/ They’re designed for storage, not sparking insights. Can AI change that?
/ 它们专为存储而设计，而不是激发见解。人工智能能改变这一点吗？
By Casey Newton, a contributing editor who has been writing about tech for over 10 years. He founded Platformer, a newsletter about Big Tech and democracy.
作者：凯西·牛顿（Casey Newton），特约编辑，撰写有关技术的文章已有10多年。他创立了Platformer，一个关于大型科技和民主的时事通讯。
Aug 25, 2023, 10:30 PM GMT+8
2023年8月25日 格林威治标准时间下午10：30+8|
This is Platformer_, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer._ Sign up here.
这是Platformer，来自Casey Newton和Zoë Schiffer的关于硅谷和民主交叉点的时事通讯。在此注册。
Today let’s step outside the news cycle and turn our attention toward a topic I’m deeply invested in but only rarely write about: productivity platforms. For decades now, software tools have promised to make working life easier. But on one critical dimension — their ability to improve our thinking — they don’t seem to be making much progress at all.
今天，让我们走出新闻周期，将注意力转向一个我深深投入但很少写的话题：生产力平台。几十年来，软件工具一直承诺让工作生活更轻松。但在一个关键方面——他们改善我们思维的能力——他们似乎根本没有取得太大进展。
Meanwhile, the arrival of generative artificial intelligence could make the tools we use more powerful than ever — or they could turn out to be just another mirage.
与此同时，生成人工智能的到来可能会使我们使用的工具比以往任何时候都更强大——或者它们可能只是另一个海市蜃楼。
To understand where things went wrong, I want to focus on the humble note-taking app: the place where, for so many of us, thinking begins.
为了了解哪里出了问题，我想专注于一个不起眼的笔记应用程序：对我们许多人来说，思考开始的地方。
I.
Earlier this week I read a story about farmers. “America’s Farmers Are Bogged Down by Data,” read the headline on Belle Lin’s story in the Wall Street Journal. I thought to myself: You and me both, farmer! And I read the piece.
本周早些时候，我读到一个关于农民的故事。“美国的农民被数据所困扰，”《华尔街日报》上关于Belle Lin故事的标题写道。我心想：你和我两个，农夫！我读了这篇文章。
Over the past decade, farmers have been offered all manner of software tools to analyze and manage their crops. In general, though, the more software that farmers use, the more they find themselves overwhelmed by data that the tools collect. “We’re collecting so much data that you’re almost paralyzed with having to analyze it all,” one farmer told the Journal.
在过去的十年中，农民获得了各种软件工具来分析和管理他们的作物。不过，一般来说，农民使用的软件越多，他们就越发现自己被工具收集的数据所淹没。“我们正在收集如此多的数据，以至于你几乎瘫痪了，不得不分析所有数据，”一位农民告诉“华尔街日报”。
As a journalist, I’ve never collected as much data as I do now. The collapse of Twitter has me browsing four or five text-based social feeds a day, scanning for news and thoughtful conversation. The growing popularity of arXiv and pre-prints in general has left me with a stack of research that I will never get through. Book galleys pile up in my house.
作为一名记者，我从未像现在这样收集过那么多的数据。Twitter的崩溃让我每天浏览四到五个基于文本的社交提要，扫描新闻和深思熟虑的对话。arXiv和预印本的日益普及给我留下了一堆我永远无法完成的研究。书厨房堆积在我家。
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24872791/release_sub_items.png)
A screenshot of the app Notion.
Image: Notion
应用概念的屏幕截图。图片：概念
Meanwhile, all day long I browse the web. Stories that might belong in Platformer get saved into a database in the productivity platform Notion. Every link that has ever been in this newsletter is stored there, in many cases with the full article text.
与此同时，我整天都在浏览网页。可能属于 Platformer 的故事会保存到生产力平台 Notion 的数据库中。本通讯中的每个链接都存储在那里，在许多情况下带有完整的文章文本。
Collectively, this material offers me an abundance of riches — far more to work with than any beat reporter had such easy access to even 15 years ago.
总的来说，这些材料为我提供了丰富的财富——远远超过15年前任何一位记者都能如此容易获得的财富。
And yet most days I find myself with the same problem as the farmer: I have so much information at hand that I feel paralyzed.
