IELTS CAM Inspired 16 - Reading Test 1 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS Mock Test 16 - Reading Test 1 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
1
Polar bears are extremely well suited to surviving in very cold conditions.
2
A polar bear's thick fat causes it to become diabetic.
3
Solheim's team compared the polar bear with a close relative from milder surroundings.
4
Defects in the APOB gene have been found to cause heart disease in brown bears.
5
A female polar bear will leave her den at intervals over the winter months to feed.
6
Female polar bears increase how dense their bones are before constructing a den.
7
Brown bears do not need to restore their bones once winter ends.
Question 8 - 13
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Why polar bears deserve protection
Bears are commonly assumed to lack intelligence and to be
8.
.
This assumption, however, may be mistaken. Consider the following:
• At an Arctic wildlife centre, one bear was seen working a branch into a
9.
in order to reach a
10.
that had been suspended above it.
• In the wild, a bear devised a way of getting up to a platform on which a
11.
was standing.
• Bears have been seen deliberately arranging and then toppling things, in play resembling a
12.
.
There are also signs that bears feel emotion. For instance:
• After an unsuccessful hunt, a bear may move in a way that seems to express
13.
.
• They are capable of forming bonds with animals of other kinds.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 20
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
List of Headings
I
A ruler remembered for rescuing his subjects
II
A tour of the grounds and structures outside
III
Rethinking how a royal tomb should be shaped
IV
Remarkable finds, though little of the original survived
V
Resolving a set of surprising puzzles
VI
One firm conclusion amid much that stays uncertain
VII
What lies inside the monument, and what was left there
VIII
A construction that severely tested its builders
IX
A template later builders chose to imitate
14
Paragraph A
15
Paragraph B
16
Paragraph C
17
Paragraph D
18
Paragraph E
19
Paragraph F
20
Paragraph G
Question 21 - 24
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
The Step Pyramid of Djoser
Taken together with everything around it, the Step Pyramid's complex has been judged as large as an entire Egyptian
21.
from early times. Beyond the pyramid stood living space set aside for the
22.
, together with numerous other buildings and installations.
The whole complex was enclosed by a wall into which several deceptive doorways had been set. Running right around that wall, moreover, was a lengthy
23.
. Because of this, nobody who arrived without invitation could get into the grounds without first knowing the
24.
of the one genuine doorway.
Question 25 - 26
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO of the following points does the writer make about King Djoser?
A
Scholars do not all agree on how many years he was on the throne
B
He needed convincing to work in stone instead of mud brick
C
He thought little of the way other Egyptian pyramids were built
D
He overlooked the contribution his official made to the pyramid's design
E
When his tomb was uncovered, a small number of his belongings still remained
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
27
What is the opening paragraph mainly concerned with?
A
which occupations are most at risk from the rise of AI
B
how many of the world's workers will be employed within the AI industry
C
the degree to which AI will transform what people's work involves
D
the contrast between the effects of embodied and disembodied AI on employees
28
In the second paragraph, how does Solberg regard the knowledge economy?
A
as a leading force behind the changes now reshaping work
B
as something that is altering how people feel about their jobs
C
as the chief cause of the decline of manufacturing
D
as a development that is affecting how many jobs exist
29
What did Solberg notice at the insurance firm?
A
employees objecting to the advice the AI gave
B
employees manipulating the AI so that it delivered the outcomes they were after
C
employees resenting the intrusion of AI into their work
D
employees letting the AI perform duties they should have done themselves
30
What does Holt's recently published research do?
A
it shows that shifts in the job market can be handled effectively
B
it reveals the deep impact of widespread joblessness on society
C
it points out ways in which past and future job losses differ
D
it questions the assumption that being made redundant is harmful
Question 31 - 34
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-G, below.
The 'algorithmication' of jobs
Dr Ingrid Solberg's work centres on the 'algorithmication' of occupations whose basis is not manufacturing but . Over the period she spent studying an insurance company, she saw staff place ever more on the advice the AI gave, until the system increasingly framed how they understood their own work. At the same time, employees were discouraged from trying things out for themselves or drawing on their own , which shut off the path to new ideas. Researchers hope to prevent situations of the sort Solberg documented by making the way AI reaches its decisions easier to follow, and by building users' in the systems they rely on.
A
strain
B
data
C
efficiency
D
dependence
E
instinct
F
creativity
G
assurance
Question 35 - 40
Match each statement with the correct person, A, B or C.
