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  3. 2050 and Immortality Is Within Our Grasp Aeroplanes will be too afraid to crash, yoghurts will wish you good morning before

2050 and Immortality Is Within Our Grasp Aeroplanes will be too afraid to crash, yoghurts will wish you good morning before

admin2013-07-11  86
问题                 2050 and Immortality Is Within Our Grasp
    Aeroplanes will be too afraid to crash, yoghurts will wish you good morning before being eaten and human consciousness will be stored on supercomputers, promising immortality for all. These fantastic claims are not made by a science fiction writer or a crystal ball gazing madman. They are the deadly earnest predictions of Ian Pearson, head of the futurology unit at BT.
    "If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it’s not a major career problem," Pearson told The Observer. "If you’re rich enough then by 2050 it’s feasible. If you’re poor you’ll probably have to wait until 2075 or 2080 when it’s routine. We are very serious about it. That’s how fast this technology is moving: 45 years is a hell of a long time in IT."
    The world’s fastest computer, IBM’s Blue Gene, can perform 70. 72 trillion calculations per second and is accelerating all the time. But anyone who believes in the uniqueness of consciousness or the soul will find Pearson’s next suggestion hard to swallow. "We’re already looking at how you might structure a computer that could possibly become conscious. There are quite a lot of us now who believe it’s entirely feasible."
    In the shorter term, Pearson identifies the next phase of progress as " ambient intelligence": chips with everything. He explained: "For example, if you have a pollen count sensor in your car you take some antihistamine before you get out. Chips will come small enough that you can start impregnating them into the skin. We’re talking about video tattoos as very, very thin sheets of polymer that you just literally stick on to the skin and they stay there for several days. You could even build in cellphones and connect it to the network, use it as a video phone and download videos or receive emails."
    The next age, he predicts, will be that of "simplicity" in around 2013-2015. This is where the IT has actually become mature enough that people will be able to drive it without having to go on a training course. "Forget this notion that you have to have one single chip in the computer which does everything. Why not just get a stack of little self-organizing chips in a box and they’ll hook up and do it themselves. It won’t be able to get any viruses because most of the operating system will be stored in hardware which the hackers can’t write to. If your machine starts going wrong, you just push a button and it’s reset to the factory setting."
    Pearson’s third age is "virtual worlds" in around 2020. "We will spend a lot of time in virtual space, using high quality, 3D, immersive, computer generated environments to socialise and do business in. When technology gives you a life-size 3D image and the links to your nervous system allow you to shake hands, it’s like being in the other person’s office. It’s impossible to believe that won’t be the normal way of communicating."
To which of the following would Pearson most likely agree?
选项 A、Soon the wealthy will be able to download their consciousness into computers.
B、Next generation technologies will adjust to communication and emotion.
C、It’s possible that we could have computers smarter than human beings.
D、Ambient intelligence will be the first step in making conscious computers.
答案B
解析 本题考查文中人物观点。从“非常担心自己坠毁的飞机、会问候的乳酪、有意识的电脑、虚拟世界”可以看出，皮尔逊预测未来技术朝着情感和交流方向发展。因此[B]正确。第二段中，皮尔逊谈到富人比穷人可以更早地实现将人的思想下载到机器上，但是皮尔逊并没有表示这个时间是短暂的。相反，该段末句中他提到，45年(即实现思想下载的时间)在IT业中是很长的一段时间。因此[A]不正确。“情景智能”和“有意识的电脑”分别属于人工智能发展的不同阶段，两者没有必然的联系，排除[D]。[C]无从推知。
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