XXII. Прочитайте каждый свой отрывок А, В, С и заполните таблицу

Telecoms applications will soon be bundled n much the same way as office application suites are today. A major example is the electronic marketplace, which will bring customers and suppliers together in smart databases and virtual environments, with ID verification, encryption and translation. It will then implement the billing, taxation and electronic funds transfer, while automatically producing accounts and auditing. The whole suite of services will be based on voice processing, allowing a natural voice interface to talk to the computer, all the AI to carry out the request, and voice synthesis and visualization technology to get the out.

Electronic money will be very secure but much more versatile than physical alternatives. E-cash can be completely global and could be used as a de facto standard. It does not have to be linked to any national currency, so can be independent of local currency fluctuations. Its growing use on the Net will lead to its acceptance on the street and we may hold a large proportion of our total funds in this global electronic cash. People will increasingly buy direct from customized manufacturers. Shops will be places where people try on clothes, not buy them. Their exact measurements can be sent instantly to the manufacturer as soon as they have chosen an outfit. The shops may be paid by the manufacturer instead.

Employment patterns will change, as many jobs are automated and new jobs come into existence to serve new technologies. Some organizations will follow the virtual company model, where a small core of key employees is supported by contractors on a project by project basis, bringing the right people regardless of where they live. The desks they will use will have multiple flat screens, voice interfaces, computer programs with human-like faces and personalities, full-screen videoconferencing and 3D sound positioning. All this will be without any communication cables since the whole system uses high capacity infrared links. The many short-term contractors may not have enough space in their homes for an office and may go instead to a new breed of local telework centre.

Of course, workers can be fully mobile, and we could see some people abandon offices completely, roaming the world and staying in touch via satellite systems. Even in trains and planes there may be infrared distribution to each seat to guarantee high bandwidth communication. One tool they may have in a few years is effectively a communicator badge. This will give them a voice link to computers across the network, perhaps on their office desk. Using this voice link, they can access their files and email and carry out most computer-based work. Their earphones will allow voice synthesizers to read out'¹ their mail, and glasses with a projection system built into the arms and reflectors on the lenses will allow a head-up display of visual information. Perhaps by 2010, these glasses could be replaced by an active contact lens that writes pictures directly onto the retina using tiny lasers.

Finally and frivolously to the very long term. By around 2030, we may have the technology to directly link our brain to the ultra-smart computers that win be around then, giving us so much extra brainpower that we deserve a new name, Homo Cyberneticus. In much the same time frame, geneticists may have created the first biologically optimised humans, Homo Optimus. It would make sense to combine this expertise with information technology wizardry to make something like the Borg, Homo Hybridus, with the body of an Olympic athlete and a brain literally the size of the planet, the whole global superhighway and every machine connected to it. Over time, this new form may converge with the machine world, as more and more of his thoughts occur in cyberspace. With a complete backup on the network, Homo Hybridus would be completely immortal. Ordinary biological humans would eventually accept the transition and plain old Homo Sapiens could become voluntarily extinct, perhaps as early as 2200

 

XXIII. Обменяйтесь информацией, чтобы дополнить ваши таблицы пп. 1,2. Заполните пункт 3 вашими комментариями.

 

XXIV. Приведите доводы «за» и «против» данного утверждения:

Computers will catch up with the power and speed of the human brain by 2050. Some time after that they will start outstripping us and taking over from us.

 

XXV. Прочитайте информацию, представленную профессором Pearson и другими экспертами о будущем IT. Прокомментируйте их точки зрения.

The Future of IT

Speaker A. To recreate human intelligence we need speed, we need memory capacity to match the human brain and we need the right hardware. We'll have all this by 2020 but these things aren't enough. We also need to capture the complexity, range and richness of human intelligence. That's more difficult... but we will do it. And we'll do it by reverse engineering of the human brain. What I mean is that we'll explore the human brain from the inside and find out how it works, how it's connected, how it's wired up. We're already well on the way to this. With brain scanning we can see inside the brain. But by 2030 we'll have another instrument for exploring the brain. We'll be able to send tiny scanning robots along blood vessels to map the brain from the inside. This will give us all the data on how the brain is connected and all the features which enable it to perform as it does. When we know how the brain works, we'll be able to recreate its operation using the powerful computers which will've been developed even before this date.

Speaker В. The most important difference at the moment between computers and brains is that computers work in serial and brains work in parallel. This means that we can do incredible amounts of processing compared to what a computer can achieve running for weeks, or even months. What's interesting is not so much that the brain is fast, it's the fact that it operates in parallel. If you look at the way a signal flows down neurons, they don't move extraordinarily quickly. But there are billions of them doing it all at once, whereas in a computer everything has to be done one thing after another.