List of Findings
A
Professor Halvard Aune
B
Dr Rasmus Holt
C
Dr Ingrid Solberg
35
A rise in automation will not mean that fewer people are in work.
36
More than one factor makes AI attractive to companies.
37
The power of AI to reshape how people live echoes great turning points of earlier times.
38
We ought to recognise the variety of difficulties that AI brings with it.
39
Working lives ahead will be less predictable in shape than those of former generations.
40
Those in power should act so that everyone can find properly paid employment.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Why we need to protect polar bears
Climate change poses a mounting danger to polar bears, and were they to vanish, the effects would reach well beyond the Arctic itself. Few animals are so precisely suited to the punishing cold of the far north, where the thermometer can sink to around -40°C. Part of what makes this possible is a layer of fat, in places almost ten centimetres thick, sitting just beneath the skin. Carry a comparable amount of such tissue and a human being would be classed as obese, with diabetes and heart trouble the probable result — and yet none of these afflictions touches the bear.
Some light was thrown on this puzzle by research that Reidar Solheim and his team published in 2015. Setting the animal's genetic make-up against that of the brown bear — a warmer-climate cousin and the polar bear's nearest kin — the group was able to pin down the genes behind the species' survival in so harsh a place. Among these was APOB, a gene that drives down concentrations of low-density lipoproteins, or LDLs, the so-called 'bad' cholesterol. Because it is faults in this very gene that raise a person's heart-disease risk, the polar bear could prove a valuable model for studying that condition in ourselves.
There is a second disorder the bear's genome might help resolve, one that falls most heavily on the elderly: osteoporosis, in which the bones grow less dense — a decline brought on, as a rule, by too little exercise, a shortage of calcium, or plain starvation. Bone is not fixed tissue; it is forever being rebuilt, laid down or broken down according to how well an animal is nourished and how much strain the skeleton must bear. Every pregnancy, though, puts the female polar bear through an ordeal. When autumn arrives she hollows out a den in the snow and stays inside for the whole winter, giving birth there and remaining with her cubs. Roughly six months of going without food follow, during which she must sustain both herself and her young from her own dwindling stores of calcium and energy. Her bones, remarkably, stay every bit as dense and strong.
In 2009 the physiologists Marika Toft and Elias Brandt offered a way of making sense of this contradiction. What they found was that a bear, before ever beginning her den, would build extra density into her bones in advance; and that when she came out half a year later alongside her cubs, no meaningful thinning of the bone could be detected. Brown bears passing the winter in hibernation lack this trick, and are left to rebuild their skeletons wholesale once spring returns. Should the way polar bears remodel their bone ever be worked out, the gains might extend to astronauts, and to the many patients confined to their beds.
For all that such medical promise should weigh in any argument for conservation, it ought not to be the whole of the case. Our instinct is to shield the creatures we credit with intelligence and feeling — elephants, say, or the primates — whereas the bear tends to strike people as dull-witted and, more often than not, aggressive. Reports from the field tell against that picture, hinting among other things at a real talent for solving problems. At the Nordvik Arctic Centre, a male bear named Sisu was repeatedly seen turning a branch into a lever, working it to bring down a fish that had been hung beyond his reach. The same knack, if less strikingly, has turned up in the wild: one male, in a calculated bid to reach a researcher stationed on a platform three metres above him, took a run-up and hurled himself onto a row of barrels.
Further work — an investigation carried out by Johanna Kreft in 2010, for one — has caught the animals in bouts of careful, purposeful handling of objects. Bears in her study would gather items into heaps and then topple them, for all the world as if the whole thing were a sport. Behaviour of this kind, she argues, is nimble and thought-through, and it points to reserves of creativity and problem-solving that the species had never been given credit for.
Emotion, too, shows through, though here again the proof is only anecdotal. A bear that has just let a kill slip away will often lash out at the surrounding ice and snow, apparently in annoyance. Stranger still are the bonds the animals sometimes strike up with other species — romping, for instance, with the sled dogs of the Arctic. One polar bear reared by hand, a female called Luna, grew so attached to her keeper, Tomas Reinholt, that the two of them will even swim side by side — astonishing behaviour, given that wild polar bears are quite prepared to hunt human beings.
Were the warming climate to drive the species out of existence, we would forfeit not just the medical advances they may yet make possible but, more grievously, a magnificent and clever animal.
