In 1981 Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old Japanese factory worker, climbed over a safety fence at a Kawasaki plant to carry out some maintenance work on a robot. In his haste, he failed to switch the robot off properly. Unable to sense him, the robot’s powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine. His death made Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot. This astounding industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behavior was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science fiction writer. The laws appeared in I, Robot, a book of short stories published in 1950 that inspired a Hollywood film. But decades later the laws, designed to prevent robots from harming people either through action or inaction, remain in the realm of fiction. With robots now poised to emerge from their industrial cages and to move into homes and workplaces, roboticists are concerned about the safety implications beyond the factory floor. To address these concerns, leading robot experts have come together to try to find ways to prevent robots from harming people. "Security, safety and sex are the big concerns," says Henrik Christensen, chairman of the European Robotics Network at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and one of the organisers of the new roboethics group. Should robots that are strong enough or heavy enough to crush people be allowed into homes Should robotic sex dolls resembling children be legally allowed These questions may seem esoteric but in the next few years they will become increasingly relevant, says Dr. Christensen. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s World Robotics Survey, in 2002 the number of domestic and service robots more than tripled, nearly outstripping their industrial counterparts. Japanese industrial firms are racing to build humanoid robots to act as domestic helpers for the elderly, and South Korea has set a goal that 100K of households should have domestic robots by 2020. In light of all this, it is crucial that we start to think about safety and ethical guidelines now, says Dr. Christensen. So what exactly is being done to protect us from these mechanical menaces "Not enough," says Blay Whitby, an artificial-intelligence expert at the University of Sussex in England. This is hardly surprising given that the field of "safety-critical computing" is barely a decade old, he says. But things are changing, and researchers are increasingly taking an interest in trying to make robots safer. One approach, which sounds simple enough, is to try to program them to avoid contact with people altogether. But this is much harder than it sounds. Getting a robot to navigate across a cluttered room is difficult enough without having to take into account what its various limbs or appendages might bump into along the way. Regulating the behavior of robots is going to become more difficult in the future, since they will increasingly have self-learning mechanisms built into them, says Gianmarco Veruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, Italy. As a result, their behavior will become impossible to predict fully, he says, since they will not be behaving in predefined ways but will learn new behavior as they go. The word "astounding" in the second paragraph is closest in meaning to
A. gullible.
B. awesome.
C. gruesome.
D. stupendous.
What’s wrong with the woman
A. She has eaten too much.
B. She is too tired.
C. She is ill.
"Leave him alone!" I yelled as I walked out of the orphanage gate and saw several of the Spring Park School bullies pushing the deaf kid around. I did not know the boy at all but I knew that we were about the same age, because of his size. He lived in the old white house across the street from the orphanage where I lived. I had seen him on his front porch several times doing absolutely nothing, except just sitting there making funny like hand movements. In the summer time we didn’t get much to eat for Sunday supper, except watermelon and then we had to eat it outside behind the dining room so we would not make a mess on the tables inside, About the only time that I would see him was through the high chain-link fence that surrounded the orphanage when we ate our watermelon outside. The deaf kid started making all kinds of hand signals, real fast like. "You are a stupid idiot!" said the bigger of the two bullies as he pushed the boy down on the ground. The other bully ran around behind the boy and kicked him as hard as he could in the back. The deaf boy’s body started shaking all over and he curled up in a ball trying to shield and hide his face. He looked like he was trying to cry, or something but he just couldn’t make any sounds. I ran as fast as I could back through the orphanage gate and into the thick azalea bushes. I uncovered my home-made bow which I had constructed out of bamboo and string. I grabbed four arrows that were also made of bamboo and they had Coca Cola tops bent around the ends to make real sharp tips. Then I ran back out of the gate with an arrow cocked in the how and I just stood there quiet like, breathing real hard just daring either one of them to kick or touch the boy again. "You’re a dumb freak just like him, you big eared creep!" said one of the boys as he grabbed his friend and backed off far enough so that the arrow would not hit them. "If you’re so brave kick him again now," I said, shaking like a leaf. The bigger of the two bullies ran up and kicked the deaf boy in the middle of his back as hard as he could and then he ran out of arrow range again. The boy jerked about and then made a sound that I will never forget for as long as I live. It was the sound like a whale makes when it has been harpooned and knows that it is about to die. I fired all four of my arrows at the two bullies as they ran away laughing about what they had done. I pulled the boy up off the ground and helped him back to his house which was about two blocks down the street from the school building. The boy made one of those hand signs at me as I was about to leave. I asked his sister "If your brother is so smart then why is he doing things like that with his hands" She told me that he was saying that he loved me with his hands. Almost every Sunday for the next year or two I could see the boy through the chain-link fence as we ate watermelon outside behind the dining room, during the summer time. He always made that same funny hand sign at me and I would just wave back at him, not knowing what else to do. On my very last day in the orphanage I was being chased by the police. They told me that I was being sent off to the Florida School for Boys Reform School at Marianna so I ran to get away from them. They chased me around the dining room building several times and finally I made a dash for the chain-link fence and tried to climb over in order to escape. I saw the deaf boy sitting there on his porch just looking at me as they pulled me down from the fence and handcuffed me. The boy, now about twelve jumped up and ran across San Diego Road, placed his fingers through the chain-link fence and just stood there looking at us. They dragged me by my legs, screaming and yelling for more than several hundred yards through the dirt and pine-straw to the waiting police car. All I could hear the entire time was the high pitched sound of that whale being harpooned again. The author was ______ when he tried to protect the deaf kid against the two bullies.
