jobs someday. “After all, if a machine can beat humans at Jeopardy, will computers soon be competing with people for knowledge-based jobs?” asks Martin Ford, author of The Lights in the Tunnel in a Fortune magazine article. “If IBM’s hopes for the technology are realized, workers may, in fact, have cause for concern.”
Ford and others argue that computers and robots such as Watson have the potential to replace not only assembly-line jobs, such as the manufacturing positions that dropped nationwide by one-third over the last decade, but the “knowledge worker” jobs of the modern economy, such as radiologists and lawyers. “Many of
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these people will be highly educated professionals who had previously assumed that they were, because of their skills and advanced educations, beneficiaries of the trend toward an increasingly book.
But
Cornell
University
sociologist Trevor Pinch says that warnings about artificial intelligence taking over have missed essential shortcomings of computers for decades. “I would call them friendly monsters,” he says, rather than job-killing ones. “Computers can never experience the things that make us uniquely human, they have never been delayed at
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technological and
globalized world,” Ford argues in his
O’Hare airport long enough to walk around the memorial to Gen. O’Hare, and have that memory stuck in your brain.”
Underneath
the
exaggerated
publicity, the human brain far outperforms computers, and not just in raw
calculating
power,
says
information scholar Martin Hilbert of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. All of the computers in the world taken together possess the computational power of, in all, 62 human brains, he says, based on findings his team reported this month in Science. There are about six billion people alive today.
And they, if things turn out as
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bad as Ford suggests, there is always the solution that Andy Richter settled on - beating anything that resembles the job-threatening Watson with a baseball bat. Let’s hope it doesn’t come down to that.
69. We can learn that Jeopardy! is
________.
A. a newly developed computer program
B. a match between computers and humans
C. a robot built with the least technology
D. a competition between fastest computers
70. Paragraph 3 mainly discusses
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71.
________. A. the threat posed by tech development
B. the potential benefits of digitalization
C. the gap between blue-collar and white-collar jobs D. the way to survive
knowledge-based economy
In paragraph 4, Trevor Pinch is
talking about ________. A.
man’s
advantages
over
computers
B. advantages of computers over man
C. the reliability of computers D. the future development of
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