[阅读理解]

【题干】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.
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. 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 sub -millimeter 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.
Despite 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, researchers 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 一than previously imagined. They have built
robots that can recognize the error of a machine panel by a fraction of a millimeter
in a controlled factory environment. 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 know quite
how we do it.

【题目】【阅读理解】24. Besides reducing human labor, robots can also______.
A. cope with some errors with human assistance
B. improve factory environments
C. make decisions on their own
D. stimulate human creativity

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