A. Among all the surviving monuments of ancient Egypt, none draws visitors so reliably as the pyramids, and their appeal has scarcely faded today. Though peoples as distant as the Maya and the Chinese raised pyramids of their own, it is with Egypt that the form has come to be identified, standing as a lasting memorial to the land's early kings. How the shape first emerged is something scholars have argued over for generations. Yet on one matter there is little doubt: within Egypt the story opens with a single tomb, raised for a single ruler and devised by a single gifted builder — the Step Pyramid of Djoser on the plateau at Nedjeru.
B
B.
The earliest of Egypt's Second Dynasty kings, Djoser was also the first to raise his monuments in stone. Those that had gone before were low rectangular structures of sun-dried mud brick, set over the buried passages in which the dead were laid. Why the notion came to him is not recorded, yet it was Djoser's chief official, a man named Neferkha, who put forward a loftier and more striking resting place, to be achieved by laying stone slabs one upon another and shrinking each in turn until the familiar stepped profile emerged. Most estimates place Djoser's reign at around 24 years, though a number of scholars, pointing to how many monuments he left behind and how large they were, contend that he must have ruled for considerably longer.
C
A century of close study has established that the Step Pyramid reached its final form not at a stroke but through a long succession of stages. The historian Adrien Vaillant makes the same point, remarking: 'A great deal of trial and error went into it, nowhere more plainly than in the structure at the heart of the complex. Several schemes were tested … before it rose as the first step pyramid ever made, five tiers set one above the next … Its sheer mass tested those who built it, and to stop the whole from pulling itself apart they angled the blocks inwards.'
D
Once the work was finished the Step Pyramid stood 58 meters tall, overtopping every other building of its age. In size its surrounding complex rivalled a whole Egyptian town, taking in a temple, open courts, shrines and the quarters where the attendants lived. Spreading across 14 hectares, the enclosure was shut in by a wall roughly 11 meters high. Fourteen false doorways had been cut into that wall, along with just one genuine way in at the south-eastern corner, and around the outside of it ran a moat, 680 meters in length and 33 meters across. Dummy doors and moat alike were meant to keep out the unwanted, since anyone hoping to get inside had first to learn the position of the single real opening. So pleased was Djoser with the achievement that he set aside the old custom of naming only the king, having Neferkha's name inscribed on the monument alongside his own.
E
Well beneath the pyramid's base lay the burial chamber in which the king was interred, encircled by a bewildering web of tunnels off which small rooms opened, the whole arrangement designed to baffle intruders. Among the more puzzling things the pyramid gave up was an immense hoard of stone jars. In storerooms leading off the underground galleries, upwards of 30,000 of them came to light, in every imaginable size and shape. Fashioned from many kinds of stone, they bear the names of rulers from Egypt's earliest dynasties. On why they had been placed in Djoser's tomb, and what they were meant to signify, specialists have never reached agreement. Ludwig Steinmann, who cleared the greater part of the pyramid and its complex, took the view that they had first been kept in storage and were later reburied with due ceremony by Djoser as a tribute to the kings who came before him. A rival explanation, favoured by other scholars, is that the jars were simply tipped down the shafts in one further bid to keep robbers away from the royal chamber.
F
For all the care lavished on the maze below ground, in the end it did nothing to keep the ancient robbers out. Long ago Djoser's burial goods, and the king's own body with them, were carried off, so that the excavators came away with no more than the few treasures the thieves had happened to miss. What still lay scattered through the pyramid and its complex was nonetheless enough to leave those who dug there astonished.
G
The way the Egyptologist Katarzyna Brzeska frames it is this: 'Few structures anywhere hold a place in human history to match the Step Pyramid at Nedjeru … one may say without overstatement that this complex marks a turning point in the growth of monumental stone building, in Egypt and across the world alike.' A bold leap forward in design, the Step Pyramid went on to become the model that every later master of the Egyptian pyramid would look back to.
One widely cited advisory firm estimates that, over the next twelve to eighteen years, between four and sixteen percent of the world's workers will have to move into a different line of work, while everyone else adapts as their roles are reshaped by ever more capable machines. The disruption technology brings to the labour market has more than one face. One is automation, sometimes called embodied artificial intelligence (AI); another is the disembodied kind, the sort of algorithm that runs inside the phone in your pocket.