A. about ten years old
B. not quite about ten
C. in his late teens
D. in his twenties
I recently took care of a 50-year-old man who had been admitted to the hospital short of breath. During his monthlong stay he was seen by a hematologist, an endocrinologist, a kidney specialist, a podiatrist, two cardiologists, a cardiac electrophysiologist, an infectious-diseases specialist, a pulmonologist, an ear-nose-throat specialist, a urologist, a gastroenterologist, a neurologist, a nutritionist, a general surgeon, a thoracic surgeon and a pain specialist. He underwent 12 procedures, including cardiac catheterization. a pacemaker implant and a bone-marrow biopsy (to work-up chronic anemia). Despite this wearying schedule, he maintained an upbeat manner, walking the corridors daily with assistance to chat with nurses and physician assistants. When he was discharged, follow-up visits were scheduled for him with seven specialists. This man’s case, in which expert consultations sprouted with little rhyme, reason or coordination, reinforced a lesson I have learned many times since entering practice: In our health care system, where doctors are paid piecework for their services, if you have a slew of physicians and a willing patient, almost any sort of terrible excess can occur. Though accurate data is lacking, the overuse of services in health care probably cost hundreds of billions of dollars last year, out of the more than $2 trillion that Americans spent on health. Are we getting our money’s worthy Not according to the usual measures of public health. The United States ranks 45th in life expectancy, behind Bosnia and Jordan, near last, compared with other developed countries, in infant mortality; and in last place, according to the Commonwealth Fund, a health-care research group, among major industrialized countries in health-care quality, access and efficiency. And in the United States, regions that spend the most on health care appear to have higher mortality rates than regions that spend the least, perhaps because of increased hospitalization rates that result in more life-threatening errors and infections. It has been estimated that if the entire country spent the same as the lowest spending regions, the Medicare program alone could save about $40 billion a year. Overutilization is driven by many factors—"defensive" medicine by doctors trying to avoid lawsuits; patients’ demands; a pervading belief among doctors and patients that newer, more expensive technology is better. The most important factor, however, may be the perverse financial incentives of our current system. Overconsultation and overtesting have now become facts of the medical profession. The culture in practice is to grab patients and generate volume. "Medicine has become like everything else," a doctor told me recently. "Everything moves because of money." Consider medical imaging. According to a federal commission, from 1999 to 2004 the growth in the volume of imaging services per Medicare patient far outstripped the growth of all other physician services. In 2004, the cost of imaging services was close to $100 billion, or an average of roughly $350 per person in the United States. Not long ago, I visited a friend—a cardiologist in his late 30s—at his office on Long Island to ask him about imaging in private practices. "When I started in practice, I wanted to do the right thing," he told me matter-of-factly. "A young woman would come in with palpitations. I’d tell her she was fine. But then I realized that she’d just go down the street to another physician and he’d order all the tests anyway: echocardiogram, stress test, Holter monitor—stuff she didn’t really need. Then she’d go around and tell her friends what a great doctor— a thorough doctor—the other cardiologist was. "I tried to practice ethical medicine, but it didn’t help. It didn’t pay, both from a financial and a reputation standpoint." Last year, Congress approved steep reductions in Medicare payments for certain imaging services. Deeper cuts will almost certainly be forthcoming. This is good; unnecessary imaging is almost certainly taking place, leading to false-positive results, unnecessary invasive procedures, more complications and so on. But the problem in medicine today is much larger than imaging. Doctors are doing too much testing and too many procedures, often for the sake of business. And patients, unfortunately, are paying the price. "The hospital is a great place to be when you are sick," a hospital executive told me recently. "But I don’t want my mother in here five minutes longer than she needs to be.\ What’s the main idea of the first three paragrahs
A. There are a lot of excessive services in American hospitals.
B. Doctors are over-loaded in American hospitals.
C. American hospitals are suffering great losses because of poor health conditions.
D. The health-care service in the American hospitals is systematic and patient-oriented.