The average person must think the field of artificial intelligence or AI is making great progress. The boss of a top tech company thinks that in search of creating AI that has the flexibility of the human brain, “the game is over”. Don’t be fooled. We should see it in a reasonable way. Machines may someday be as smart as people and perhaps even smarter, but the game is far from over. There is still a large amount of work to be done in making AI machines that can truly understand and reason about the world around them. What we need right now is more basic research to speed it up.
AI is making progress. Artificial images look more and more realistic, and speech recognition can often work in noisy environments. But we are still likely decades away from human-level AI that can understand the true meanings of articles and videos or deal with unexpected difficulties. The field is stuck on the same challenges that scientists have been pointing out for years: getting AI to be reliable and getting it to flexibly deal with unusual situations. Unluckily, the fact is that these systems still fail to work reliably and struggle with new situations.
Although deep learning has advanced the ability of AI machines to recognize patterns in data, it has three main disadvantages. The patterns that it learns are superficial. The results it creates are hard to explain. And the results are difficult to use in the other processes, such as memory and reasoning. As Harvard University computer scientist Leslie Valiant noted, “The central challenge in the future is to unify the formulations (统一公式) of learning and reasoning.” You can’t deal with a person carrying a stop sign if you don’t really understand what a stop sign even is.
It’s time for AI researchers to get out of turning to the media straightly for help, and ask important questions about how to build systems that can learn and reason at the same time.
1. What does the author expect of AI?| A．It’ll make less progress. |
| B．It’ll get less basic research. |
| C．It’ll replace human workforce in all fields. |
| D．It’ll have the real ability to understand and reason. |
| A．Its cost and quality. | B．Its speech and sound. |
| C．Its reliability and flexibility. | D．Its appearance and operation. |
| A．The weaknesses of AI machines. | B．The advances brought out by AI. |
| C．The processes of making AI machines. | D．The scientists working on AI research. |
| A．Keep Away from AI | B．Treat AI Reasonably |
| C．The Use of AI Should Be Reported | D．AI Is Turning to the Media for Help |
相似题推荐
【推荐1】Volunteering Abroad
The following Important Adult Gap Year Questions will answer something you need to know about volunteering abroad
When is the best time to volunteer?
There is no best time to volunteer and most volunteer programmes run all year round. The main question will be climate and volunteer numbers. Ask when the busier and quieter periods are if you would like more or less company to volunteer alongside. Summer months will be popular with students and teachers, whereas between October and May you should expect to share your experience with maturer people of all ages and the self-employed whose business might be slow during winter months. It is not uncommon for the average age on a volunteer project in January to be between 40 and 70.You may also want to check whether it will be summer or winter at your destination. July is the middle of winter in the southern hemisphere.
Do I need experience?
Unless you would like to volunteer in a hospital, you probably won’t need any experience. Many projects need help playing with the children, building new classrooms and mending rooms which are falling down, jobs where the volunteers can get stuck in for a week and can easily be taken over by another volunteer once they’ve left. These are often jobs which wouldn’t get done unless volunteers help.
Can I volunteer doing different things, or just one?
Most sending organisations prefer volunteers to be in the same place going to the same placement throughout their stay. However, each organisation does things differently. Some organisations will allow volunteers to spend a week in a different area of work while others provide a weekly schedule where the volunteer group is taken each day to different locations. Do check you have all the visas you need before your trip if you are travelling to more then one country as you may not be able to pick up visas along the way.
What if I don t speak the language
It’s a bit of a myth that you need to speak the local language to volunteer abroad. Providing there is someone locally who speaks both English and the local language and will be settling you in and supporting during your stay, you should have no problems. Even for teaching, knowing the language won’t give you an advantage. It can even get in the way. Often children will complain they don’t want to practise their own language with their teacher who endlessly repeats “hello” and “what’s your name?” They would rather learn how to say it in English!