然而，大多数时候，我发现自己和农民有同样的问题：我手头有太多的信息，以至于我感到瘫痪。
II.
One solution to this data paralysis is to take notes. As a journalist, of course, I have always taken notes. A few years ago, I thought we had seen some true breakthroughs in note-taking, and increasingly put my faith in those tools not just to capture my writing but to improve the quality of my thinking.
解决这种数据瘫痪的一种方法是做笔记。当然，作为一名记者，我一直在做笔记。几年前，我认为我们在笔记方面看到了一些真正的突破，并且越来越相信这些工具不仅可以捕捉我的写作，还可以提高我的思维质量。
The breakthrough tool was Roam Research. In 2021, I wrote here about my first year using the subscription-based software, which had two key insights into knowledge work. One was to make professional note-taking feel more like journaling. It turns out that a fresh note created each day, labeled with a date, is a good canvas for collecting transient thoughts, which can serve as a springboard into deeper thinking.
突破性的工具是Roam Research。2021 年，我在这里写了我使用基于订阅的软件的第一年，它对知识工作有两个关键见解。一个是让专业的笔记感觉更像写日记。事实证明，每天创建的带有日期的新鲜笔记是收集短暂想法的好画布，可以作为深入思考的跳板。
The second is known to note-taking nerds as “bidirectional linking.” Standard links, like the ones you find on the web, go in only one direction — from one page to another. In a note-taking app, bidirectional links join two pages together. This effectively lets you add backlinks to any concept — a company that’s important to you, say, or a concept that’s on your mind — and then let you browse everything you’ve collected related to that concept at your leisure.
第二个被笔记书称为“双向链接”。标准链接，就像你在网络上找到的链接一样，只朝一个方向发展——从一个页面到另一个页面。在笔记应用中，双向链接将两个页面连接在一起。这有效地让你向任何概念添加反向链接——比如说，一个对你很重要的公司，或者一个你脑海中的概念——然后让你在闲暇时浏览你收集的与该概念相关的所有内容。
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A graphic from Roam illustrating bidirectional linking.
Image: Roam
来自漫游的图形说明了双向链接。图片：漫游
On one level, that’s not so different from adding tags to notes. But tags are more about search. Bidirectional links, which some apps show you on pages that include snippets of all the other notes that contain the same link, are more about browsing and rediscovery.
在一个层面上，这与向笔记添加标签没有太大区别。但标签更多的是关于搜索。双向链接（某些应用在包含包含相同链接的所有其他笔记片段的页面上显示的双向链接）更多是关于浏览和重新发现的。
Initially, I threw myself into this kind of associative note-taking. I gathered links around concepts I wanted to explore (“the internet enables information to travel too quickly,” for example, or social networks and polarization). When I had an interesting conversation with a person, I would add notes to a personal page I had created for them. A few times a week, I would revisit those notes.
最初，我全身心地投入到这种联想笔记中。我收集了关于我想探索的概念的链接（例如，“互联网使信息传播得太快”，或者社交网络和两极分化）。当我与一个人进行有趣的对话时，我会在我为他们创建的个人页面上添加注释。每周几次，我会重温这些笔记。
I waited for the insights to come.
我等待着见解的到来。
And waited. And waited. 并等待。并等待。
Note-taking apps are up against a much stronger foe
笔记应用程序面临着更强大的敌人
My gusto for concept-based, link-heavy note-taking diminished. Roam’s development slowed to a crawl, and I spent a season with the lightweight, mostly free alternative known as Obsidian. Obsidian’s brutalist design wore on me, though, and eventually I decamped for the more polished user interface of Mem. (These apps all enable the exporting of your notes in Markdown, making switching relatively painless.)
我对基于概念、链接繁重的笔记的热情减弱了。Roam的发展放缓到爬行，我用轻量级的，大部分免费的替代品黑曜石度过了一个赛季。不过，黑曜石的野兽派设计让我感到厌烦，最终我选择了Mem更精致的用户界面。（这些应用程序都可以在 Markdown 中导出笔记，使切换相对轻松。
I continue to journal most days, and occasionally find myself working to refine one concept or another among those notes.
