年秋季高级口译阅读部分SAQ第二篇原文
I, robot-manager
ROBOTS have been the stuff of science fiction for so long that it is surprisingly hard to see them as the stuff of management fact. A Czech playwright, Karel Capek, gave them their name in 1920 (from the Slavonic word for “work”). An American writer, Isaac Asimov, confronted them with their most memorable dilemmas. Hollywood turned them into superheroes and supervillains. When some film critics drew up lists of Hollywood’s 50 greatest good guys and 50 greatest baddies, the only character to appear on both lists was a robot, the Terminator.
It is time for management thinkers to catch up with science-fiction writers. Robots have been doing menial jobs on production lines since the 1960s. The world already has more than 1m industrial robots. There is now an acceleration in the rates at which they are becoming both cleverer and cheaper: an explosive combination. Robots are learning to interact with the world around them. Their ability to see things is getting ever closer to that of humans, as is their capacity to ingest information and act on it. Tomorrow’s robots will increasingly take on delicate, complex tasks. And instead of being imprisoned in cages to stop them colliding with people and machines, they will be free to wander.
America’s armed forces have blazed a trail here. They now have no fewer than 12,000 robots serving in their ranks. Peter Singer, of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, says mankind’s 5,000-year monopoly on the fighting of war is breaking down. Recent additions to the battlefield include tiny “insects” that perform. reconnaissance missions and giant “dogs” to terrify foes. The Pentagon is also working on the EATR, a robot that fuels itself by eating whatever biomass it finds around it.
But the civilian world cannot be far behind. Who better to unclog sewers or suck up nuclear waste than these remarkable machines? The Japanese have made surprisingly little use of robots to clear up after the recent earthquake, given their world leadership in this area. They say that they had the wrong sort of robots in the wrong places. But they have issued a global call for robotic assistance and are likely to put more robots to work shortly.
As robots advance into the service industries they are starting to look less like machines and more like living creatures. The Paro (made by AIST, a Japanese research agency) is shaped like a baby seal and responds to attention. Honda’s robot, ASIMO, is humanoid and can walk, talk and respond to commands. Roxxxy, an American-made “sex robot”, can be programmed to appeal to all preferences, and (unlike many a real-life spouse) listens to its partner to try to improve its performance.
Until now executives have largely ignored robots, regarding them as an engineering rather than a management problem. This cannot go on: robots are becoming too powerful and ubiquitous. Companies may need to rethink their strategies as they gain access to these new sorts of workers. Do they really need to outsource production to China, for example, when they have clever machines that work ceaselessly without pay? They certainly need to rethink their human-resources policies—starting by questioning whether they should have departments devoted to purely human resources.
The first issue is how to manage the robots themselves. Asimov laid down the basic rule in 1942: no robot should harm a human. This rule has been reinforced by recent technological improvements: robots are now much more sensitive to their surroundings and can be instructed to avoid hitting people. But the Pentagon’s plans make all this a bit more complicated: many of its robots will be, in essence, killing machines.
A second question is how to manage the homo side of homo-robo relations. Workers have always worried that new technologies will take away their livelihoods, ever since the original Luddites’ fears about mechanised looms. That worry takes on a particularly intense form. when the machines come with a human face: Capek’s play that gave robots their name depicted a world in which they initially brought lots of benefits but eventually led to mass unemployment and discontent. Now, the arrival of increasingly humanoid automatons in workplaces, in an era of high unemployment, is bound to provoke a reaction.
Loving the alien
So, companies will need to work hard to persuade workers that robots are productivity-enhancers, not just job-eating aliens. They need to show employees that the robot sitting alongside them can be more of a helpmate than a threat. Audi has been particularly successful in introducing industrial robots because the carmaker asked workers to identify areas where robots could improve performance and then gave those workers jobs overseeing the robots. Employers also need to explain that robots can help preserve manufacturing jobs in the rich world: one reason why Germany has lost fewer such jobs than Britain is that it has five times as many robots for every 10,000 workers.
These two principles—don’t let robots hurt or frighten people—are relatively simple. Robot scientists are tackling more complicated problems as robots become more sophisticated. They are keen to avoid hierarchies among rescue-robots (because the loss of the leader would render the rest redundant). So they are using game theory to make sure the robots can communicate with each other in egalitarian ways. They are keen to avoid duplication between robots and their human handlers. So they are producing more complicated mathematical formulae in order that robots can constantly adjust themselves to human intentions. This suggests that the world could be on the verge of a great management revolution: making robots behave like humans rather than the 20th century’s preferred option, making humans behave like robots.
-
高级口译第三版答案(7):参观访问
高级口译第三版答案(7):参观访问高级口译听力教程音频下载(第三版)第一篇学位点degreeprogram国家级重点社科研究基地keysocialscienceresearchcenters博士后科学研究流动站post-doctoralresearchstations国家级重点学科nationalkeydisciplines两院院士academici...
-
年9月高口汉译英原文、答案和解析
高口汉译英答案及解析我们应该牢记国际金融危机的深刻教训,正本清源,对症下药,本着简单易行、便于问责的原则推进国际金融监管改革,建立有利于实体经济发展的国际金融体系。要强调国际监管核心原则和标准的一致性,同时要充分考虑不同国家金融市场的差异性,提高金融监...
-
高级口译英译汉必备15篇(13)
Wemustrecognizethattheworldtodayisdiverse,manifold,colorfulandrichintermsofculture.Thisshouldbeanassetratherthanadebtofhumanity.Itpermeatesallaspectsofhumanrights,whethercivil,political,economic,socialorcultural.Theworldwouldbeamuchbetterpl...
-
年3月17日中高级口译笔试考试考前温馨提醒
2013年3月17日将迎来春季上海中高级口译笔试考试,备考的同学们都准备得怎么样了呢?相信现在大家都已经准备充分蓄势待发了吧。小编将为大家带来一些考前的注意事项和温馨提示,希望能够提醒到大家一些细节的问题。复习知识固然重要,可是小细节也不能忽视哦。下面就...