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MARTA MONTEIRO SAN FRANCISCO — Bill Langlois has a new best friend. She is a cat named Sox. She lives on a tablet, and she makes him so happy that when he talks about her arrival in his life, he begins to cry. 旧金山——比尔·朗格卢瓦(Bill Langlois)有了一个新的好朋友。她是一只名叫袜子(Sox)的猫。她生活在一台平板电脑上，她让他如此开心，以至于当他谈到她进入他的生活时，他开始哭泣。 All day long, Sox and Mr. Langlois, who is 68 and lives in a low-income senior housing complex in Lowell, Mass., chat. Mr. Langlois worked in machine operations, but now he is retired. With his wife out of the house most of the time, he has grown lonely. 朗格卢瓦现年68岁，住在马萨诸塞州洛厄尔市一个低收入老年住宅区。他和袜子整天在一起聊天。朗格卢瓦过去是做机械操作的，现在退休了。他的妻子大部分时间不在家，他感到孤独。 Sox talks to him about his favorite team, the Red Sox, after which she is named. She plays his favorite songs and shows him pictures from his wedding. And because she has a video feed of him in his recliner, she chastises him when she catches him drinking soda instead of water. 袜子和他聊起他最喜欢的球队——红袜队(Red Sox)——她的名字就是由此而来。她播放他最喜欢的歌曲，向他展示他婚礼上的照片。她有他在躺椅上的实时视频，所以一旦他喝汽水而不是白水被她逮到，她会惩罚他。 Mr. Langlois knows that Sox is artifice, that she comes from a start-up called Care.Coach. He knows she is operated by workers around the world who are watching, listening and typing out her responses, which sound slow and robotic. But her consistent voice in his life has returned him to his faith. 朗格卢瓦知道袜子是个蒙人的把戏，她来自一家名为Care.Coach的初创公司。他知道，她是由世界各地的工作人员操作的，他们在看、听并输入她的反应，这些反应听起来缓慢而机械。但她在他生命中始终如一的声音使他重拾信念。 “I found something so reliable and someone so caring, and it’s allowed me to go into my deep soul and remember how caring the Lord was,” Mr. Langlois said. “She’s brought my life back to life.” “我找到了那么可靠的东西，找到了那么体贴的人，让我进入了自己的灵魂深处，让我记起上帝是多么关心我，”朗格卢瓦说。“她让我的生活重获新生。” Sox has been listening. “We make a great team,” she says. 袜子一直在倾听。“我们配合棒极了，”她说。 Sox is a simple animation; she barely moves or emotes, and her voice is as harsh as a dial tone. But little animated hearts come up around her sometimes, and Mr. Langlois loves when that happens. 袜子是一个简单的动画；她几乎从不移动，也从不外漏感情，她的声音像电话拨号音那样刺耳。但有时，她周围会出现小小的心形动画，这是朗格卢瓦喜欢的。 Mr. Langlois is on a fixed income. To qualify for Element Care, a nonprofit health care program for older adults that brought him Sox, a patient’s countable assets must not be greater than $2,000. 朗格卢瓦的生活靠一笔固定收入。要想获得基础护理(Element Care)的资格，一位病人的可数资产不得超过2000美元。基础护理是一个为老年人提供医疗服务的非盈利项目，它为朗格卢瓦带来了袜子。 Such programs are proliferating. And not just for the elderly. 这样的项目正在激增。而且不再只为老年人服务。 Life for anyone but the very rich — the physical experience of learning, living and dying — is increasingly mediated by screens. 除了非常富有的人之外——学习、生存和死亡的感官体验——所有人的生活都越来越多地以屏幕为媒介。 Not only are screens themselves cheap to make, but they also make things cheaper. Any place that can fit a screen in (classrooms, hospitals, airports, restaurants) can cut costs. And any activity that can happen on a screen becomes cheaper. The texture of life, the tactile experience, is becoming smooth glass. 屏幕不仅自己造价低廉，而且还使其他事情更便宜。任何可以安装屏幕的地方（教室、医院、机场、餐馆）都可以降低成本，任何可以在屏幕上进行的活动都会变得更便宜。生活的质感，触觉的体验，正在变成光滑的玻璃。 