Sensors Will Surround You

The home of the future will be filled with sensors that collect data about all the activity that goes on inside. Systems in the house will then use that information to understand your needs.

Already, certain washing machines can assess the size of each load—and how dirty the clothes are —    1     (determine) how much water and detergent (清洁剂) to use. A company called June makes an “intelligent oven” that will use sensors and cameras to figure out what kind of food you     2    (prepare), then adjust the temperature and cooking method accordingly. Down the road, smart surfaces all cover the house will respond to     3     is placed on them: A counter top could help keep a cup of coffee warm, or make sure a beer stays ice-cold.

Your house will know not just whether someone is home but who that someone is.     4    (exist) home-security cameras like the Netatmo Welcome can identify family members upon arrival, and let you know through your smartphone when an unfamiliar face     5     (detect). In the future, such systems will use not just facial-recognition software but also data from biometric (生物特征的) sensors, like fingerprints and heartbeats, to identify people. And     6     your house knows who’s home, it can automatically implement their preferences for lighting, temperature, music, and so on. This technology will also let you inside in the first place: you     7     not carry the key as the front door can recognize you.

Of course, a home     8     tracks you so closely will be a little dangerous, too. Just think of all that data in the cloud detailing the movements and habits of your family---a second-by-second record that sustains years or even decades.     9    (use) appropriately, that information will make your household run like a machine. However,     10     access to your home’s data, a thief could figure out when you’re likely to be in the house. Then again, your house will probably know how and when to call for help.

Baby Steps Toward Autonomy…

Companies, like Google and Tesla, didn't even exist when Toyota introduced the Prius in1997. However, they have become major     11     in the auto industry recently. Both of them aim to introduce fully autonomous cars ---that is, cars that drive themselves---within the next several years.

Self-driving cars are expected to be much safer than human-driven ones. But even if the first robot cars     12     the roads in the next few years, most of us probably won't give up driving entirely for at least another 15 or 20 years. In the meantime,     13     cars will gradually take over certain aspects of driving.

Companies have been adding     14     features to cars since the 1990s---things like adaptive cruise control, which uses sensors to adjust a car's speed based on the traffic in front of it, and automated parallel parking. Some cars automatically stop—or at least slow down—if a driver doesn't step on the brake in time to avoid a crash. In a certain model developed in 2017, the driver will be able to change     15     simply by hitting the turn signal for two seconds (the car will take care of the rest). Within a few years, cars may be able to determine when an accident is likely and make     16    to the cabin---moving seats, closing windows , retracting the steering wheel.

Even better than preparing for a crash, of course, is     17    one. Some vehicles     18     warnings when they detect, through cameras and sensors, that a driver is getting sleepy. Future cars might take over for     19     drivers---or automatically pull to the side of the road and shut down. Biometrics(生物识别技术）could aid this process. If a car has sensors that can measure a driver's breath and heart rate, it could     20     into self-driving mode when a driver has a heart attack.

While many of our friends are on holiday in foreign places this summer, our family will be staying at home to get away from it all, as we have done for the last five years. We generally just wander about at home and catch up with some reading. The kids are old enough to go off on their own and often go to the local park or open-air pool. When we have visitors, we might go on the day trip somewhere. On the whole, though, we don’t bother going much beyond our local area. It’s a pattern we’re going to stick to for the foreseeable future for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, it’s just much more relaxing. You don’t have any of the inconveniences and annoyances which are so often associated with travelling. And that’s not to mention the kids asking ‘Are we there yet?’ every two minutes or ‘Do we HAVE to go to the museum?’ Honestly, there’s nothing like dragging a couple of teenagers round some Roman remains to put you off that kind of thing for life. All these would inevitably wind me up, which in turn would lead to a quarrel where I would complain about how ungrateful they were, and how anyone else would leap at the chance to see the places we were taking them, and then I’d threaten them that next time we’d just stay at home! Well, finally I carried out the threat—and everyone’s far, far happier!

