible as the amount of data we're producing and technology's ability to understand it both expand exponentially. Now in closing, I think what we all need to be thinking about is if we want that to become our reality -- and if so, what it means for a definition of life and everything that comes after it. Thank you very much.

我认为这是完全有可能的，因为我们使用的数据流量和科技对其认知的能力，都在成倍地增长。在结束之际，我认为我们都需要思考的是，我们是否想要此成为现实，如果是，它对生命的定义，以及随之而来的一切事物，又意味着什么？ 非常感谢。

Remark：一切权益归TED所有，更多TED相关信息可至官网www.ted.com查询！

声明：除特别注明原创授权转载文章外，其他文章均为转载，版权归原作者或平台所有。如有侵权，请后台联系，告知删除，谢谢

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