1. Which of the following statements is TRUE about the best time to volunteer?| A．It depends on whether the programme is in low season. |
| B．Summer months are better than winter months |
| C．The location of your destination matters a lot |
| D．You can volunteer throughout the year as you like |
| A．ask the sending organisations to help you enter those countries |
| B．make sure that you already have all the visas needed |
| C．pick up all the visas needed one by one along the way |
| D．find some locals to take you across the borders |
| A．academic paper | B．scientific journal |
| C．magazine | D．fiction |
【推荐2】Medicine is notonly a human invention. Many other animals have been known to self-medicate with plants and minerals for infections and other conditions.
Behavioral ecologist Helen Morrogh-Bernard has spent decades studying orangutans (猩猩) and says she has now found evidence they use plants in a medicinal way.
Morrogh and her colleagues watched 10 orangutans occasionally chew a particular plant (which is not part of their normal diet) into a foamy lather (泡沫) and then rub it into their fur. The apes spent up to 45 minutes at a time massaging the mixture onto their upper arms or legs. The researchers believe this behavior is the first known example using a painkiller.
Local people use the same plant, Dracaena cantleyi, to treat aches and pains. Morrogh’s co-authors studied its chemistry. They added extracts (汁) from the plant to human cells that had been grown in a dish and had been artificially stimulated to produce cytokines (细胞因子) that causes inflammation (炎症) and discomfort. The plant extract reduced the production of several types of cytokines, the scientists reported the finding in a study published last November in Scientific Reports.
The results suggest that orangutans use the plant to reduce inflammation and treat pain. Such findings could help identify plants and chemicals that might be useful for human medications.
In creatures such as insects, the ability to self-medicate is almost certainly innate; woolly bear (灯蛾毛虫) infected with flies seek out and eat plant substances poisonous to the flies. But more complex animals may learn such tricks after an initial discovery by one member of their group.
For example, an orangutan may have rubbed the plant on its skin to try to treat parasites (寄生虫) and realized that it also had a pleasant pain-killing effect. That behavior may then have been passed on to other orangutans. Because this type of self-medication is seen only in south-central Borneo, Morrogh says, it was probably learned locally.
1. Why does orangutans chew Dracaena cantleyi?| A．To self medicate. | B．To have their normal diet. |
| C．To scare other animals away. | D．To pass on a message to other orangutans. |
| A．They can help vets treat pets. |
| B．They can help scientists study orangutans. |
| C．They can help botanist learn more about plants. |
| D．They can help people find new resources for human medication. |
| A．natural | B．sociable | C．obtainable | D．professional |
| A．Apes use plant extracts to treat pain. |
| B．Humans and animals have a lot in common. |
| C．A plant has been found useful for human medication. |
| D．Morrogh-Bernard and her colleagues have been observing orangutans. |
【推荐3】Like members of a street gang, male dolphins call on their buddies when it comes time to attack—or, in their case, to catch and defend females. A new study shows that they do this by learning the whistles, of their closest allies—sometimes more than a dozen animals—and remembering who consistently cooperated with them in the past. The findings indicate dolphins have a concept of team membership—previously seen only in humans—and may help reveal how they keep such complicated and tight-connected societies.
Male dolphins typically cooperate as a pair, which researchers call a “first-order alliance.” These small groups work together to find and catch a female. Males also cooperate in second-order alliances consisting of as many as 14 dolphins which defend against opponent(对手) groups attempting to steal the female. Some second-order alliances join together in even larger third-order alliances, providing males in these groups with even better chances of having allies nearby if enemies should attack.
But how do the males keep track of everyone in these complex groups?
Scientists have argued that their whistles are key. Every dolphin learns a unique signature whistle from its mother, which it keeps for life; dolphins recognize and remember each other’s whistles, similar to how we recognize each other’s names.
To further investigate how the male dolphins use their whistles, King and her colleagues turned to a population of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins. The team has tracked the animals with underwater microphones since 2016, enabling them to identify which dolphin produces which whistle.