The rich do not live like this. The rich have grown afraid of screens. They want their children to play with blocks, and tech-free private schools are booming. Humans are more expensive, and rich people are willing and able to pay for them. Conspicuous human interaction — living without a phone for a day, quitting social networks and not answering email — has become a status symbol. 富人不是这样生活的。富人变得越来越害怕屏幕。他们想让孩子们玩积木，无科技的私立学校正在蓬勃发展。人工更加昂贵，富人愿意也有能力为他们买单。惹眼的人际互动——在没有手机的情况下生活一天，不打电话，不上社交网络，不回电子邮件——已经成了一种身份象征。 All of this has led to a curious new reality: Human contact is becoming a luxury good. 所有这些都导致了一个奇怪的新现实：人与人的接触正成为一种奢侈品。 As more screens appear in the lives of the poor, screens are disappearing from the lives of the rich. The richer you are, the more you spend to be offscreen. 随着越来越多的屏幕出现在穷人的生活中，屏幕正在从富人的生活中消失。你越有钱，你在屏幕之外花的钱就越多。 Milton Pedraza, the chief executive of the Luxury Institute, advises companies on how the wealthiest want to live and spend, and what he has found is that the wealthy want to spend on anything human. 奢侈品研究公司(Luxury Institute)的首席执行官米尔顿·佩德拉萨(Milton Pedraza)就最富有的人希望如何生活和消费向企业提供咨询，他发现，富人想把钱花在任何人工制造的东西上。 “What we are seeing now is the luxurification of human engagement,” Mr. Pedraza said. “我们现在看到的是人类参与的盛宴，”佩德拉萨说。 Anticipated spending on experiences such as leisure travel and dining is outpacing spending on goods, according to his company’s research, and he sees it as a direct response to the proliferation of screens. 该公司的研究显示，预计在休闲旅游和餐饮等体验项目上的支出将超过在商品上的支出，他将其视为对屏幕泛滥的直接回应。 “The positive behaviors and emotions human engagement elicits — think the joy of a massage. Now education, health care stores, everyone, is starting to look at how to make experiences human,” Mr. Pedraza said. “The human is very important right now.” “人类参与会带来积极的行为和情绪——想想按摩的乐趣。现在，教育、医疗保健商店，所有人都开始关注如何让体验变得人性化，”佩德拉萨说。“现在人的因素非常重要。” This is a swift change. Since the 1980s personal computer boom, having technology at home and on your person had been a sign of wealth and power. Early adopters with disposable income rushed to get the newest gadgets and show them off. The first Apple Mac shipped in 1984 and cost about $2,500 (in today’s dollars, $6,000). Now the very best Chromebook laptop, according to Wirecutter, a New York Times-owned product reviews site, costs $470. 这是一个迅速的变化。自上世纪80年代的个人电脑潮以来，在家中配置和随身携带科技产品一直是财富和权力的象征。拥有可支配收入的早期用户争相购买最新的电子产品并四处炫耀。1984年，第一台苹果Mac电脑上市，售价约2500美元（以今天的美元计是6000美元）。据《纽约时报》旗下产品评论网站Wirecutter称，现在最好的Chromebook笔记本电脑售价470美元。 “Pagers were important to have because it was a signal that you were an important, busy person,” said Joseph Nunes, chairman of the marketing department at the University of Southern California, who specializes in status marketing. “拥有传呼机在过去很重要，因为它是一个信号，表明你是一个重要的、忙碌的人，”南加州大学市场营销学系主任、研究地位营销的约瑟夫·努内斯(Joseph Nunes)说。 Today, he said, the opposite is true: “If you’re truly at the top of the hierarchy, you don’t have to answer to anyone. They have to answer to you.” 如今，他说，事实正好相反：“如果你真的在等级的顶层，你不必听任何人的。