This year marks the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s brilliant novel,Frankenstein. So it’s a good time to ask: can technologies be monstrous? Can human beings create devices and platforms that run beyond our intentions and out of our control? What dangerous technologies may be lurking on the horizon? And what, if anything, can we do to prevent them doing damage?

这些都是很难的问题，我觉得我们需要认真地思考它们。我不同意那些说没有什么可担心的，人们可能提出的任何担忧都只是“技术恐慌”的人。这些随和的人喜欢指出，每当一项新发明出现时——印刷机、机械化织布机、报纸、电力，只要你能想到的——人们总是被吓坏了，然后事实证明一切都很好。但另一方面也有很多例子。我们只需要想想，石棉、滴滴涕、沙利度胺、烟草、美式足球和核电站是多么有力地保证我们是绝对安全的。(或者我们的Facebook数据是好的和隐私的!)

At the same time, we also shouldn’t go to the other extreme and decide that all new technology is dangerous. There’s plenty of technology that is straightforwardly beneficial, like pacemakers, reading glasses, and hearing aids.

Mary Shelley understood this complexity at a deep level. Unfortunately, most people don’t know this about her, since the standard way of readingFrankenstein就是把它看成一个简单的道德故事:表面上，它告诉我们自然总是好的，技术总是坏的。但这种阅读小说的方式是完全错误的。First of all,Frankensteinis much more than just a morality tale: it’s also an exploration of deeply buried antisocial impulses, a philosophical investigation into personal identity, and a brilliant experiment with literary form. (I highly recommend rereading it this year!) And second, it’s actually deeply ambivalent on the question of technology.

小说中有一个奇妙的时刻，生物学会了语言。他被它所震撼，并称之为“神一般的科学”。他同样对另一种“科学”的写作印象深刻，并最终阅读了普鲁塔克、弥尔顿和歌德，所有这些他喜爱的人。正如雪莱所认识到的，语言是一种技术;写作是一种技术;印刷是一项技术。所有这些技术都创造出了他喜欢的书。And all of these technologies also produceFrankenstein, the book we have in our hands. Surely there’s nothing particularly wrong withthose各种各样的技术。

我同意玛丽·雪莱的观点:我不认为所有形式的技术都是危险的，我也不认为所有形式的技术都是无害的。这将取决于技术的具体性质，以及如何使用它。(维克多·弗兰肯斯坦有充分的理由认为他只是疏忽大意:如果他只是创造了一个看起来不那么可怕的生物，或者只是像一个好父亲一样留下来照顾它，灾难就不必发生了。)因此，摆在我们面前的任务是试图确定哪些技术是危险的，哪些不是。

One possible rule of thumb is this:technology is dangerous when it produces effects that can’t easily be predicted or controlled. If that’s correct, then perhaps we should be particularly careful when it comes to complex systems and distributed networks. And when it comes to technologies like those, we had better be vigilant. We had better train engineers to predict the effects of their inventions; we had better consider new regulations and new incentive structures; and we had better create a different culture, one that cares more about society-wide effects than about clicks, shares, and the bottom line.