For Dr Ingrid Solberg of the Hanseatic Business School, the deepest shifts are occurring where work depends not on making things but on handling information, the territory usually called the knowledge economy, as such jobs undergo what she calls algorithmication. Duties that once required human judgement, among them reading legal contracts, interpreting medical scans and gathering market intelligence, can now be handled by algorithms that learn to do them unaided.
Very often they do the job better than we can, Solberg observes. What draws organisations to them is partly the promise of decisions based on what firms regard as perfect information, and partly the appeal of cutting costs while raising output.
Yet such gains carry a price, she warns. Once AI absorbs the routine thinking, where are a profession's future experts to come from? Traditionally, Solberg notes, people learn a trade through what is called legitimate peripheral participation: the newcomer works beside seasoned practitioners and learns by watching. Remove that, she argues, and another route to expertise must be found.
There is also the question of how far these systems come to steer, or even govern, those who use them. For more than two years, Solberg followed the workings of a large insurance firm. Selling insurance has always rested on regular, personal contact with clients: an agent judges a case from experience and makes a call. But this company had brought in an algorithm that dictated which customers an agent should approach, when, and with which policies and offers.
Usually designed by outside contractors, the algorithm tends to become the true custodian of know-how, she explains. When that happens, Solberg believes, a narrowing of outlook creeps into daily practice: staff see their work through the algorithm's eyes and lean ever more heavily on what it tells them to do. Room for the alternative, the trial-and-error and gut feeling from which fresh ideas and real progress emerge, is quietly closed off.
Solberg and her colleagues even watched employees devise ways of bending the system to their own ends. We have found staff deliberately feeding the algorithm inaccurate information so that they can hit their targets, she reports.
Outcomes of this sort are what many researchers now hope to prevent. Their aim is to make AI more transparent and more trustworthy, so that firms and individuals can see how its decisions are reached. Until then, Solberg cautions, we must be sure we truly grasp the dilemmas this new world raises, around expertise, the borders of occupations, and control.
The economist Professor Halvard Aune expects the coming decades to reshape everyone's working life from start to finish. The old sequence, full-time study, then full-time work, then a pension and retirement, belongs to the past, he says. In its place he pictures a career built in several stages, with retraining recurring throughout and with spells of several jobs, or none, chosen deliberately at different points.
When talk turns to disappearing jobs, Aune sees a flawed assumption behind the gloomy forecasts. They take the total number of jobs to be fixed. Suppose that thirty years from now robots do half of today's hundred jobs; it does not follow that only fifty remain for people. The total grows, I would expect a hundred and fifty jobs by then.
Dr Rasmus Holt, of the Centre for Enterprise and Labour Research and Vestmark Law School, likewise regards apocalyptic visions of future work as wide of the mark. Unemployment is caused not by the arrival of new technologies but by the laws that choke off the flow of capital into the labour market.
In newly published work, Holt asks whether automation, AI and robotics are steering us towards a jobless future, and does so by tracing where unemployment really comes from. The historical record leaves no doubt that upheaval can throw people out of work. But retraining and redeployment, backed by the right social policies, can deal with that.
He goes on: If AI and robotics are going to reshape jobs, I want governments to treat that as a chance to strengthen the rules and lock in solid job security. The law can be rewritten to ready us for a fairer division of work and leisure. Holt's conclusions read as a summons to those running companies, governments and banks: get ahead of the change with bold measures that secure full employment, decent incomes and a flourishing economic democracy.
What these technologies hold out is extraordinary, he adds. They give humanity the means to live in ways no one could once have pictured. The industrial revolution carried people beyond mere subsistence farming, and the corporate revolution opened the door to mass production; now a third revolution has been declared. Yet it will not be a matter of technology alone: the revolution still to come will be a social one.
Climate change poses a mounting danger to polar bears, and were they to vanish, the effects would reach well beyond the Arctic itself. Few animals are so precisely suited to the punishing cold of the far north, where the thermometer can sink to around -40°C. Part of what makes this possible is a layer of fat, in places almost ten centimetres thick, sitting just beneath the skin. Carry a comparable amount of such tissue and a human being would be classed as obese, with diabetes and heart trouble the probable result — and yet none of these afflictions touches the bear.