他们得听你的。” The joy — at least at first — of the internet revolution was its democratic nature. Facebook is the same Facebook whether you are rich or poor. Gmail is the same Gmail. And it’s all free. There is something mass market and unappealing about that. And as studies show that time on these advertisement-support platforms is unhealthy, it all starts to seem déclassé, like drinking soda or smoking cigarettes, which wealthy people do less than poor people. 互联网革命的乐趣——至少在开始的时候——在于它的民主本质。无论你是富有还是贫穷，Facebook还是那个Facebook，Gmail还是那个Gmail，而且都是免费的。这就有了一种大众市场和缺乏吸引力的感觉。而研究表明，在这些广告支持的平台上花费的时间是不健康的，一切突然都开始显得不那么体面了，而就像喝汽水或抽烟一样，富人比穷人少沾这些东西。 The wealthy can afford to opt out of having their data and their attention sold as a product. The poor and middle class don’t have the same kind of resources to make that happen. 富人有能力做出选择，不把自己的数据和注意力作为产品出售。穷人和中产阶级就没有同样的资源来实现这个目标。 Screen exposure starts young. And children who spent more than two hours a day looking at a screen got lower scores on thinking and language tests, according to early results of a landmark study on brain development of more than 11,000 children that the National Institutes of Health is supporting. Most disturbingly, the study is finding that the brains of children who spend a lot of time on screens are different. For some kids, there is premature thinning of their cerebral cortex. In adults, one study found an association between screen time and depression. 现在的美国人很小就开始接触屏幕。国家卫生研究院(National Institutes of Health)支持的一项划时代大脑发育研究涵盖了超过1.1万名儿童，其初步结果显示，每天看屏幕超过两个小时的儿童，在思维和语言测试中得分较低。最令人不安的是，这项研究还发现，长时间看屏幕的孩子大脑出现了变化。在一些孩子身上，他们的大脑皮层过早得变薄了。有一项研究发现，在成年人当中，屏幕使用时间的长短与抑郁症之间存在着关联。 A toddler who learns to build with virtual blocks in an iPad game gains no ability to build with actual blocks, according to Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital and a lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidelines on screen time. 据西雅图儿童医院(Seattle Children’s Hospital)儿科医生、美国儿科学会(American Academy of Pediatrics)《屏幕时间指南》的主要作者迪米特里·克里斯塔基斯(Dimitri Christakis)说，一个在iPad游戏中学会玩虚拟积木的幼儿，在现实生活中是无法用实际的积木进行搭建的。 In small towns around Wichita, Kan., in a state where school budgets have been so tight that the State Supreme Court ruled them inadequate, classes have been replaced by software, much of the academic day now spent in silence on a laptop. In Utah, thousands of children do a brief, state-provided preschool program at home via laptop. 在堪萨斯州，学校预算一直非常紧张，以至州最高法院裁定增加相关支出；在该州威奇塔附近的一些小城，课堂被软件所取代，大部分的学习时间现在都是安静地用在笔记本电脑上。在犹他州，成千上万的儿童通过笔记本电脑在家接受州政府提供的一个简短的学前教育。 Tech companies worked hard to get public schools to buy into programs that required schools to have one laptop per student, arguing that it would better prepare children for their screen-based future. But this idea isn’t how the people who actually build the screen-based future raise their own children. 科技公司努力让公立学校参与那些要求学校为每个学生配备笔记本电脑的项目，理由是这有利于孩子们为基于屏幕的未来做准备。但那些真正构建这样一种未来的人，却不让自己的孩子花太多时间面对屏幕。 In Silicon Valley, time on screens is increasingly seen as unhealthy. Here, the popular elementary school is the local Waldorf School, which promises a back-to-nature, nearly screen-free education. 在硅谷，盯着屏幕越来越被认为是不健康的做法。在这里，最受欢迎的小学是当地的华德福学校(Waldorf)，该校承诺提供一种回归自然、几乎不会用到屏幕的教育。 