A precise, three-word address for every place on earth
With what3words, Chris Sheldrick and his team have divided the entire planet into three-meter squares and assigned each a unique, three-word identifier, like famous.splice.writers or blocks.evenly.breed, giving a precise address to the billions of people worldwide who don't have one. In this quick talk about a big idea, Sheldrick explains the economic and political implications of giving everyone an accurate address -- from building infrastructure to sending aid to disaster zones to delivering hot pizza.
1. According to the UN, billions of people still live without an address. The economist Hernando de Soto said, "Without an address, you live outside the law. You might as well not exist." I'm here to tell you how my team and I are trying to change that.
根据联合国的数据，数十亿人仍然生活在没有地址的地方。经济学家赫尔南多·德·索托曾说：“没有地址，你就生活在法律之外，你基本可以算是不存在。”我在这里要告诉你们，我的团队和我是如何尝试改变这一现状的。
2. If you go to an online map and look at a favela in Brazil or a township in South Africa, you'll see a few streets but a lot of empty space. But if you flip to satellite view, there are thousands of people, homes and businesses in this vast, unmapped and unaddressed spaces. In Ghana's capital, Accra, there are numbers and letters scrawled onto the sides of walls, where they piloted address systems but not finished them. But these places, these unaddressed places, hold huge economic potential.
如果你在在线地图上查看巴西的贫民窟或南非的乡镇，你会看到一些街道，但更多的是大量空白区域。但如果你切换到卫星视图，你会发现在这些广阔的、未绘制地图和未标记地址的空间中，有成千上万的人、住宅和企业。在加纳首都阿克拉，墙上涂写着数字和字母，他们试行了地址系统，但没有完成。但这些地方，这些没有地址的地方，拥有巨大的经济潜力。
3. Here's why the issue of addressing stuck with me. I worked in the music business for 10 years, and what you may not know about the music world is that every day, people struggle with the problems of addressing. So from the musicians who have to find the gigs to the production companies who bring the equipment, everyone somehow always gets lost. We even had to add someone to our schedules who was the person you called when you thought you'd arrived but then realized you hadn't. And we had some pretty bad days, like in Italy, where a truck driver unloaded all the equipment an hour north of Rome, not an hour south of Rome, and a slightly worse day where a keyboard player called me and said, "Chris, don't panic, but we may have just sound-checked at the wrong people's wedding."
这就是为什么地址问题对我来说如此重要。我在音乐行业工作了10年，你可能不知道音乐界的情况是，每天人们都在努力解决地址问题。从需要找到演出场地的音乐家到提供设备的制作公司，每个人都不知怎的总会迷路。我们甚至不得不在日程安排中增加一个人，当你认为你已经到达了但实际上没有到达时，你可以打电话给这个人。我们经历了一些非常糟糕的日子，比如在意大利，一位卡车司机将所有设备卸在了罗马以北一个小时的地方，而不是以南一个小时的地方；还有稍微更糟糕的一天，一位键盘手打电话给我说：“克里斯，不要惊慌，但我们可能刚刚在别人的婚礼上做了声音检查。”
4. So not long after the fated Rome event, I chatted this through with a friend of mine who is a mathematician, and we thought it was a problem we could do something about. We thought, well, we could make a new system, but it shouldn't look like the old system. We agreed that addresses were bad. We knew we wanted something very precise, but GPS coordinates, latitude and longitude, were just too complicated.
在那次命运多舛的罗马事件不久之后，我与我的一位数学家朋友讨论了这个问题，我们认为这是我们可以采取行动解决的问题。我们认为，我们可以创建一个新的系统，但它不应该像旧系统那样。我们一致认为现有的地址系统很糟糕。我们知道我们想要一些非常精确的东西，但GPS坐标、纬度和经度实在是太复杂了。
5. So we divided the world into three-meter squares. The world divides into around 57 trillion three-meter squares, and we found that there are enough combinations of three dictionary words that we could name every three-meter square in the world uniquely with just three words. We used 40,000 words, so that's 40,000 cubed, 64 trillion combinations of three words, which is more than enough for the 57-trillion-odd three-meter squares, with a few spare. So that's exactly what we did. We divided the world into three-meter squares, gave each one a unique, three-word identifier -- what we call a three-word address. So for example, right here, I'm standing at mustards.coupons.pinup, but over here ... I'm standing at pinched.singulary.tutorial.