Some light was thrown on this puzzle by research that Reidar Solheim and his team published in 2015. Setting the animal's genetic make-up against that of the brown bear — a warmer-climate cousin and the polar bear's nearest kin — the group was able to pin down the genes behind the species' survival in so harsh a place. Among these was APOB, a gene that drives down concentrations of low-density lipoproteins, or LDLs, the so-called 'bad' cholesterol. Because it is faults in this very gene that raise a person's heart-disease risk, the polar bear could prove a valuable model for studying that condition in ourselves.
There is a second disorder the bear's genome might help resolve, one that falls most heavily on the elderly: osteoporosis, in which the bones grow less dense — a decline brought on, as a rule, by too little exercise, a shortage of calcium, or plain starvation. Bone is not fixed tissue; it is forever being rebuilt, laid down or broken down according to how well an animal is nourished and how much strain the skeleton must bear. Every pregnancy, though, puts the female polar bear through an ordeal. When autumn arrives she hollows out a den in the snow and stays inside for the whole winter, giving birth there and remaining with her cubs. Roughly six months of going without food follow, during which she must sustain both herself and her young from her own dwindling stores of calcium and energy. Her bones, remarkably, stay every bit as dense and strong.
In 2009 the physiologists Marika Toft and Elias Brandt offered a way of making sense of this contradiction. What they found was that a bear, before ever beginning her den, would build extra density into her bones in advance; and that when she came out half a year later alongside her cubs, no meaningful thinning of the bone could be detected. Brown bears passing the winter in hibernation lack this trick, and are left to rebuild their skeletons wholesale once spring returns. Should the way polar bears remodel their bone ever be worked out, the gains might extend to astronauts, and to the many patients confined to their beds.
For all that such medical promise should weigh in any argument for conservation, it ought not to be the whole of the case. Our instinct is to shield the creatures we credit with intelligence and feeling — elephants, say, or the primates — whereas the bear tends to strike people as dull-witted and, more often than not, aggressive. Reports from the field tell against that picture, hinting among other things at a real talent for solving problems. At the Nordvik Arctic Centre, a male bear named Sisu was repeatedly seen turning a branch into a lever, working it to bring down a fish that had been hung beyond his reach. The same knack, if less strikingly, has turned up in the wild: one male, in a calculated bid to reach a researcher stationed on a platform three metres above him, took a run-up and hurled himself onto a row of barrels.
Further work — an investigation carried out by Johanna Kreft in 2010, for one — has caught the animals in bouts of careful, purposeful handling of objects. Bears in her study would gather items into heaps and then topple them, for all the world as if the whole thing were a sport. Behaviour of this kind, she argues, is nimble and thought-through, and it points to reserves of creativity and problem-solving that the species had never been given credit for.
Emotion, too, shows through, though here again the proof is only anecdotal. A bear that has just let a kill slip away will often lash out at the surrounding ice and snow, apparently in annoyance. Stranger still are the bonds the animals sometimes strike up with other species — romping, for instance, with the sled dogs of the Arctic. One polar bear reared by hand, a female called Luna, grew so attached to her keeper, Tomas Reinholt, that the two of them will even swim side by side — astonishing behaviour, given that wild polar bears are quite prepared to hunt human beings.
Were the warming climate to drive the species out of existence, we would forfeit not just the medical advances they may yet make possible but, more grievously, a magnificent and clever animal.
The earliest of Egypt's Second Dynasty kings, Djoser was also the first to raise his monuments in stone. Those that had gone before were low rectangular structures of sun-dried mud brick, set over the buried passages in which the dead were laid. Why the notion came to him is not recorded, yet it was Djoser's chief official, a man named Neferkha, who put forward a loftier and more striking resting place, to be achieved by laying stone slabs one upon another and shrinking each in turn until the familiar stepped profile emerged. Most estimates place Djoser's reign at around 24 years, though a number of scholars, pointing to how many monuments he left behind and how large they were, contend that he must have ruled for considerably longer.
C. A century of close study has established that the Step Pyramid reached its final form not at a stroke but through a long succession of stages. The historian Adrien Vaillant makes the same point, remarking: 'A great deal of trial and error went into it, nowhere more plainly than in the structure at the heart of the complex. Several schemes were tested … before it rose as the first step pyramid ever made, five tiers set one above the next … Its sheer mass tested those who built it, and to stop the whole from pulling itself apart they angled the blocks inwards.'
