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!

6 . 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?

7 . 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.

8 . Here is a page from a magazine called Future. Read the following information about things that may happen in twenty years.

    1    

Cars will run on solar power and will be much cleaner and safer. For example, if you are too close to another car or if you are driving dangerously, your car will slow down or stop by itself. It not only prevents the pollution of the environment but also decreases the rate road killers.

    2    

New cities will have to be built in the sea. Some cities on water will have two levels (层). People will live on the upper level; the lower level will be used for traffic, shops and factories, which will be a better way of solving the problem of increasing population and cities.

    3    

Biotechnology (生物技术) will make everything we eat better and healthier. Plants without insects or illnesses (病虫害) will be developed. The taste of fruit and vegetables will be better and food will be kept longer. At that time, people will have no need to worry about whether their diet is safe or not, because these foods have been tested again and again. They surely are safe.

Ways of curing illness

Many new ways to cure illnesses will be found. People will use products of genetic engineering (基因产品) to cure more illnesses. However, some new illnesses will appear.