We are living in a world where technology is never a neutral tool for achieving human ends. Technological innovations reshape people as they use these innovations to control their environment. Artificial intelligence, for example, is altering humanity.
While the term AI arouses anxieties about killer robots or catastrophic levels of unemployment, there are other deeper implications. As AI increasingly shapes the human experience, how does this change what it means to be human? Central to the problem is a person’s capacity to make choices, particularly judgments that have moral implications. Aristotle argued that the capacity for making practical judgments depends on regularly making them—on habit and practice. We see the emergence of machines as substitute judges in a variety of everyday contexts as a potential threat to people learning how to effectively exercise judgment themselves.
In the workplace, managers routinely make decisions about who to hire or fire and which loan to approve. These are areas where algorithm (算法) is replacing human judgment, and so people who might have had the chance to develop practical judgment in these areas no longer will.
Recommendation engines, which are increasingly popular in people’s consumption of culture, may serve to restrict choice and minimize luck. By presenting consumers with algorithmically selected choices of what to watch, read, stream and visit next, companies are replacing human taste with machine taste. In one sense, this is helpful. After all, machines can survey a wider range of choices than any individual is likely to have the time or energy to do on their own.
Algorithms could soon—if they don’t already-have a better idea about which show you’d like to watch next and which job candidate you should hire than you do. One day,humans may even find a way for machines to make these decisions without some of the prejudices that humans typically display.
But unpredictability is part of how people understand themselves and part of what people like about themselves. From this aspect, humanity is in the process of losing something significant. As they become more and more predictable, the creatures living in the AI world will become less and less like us.
12. Why does the author cite Aristotle’s words in paragraph 2?
| A．To present a fact. | B．To explain a rule |
| C．To clarify a concept. | D．To illustrate a viewpoint. |
13. What may result from increasing application of recommendation engines in our consumption of culture?
| A．Consumers will actually enjoy better luck. |
| B．Consumers will have much limited choice. |
| C．Humans will develop tastes similar to machines’. |
| D．Humans will find it easier to decide what to enjoy. |
14. Why does the author say the creatures living in AI world will become increasingly unlike us?
| A．They will not be able to understand themselves as we can do today. |
| B．They will lose what their ancestors were proud of about themselves. |
| C．They will lose the most significant human element of being intelligent. |
| D．They will no longer possess the human characteristic of being unpredictable. |
15. What can be the best title for the passage?
| A．AI is reshaping humanity. | B．AI is affecting moral judgments. |
| C．AI is becoming more predictable. | D．AI is causing massive unemployment. |
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