换个“傻瓜手机”明智吗？

I’ve recently found myself wondering if I could do without Google Maps. It is, I think, the only app on my phone I’d really miss were I to swap my smartphone for a “dumb” one that handles only calls and text messages.

我最近一直在想一个问题：如果没有谷歌地图，我还能不能正常地生活?我想，如果我要将现在的智能手机换成只能打电话、发短信的“傻瓜”手机，谷歌地图可能是我唯一真正想念的一个应用了。

Why am I thinking about this? It’s because every time I try to read a book, I end up picking up my phone instead. I convince myself that I need to google something, something important, and, 30 minutes later, I’m scrolling through Facebook or Twitter with all sense of time and purpose lost. I’ve taken to turning off my phone, but then I turn it back on. I’ve tried hiding all my colourful apps in little folders, but that doesn’t really work. I keep interrupting my own train of thought in order to do something that I don’t consciously want to do.

我为什么会想这个问题呢? 因为每当我想读会儿书时，我最终拿起的却是手机。我说服自己说，我需要用谷歌搜索一些东西，一些重要的东西，可是30分钟后，我还在查看Facebook或推特(Twitter)，时间观念和目的性完全丢失。我曾经将手机关上，可随后再度开机。我也尝试过将所有花花绿绿的应用程序隐藏在一个个小文件夹中，但这并不奏效。为了做一些我不是有意识想做的事情，我不停地打断自己的思路。

This is not accidental. Developers have become ever more brazen in their attempts to keep us hooked on our smartphones. Some of them speak in the language of addiction and behavioural psychology, though most prefer the term “persuasive tech”. In itself, persuasive tech is not a new idea — an academic named BJ Fogg has been running classes from a “persuasive tech lab” at Stanford since the late 1990s. But as smartphone ownership has rocketed and social-media sites have been born, persuasive tech has vastly expanded its reach.

发生这一切不是偶然的。为了让我们一刻都离不开我们的智能手机，开发人员的手段越来越肆无忌惮了。一些人凭借的是成瘾和行为心理学，但大多数人喜欢用“说服技术”这一术语。“说服技术”本身并不是一个新的想法——一位名叫B•J•福格(BJ Fogg)的学者自上世纪九十年代末以来就一直在斯坦福大学“说服技术实验室”( persuasive tech lab)讲授这一课程。但随着智能手机保有量大幅增长和社交媒体网站的出现，“说服技术”的应用更加广泛了。

One company, Dopamine Labs — named for the chemical released in the reward centre of the brain — offers a service to tech businesses wanting to “keep users engaged”. Founded by two neuroscientists-turned-programmers, it explicitly talks about using artificial intelligence to modify apps and release dopamine hits to “surprise and hook each user”. Loosely translated, in case it’s not terrifying enough: robots are trying to alter your brain chemistry to make you spend more time doing something you don’t want to do.

一家名叫“多巴胺实验室”(Dopamine Labs)的公司——以大脑的奖励中心释放的化学物质多巴胺命名——为希望“留住用户”的科技企业提供此类服务。该公司的两位创始人曾经是神经科学家，后转行当程序员。该公司明确地谈到使用人工智能来修改应用程序，释放令人产生愉悦情绪的多巴胺“来给每位用户带来惊喜，并让其无法自拔”。如果这种说法还不够吓人的话，我们可以将其更通俗地解释为：机器人正试图改变你大脑中的化学成份，让你花更多时间做你不想做的事情。

Dopamine Labs is interesting, though, because it also offers an antidote service — an app that tries to help users regain control.

不过，多巴胺实验室真是一家有趣的公司，因为它还提供“戒毒”服务 ——一个试图帮助用户重新获得自控力的应用程序。

Founder Ramsay Brown tells me he wants people to understand that “their thoughts and feelings are on the table as things that can be controlled and designed”. He thinks there should be more conversation around the persuasive power of the technologies being used. “We believe everyone has a right to cognitive liberty, and to build the kind of mind they want to live in,” he says.

该公司创始人拉姆齐•布朗(Ramsay Brown)对我说，他希望大家明白，“他们的想法和感受都被摆到桌面上，成为可以被控制和设计的东西”。他认为，应该对“说服技术”的使用进行更广泛的讨论。“我们认为，每个人都有权获得认知自由，并建立一种自己所期望的思维状态。”他说。

Dopamine Labs’ app — Space — springs from the idea that technology can help us change the way we use it, by encouraging us to resist the lure of the smartphone and spend our time online more productively.

多巴胺实验室的一款应用——Space ——源于如下想法，即技术可以通过鼓励我们抵制智能手机的诱惑、更有效地利用我们上网的时间，来帮助我们改变使用技术的方式。

There are two main ways the tech world seeks to help us regain our self-control. Space opts for the “mindfulness” approach, asking us to breathe slowly for a few seconds before it loads an app. The alternative is the cold turkey option — which seems appealing, though it comes with obvious practical problems.

技术界试图帮助我们重新获得自控力，主要有两种方法。Space选择了“正念”法，即要求我们在加载应用前放慢呼吸几秒钟。 另一种方法就是冷火鸡法(指突然而彻底地戒断——译者注)——这种方法似乎很有吸引力，但会遇到明显的实际问题。

The poster child of the resistance movement against addictive apps is former Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris. He thinks the power to change the system lies not with app developers but with the hardware providers. In 2014, Harris founded “Time Well Spent”, a group that campaigns for more ethical design practices among developers. When I ask him about this, he drops in phrases such as “brain hacking” — which seem extreme until you remember that there’s a company called Dopamine Labs.

抵制易上瘾应用运动的代表人物是前谷歌“设计伦理学家”特里斯坦•哈里斯(Tristan Harris)。他认为，改变目前这一体系的力量不掌握在应用开发人员手上，而掌握在硬件提供商手中。早在2014年，哈里斯就发起了名叫一个“光阴不虚度”(Time Well Spent)组织，呼吁开发公司在应用开发过程中坚持设计伦理。当我就这个问题向他提问时，他使用了诸如“大脑黑客”(brain hacking)这样的词语—— 他的用词似乎有些极端，不过转念一想并不——毕竟有一家公司就叫多巴胺实验室。

Any tech business that relies on advertising revenues is incentivised to hold its users online for as long as possible, Harris says. This means apps are specifically designed to keep us in them. Apple, on the other hand, wants to sell phones but doesn’t have a revenue stream so rigidly correlated to the amount of time its customers spend online. Harris hopes that companies like Apple could use their influence to boost more ethically designed apps.

哈里斯说，任何依赖广告收入的科技企业都在设法尽可能长时间把用户留在网上。这意味着应用程序是专门设计来钩住用户的。另一方面，苹果期望的是销售手机，他们的收入与客户在线时间的关联性不是那么强。哈里斯希望像苹果这样的公司可以利用他们的影响力来推动应用更符合设计伦理。

While I wait for Apple to sort this out, I find myself longing for something called a “Light Phone”, a credit-card-sized handset that does absolutely nothing but make and receive calls. Price tag? $150. Seems expensive. But the company’s website is very persuasive.

在我等待苹果来解决这个问题之际，我发现自己心心念念想买一部Light Phone，这款手机就像信用卡那么大，除拨打和接听电话外，没有其它功能。价格嘛，150美元?似乎有点贵。不过，Light Phone公司网站上的介绍很让人动心。

Aime Williams is an FT Money reporter

插图由克里斯托弗•德洛伦佐(Christopher De Lorenzo)提供