The researchers expected that males hearing the whistle of their first-order alliance partners would respond most strongly. But when they reviewed the videos, they found the strongest responses came from males in the dolphins’ second-order alliances—animals who had a firm cooperative history of fighting off attackers with them.
“It was so striking,” says King, leading author of the study. “In 90% of experiments, dolphins who heard whistles of second-order alliance members turned immediately and directly toward the speaker.” The findings, she says, suggest dolphins—like humans—have a “social concept of team membership, based on an individual’s previous cooperative investment, rather than how good friends they are.”
1. What’s the main purpose of the first paragraph?| A．To introduce the topic of how dolphins control their complex societies. |
| B．To show the unique way male dolphins attract and keep female dolphins. |
| C．To explain why male dolphins catch and defend females. |
| D．To highlight the concept of team membership of human society. |
| A．Opponents. | B．Relatives. | C．Partners. | D．Enemies. |
| A．Dolphins don’t respond to their first-order alliance partners. |
| B．The result of the study is beyond scientists’ expectation. |
| C．Male dolphins in second-order alliances work together to steal the female. |
| D．Mother dolphins often work together to feed and defend their children. |
| A．Dolphins maintain their societies by making friends with each other. |
| B．The second-order alliance members are in control of dolphins’ societies. |
| C．Dolphins have a lasting friendly relationship among themselves. |
| D．Dolphins’ team membership depends on their cooperation in the past. |
【推荐1】Back in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that with technological change and improvements in productivity, we’d be working only 15 hours a week in the near future. But while working hours have declined by 26%, most of us still work 42.5 hours a week on average, according to Eurostat figures.
One of the things Keynes underestimated is our desire to compete with our peers — a drive that makes us work more than we need to. “We don’t measure productivity by how many acres we’ve harvested, so the amount of working time becomes an indicator.” says Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.
Due to computerization and globalization in the 1980s, managers could demand more of employees under the threat that jobs could be given to someone else, so the pressure increased. And we took it, overwhelmed with the pressure while shouldering the burden all the same at the cost of our health. Psychologist Barbara Killinger writes such a phenomenon in Workaholics: The Respectable Addicts.
But far from delivering productivity, value, or personal fulfillment, overwork has been proven to lead to burnout, stress, poor health, etc. Nevertheless, we persisted — until the fourth Industrial Revolution came along.
The fourth Industrial Revolution has accelerated the move towards automation and AI, especially for jobs with high physical proximity (接近). Economist Dr. Carl Frey predicts that at least 40% of current jobs will be lost to automation by 2050.
There are exceptions. Jobs that involve complex social interactions are beyond current robot skills, such as teaching, cleaning jobs, and jobs that rely on creativity, according to Frey and Osborne.
According to McKinsey, those whose work falls outside the caring, cleaning and creative fields will still work in the future, just differently. In about 60% of occupations, it’s estimated that a third of the tasks can be automated, meaning substantial changes to the way we work. A large-scale study carried out by accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted that over the next 20 years, although 7 million jobs will be lost to AI, 7.2 million new ones will be created as a result. So we will work in the future: we just don’t know what we’ll be doing yet.
1. What do the figures in Paragraph 1 mainly indicate?| A．Our working time failed to decrease as much as predicted. |
| B．Technology keeps changing with the development of society. |
| C．Keynes’ prediction mainly focused on productivity improvement. |
| D．Overwork will result in fierce competition between employees. |
| A．People’s false sense of time. |
| B．People’s awareness of peer competition. |
| C．People’s ignoring the quality of their jobs. |
| D．People’s pressure to increase productivity. |
| A．They argued for fairness. |
| B．They devoted more to their work. |
| C．They tried to escape shouldering the burden. |
| D．They emphasized the importance of their health. |
| A．Counseling service will be paid less attention to. |
| B．More and more cleaners become unemployed in cities. |
| C．A majority of teachers will be replaced by robots. |
| D．The types of jobs with high physical proximity will be transformed. |
| A．Worried. | B．Hopeful. | C．Objective. | D．Indifferent. |
【推荐2】Well, well, well. It looks like robots are now coming for our beloved furry friends. According to a new study, animal robots may be just as effective, if not better, at providing therapeutic(治疗的) benefits to children as real pets. As someone who has both interacted with real dogs and robots, I can tell you that this is quite a bold claim.