If the truth be told, I can’t say I ever really enjoyed going sightseeing anyway. I think we were going on holiday simply out of habit and going sightseeing out of some weird sense of duty. I felt it was what you ought to do when you go abroad and that it would be education for the kids. Most of the time, though, these places actually just left me cold. Even the really big monuments, which are genuinely impressive, didn’t move me in the way I expected. Take the Pyramids. I’d always wanted to go and see them. I’d imagined myself traveling through the desert on a camel to reach them, the sun beating down on my back. The reality, when I finally went there, was that I only had to walk through the streets of Cairo in a taxi to reach them. While they are hugely impressive achievements of engineering, you have to battle with crowds of tourists to get anywhere near them, fighting off the crowds of locals as they shout for business, persuading you to change money or to take a camel ride. I don’t blame these people—they’re just trying to earn a living—but frankly, I could’ve done without it and, for me at least, it meant the Pyramids didn’t live up to my expectations.

As the UK personal debt breaks the one trillion pound mark, four people talked to Channel 9 News Online about debt.

I see the government says it wants to encourage small businesses. What a joke! The whole financial system is in favour of the big boys and they always just want to protect their interests. My gardening business had cash-flow problems last year, which I meant I needed a temporary loan to pay my staff. My bank just refused point blank to extend my credit. My business ended up going to the wall. Now I open the paper today and I see some cable company is negotiating with the banks to restructure £12 billion of debt. There’s no justice.

My parents had problems with debt, which meant I couldn’t get a credit card before I left home and I believe I wouldn’t get one when I did leave home. But then you get out into the big bad world and you’re just surrounded by temptation. A few years ago, I was persuaded to celebrate New Year in Egypt. I took out a loan to pay for the holiday and cover my expenses and then I got a credit ‘just for emergencies’. The next thing I knew I’d spent £3,000 on the card. I tried to deal with the debt by transferring the money onto another credit card, but by then I’d got into the habit of spending and I ran up a debt on that card too. Over the next two or three years, things just got completely out of hand, and now I’m £38,000 in debt.

All that ‘never a borrower nor a lender be’ stuff is all just rubbish, if you ask me. There isn’t a successful businessman in the world who hasn’t had to borrow money to either get started or to expand. If you worry about what you owe, if you let it play on your mind, you’ll never take the risks you need to take in order to be successful.

We borrowed a few thousand pounds off my parents-in-law to buy our house and now I just wish we hadn’t. It’s just something they constantly hold over us and it’s caused a lot of problems --- like last year when we said we weren’t going to stay at Christmas. My mother-in-law got all upset saying ‘You’re so ungrateful. All the things we’ve done for you and you just throw it back in our faces.’

As is often the case, technology eliminates old jobs, but it also creates new ones---the job title radiology technician(放射技师), for example, has been included in data only since 1990. Transitioning to a new type of work is never easy, however, and it might be particularly difficult for many in the service industry. New jobs that arise due to the development of technology tend to require skills that laid-off workers don’t have. A college education helps protect workers from automation, enabling them to develop the kind of skills, judgment, and problem-solving abilities that robots can’t match. Yet nearly 80 percent of workers in food preparation and service-related occupations have a high-school diploma or less, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The better hope for workers might be that automation helps the food-service industry continue to develop. Because of its app that allows online ordering, Panera is now processing more orders overall, which means it needs more total workers to fulfill customer demand. Starbucks customers who use the chain’s app return more frequently than those who don’t, and the greater efficiency that online ordering allows has increased sales at busy stores during peak hours. Starbucks employed 8 percent more people in the U.S. in 2016 than it did in 2015, the year it launched the app.

Of course, whether automation is a net positive for workers in restaurants, and not just a competitive advantage for one chain over another (more business for machine-enabled Panera, less for the Luddites at the local deli), will depend on whether an improved customer experience makes Americans more likely to dine out, rather than brown-bagging it.

That could be the case. James Bessen, an economist at Boston University School of Law, found that as the number of ATMs in America increased fivefold from 1990 to 2010, the number of bank tellers (出纳员) also grew. Bessen believes that ATMs drove demand for consumer banking: No longer restricted by a branch’s limited hours, consumers used banking services more frequently, and people who were unbanked opened accounts to take advantage of the new technology. Although each branch employed fewer tellers, banks added more branches, so the number of tellers grew overall. And as machines took over many basic cash-handling tasks, the nature of the tellers’ job changed. They were now tasked with talking to customers about products---a certificate of deposit, an auto loan---which in turn made them more valuable to their employers. “It’s not clear that automation in the restaurant industry will lead to job losses,” said Bessen.