我大部分时间都在写日记，偶尔发现自己正在努力完善这些笔记中的一个或另一个概念。
But the original promise of Roam — that it would improve my thinking by helping me to build a knowledge base and discover new ideas — fizzled completely.
但是Roam最初的承诺——它将通过帮助我建立知识库和发现新想法来改善我的思维——完全失败了。
III. 第三。
One interpretation of these events is that the software failed: that journaling and souped-up links simply don’t have the power some of us once hoped they did.
对这些事件的一种解释是，软件失败了：日记和强化链接根本没有我们中的一些人曾经希望他们做到的功能。
Another view, though, is that they are up against a much stronger foe — the infinite daily distractions of the internet.
然而，另一种观点是，他们面对的是一个更强大的敌人——互联网每天无穷无尽的干扰。
Note-taking, after all, does not take place in a vacuum. It takes place on your computer, next to email, and Slack, and Discord, and iMessage, and the text-based social network of your choosing. In the era of alt-tabbing between these and other apps, our ability to build knowledge and draw connections is permanently challenged by what might be our ultimately futile efforts to multitask.
毕竟，记笔记不是在真空中进行的。它发生在您的计算机上，电子邮件，Slack，Discord，iMessage以及您选择的基于文本的社交网络旁边。在这些应用程序和其他应用程序之间的alt-tabb时代，我们建立知识和建立联系的能力受到我们最终徒劳的多任务处理努力的永久挑战。
Ezra Klein wrote beautifully about this situation this week in the New York Times:
埃兹拉·克莱因（Ezra Klein）本周在《纽约时报》上对这种情况进行了精彩的描述：
Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Attention Span,” started researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time people spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded,” she told me. “That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.” But that was just the beginning. By 2012, Mark and her colleagues found the average time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s down to about 47.
加州大学欧文分校（University of California， Irvine）信息科学教授格洛丽亚·马克（Gloria Mark）是《注意力跨度》（Attention Span）一书的作者，她从2004年开始研究人们使用计算机的方式。人们在单个屏幕上花费的平均时间为2.5分钟。“我很震惊，”她告诉我。“这比我想象的要糟糕得多。但这仅仅是个开始。到2012年，马克和她的同事发现，一项任务的平均时间为75秒。现在下降到大约47。This is an acid bath for human cognition. Multitasking is mostly a myth. We can focus on one thing at a time. “It’s like we have an internal whiteboard in our minds,” Mark said. “If I’m working on one task, I have all the info I need on that mental whiteboard. Then I switch to email. I have to mentally erase that whiteboard and write all the information I need to do email. And just like on a real whiteboard, there can be a residue in our minds. We may still be thinking of something from three tasks ago.”
这是人类认知的酸浴。多任务处理主要是一个神话。我们可以一次专注于一件事。“这就像我们脑海中有一个内部白板，”马克说。“如果我正在做一项任务，我会在那个心理白板上拥有我需要的所有信息。然后我切换到电子邮件。我必须在精神上擦除白板并写下我需要发送电子邮件的所有信息。就像在真正的白板上一样，我们的脑海中可能会有残留物。我们可能还在思考三个任务前的一些事情。
My first thought upon reading this was that it seems rare for me to spend even 47 seconds looking at one screen on my computer without at least glancing at another. (I bought a 38-inch widescreen monitor for the express purpose of being able to glance at many windows simultaneously. At the time I understood this as a tool for enhancing my productivity.)
读到这篇文章后，我的第一个想法是，我似乎很少花 47 秒的时间看着电脑上的一个屏幕，而至少不看另一个屏幕。（我买了一台 38 英寸宽屏显示器，目的是能够同时浏览多个窗口。当时我理解这是提高生产力的工具。
My second thought is that if you want to take good notes, you have to first extract your mind from the acid bath.
我的第二个想法是，如果你想做好笔记，你必须首先把你的思想从酸浴中抽出来。
IV.
Klein’s piece starts from the observation that productivity growth is now about half of what it was in the 1950s and ‘60s. The internet’s arrival briefly speeded it up, he writes, but the more we stared at our screens the slower our productivity improved. He worries that AI will have a similar effect on the economy — promising to make us more productive, while simultaneously inventing so many new distractions and entertainments that they overwhelm and paralyze us.
