Uncanny Valley  

“怪”谷：网络让我们的生活变得更好吗？ 

billion十亿 

full-time全职的 

Silicon Valley硅谷 

wunderkinds神童 

memoir回忆录  

In the past decade the number of people using the internet has leapt from 1.8bn, or a quarter of the world, to 4.1bn, well over  half. Internet companies grew with their user bases. Ten years ago Facebook had roughly 2,000 employees; today 45,000 people work for it full-time, mostly in Silicon Valley. Google went from 24,000 staff to 119,000 in the same period. Add in other big firms such as Apple and Netflix, dozens of unlisted “unicorns” and thousands of startups, and the head-count in the valley is equal to a fair-sized city.   

Who are these people? A handful are stereotypical wunderkinds, too busy building apps that improve the human condition to waste time on human emotions (or finish their degrees). But many— all the normal folk in sales, marketing, hr, customer support—are like Anna Wiener, the author of “Uncanny Valley”, a memoir about working in the tech industry of the 2010s. Like most people, the condition they mainly want to improve is their own.   

文章来源：Economist