Charles Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (1841) is reviled(被鄙视的) by historians and revered among traders. The book is best known for its colourful passages on tulip mania(郁金香狂热) in the 17th century and the South Sea bubble in the 18th. But those wanting to understand business in the 21st should instead turn to Mackay’s chapter on the “epidemic terror of the end of the world”.
查尔斯·麦凯的《异常流行的错觉与群体的疯狂》（1841年）受到历史学家的鄙视和交易员的推崇。这本书最著名的是它对17世纪郁金香狂热和18世纪南海泡沫的生动描述。但那些想了解21世纪商业的人，应该转而阅读麦凯关于“世界末日的流行恐慌”的章节。
Apocalyptic thinking is the strongest impulse in American capitalism today. Elon Musk, a character who could be straight from Mackay’s pages, will soon float SpaceX, a rocket company whose professed mission is to avert existential threats to humanity by establishing a colony on Mars. Mr Musk is America’s richest capitalist in part because he is its loudest Cassandra(卡珊德拉（预言灾难的人）).
末日论思维是当今美国资本主义最强烈的冲动。埃隆·马斯克这个像是从麦凯书中走出来的人物，即将推动SpaceX上市，这家火箭公司宣称的使命是通过在火星建立殖民地来避免人类面临的生存威胁。马斯克之所以是美国最富有的资本家，部分原因在于他是美国最响亮的卡珊德拉。
Mr Musk is rushing to list before two other prophets with similarly millenarian worldviews. Anthropic filed paperwork for a public offering this week. Dario Amodei, its boss, has made much of(大肆渲染，高度重视) the destructive potential of his firm’s Mythos model, which has thus far been kept from the public. OpenAI, run by Sam Altman, will probably file its paperwork soon. The lab recently published a utopian plan for the social contract after (or, rather, under) AI.
马斯克正赶在其他两位同样具有千禧年主义世界观的‘先知’之前上市。Anthropic本周提交了上市文件。其老板达里奥·阿莫代伊大肆宣扬公司神话模型的破坏性潜力，该模型至今未公开。山姆·奥特曼领导的OpenAI可能很快也会提交文件。该实验室最近发布了一个关于AI之后（更确切地说，在AI统治下）社会契约的乌托邦计划。
The best of times, the worst of times
最好的时代，最坏的时代