克莱因的文章从观察到的生产率增长现在大约是1950年代和60年代的一半开始。他写道，互联网的到来短暂地加快了它的速度，但我们盯着屏幕的次数越多，我们的生产力提高就越慢。他担心人工智能会对经济产生类似的影响——承诺让我们更有效率，同时发明出如此多的新干扰和娱乐，以至于它们让我们不知所措和瘫痪。
The piece stuck with me, because there is one specific way I am counting on AI to make me more productive. It goes back to that database of links I’ve been building in Notion, and the insights I was hoping to get out of Roam.
这篇文章让我印象深刻，因为我依靠人工智能来提高工作效率。它可以追溯到我一直在 Notion 中构建的链接数据库，以及我希望从 Roam 中获得的见解。
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Saving an article in Mem.
Image: Mem
在内存中保存文章。图片：记忆
Earlier this year, like many productivity tools, Notion added a handful of AI features. I use two of them in my links database. One extracts the names of any companies mentioned in an article, creating a kind of automatic tagging system. The other provides a two- or three-sentence summary of the article I’m saving.
今年早些时候，像许多生产力工具一样，Notion 增加了一些人工智能功能。我在链接数据库中使用了其中两个。一个人提取文章中提到的任何公司的名称，创建一种自动标记系统。另一个提供了我正在保存的文章的两到三句话摘要。
Neither of these, in practice, is particularly useful. Tags might theoretically be useful for revisiting old material, but databases are not designed to be browsed. And while we publish summaries of news articles in each edition of Platformer, we wouldn’t use AI-written summaries: among other reasons, they often miss important details and context.
实际上，这两种方法都不是特别有用。从理论上讲，标签对于重新访问旧材料可能很有用，但数据库不是为浏览而设计的。虽然我们在每一版Platformer中都会发布新闻文章的摘要，但我们不会使用AI编写的摘要：除其他原因外，它们经常错过重要的细节和背景。
At the same time, the database contains nearly three years of links to every subject I cover here, along with the complete text of thousands of articles. It is here, and not in a note-taking app, that knowledge of my beat has been accreting over the past few years. If only I could access that knowledge in some way that went beyond my memory.
同时，该数据库包含近三年来我在这里涵盖的每个主题的链接，以及数千篇文章的完整文本。正是在这里，而不是在笔记应用程序中，在过去的几年里，对我的节拍的了解一直在增加。如果我能以某种超出我记忆的方式访问这些知识就好了。
It’s here that AI should be able to help. Within some reasonable period of time, I expect that I will be able to talk to my Notion database as if it’s ChatGPT. If I could, I imagine I would talk to it all the time.
正是在这里，人工智能应该能够提供帮助。在一段合理的时间内，我希望我能够像ChatGPT一样与我的概念数据库交谈。如果可以的话，我想我会一直和它说话。
Much of journalism simply involves remembering relevant events from the past. An AI-powered link database has a perfect memory; all it’s missing is a usable chat interface. If it had one, it might be a perfect research assistant.
许多新闻只是简单地记住过去的相关事件。人工智能驱动的链接数据库具有完美的内存;它所缺少的只是一个可用的聊天界面。如果它有一个，它可能是一个完美的研究助手。
Today’s chatbots can’t do any of this to a reporter’s standard
今天的聊天机器人无法按照记者的标准做到这一点。
I imagine using it to generate little briefing documents to help me when I return to a subject after some time away. Catch me up on Canada’s fight with Meta over news, I might say. Make me a timeline of events at Twitter since Elon Musk bought it. Show me coverage of deepfakes over the past three months.
我想象用它来生成一些简报文件，以便在我离开一段时间后回到一个主题时帮助我。我可能会说，赶上加拿大与Meta在新闻上的斗争。让我了解自埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）收购Twitter以来Twitter上的事件时间表。给我看过去三个月的深度伪造报道。
Today’s chatbots can’t do any of this to a reporter’s standard. The training data often stops in 2021, for one thing. The bots continue to make stuff up, and struggle to cite their sources.
