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  3. 【61】 Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to cope with work that is dangerous, boring,

【61】 Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to cope with work that is dangerous, boring,

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问题      【61】 Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to cope with work that is dangerous, boring, burdensome, or just plain nasty. That compulsion has resulted in robotics--the science of conferring various human capabilities on machines. And if scientists have yet to create the mechanical version of science fiction, they have begun to come close.
     【62】 As a result, the modern world is increasingly populated by intelligent gizmos whose presence we barely notice but whose universal existence has removed much human labor. Our factories hum to the rhythm of robot assembly arms. Our banking is done at automated teller terminals that thank us with mechanical politeness for the transaction. Our subway trains are controlled by tireless robot-drivers. 【63】 And thanks to the continual miniaturization of electronics and micro-mechanics, 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.
     But if robots are to reach the next stage of laborsaving 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 real challenge. "While we know how to tell a robot to handle a specific error," says Dave Lavery, manager of a robotics program at NASA, we can’t yet give a robot enough common sense to reliably interact with a dynamic world.
     Indeed the quest for true artificial intelligence has produced very mixed results. 【64】 De spite a spell of initial optimism in the 1960s and 1970s when it appeared that transistor circuits and microprocessors might be able to copy the action of the human brain by the year 2010, re searchers lately have begun to extend that forecast by decades if not centuries.
     What they found, in attempting to-model thought, is that the human brain’s roughly one hundred billion nerve cells are much more talented--and human perception far more complicated than previously imagined. They have built robots that can recognize the error of a machine panel by a fraction of millimeter in a controlled factory environment. 【65】 But the human mind can glimpse a rapidly changing scene and immediately disregard the 98 percent that is irrelevant, instantaneously focusing on the monkey at the side of a winding forest road or the single suspicious face in a big crowd. The most advanced computer systems on Earth can’t approach that kind of ability, and neuroscientists still don’t quite know how we do it.
【64】
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答案尽管20世纪的60年代和70年代是这一研究的最初乐观时期，当时人们预料到2010年，晶体管电路和微处理器就可以复制人类大脑的活动，但是最近，研究者们已经把这个时限向后推迟了几十年，如果不是几百年的话。
解析 这是一个复合句，句子的主干为：...researchers have begun to extend that fore cast..., 前面是由Despite引导的介词短语Despite a spell of initial optimism…作为全句的状语，后面跟着一个由when引导的定语从句用来修饰1960s and 1970s。a spell一段时间。注意to extend that forecast by decades if not centuries的字面意思是“把那个预言如果不推迟几个世纪也要推迟几个年代”，可以把 forecast引申为“那个预言的时限”。
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