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21st translation contest: "The tides of tech" » English to Slovenian » Entry by Jaka Geltar


Source text in English

Translation by Jaka Geltar (#26348) — Winner

Boom times are back in Silicon Valley. Office parks along Highway 101 are once again adorned with the insignia of hopeful start-ups. Rents are soaring, as is the demand for fancy vacation homes in resort towns like Lake Tahoe, a sign of fortunes being amassed. The Bay Area was the birthplace of the semiconductor industry and the computer and internet companies that have grown up in its wake. Its wizards provided many of the marvels that make the world feel futuristic, from touch-screen phones to the instantaneous searching of great libraries to the power to pilot a drone thousands of miles away. The revival in its business activity since 2010 suggests progress is motoring on.

So it may come as a surprise that some in Silicon Valley think the place is stagnant, and that the rate of innovation has been slackening for decades. Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, and the first outside investor in Facebook, says that innovation in America is “somewhere between dire straits and dead”. Engineers in all sorts of areas share similar feelings of disappointment. And a small but growing group of economists reckon the economic impact of the innovations of today may pale in comparison with those of the past.

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Across the board, innovations fueled by cheap processing power are taking off. Computers are beginning to understand natural language. People are controlling video games through body movement alone—a technology that may soon find application in much of the business world. Three-dimensional printing is capable of churning out an increasingly complex array of objects, and may soon move on to human tissues and other organic material.

An innovation pessimist could dismiss this as “jam tomorrow”. But the idea that technology-led growth must either continue unabated or steadily decline, rather than ebbing and flowing, is at odds with history. Chad Syverson of the University of Chicago points out that productivity growth during the age of electrification was lumpy. Growth was slow during a period of important electrical innovations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; then it surged.
Časi razcveta se vračajo v Silicijevo dolino. Poslovne stavbe ob glavni cesti 101 so spet polne obetov nadobudnih zagonskih podjetij. Najemnine naraščajo, tako kot povpraševanja po razkošnih počitniških hišah v letoviških krajih, kot je Jezero Tahoe, vse to pa je znak kopičenja bogastva. Zalivsko območje je zibelka polprevodniške industrije in računalniških ter spletnih podjetij, ki še vedno uspevajo po njihovem zgledu. Geniji tovrstnih podjetij so poskrbeli za številna čuda, zaradi katerih svet deluje futuristično: od mobilnih telefonov na dotik do možnosti takojšnjega iskanja po ogromnih knjižnicah in upravljanja brezpilotnega letala, ki je oddaljen tisoče kilometrov. Glede na obuditev poslovnih aktivnosti, ki se je začela v 2010, je napredek v polnem zamahu.

Zato je morda presenetljivo, da nekateri ljudje v Silicijevi dolini menijo, da območje stagnira in da se število inovacij zmanjšuje iz desetletja v desetletje. Ustanovitelj PayPala in prvi zunanji investitor v Facebook Peter Thiel pravi, da so inovacije v Ameriki »nekje med hudimi škripci in propadom«. Inženirji z različnih področij delijo njegovo razočaranje. Poleg tega manjša, a rastoča skupina ekonomistov predvideva, da je gospodarski učinek današnjih inovacij v primerjavi s preteklimi bolj kot ne slaboten.

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Inovacije, ki jih poganja poceni procesorska moč, so v vsesplošnem porastu. Računalniki začenjajo razumevati naravni jezik. Današnje videoigre že lahko upravljamo samo s telesnimi gibi in ta tehnologija bo morda kmalu našla pot do uporabe na številnih področjih v poslovnem svetu. Tridimenzionalno tiskanje je zmožno »izpljuniti« številne vedno bolj zapletene predmete, kmalu pa bo verjetno mogoče tiskati človeška tkiva in druge organske materiale.

Inovacijski pesimist bi lahko to zavrnil kot »slepe obljube prihodnosti«. Kljub temu pa zgodovina nasprotuje ideji, da se mora rast, ki jo poganja tehnologija, neovirano nadaljevati ali pa enakomerno zmanjševati namesto, da bi nihala kot plima in oseka. Chad Syverson iz Univerze v Chicagu opozarja na to, da rast produktivnosti v dobi elektrifikacije ni bila stalna. V obdobju pomembnih električnih inovacij na prelomu 19. in 20. stoletja je bila rast počasna, nato pa je poskočila.


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