Topic：Some people believe that robots are important to human's future development, while others think that it is a dangerous invention that will impact society negatively. Discuss both views and give your opinion. (2022年9月24日真题)

　　雅思写作考情分析：

　　科技类考题在2021、2022年分别出现了4次和7次，考频分别为8%和16%。 截止2023年5月27日，中国大陆雅思大作文纸笔考试中科技类考频为0。

　　雅思写作题目解读：

　　1. 一些人认为机器人对人类未来发展至关重要，一些人则认为机器人是一项危险的发明，会对社会产生消极影响。

　　2. 属于观点类;机器人对社会的积极或消极影响。

　　3. 难点：

　　①　论述两方的观点;

　　②　较难想到恰当的论据和多样化的论述。

　　原文节选(机器人的消极影响):

　　1. 机器人取代人类工作，导致失业潮

　　网址：https://www.economist.com/business/2023/03/06/dont-fear-an-ai-induced-jobs-apocalypse-just-yet

　　Since November Chatgpt, an AI conversationalist, has dazzled users with its passable impression of a human interlocutor. Other “generative” AIs have been conjuring up similarly human-like texts, images and sounds by analysing reams of data on the internet. Last month the boss of IBM, a computing giant, forecast that AI will do away with much white-collar clerical work. On March 6th Microsoft announced the launch of a suite of AI “co-pilots” for workers in jobs ranging from sales and marketing to supply-chain management. Excitable observers murmur about a looming job apocalypse.

　　Fears over the job-displacing effects of technology are, of course, nothing new. In early 19th-century Britain, the Luddites burned factory machines. The term “automation” first rose to prominence as the adoption of wartime innovations in mechanisation sparked a wave of panic over mass joblessness in the 1950s. In 1978 James Callaghan, Britain’s prime minister, greeted the breakthrough technology of his era—the microprocessor—with a government inquiry into its job-killing potential. Ten years ago Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University published a blockbuster paper, since cited over 5,000 times, claiming that 47% of the tasks American workers perform could be automated away “over the next decade or two”. Now even the techno-optimistic Mr Musk wonders what it would mean for robots to outnumber humans: “It’s not even clear what an economy is at that point.”

　　网址：https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/07/30/the-fear-of-robots-displacing-workers-has-returned

　　The world has only recently recovered from a bout of robophobia. In the early 2010s advances in robotics and artificial intelligence(AI), described ominously in countless papers and books, seemed to portend a wave of job destruction. High unemployment after the global financial crisis of 2007-09 added to fears of a job scarcity. Fretting about robots in a downturn is not entirely irrational: firms appear to do most of their job-slashing during slumps. Nir Jaimovich of the University of Zurich and Henry Siu of the University of British Columbia argue that labour-market recoveries have grown weaker in recent decades as a result. Worries can be overdone, though. By the end of the decade unemployment had dropped like a stone and driverless vehicles were struggling to turn left. The earlier panic seemed a touch hysterical.

　　High rates of joblessness and eye-catching technological advances are again contributing to a new round of fears. In recent weeks, for instance, mind-boggling examples of the capabilities of gpt-3—an AI-based language-processing model developed by OpenAI, a research organisation—have zoomed around the internet. Another cause for anxiety has been businesses’ strategies for coping with the pandemic. Anecdotes of covid-motivated automation are easy to find. Many organisations have turned to software to automate paper-processing tasks that cannot be done by homebound workers. Those facing a deluge of customer enquiries, such as hospitals, are supplementing human assistants with chatbots. Employers’ interest in automating tasks in high-risk environments, such as slaughterhouses, is reportedly on the rise.

　　原文节选(机器人的积极影响):

　　1. 提高生产力、解放劳动力

　　网址：https://www.economist.com/business/2023/03/06/dont-fear-an-ai-induced-jobs-apocalypse-just-yet

　　Mechanical arms on a factory floor performing repetitive tasks such as welding, drilling or moving an object have been around for decades. Robot usage historically centred on the car industry, whose heavy parts and large batches with limited variety are ideally suited to the machines. The electronics industry, with its need for precise but repetitive movements, was also an early adopter.

　　More recently the list of industries which are embracing robots has lengthened, observes Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, an American industry group. Advances in computer vision have made machines much more dexterous, points out Sami Atiya, who runs the robotics business of abb, a Swiss industrial firm. Lightweight “collaborative robots” now work side-by-side with human workers rather than being caged off, and autonomous vehicles ferry objects from one place to another in factories and warehouses.

　　网址：https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/covid-has-reset-relations-between-people-and-robots/21807815

　　Instead of just moving goods in warehouses to human “pickers”, who then put items into bags for home delivery, they are learning to do the picking and packing for themselves. In factories, they are stepping out of their cages and, equipped with advanced sensors and machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), are going to work alongside people.

　　网址：https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/02/26/the-world-should-welcome-the-rise-of-the-robots

　　Warehousing has grown rapidly thanks to the e-commerce boom. Robots are now indispensable, picking items off shelves and helping people pack an exponentially rising numbers of boxes. They are even beginning to trundle slowly along some pavements, delivering goods or food right to people’s doors. In a pandemic-ravaged world, short of workers but with lots of elderly folk to look after, having more robots to boost productivity would be a good thing.

　　2. 让人的生活更便利和高效

　　网址：https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/covid-has-reset-relations-between-people-and-robots/21807815

　　Such robots will increasingly help out in other places too, including hospitals, and in roles, such as caring for an ageing society—which, post-covid, has got used to a more techno future for health care, with “telemedicine” via remote doctors and health-monitoring mobile-phone apps.

　　网址：How to prepare for killer robots (cnn.com)

　　Self-driving vehicles are just the tip of the autonomous revolution. Government officials say autonomous vehicles will make transportation safer, more accessible, more efficient and cleaner and last week, the Department of Transportation released guidelines for the testing and deployment of automated vehicles, which detail how the vehicles should perform, and include a model for state policies.

　　In 2016, autonomous robot doctors perform surgery; algorithms invest your money; robocops patrol shopping malls; and if you end up in hospital, a computer system can determine how quickly you get treated.

　　话题扩充:人们该如何应对人工智能时代的到来?

　　网址：https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/02/26/the-world-should-welcome-the-rise-of-the-robots

　　Inevitably, some people will be on the losing end of change even as the robots make society as a whole better off. One lesson from the freewheeling globalisation of the 1990s and 2000s is that the growth in trade that was overwhelmingly beneficial triggered a political backlash, because the losers felt left behind. That is one more reason why firms and governments would do well to recognise the value of retraining and lifelong learning. As jobs change, workers should be helped to acquire new skills, including how to work with and manage the robots that will increasingly be their colleagues.

　　雅思写作解析：

　　观点①：机器人能够提高生产效率 (boost productivity)，替人们做一些危险的工作(automate tasks in high-risk environments)，能够把人们从繁重重复的劳动中解放出来 (liberate workforce from heavy and repetitive tasks);帮助人们，让人的生活更便利高效 (make life more convenient and efficient)。

　　观点②：但是另一方面机器人的普及也会导致失业 (unemployment/ job scarcity/ job destruction/ joblessness)，影响某些人的生计 (livelihood)。

　　观点扩充：人们应该不断学习和掌握新技能以提升自身就业能力( improve employ-ability)、适应人工智能时代。