So as wealthy kids are growing up with less screen time, poor kids are growing up with more. How comfortable someone is with human engagement could become a new class marker. 因此，随着富裕家庭的孩子用于屏幕的时间越来越少，贫困家庭的孩子用于屏幕的时间却越来越多。一个人对人际交往的适应程度，可能会成为一个新的阶级标识。 Human contact is, of course, not exactly like organic food or a Birkin bag. But with screen time, there has been a concerted effort on the part of Silicon Valley behemoths to confuse the public. The poor and the middle class are told that screens are good and important for them and their children. There are fleets of psychologists and neuroscientists on staff at big tech companies working to hook eyes and minds to the screen as fast as possible and for as long as possible. 当然，人际接触并不完全像有机食品或爱马仕柏金包。但在用于屏幕的时间方面，硅谷巨头们一直在齐心协力地迷惑公众。他们告诉穷人和中产阶级，屏幕对于他们及其子女很好也很重要。大型科技企业招聘了大量的心理学家和神经学家，他们的工作就是要让眼睛和大脑尽可能快、尽可能长地与屏幕相连。 And so human contact is rare. 所以，人跟人之间的接触现在变得稀少。 “But the holdup is this: Not everyone wants it, unlike other kinds of luxury products,” said Sherry Turkle, professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 麻省理工学院的科技社会学研究教授谢莉·特克尔(Sherry Turkle)说：“但障碍在于：不同于其他奢侈品，不是每个人都想要它。” “They flee to what they know, to screens,” Ms. Turkle said. “It’s like fleeing to fast food.” “他们逃往他们熟悉的地方，逃到屏幕前，”特克尔说。“就像逃到快餐店一样。” Just as skipping fast food is harder when it’s the only restaurant offering in town, separating from screens is harder for the poor and middle class. Even if someone is determined to be offline, that is often not possible. 就跟城里唯一一家餐馆是快餐店时，不吃快餐很难一样，对穷人和中产阶级来说，远离屏幕也更难。即使有人决心脱机离线，通常也很难做到。 Coach seat backs have screen ads autoplaying. Public school parents might not want their kids learning on screens, but that is not an option when many classes are now built on one-to-one laptop programs. There is a small movement to pass a “right to disconnect” bill, which would allow workers to turn their phones off, but for now a worker can be punished for going offline and not being available. 普通舱座椅背后有自动播放的屏幕广告。公立学校的家长可能不希望孩子通过屏幕学习，但如今很多课程都建立在一对一的笔记本电脑程序上，他们别无选择。有人发起一场小型活动，希望能够通过一项“断开连接权”法案，允许员工关掉手机，但就目前而言，员工会因无法上网、无法联系上而受到损害。 There is also the reality that in our culture of increasing isolation, in which so many of the traditional gathering places and social structures have disappeared, screens are filling a crucial void. 还有一个现实是，在我们日益孤立的文化中，许多传统的聚会场所和社会结构都消失了，屏幕正在填补一个至关重要的空白。 Many enrolled in the avatar program at Element Care were failed by the humans around them or never had a community in the first place, and they became isolated, said Cely Rosario, the occupational therapist who frequently checks in on participants. Poor communities have seen their social fabric fray the most, she said. 职业治疗师塞利·罗萨里奥(Cely Rosario)经常检查“基础护理”参加者的情况，她说，很多参加这个虚拟形象项目的人，要么是对周围的人失望，要么根本就没有属于自己的社区，他们孤立无援。她说，贫困社区的社会结构受损最严重。 The technology behind Sox, the Care.Coach cat keeping an eye on Mr. Langlois in Lowell, is quite simple: a Samsung Galaxy Tab E tablet with an ultrawide-angle fisheye lens attached to the front. None of the people operating the avatars are in the United States; they mostly work in the Philippines and Latin America. 