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  3. (1) Faster, cheaper, better—technology is one field many people rely upon to

(1) Faster, cheaper, better—technology is one field many people rely upon to

游客2023-10-21  33
问题     (1) Faster, cheaper, better—technology is one field many people rely upon to offer a vision of a brighter future. But as the 2020s dawn, optimism is in short supply. The new technologies that dominated the past decade seem to be making things worse. Social media were supposed to bring people together. Today they are better known for invading privacy, spreading propaganda and undermining democracy. E-commerce, ride-hailing and the gig economy may be convenient, but they are charged with underpaying workers, exacerbating inequality and clogging the streets with vehicles. Parents worry that smartphones have turned their children into screen-addicted zombies.
    (2) The technologies expected to dominate the new decade also seem to cast a dark shadow. Artificial intelligence (AI) may well entrench bias and prejudice, threaten your job and support authoritarian rulers. Autonomous cars still do not work, but manage to kill people all the same. Polls show that internet firms are now less trusted than the banking industry. At the very moment banks are striving to re brand themselves as tech firms, internet giants have become the new banks.
    (3) The New York Times sums up the encroaching gloom. "A mood of pessimism", it writes, has displaced "the idea of inevitable progress born in the scientific and industrial revolutions." Except those words are from an article published in 1979. Back then the paper worried that the anxiety was "fed by growing doubts about society’s ability to rein in the seemingly runaway forces of technology".
    (4) Today’s gloomy mood is centered on smartphones and social media, which took off a decade ago. Yet concerns that humanity has taken a technological wrong turn, or that particular technologies might be doing more harm than good, have arisen before. In the 1970s the despondency was prompted by concerns about overpopulation, environmental damage and the prospect of nuclear destruction. The 1920s witnessed a backlash against cars, which had earlier been seen as a miraculous answer to the affliction of horse-drawn vehicles—which filled the streets with noise and dung, and caused congestion and accidents.
    (5) Stand back, and in each of these historical cases disappointment arose from a mix of unrealized hopes and unforeseen consequences. Technology unleashes the forces of creative destruction, so it is only natural that it leads to anxiety; for any given technology its drawbacks sometimes seem to outweigh its benefits. When this happens with several technologies at once, as today, the result is a wider sense of techno-pessimism.
    (6) However, that pessimism can be overdone. Too often people focus on the drawbacks of a new technology while taking its benefits for granted. Worries about screen time should be weighed against the much more substantial benefits of ubiquitous communication and the instant access to information and entertainment that smartphones make possible. A further danger is the efforts to avoid the short-term costs associated with a new technology will end up denying access to its long-term benefits—a so-called "technology trap". Fears that robots will steal people’s jobs may prompt politicians to tax them, for example, to discourage their use. Yet in the long run countries that wish to maintain their standard of living as their workforce ages and shrinks will need more robots, not fewer.
    (7) That points to another lesson, which is that the remedy to technology-related problems very often involves more technology. Airbags and other improvements in safety features, for example, mean that in America deaths in car accidents per billion miles travelled have fallen from around 240 in the 1920s to around 12 today. AI is being applied as part of the effort to stem the flow of extremist material on social media. The ultimate example is climate change. It is hard to imagine any solution that does not depend in part on innovations in clean energy, carbon capture and energy storage.
    (8) The most important lesson is about technology itself. Any powerful technology can be used for good or ill. The internet spreads understanding, but it is also where videos of people being beheaded go viral. Biotechnology can raise crop yields and cure diseases—but it could equally lead to deadly weapons.
    (9) Technology itself has no agency-, it is the choices people make about it that shape the world. At its best, it helps frame how society comes to terms with innovations and imposes rules and policies that limit their destructive potential, accommodate change or strike a trade-off. Healthy skepticism means that these questions are settled by a broad debate, not by a group of technologists. (本文选自 Economist) [br] Which is the negative side of the technologies of the past decade?
选项 A、AI increases prejudice and discrimination.
B、Autonomous cars endanger people’s life.
C、Workers in e-commerce are not paid enough.
D、People have little confidence in internet firms.
答案 C
解析 细节题。第一段中描述了过去十年占主导地位的新技术的负面影响，包括社交媒体、电子商务、网约车、零工经济和智能手机。其中电子商务因工人工资过低而被批评，因此C“电子商务的工人工资不足”为本题答案。A “人工智能加剧偏见和歧视”、B“自动驾驶汽车危及人们的生命”和D“人们几乎不相信互联网企业”都是第二段提到的未来十年占主导地位的新技术的负面影响，因此排除。
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