单选题
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. 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 1 million 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.
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 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. An American writer, Isaac 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.
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. Now, the arrival of increasingly humanoid automatons in workplaces, in an era of high unemployment, is bound to provoke a reaction.
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). They are keen to avoid duplication between robots and their human handlers. 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.
单选题
The second sentence implies that management thinkers should ______.