Many people say we will never have an intelligent computer. They say it's not possible to have a computer that thinks. My own view is that it is possible but not with computers as they are today. If we start having parallel computers, only then I feel will we even start to approach the kind of computing power necessary to begin to make a start to reproducing some of the higher functions of the human brain. But we'll never be able to program in human emotions, moral responsibility and the uniqueness of the individual.

Speaker С. What people really don't realize is the accelerating speed of change. They think that a hundred years from now we'll have made a hundred years of progress at today's rate. But we'll see a hundred years of progress at today's rate in twenty-five years because the speed of technical progress is accelerating. Right now we're doubling the rate of technical progress every decade so the next decade will mean twenty years of progress; and the following decade will be like forty. We'll make two thousand years of progress at today's rate this century. Things are changing faster and faster.

Erm, we already have computers that run factories and computers which help to build other computers. It's only a matter of time before these artificial children of ours are able to outdo us. They will think faster than we do. They will make smarter decisions than we do. Who then will be the masters - us or the machines? If we play it right, machines will look after us. If we get it wrong, machines may replace us. And it could happen sooner than we imagine.

 

XXVI. Найдите ответы на эти вопросы в тексте:

1. Of what is Professor Cochrane completely convinced?

2. What is stored in the professor's signet ring?

3. What will change dramatically when we start using rings like these?

4. What is the ВТ lab developing with artificial intelligence?

5. What effect are the professor's Al experiments having on evolution?

6. What does the professor see as the negative side of the electronic revolution?

7. What was the result of combining the Internet with TV?

8. What developments does the professor suggest in the field of biotechnology?

9. According to the professor, what will happen by the year 2015?

Talking to Professor Cochrane is probably as close as you can get to time travelling without leaving the current dimension, as his vision stretches far into the 21’st century and beyond.

His seemingly unshakeable conviction is thatanything is possible if you really put your mind to it. In fact, ВТ (British Telecom) is already sitting on a host of innovations poised to blow your mind during this century.

Designed for the 21st century, Peter Cochrane's signet ring is built around a chip that holds all the details of his passport, bank account, medical records and driving license. According to Cochrane, it's set to revolutionize shopping.

The ring is already a fully operational prototype, but it will be some time before you'll be trading your credit card in for the ultimate fashion accessory.

It's not just jewellery that's set to get smarter.

One of the biggest projects down at the Lab is looking at artificial intelligence as a way of creating software programs, networks, telephones and machines with a degree of intelligence built in. By sensing their environment, they should be able to develop new capacities as demands change. 'I have software that is breeding, which is interchanging genes and creating adaptable behavior. This means you'll see the network come alive – it will watch what you do and it will adapt’.

It doesn't stop there, though, as ВТ has taken artificial intelligence one step further and created machines that are solving their own problems. 'We've created solutions that a human being could never have dreamed of. We have solutions, and although we don't understand how they work, they do work. We're effectively increasing the speed of evolution', says Cochrane.

It's already good to talk, but with artificially intelligent phones on the way it will be even better. Cochrane is at present working on smart phones that can translate English into German, Japanese and French in real-time. 'Some of it's rocket science, but a lot of it's extremely simple. What we've built is a kernel of understanding inside a machine that extracts meaning from the sentence itself - at the moment we can do simple things such as phrase books,' he says.

The system uses a non-linear approach that sends the English to the understanding kernel in the machine and then fans it out to all the other languages simultaneously.

There's no doubt that Cochrane is putting a lot of faith in intelligent machines, particularly when it comes to cutting through the deluge of information that he says is the downside of the electronic revolution. BT's solution is the development of intelligent agents that watch, во learn and start communicating.

It's not all work down at the Lab, though. BT's also involved in an on-going trial that it claims will revolutionize our leisure time, in particular the way we watch TV. 'We put people on the Internet and broadcast TV at the same time, so that the people at home could actually influence what was happening on their TV sets. As a result, it became interactive and therefore more active'.

ВТ has its fingers in multiple pies and has made biotechnology another core focus of R&D. 'Personally, I think hospitals are very dangerous places to be. There are lots of viable alternatives. For a start, we can stop bunging up hospital wards by putting people online.' ВТ has already developed a pack for heart attack victims that monitors their progress and uploads information via a radio link back to the hospital.

So what will the 21st century hold for us if Peter Cochrane and his futurologists have their way? Well, by the year 2015, it's likely that we will be eclipsed by a supercomputer more powerful than the human brain. And if that's got visions of Terminator dancing in your head, don't worry - Cochrane's got it covered. 'I'd really hate one morning to find myself considered an infestation of this planet. Our inclination is to nurture life and not to destroy it. Before we let loose a bunch of artificial intelligence, we ought to be thinking through the necessity of building in a number of rules that hold your life as a human being sacrosanct'.