The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
—Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
未来是无序的。自从我们直立行走以来，这样的门已经裂开了五六次。这是活着最好的时代，几乎所有你自认了解的东西都是错的。
—汤姆·斯托帕德《阿卡迪亚》
Medieval men despaired of the will. They thought of humans as wounded and weak. But they respected the intellect. They thought even humans, if we think carefully, have the power to answer the most profound questions of God and the Universe.
中世纪的人对意志没有信心，认为人类是容易受伤的、软弱的，但他们尊重智力。他们认为只要认真思考，即使是人，也有能力回答关于上帝和宇宙的最深奥的问题。
Modern men worship the will, but they despair of the intellect. The wisdom of crowds; the swerve of random particles; the influence of unconscious biases: all of these contemporary clichés are ways to talk about intellectual weakness—or ways to talk ourselves into it.
现代人崇拜意志，但他们对智力感到绝望。乌合之众，随机粒子的偏转，无意识偏见的影响：所有这些当代的陈词滥调，都在谈论智力的弱点，或者说也在谈论我们自己。
Lord William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson do not promise answers about God and the Universe, nor do they supply any. But their investigation of “megapolitics”—an anatomy of the forces at work in history and a set of predictions for the near future—is unusual, or even countercultural, because it applies human reason to matters that we have been taught to leave to chance or fate.
威廉·里斯·莫格勋爵和詹姆斯·戴尔·戴维森，并没有承诺也没有给出任何关于上帝和宇宙的答案。但是，他们对“大政治”的研究，对历史上各种力量的剖析，以及对不久将来的一系列预测，是非比寻常的，甚至是反文化的，因为他们运用人类的理性，去思索那些我们被教导为“机遇”或“命运”的事情。
Looking back almost a quarter century after the first publication of The Sovereign Individual, the easiest thing to do, and the thing most encouraged by the culture around us, is to look at what they got wrong—almost as if to reassure ourselves that there was no point all along in thinking carefully about the future.
在《主权个人》首次出版近四分之一个世纪之后，回顾过去，最容易做、也是我们周围的文化最鼓励做的事，就是检测他们的错误；这也算是一种自我安慰：那么费心去思考未来有什么意义呢。
And of course, there are some things they missed: above all, the rise of China. The twenty-first-century People’s Republic of China under the Communist Party has created its very own version of the Information Age with decidedly nationalist, ethnically homogenous, profoundly statist characteristics. This is probably the single biggest “megapolitical” development since the book came out. To cite just one key illustration, Communist China has crushed the city-state of Hong Kong—whereas Rees-Mogg and Davidson had described Hong Kong as “a mental model of the kind of jurisdiction that we expect to see flourish in the Information Age.”
当然，有一些事情他们没有料到：首先就是中国的崛起。在共产党的领导下，21世纪的中国创造了自己的信息时代，具有明显的民族主义、种族同化和深刻的国家主义特征。这可能是该书出版以来最大的“大政治”现象。仅举一个关键的例子，共产主义中国已经粉碎了香港这个城邦（城市国家），而里斯·莫格和戴维森曾将香港描述为“一种心智模式，一种会在信息时代繁荣昌盛的管辖区模式”。
On one account, this is a blind spot on the part of the authors. On another view, it can seem like China’s Politburo must have been keen readers of The Sovereign Individual. It is only through a unique long-term awareness that looks back to Lenin and Stalin as well as forward to the Information Age that the Party’s leaders prevailed amid the trends analyzed by this book.
从某个角度看，这是作者的盲点之一。从另一个角度看，中国的政治局委员一定是《主权个人》的热心读者。在不断重温列宁斯大林主义的同时，他们也在积极地展望信息时代，只有这种特有的、长期的警惕意识，才使得党的领导人能在本书分析的趋势中获得胜利。
Those trends—winner-take-all economics, jurisdictional competition, the shift away from mass production, and the arguable obsolescence of interstate warfare—are still at work today. The rise of China is less a refutation of Rees-Mogg and Davidson than a dramatic raising of the stakes they described.
这些趋势在今天依然适用：赢家通吃的经济、管辖权的竞争、大规模生产的转移，以及国家间的战争可能会过时。中国的崛起，与其说是对里斯·莫格和戴维森的反驳，倒更像是对他们所描述的利害关系的剧烈提升。
In truth, the great conflict over our megapolitical future is only just beginning. On the dimension of technology, the conflict has two poles: AI and crypto. Artificial Intelligence holds out the prospect of finally solving what economists call the “calculation problem”: AI could theoretically make it possible to centrally control an entire economy. It is no coincidence that AI is the favorite technology of the Communist Party of China. Strong cryptography, at the other pole, holds out the prospect of a decentralized and individualized world. If AI is communist, crypto is libertarian.
事实上，未来大政治的重大冲突才刚刚开始。在技术层面上，这场冲突的两极是：人工智能和加密技术。人工智能展现出一种前景，它能够最终解决经济学家所说“计算问题”（计划经济的关键，译注）。理论上，它使集中控制整个经济成为可能。中国共产党最喜欢的技术，就是人工智能，这绝不是巧合。强加密技术在另外一极，它带来的远景是一个去中心化和个性化的世界。如果说人工智能是共产主义的，那么加密技术就是自由主义的。
The future may lie somewhere between these two extreme poles. But we know the actions we take today will determine the overall outcome. Reading The Sovereign Individual in 2020 is a way to think carefully about the future that your own actions will help to create. It is an opportunity not to be wasted.
未来可能就落在这两极之间。而要知道，我们今天采取的行动，会决定日后全局性的结果。在 2020 年，阅读《主权个人》，是你认真思考自己的行动将塑造何种未来的一种方式，是一次不容浪费的学习机会。
Peter Thiel 彼得·泰尔
January 6, 2020 Los Angeles
2020 年 1 月 6 日，洛杉矶