今天的聊天机器人无法按照记者的标准做到这一点。一方面，训练数据通常会在 2021 年停止。机器人继续编造东西，并努力引用他们的来源。
But if I could chat in natural language with a massive archive, built from hand-picked trustworthy sources? That seems powerful to me, at least in the abstract.
但是，如果我可以用自然语言与大量档案聊天，这些档案是由精心挑选的可靠来源构建的？这对我来说似乎很强大，至少在抽象上是这样。
Of course, the output from this kind of AI tool has to be trustworthy. A significant problem with using AI tools to summarize things is that you can’t trust the summary unless you read all the relevant documents yourself — defeating the point of asking for a summary in the first place.
当然，这种人工智能工具的输出必须是值得信赖的。使用人工智能工具总结事物的一个重大问题是，除非你自己阅读所有相关文档，否则你不能相信摘要——这首先违背了要求摘要的意义。
Still, if you are the sort of productivity-tool optimist who will try any to-do list or calendar app on the off chance it makes you even a little happier at work, it seems to me that a database you can talk to might be the next-generation note-taking tool we have been waiting for.
不过，如果你是那种生产力工具的乐观主义者，会尝试任何待办事项列表或日历应用程序，只要它让你在工作中更快乐一点，在我看来，你可以与之交谈的数据库可能是我们一直在等待的下一代笔记工具。
V.
I’ve learned something else about note-taking apps, though, since my mania for them began in 2020.
不过，自从我对笔记应用程序的狂热始于 2020 年以来，我对笔记应用程序的其他了解。
In short: it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to improve our thinking. Even if you can rescue your attention from the acid bath of the internet; even if you can gather the most interesting data and observations into the app of your choosing; even if you revisit that data from time to time — this will not be enough. It might not even be worth trying.
简而言之：最终，要求软件来改善我们的思维可能是一个错误。即使你能从互联网的酸浴中拯救你的注意力;即使您可以将最有趣的数据和观察结果收集到您选择的应用程序中;即使您不时重新访问这些数据，这也是不够的。它甚至可能不值得尝试。
I’ll admit to having forgotten those questions over the past couple years
我承认在过去的几年里忘记了这些问题
The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.
可悲的是，原因是思考发生在你的大脑中。思考是一种积极的追求——当你花很长时间盯着太空，然后写一点，然后盯着太空多一点时，经常会发生这种追求。正是在这里，建立了联系并形成了见解。这是一个顽固地抵制自动化的过程。
Which is not to say that software can’t help. Andy Matuschak, a researcher whose spectacular website offers a feast of thinking about notes and note-taking, observes that note-taking apps emphasize displaying and manipulating notes, but never making sense between them. Before I totally resign myself to the idea that a note-taking app can’t solve my problems, I will admit that on some fundamental level no one has really tried.
这并不是说软件无济于事。安迪·马图沙克（Andy Matuschak）是一位研究人员，他的壮观网站提供了思考笔记和记笔记的盛宴，他观察到笔记应用程序强调显示和操作笔记，但从来不理解它们之间。在我完全接受笔记应用程序无法解决我的问题之前，我会承认在某些基本层面上没有人真正尝试过。
“The goal is not to take notes — the goal is to think effectively,” Matuschak writes. “Better questions are ‘what practices can help me reliably develop insights over time?’ [and] ‘how can I shepherd my attention effectively?’”
“目标不是做笔记——目标是有效地思考，”马图沙克写道。“更好的问题是'随着时间的推移，哪些实践可以帮助我可靠地获得见解？[和]“我怎样才能有效地引导我的注意力？”
I’ll admit to having forgotten those questions over the past couple years as I kept filling up documents with transient strings of text inside expensive software. And I accept that to be a better thinker, I’ll have to devote more time and attention to wrestling with what I find.
我承认在过去的几年里忘记了这些问题，因为我一直在昂贵的软件中用瞬态文本字符串填充文档。我承认，要成为一个更好的思考者，我必须投入更多的时间和精力来与我的发现搏斗。
If there’s a friendly AI to help me do that, though, I’ll be first in line to try it.
不过，如果有一个友好的人工智能可以帮助我做到这一点，我会第一个尝试它。