A machine can now not only beat you at chess, it can also outperform you in debate. Last week, in a public debate in San Francisco, a software program called Project Debater beat its human opponents, including Noa Ovadia, Israel’s former national debating champion.
Brilliant though it is, Project Debater has some weaknesses. It takes sentences from its library of documents and prebuilt arguments and strings them together. This can lead to the kinds of errors no human would make. Such wrinkles will no doubt be ironed out, yet they also point to a fundamental problem. As Kristian Hammond, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University, put it: “There’s never a stage at which the system knows what it’s talking about.”
What Hammond is referring to is the question of meaning, and meaning is central to what distinguishes the least intelligent of humans from the most intelligent of machines. A computer works with symbols. Its program specifies a set of rules to transform one string of symbols into another. But it does not specify what those symbols mean. Indeed, to a computer, meaning is irrelevant. Humans, in thinking, talking, reading and writing, also work with symbols. But for humans, meaning is everything. When we communicate, we communicate meaning. What matters is not just the outside of a string of symbols, but the inside too, not just how they are arranged but what they mean.
Meaning emerges through a process of social interaction, not of computation, interaction that shapes the content of the symbols in our heads. The rules that assign meaning lie not just inside our heads, but also outside, in society, in social memory, social conventions and social relations. It is this that distinguishes humans from machines. And that’s why, however astonishing Project Debater may seem, the tradition that began with Socrates and Confucius will not end with artificial intelligence.
Why does the author mention Noa Ovadia in the first paragraph?
A.To explain the use of a software program. |
B.To show the cleverness of Project Debater. |
C.To introduce the designer of Project Debater. |
D.To emphasize the fairness of the competition. |
Imagine you can open your fridge, open an app on your phone and immediately know which items will go bad soon. This is one of the applications that a new technology developed by engineers at the University of California San Diego would enable.
The technology combines a chip (芯片) integrated into product packaging and a software update on your phone. The phone becomes capable of identifying objects based on signals the chip sends out from specific frequencies, in this case Bluetooth or WiFi. In an industrial setting, a smartphone equipped with the software update could be used as a radio frequency identification (RFID) reader.
The work uses breakthroughs in backscatter (反向散射) communication, which uses signals already generated by your smartphone and re-directs them back in a format your phone can understand. Effectively, this technique uses less power than the latest technology to generate WiFi signals.
The custom chip, which is roughly the size of a grain of sand and costs only a few pennies to produce, needs so little power that it can be entirely powered by LTE signals, a technique for wireless broadband communication for mobile devices. The chip turns Bluetooth signals into WiFi signals, which can in turn be detected by a smartphone with that specific software update.
The technology’s broader promise is the development of devices that do not need batteries because they can harvest power from LTE signals instead. This in turn would lead to devices that are significantly less expensive that last longer, said Dinesh Bharadia, one of the paper’s senior authors.
“E-waste, especially batteries, is one of the biggest problems the planet is facing, after climate change,” Bharadia said.
For future research, the team will integrate this technology into other projects to demonstrate its capabilities, and they also hope to commercialize it, either through a startup or through an industry partner.
【小题1】How does the chip interact with the phone?A.By providing power for the phone. | B.By producing LTE signals for the phone. |
C.By giving Bluetooth signals to the phone. | D.By sending WiFi signals back to the phone. |
A.Reducing e-waste. | B.Making batteries cheap. |
C.Supplying power to LTE signals. | D.Decreasing the cost of LTE signals. |
Now, an increasing number of cities are suspending recycling services, partly out of fear that workers might contact the coronavirus from one another while sorting through used water bottles, food containers and boxes. One solution: Let robots do the job.
Since the coronavirus took hold in the United States last month, AMP Robotics has seen a “significant” increase in orders for its robots that use artificial intelligence to sort through recycled material, and weed out trash. Some facilities that were looking at getting one or two robots are now saying, “We need quite a bit more.” The Colorado company’s chief executive, Matanya Horowitz said, “It’s all moving quite fast.”
Before the pandemic, automation had been gradually replacing human work in a range of jobs, from call centers to warehouses and grocery stores, as companies looked to cut labor costs and improve profit.
But labor and robotics experts say social-distancing directives, which are likely to continue in some form after the crisis become less strong, could cause more industries to accelerate their use of automation. And long-lasting worries about job losses or a broad unease about having machines control vital aspects of daily life could disappear as society sees the benefits of restructuring workplaces in ways that minimize close human contact.
Recycling is one industry that may be altered permanently by the pandemic. Some workers, who earn as little as $10 an hour, have been concerned about coming to work during the crisis and some cities have been competing to find enough protective gear (防护装备) for all of their employees. Federal health officials have assured them that the risks of transmission from household refuse is low. But workers in recycling facilities often work side by side sorting material, making social distancing difficult.
At AMP Robotics, executives like Mr. Horowitz say their robots will enable recycling facilities to space out their employees, who stand at conveyor belts weeding through the used plastic and paper.
【小题1】How do people feel about automation after the pandemic?A.Panicked. | B.Doubtful. | C.Appreciative. | D.Unconcerned. |
A.Sorting out recycled material. | B.Minimizing close human contact. |
C.Replacing the jobs of cheap labor. | D.Producing enough protective gear. |
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