所以我们将世界划分为三米见方的正方形。世界可以划分为大约57万亿个三米见方的正方形，我们发现有足够的三个字典词的组合，我们可以用仅仅三个词为世界上每一个三米见方的正方形唯一地命名。我们使用了4万个词汇，也就是4万的三次方，64万亿个三词组合，这足以为57万亿个三米见方的正方形命名，还有剩余。所以这就是我们所做的。我们将世界划分为三米见方的正方形，给每一个正方形一个独特的三个词的标识符——我们称之为三词地址。例如，就在这儿，我站在“mustards.coupons.pinup”，但在那边……我站在“pinched.singulary.tutorial”。
6. But we haven't just done this in English. We thought it was essential that people should be able to use this system in their own language. So far, we've built it into 14 languages, including French, Swahili and Arabic, and we're working on more now, like Xhosa, Zulu and Hindi.
但我们不仅仅用英语这样做。我们认为人们应该能够用自己的语言使用这个系统是至关重要的。到目前为止，我们已经将其构建到14种语言中，包括法语、斯瓦希里语和阿拉伯语，我们现在正在开发更多的语言，如科萨语、祖鲁语和印地语。
7. But this idea can do a lot more than just get my musicians to their gigs on time. If the 75 percent of countries that struggle with reliable addressing started using three-word addresses, there's a stack of far more important applications. In Durban, South Africa, an NGO called Gateway Health have distributed 11,000 three-word address signs to their community, so the pregnant mothers, when they go into labor, can call the emergency services and tell them exactly where to pick them up from, because otherwise, the ambulances have often taken hours to find them. In Mongolia, the National Post Service have adopted the system and are now doing deliveries to many people's houses for the first time. The UN are using it to geotag photos in disaster zones so they can deliver aid to exactly the right place. Even Domino's Pizza are using it in the Caribbean, because they haven't been able to find customers' homes, but they really want to get their pizza to them while it's still hot.
但这个想法能做的远不止是及时将我的乐手们送到他们的演出现场。如果那些在可靠地址方面存在困难的75%的国家开始使用三词地址，那么还有许多更为重要的应用。在南非德班，一个名为Gateway Health的非政府组织向他们的社区分发了11,000个三词地址标志，这样孕妇临产时可以打电话给紧急服务，并告诉他们确切的接送地点，因为否则，救护车经常要花几个小时才能找到她们。在蒙古，国家邮政服务已经采用了这个系统，现在他们第一次为许多人的家庭提供送货服务。联合国正在使用它来对灾区的照片进行地理标记，以便他们能够将援助送到完全正确的地方。即使是多米诺比萨也在加勒比地区使用它，因为他们一直找不到客户的家，但他们真的想把披萨在还热的时候送到客户手中。
8. Shortly, you'll be able to get into a car, speak the three words, and the car will navigate you to that exact spot. In Africa, the continent has leapfrogged phone lines to go to mobile phones, bypassed traditional banks to go straight to mobile payments. We're really proud that the post services of three African countries -- Nigeria, Djibouti and Côte d'Ivoire, have gone straight to adopting three-word addresses, which means that people in those countries have a really simple way to explain where they live, today.
不久后，你将能够进入汽车，说出这三个词，汽车就会引导你到达那个确切的位置。在非洲，这个大陆已经跳过了电话线，直接使用移动电话，绕过了传统银行，直接使用移动支付。我们非常自豪，三个非洲国家的邮政服务——尼日利亚、吉布提和科特迪瓦，已经直接采用了三词地址，这意味着这些国家的人们现在有一个非常简单的方式来解释他们居住的地方。
9. For me, poor addressing was an annoying frustration, but for billions of people, it's a huge business inefficiency, severely hampers their infrastructure growth, and can cost lives. We're on a mission to change that, three words at a time. Thank you.
对我个人而言，糟糕的地址系统是一个令人烦恼的问题，但对于数十亿人来说，它是一个巨大的商业低效问题，严重阻碍了他们的基础设施发展，并可能危及生命。我们正在执行一项使命，一次改变三个词。谢谢！