1 . Swimming in an ocean of stars
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It’s my great honor to receive the Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society. Thank you.
I started writing sci-fi because I looked for a way to escape the dull life, and to reach out, with imagination, to the mysterious time and space that I could never truly reach. But then I realized that the world around me became more and more like science fiction, and this process is speeding up. Future is like pouring rain. It reaches us even before we have time to open the umbrella. Meanwhile, when sci-fi becomes reality, it loses all its magic, and that frustrates me. Sci-fi will soon become part of our lives. The only thing I can do, is to push my imagination further to even more distant time and space to hunt for the mysteries of sci-fi. As a sci-fi author, I think my job is to write things down before they get really boring.
This being said, the world is moving in the direction opposite to Clarke’s predictions. In 2001, A Space Odyssey, in the year of 2001, which has already passed, human beings have built magnificent cities in space, and established permanent colonies on the moon, and huge nuclear-powered spacecraft have sailed to Saturn. However, today, in 2018, the walk on the moon has become a distant memory. And the furthest reach of our manned space flights is just as long as the two-hour mileage of a high-speed train passing through my city.
As a sci-fi writer, I have been striving to continue Arthur Clarke’s imagination. I believe that the boundless space is still the best direction and destination for human imagination. I have always written about the magnitude and mysteries of the universe, interstellar expeditions, and the lives and civilizations happening in distant worlds. This remains today, although this may seem childish or even outdated. It says on Arthur Clarke’s epitaph,“He never grew up, but he never stopped growing.”
Many people misunderstand sci-fi as trying to predict the future, but this is not true. It just makes a list of possibilities of what may happen in the future, like displaying a pile of cobblestones for people to see and play with. Science fiction can never tell which scenario of the future will actually become the real future. This is not its job. It’s also beyond its capabilities. But one thing is certain: in the long run, for all these countless possible futures, any future without space travel is gloomy, no matter how prosperous our own planet becomes.
Sci-fi was writing about the age of digital information and it eventually became true. I now look forward to the time when space travel finally becomes the ordinary. By then, Mars and the asteroid belts will be boring places and countless people are building a home over there. Jupiter and its many satellites will be tourist attractions. The only obstacle preventing people from going there for good, will be the crazy price.
But even at that time, the universe is still unimaginably big that even our wildest imagination fails to catch its edge. And even the closest star remains out of reach. The vast ocean of stars can always carry our infinite imagination.
Thank you all.
1. What does the writer mean by the underlined sentence in the second paragraph?| A．Science technology has been developing fast before we realize it. |
| B．What happened in our life was mysterious and beyond our imagination. |
| C．We had a good outlook for the future and were desperate to realize our dream. |
| D．We managed to escape from the boring life and looked forward to the prosperous future. |
| A．What Clarke foresaw is childish and out of date, going against scientific theories. |
| B．It is feasible for human beings to fulfill challenging space missions that Clarke forecast. |
| C．Human beings have deserted imaging and exploring the attractive and boundless space. |
| D．Clarke’s predictions haven’t happened in real life and the reality won’t change very soon. |
| A．What is written in science fiction can never become a reality. |
| B．The writer considers it his duty to create sci-fi with author Clarke. |
| C．Science fiction provides readers with possibilities that future will bring about. |
| D．High price will likely stop humans from dreaming of living on other planets. |
| A．Curious | B．Passionate |
| C．Concerned | D．Suspicious |
2 . No one knows what the future will look like. New technology and climate change might make the world more different than we can possibly imagine. So we had better keep an open mind and hope for the best.
We have no idea what the job market will look like in 2050. It is generally agreed that machine learning and robotics will change almost every line of work – from producing yoghurt to teaching yoga. However, there are conflicting views about the nature of the change and its urgency. Some believe that within a mere decade or two, billions of people will become economically redundant (多余的). Others maintain that even in the long run automation will keep creating new jobs and greater prosperity for all.
So are we on an edge of a terrifying sudden change, or are such forecasts yet another example of ill-founded Luddite hysteria(勒德分子的歇斯底里)? It is hard to say. Fears that automation will create massive unemployment go back to the nineteenth century, and so far they have never materialized. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, for every job lost to a machine at least one new job was created, and the average standard of living has increased dramatically.
Yet there are good reasons to think that this time it is different, and that machine learning will be a real game changer. Humans have two types of abilities – physical and cognitive(认知的). In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in raw physical abilities, while humans still had a great advantage over machines in cognition. Hence as manual jobs in agriculture and industry were automated, new service jobs emerged that required the kind of cognitive skills only humans possessed: learning, analysing, communicating and above all understanding human emotions. However, AI is now beginning to outperform humans in more and more of these skills, including in the understanding of human emotions.
We don’t know of any third field of activity — beyond the physical and the cognitive — where humans will always maintain a secure advantage. It is crucial to realize that the AI revolution is not just about computers getting faster and smarter. It is fuelled by breakthroughs in the life sciences and the social sciences as well. The better we understand the biochemical mechanisms that support human emotions, desires and choices, the better computers can become in analyzing human behavior, predicting human decisions, and replacing human drivers, bankers and lawyers.
In the last few decades, research in neuroscience and behavioural economics allowed scientists to gain a much better understanding of how humans make decisions. It turned out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will, but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Boasting ‘human intuition’(直觉) is actually pattern recognition.
1. The second paragraph tells us about ________.| A．predictions about the role of machine learning in future job market |
| B．the speed at which robotics will take the place of human beings |
| C．the urgency of creating new jobs with the help of automation |
| D．the nature of applying new technology to every line of work |
| A．unidentified | B．badly-managed |
| C．unproven | D．ill-intended |
| A．Lack of job security might force people to pick up machine learning. |
| B．There is possibility that AI can perform a consulting role as a psychologist. |
| C．The use of automation will make humans more needed than ever before. |
| D．A real game changer lies in making computers become faster and smarter. |
| A．AI revolution is similar to the industrial revolution in causing unemployment. |
| B．It’s crucial that humans maintain an advantage in the third field of activity. |
| C．The process of human decision is controlled by free will rather than neurons. |
| D．The nature of preference at first sight is the result of recognizing patterns. |
