Do You Think You Will Have Your Own Robot?

When we watch movies about the future, we sometimes see robots. They are usually like human servants. They help with the housework and do jobs like working in dirty or dangerous places.

Today there are already robots working in factories. Some can help to build cars, and they do simple jobs over and over again.     1     Fewer people will do such jobs in the future because they are boring, but robots will never get bored.

Scientists are now trying to make robots look like humans and do the same things as we do. Some robots in Japan can walk and dance. They are fun to watch. However, some scientists believe that although we can make robots move like people,     2     让它们真正像人类一样思考将是很困难的. For example, scientist James White thinks that robots will never be able to wake up and know where they are.     3     但是许多科学家都不同意怀特先生的观点. They think that robots will even be able to talk like humans in 25 to 50 years.

Some scientists believe that there will be more robots in the future.     4     However, they agree it may take hundreds of years. These new robots will have many different shapes. Some will look like humans and others might look like animals. In India, for example, scientists made robots that look like snakes.     5     If buildings fall down with people inside, these snake robots can help look for people under the buildings. This was not possible 20 years ago, but computers and rockets also seemed impossible 100 years ago. We never know what will happen in the future!

5 . It’s a typical day at school. You’re playing soccer with your friends. One of them kicks you the ball and you run for it. You trip. You fly through the air. You land—hard, right on your face! The next moment, you’re in the nurse’s office. Your bleeding nose is being checked by laser sensors (激光传感器) that coming out of a...robot? Has the nurse’s office been taken over by sci-fi aliens (外星人) from outer space?

No. You’ve just been pushed forward 15 years into the future. And it’s a future that Susan Epstein, a computer science professor who teaches artificial intelligence, is really excited to think about. “I am crazy about this kind of thing! You could go up to the robot, put your nose in, and the machine would decide whether you needed to be treated, and how.”

Aside from being cool, an AI nurse has other advantages. It doesn’t need to take vacations. It doesn’t need to get paid a salary. And it might figure out what’s wrong with your nose faster than a human would. There are all kinds of ways that AI could be used to help make us healthier and researchers are studying how to use AI to diagnose (诊断) lung disease, cancer, and more.

Our robot nurse isn’t meant to completely take the place of humans, though. “It would work with real, live nurses and doctors,” says Epstein, “there are things humans are good at, like building trust among members of our own species or comforting someone who’s hurt or sick. A big part of medicine is the relationship between a doctor and a patient.”

Epstein points out that AI programs will never be perfect—no matter how much we might want them to be. But if AI can diagnose a deadly disease more precisely even 10 percent of the time, think of how many lives it could save. “Besides”, says Epstein, “I think there are probably patients who might prefer to have a machine for a doctor!” Would you?

6 . Holding the large and heavy “brick” cellphone he’s credited with inventing 50 years ago,Martin Cooper talks about the future.

Little did he know when he made the first call on a New York City street from a heavy Motorola prototype(原型)that our world would come to be encapsulated on a sleek glass sheath where we search，connect,like and buy.

Cooper says he is an optimist. He believes that advances in mobile technology will continue to transform lives but he is worried about risks smartphones pose to privacy and young people.

“My most negative opinion is we don’t have any privacy anymore because everything about us is now recorded someplace and accessible to somebody who has enough intense desire to get it,” the 94-year-old said in an interview in Barcelona at MWC, the Mobile World Congress, the world’s biggest wireless trade show, where he was getting a lifetime award.

Cooper sees a dark side to the advances, including the risk to children. One idea, he said, is to have“various Internets intended for different audiences.”

Cooper made the first public call from a handheld portable telephone on a Manhattan street on April 3,1973,using a prototype device his team at Motorola had started designing just five months earlier.

Cooper used the Dyna-TAC phone to famously call his opponent at Bell Labs, owned by AT&T. It was literally the world’s first brick phone,weighing 2.5 pounds and measuring 11 inches.

The call helped kick-start the cellphone revolution (革命).

Cooper said he’s “not crazy” about the shape of modern smartphones. He thinks they will develop so that they’ll be “distributed on your body,” possibly as sensors“measuring your health at all times.”

Batteries, he said, might be replaced by human energy.The body makes energy from food,he argues, so it could possibly also power a phone.Instead of holding the phone in the hand, for example, the device could be placed under the skin.

Are all changes good?

It is a commonly held belief that as people get older, they become resistant to change. Their complaints that things used to be better in the past or     1     some new development is no good can be dismissed as the unavoidable thoughts of people who    2     (simple) don't like change and are therefore     3     (able) to see the benefits of progress.

But is this automatically true? Are the views of an older person on a new development always to be disregarded? This would suggest that every new development must be a good     4     and surely that cannot logically be    5     case.

Take    6     (architect) for example. In the 1950s and 1960s, many older British people were highly critical of the new concrete housing blocks that suddenly sprang up in cities,     7     (say) that they were ugly and depressing places to live in. They were     8     (tell) that they were simply being old-fashioned and that they were incapable of appreciating the advantages of these new buildings, which had replaced the streets of small houses that they were familiar with.     9     decades later, these very same blocks were being pulled    10    , as new generations decided they were both ugly and bad for society.