单选题
"A robot can't replace me," Andy Richter complained loudly
but in good fun, facing the prospect of losing his job to the Jeopardy!-winning
IBM's Watson computer. "A robot can't do the things a human can do. I mean, can
he love, can he feel?" Well, no. But some folks are asking
similar questions about computers such as Watson taking their jobs someday.
"After all, if a machine can beat humans at Jeopardy!, will computers soon be
competing with people for knowledge-based jobs?" asks Martin Ford, author of The
Lights in the Tunnel in a Fortune magazine article. "If IBM's hopes for the
technology are realized, workers may, in fact, have cause for
concern." Ford and others argue that computers and robots such
as Watson have the potential to replace not only assembly-line jobs, such as the
manufacturing positions that dropped nationwide by one-third over the last
decade, but the "knowledge worker" jobs of the modern economy, such as
radiologists and lawyers. "Many of these people will be highly educated
professionals who had previously assumed that they were, because of their skills
and advanced educations, beneficiaries of the trend toward an increasingly
technological and globalized world," Ford argues in his book.
But Cornell University sociologist Trevor Pinch says that warnings about
artificial intelligence taking over have missed essential shortcomings of
computers for decades. "I would call them friendly monsters," he says, rather
than job-killing ones. "Computers can never experience the things that make us
uniquely human, they have never been delayed at O'Hare airport long enough to
walk around the memorial to Gen. O'Hare, and have that memory stuck in your
brain." Underneath the exaggerated publicity, the human brain
far outperforms computers, and not just in raw calculating power, says
information scholar Martin Hilbert of the University of Southern California in
Los Angeles. All of the computers in the world taken together possess the
computational power of, in all, 62 human brains, he says, based on findings his
team reported this month in Science. There are about six billion people alive
today. And hey, if things turn out as bad as Ford suggests,
there is always the solution that Andy Richter settled on—beating anything that
resembles the job-threatening Watson with a baseball bat. Let's hope it doesn't
come down to that.