Sure, robots may have some benefits over real dogs. They can work for longer hours and won’t cause allergies(过敏) or pass on diseases. But can a robot give you that wet-nosed, slobber-filled experience that a real dog can? I think not.
Now, I’m not saying that robots don’t have their place in therapy. In fact, I can see how an animal robot could be helpful in certain situations where a real dog might not be possible. But let’s not go replacing all the good boys and girls with robots just yet.
As for the study, it’s interesting to see that while the kids said they loved real-life dogs better, they actually spent more time interacting with the robot. I can only imagine that it was doing some pretty impressive tricks, some robots dance or robot jokes maybe, to hold the kids’ attention for that long.
In all seriousness, though, I do think it’s important to consider the welfare of therapy dogs. Visiting hospitals can be stressful and tiring for them.
So, while I may not be ready to trade in my furry friends for robots just yet, I am open to the idea of introducing animal robots into therapy programs. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll all have our own personal robot pets that can provide us with just as much love and companionship as the real thing. But until then, I’ll stick with my trusty furry friends.
1. What is the text?| A．A response to a recent study. |
| B．A summary of a scientific study. |
| C．A news report of a new invention. |
| D．A review on a medical experiment. |
| A．The new study is quite a breakthrough. |
| B．His personal experience supports the study. |
| C．Robots have no therapeutic benefits to children. |
| D．Robots cannot replace real pets at present stage. |
| A．The kids preferred robot pets to real dogs. |
| B．Robots kept the kids’ interest for a longer time. |
| C．The kids’ concentration was effectively improved. |
| D．Robots had more tricks to impress kids than real dogs. |
| A．They can share some of therapy pets’ work. |
| B．They can guarantee the welfare of therapy pets. |
| C．They provide us with just as much love as real pets. |
| D．They are better at releasing patients’ stress and tiredness. |
【推荐3】Within weeks of its launch, ChatGPT started a new global race in artificial intelligence (AI). The chatbot is a part of a fresh wave of generative AI — complicated systems that produce content from text to images — that is set to have a great impact on Big Tech, industries and the future of work in a decade.
As an artificial-intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI, an AI research company, ChatGPT was released in November 2022, which can have conversations, generate poetry, and suggest edits to computer programming code. The second half of its name, GPT, stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. Transformers are specialized algorithms (算法), learning to predict not just the next word in a sentence but also the next sentence in a paragraph and the next paragraph in an essay. This is what allows it to stay on topic for long stretches of text.
ChatGPT is trained on a vast number of articles, websites and social-media posts from the Internet as well as real-time conversations with people. It learns to mimic the grammar and structure of the writing and reflects frequently-used phrases. But it isn’t always accurate: its sources aren’t fact-checked, and it relies on human feedback to improve its accuracy.
OpenAI developed ChatGPT as part of a strategy to build AI software that will help the company turn a profit. In January, Microsoft, its strategic partner, announced a fresh multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI and said it plans to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search app and other products. Google and Baidu are also pushing to launch similar tools.
ChatGPT has reached 100 million users just two months after launch. Despite its sudden burst in popularity, the technology currently has serious limitations and potential risks that include giving misinformation and breaking laws on intellectual property (知识产权).
1. What is ChatGPT able to do?| A．Produce texts. | B．Create pictures. |
| C．Develop robots. | D．Perform operations. |
| A．Define. | B．Introduce. | C．Copy. | D．Ignore. |
| A．To build company image. | B．To improve work efficiency. |
| C．To offer translation service. | D．To make more money. |
| A．AI will dominate human life. | B．ChatGPT should be used properly. |
| C．AI is unlikely to pose risks to people. | D．ChatGPT should be extended to every field. |