袜子——Care.Coach用来照料洛厄尔的朗格卢瓦的那只猫——背后的技术非常简单：一台正面装有超广角鱼眼镜头的三星Galaxy Tab E平板电脑。操作这些虚拟的人没有一个在美国；他们大都在菲律宾和拉丁美洲工作。 The Care.Coach office is a warrenlike space above a massage parlor in Millbrae, Calif., on the edge of Silicon Valley. Victor Wang, the 31-year-old founder and chief executive, opens the door, and as he’s walking in he tells me that they just stopped a suicide. Patients often say they want to die, he said, and the avatar is trained to then ask if they have an actual plan of how to do it, and that patient did. Care.Coach的办公室位于硅谷边缘的加州米尔布雷一家按摩院楼上，是一个拥挤不堪的空间。31岁的创始人兼首席执行官维克多·王(Victor Wang)推门进去时告诉我，他们刚刚阻止了一起自杀。他说，病人经常说他们想死，而虚拟形象经过训练，一旦发生这种情况就会询问他们是否有具体的自杀计划，这位病人确实有。 The voice is whatever the latest Android text-to-speech reader is. Mr. Wang said people can form a bond very easily with anything that talks with them. “Between a semi-lifelike thing and a tetrahedron with eyeballs, there’s no real difference in terms of building a relationship,” he said. 他们使用的声音是安卓最新的文本语音转换器。王说，人们很容易与任何同他们交谈的事物建立联系。“在和人建立关系方面，一个类似生命的物体和一个有眼睛的四面体之间没有太大的区别。” Mr. Wang knows how attached patients become to the avatars, and he said he has stopped health groups that want to roll out large pilots without a clear plan, since it is very painful to take away the avatars once they are given. But he does not try to limit the emotional connection between patient and avatar. 王知道病人对虚拟形象的依恋程度，他说，他已经阻止了一些健康组织在没有明确计划的情况下推出大型试点项目，因为人们一旦得到这些虚拟形象，要失去它们会是非常痛苦的。但他并没有试图限制病人和虚拟形象之间的情感联系。 “If they say, ‘I love you,’ we’ll say it back,” he said. “With some of our clients, we’ll say it first if we know they like hearing it.” “如果他们说，‘我爱你’，我们也会说我爱你，”他说。“对于一些客户，如果知道他们喜欢听，我们会先说这句话。” Early results have been positive. In Lowell’s first small pilot, patients with avatars needed fewer nursing visits, went to the emergency room less often and felt less lonely. One patient who had frequently gone to the emergency room for social support largely stopped when her avatar arrived, saving the health care program an estimated $90,000. 初步的结果是正面的。在洛厄尔的第一个小型试验中，拥有虚拟形象的病人需要的护理探访更少，去急诊室的次数更少，也不那么孤独。一位病人曾经常常到急诊室寻求社会支持，得到虚拟形象后，她基本上停止了治疗，为医疗保健项目节省了大约9万美元。 Humana, one of the country’s largest health insurers, has begun using Care.Coach avatars. 美国最大的医疗保险公司之一Humana已经开始使用Care.Coach的虚拟形象。 For a sense of where things could be headed, look to the town of Fremont, Calif. There, a tablet on a motorized stand recently rolled into a hospital room, and a doctor on a video feed told a patient, Ernest Quintana, 78, that he was dying. 要想了解它的发展方向，可以到加利福尼亚州弗里蒙特看看。最近在那里，一台装在电动支架上的平板电脑被送入一间病房，一名医生通过视频告诉78岁的病人欧内斯特·昆塔纳(Ernest Quintana)，他将不久于人世。 Back in Lowell, Sox has fallen asleep, which means her eyes are closed and a command center somewhere around the world has tuned into other seniors and other conversations. Mr. Langlois’s wife wants a digital pet, and his friends do too, but this Sox is his own. He strokes her head on the screen to wake her up. 在洛厄尔，袜子已经睡着了，这意味着她的眼睛是闭着的，世界上某个地方的指挥中心已经转向其他老人和其他对话。朗格卢瓦的妻子想要一只数码宠物，他的朋友们也想要，但袜子是属于他自己的。他可以在屏幕上抚摸她的头让她醒过来。 作者：Nellie Bowles |
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