Since the dawn of
human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to cope with work
that is dangerous, boring, onerous, or just plain nasty. That compulsion has
culminated in robotics - the science of conferring various human capabilities
on machines.
A. пустоRobots have quietly infiltrated our lives. The modern world is
increasingly populated by quasi-intelligent gizmos whose presence we barely
notice but whose creeping ubiquity has removed much human drudgery. Our
factories hum to the rhythm of robot assembly arms. Our banking is done at
automated teller terminals that thank us with rote politeness for the
transaction. Our subway trains are controlled by tireless robo-drivers. Our
mine shafts are dug by automated moles, and our nuclear accidents - such as
those at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl - are cleaned up by robotic muckers
fit to withstand radiation.
Such is the scope of uses envisioned by Karel Capek, the Czech playwright who
coined the term ‘robot’ in 1920 (the word ‘robota’ means ‘forced labor’ in
Czech). As progress accelerates, the experimental becomes the exploitable at
record pace.
B. пустоHuman skills have been heightened with the help of robotics. Other
innovations promise to extend the abilities of human operators. Thanks to the
incessant miniaturisation of electronics and micro­mechanics, there are already
robot systems that can perform some kinds of brain and bone surgery with
submillimeter accuracy - far greater precision than highly skilled physicians
can achieve with their hands alone. At the same time, techniques of
long-distance control will keep people even farther from hazard. In 1994 a ten-
foot-tall NASA robotic explorer called Dante, with video-camera eyes and with
spider-like legs, scrambled over the menacing rim of an Alaskan volcano while
technicians 2,000 miles away in California watched the scene by satellite and
controlled Dante’s descent.
C. пустоOriginal predictions have been revised. But if robots are to reach the next stage of
labour-saving utility, they will have to operate with less human supervision
and be able to make at least a few decisions for themselves - goals that pose a
formidable challenge. ‘While we know how to tell a robot to handle a specific
error,’ says one expert, ‘we can’t yet give a robot enough common sense to
reliably interact with a dynamic world.’ Indeed the quest for true artificial
intelligence (Al) has produced very mixed results. Despite a spasm of initial
optimism in the 1960s and 1970s, when it appeared that transistor circuits and
microprocessors might be able to perform in the same way as the human brain by
the 21st century, researchers lately have extended their forecasts by decades
if not centuries.
D. пустоThere are judgements that robots cannot make. What they
found, in attempting to model thought, is that the human brain’s roughly one
hundred billion neurons are much more talented - and human perception far more
complicated - than previously imagined. They have built robots that can
recognise the misalignment of a machine panel by a fraction of a millimeter in
a controlled factory environment. But the human mind can glimpse a rapidly
changing scene and immediately disregard the 98 per cent that is irrelevant, instantaneously
focusing on the woodchuck at the side of a winding forest road or the single
suspicious face in a tumultuous crowd. The most advanced computer systems on
Earth can’t approach that kind of ability, and neuroscientists still don’t know
quite how we do it.
E. пустоSome success has resulted from observing how the brain functions. Nonetheless, as information theorists,
neuroscientists, and computer experts pool their talents, they are finding ways
to get some life like intelligence from robots. One method renounces the
linear, logical structure of conventional electronic circuits in favour of the
messy, ad hoc arrangement of a real brain’s neurons. These ‘neural networks’ do
not have to be programmed. They can ‘teach’ themselves by a system of feedback
signals that reinforce electrical pathways that produced correct responses and,
conversely, wipe out connections that produced errors. Eventually, the net
wires itself into a system that can pronounce certain words or distinguish
certain shapes.
F. пустоScientists are examining the humanistic possibilities. In other
areas researchers are struggling to fashion a more natural relationship between
people and robots in the expectation that some day machines will take on some
tasks now done by humans in, say, nursing homes. This is particularly important
in Japan, where the percentage of elderly citizens is rapidly increasing. So experiments
at the Science University of Tokyo have created a ‘face robot’ - a life-size,
soft plastic model of a female head with a video camera imbedded in the left
eye - as a prototype. The researchers’ goal is to create robots that people
feel comfortable around. They are concentrating on the face because they
believe facial expressions are the most important way to transfer emotional
messages. We read those messages by interpreting expressions to decide whether
a person is happy, frightened, angry, or nervous. Thus the Japanese robot is
designed to detect emotions in the person it is ‘looking at’ by sensing changes
in the spatial arrangement of the person’s eyes, nose, eyebrows, and mouth. It
compares those configurations with a database of standard facial expressions
and guesses the emotion. The robot then uses an ensemble of tiny pressure pads
to adjust its plastic face into an appropriate emotional response.
G. пусто Are we expecting too much from one robot? Other labs are taking a different approach, one
that doesn’t try to mimic human intelligence or emotions. Just as computer
design has moved away from one central mainframe in favour of myriad individual
workstations - and single processors have been replaced by arrays of smaller
units that break a big problem into parts that are solved simultaneously - many
experts are now investigating whether swarms of semi-smart robots can generate
a collective intelligence that is greater than the sum of its parts. That’s
what beehives and ant colonies do, and several teams are betting that legions
of mini-critters working together like an ant colony could be sent to explore
the climate of planets or to inspect pipes in dangerous industrial situations.From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for
each paragraph.