D. Once the work was finished the Step Pyramid stood 58 meters tall, overtopping every other building of its age. In size its surrounding complex rivalled a whole Egyptian town, taking in a temple, open courts, shrines and the quarters where the attendants lived. Spreading across 14 hectares, the enclosure was shut in by a wall roughly 11 meters high. Fourteen false doorways had been cut into that wall, along with just one genuine way in at the south-eastern corner, and around the outside of it ran a moat, 680 meters in length and 33 meters across. Dummy doors and moat alike were meant to keep out the unwanted, since anyone hoping to get inside had first to learn the position of the single real opening. So pleased was Djoser with the achievement that he set aside the old custom of naming only the king, having Neferkha's name inscribed on the monument alongside his own.
E. Well beneath the pyramid's base lay the burial chamber in which the king was interred, encircled by a bewildering web of tunnels off which small rooms opened, the whole arrangement designed to baffle intruders. Among the more puzzling things the pyramid gave up was an immense hoard of stone jars. In storerooms leading off the underground galleries, upwards of 30,000 of them came to light, in every imaginable size and shape. Fashioned from many kinds of stone, they bear the names of rulers from Egypt's earliest dynasties. On why they had been placed in Djoser's tomb, and what they were meant to signify, specialists have never reached agreement. Ludwig Steinmann, who cleared the greater part of the pyramid and its complex, took the view that they had first been kept in storage and were later reburied with due ceremony by Djoser as a tribute to the kings who came before him. A rival explanation, favoured by other scholars, is that the jars were simply tipped down the shafts in one further bid to keep robbers away from the royal chamber.
F. For all the care lavished on the maze below ground, in the end it did nothing to keep the ancient robbers out. Long ago Djoser's burial goods, and the king's own body with them, were carried off, so that the excavators came away with no more than the few treasures the thieves had happened to miss. What still lay scattered through the pyramid and its complex was nonetheless enough to leave those who dug there astonished.
G. The way the Egyptologist Katarzyna Brzeska frames it is this: 'Few structures anywhere hold a place in human history to match the Step Pyramid at Nedjeru … one may say without overstatement that this complex marks a turning point in the growth of monumental stone building, in Egypt and across the world alike.' A bold leap forward in design, the Step Pyramid went on to become the model that every later master of the Egyptian pyramid would look back to.
One widely cited advisory firm estimates that, over the next twelve to eighteen years, between four and sixteen percent of the world's workers will have to move into a different line of work, while everyone else adapts as their roles are reshaped by ever more capable machines. The disruption technology brings to the labour market has more than one face. One is automation, sometimes called embodied artificial intelligence (AI); another is the disembodied kind, the sort of algorithm that runs inside the phone in your pocket.
For Dr Ingrid Solberg of the Hanseatic Business School, the deepest shifts are occurring where work depends not on making things but on handling information, the territory usually called the knowledge economy, as such jobs undergo what she calls algorithmication. Duties that once required human judgement, among them reading legal contracts, interpreting medical scans and gathering market intelligence, can now be handled by algorithms that learn to do them unaided.
Very often they do the job better than we can, Solberg observes. What draws organisations to them is partly the promise of decisions based on what firms regard as perfect information, and partly the appeal of cutting costs while raising output.
Yet such gains carry a price, she warns. Once AI absorbs the routine thinking, where are a profession's future experts to come from? Traditionally, Solberg notes, people learn a trade through what is called legitimate peripheral participation: the newcomer works beside seasoned practitioners and learns by watching. Remove that, she argues, and another route to expertise must be found.
There is also the question of how far these systems come to steer, or even govern, those who use them. For more than two years, Solberg followed the workings of a large insurance firm. Selling insurance has always rested on regular, personal contact with clients: an agent judges a case from experience and makes a call. But this company had brought in an algorithm that dictated which customers an agent should approach, when, and with which policies and offers.
Usually designed by outside contractors, the algorithm tends to become the true custodian of know-how, she explains. When that happens, Solberg believes, a narrowing of outlook creeps into daily practice: staff see their work through the algorithm's eyes and lean ever more heavily on what it tells them to do. Room for the alternative, the trial-and-error and gut feeling from which fresh ideas and real progress emerge, is quietly closed off.
Solberg and her colleagues even watched employees devise ways of bending the system to their own ends. We have found staff deliberately feeding the algorithm inaccurate information so that they can hit their targets, she reports.
Outcomes of this sort are what many researchers now hope to prevent. Their aim is to make AI more transparent and more trustworthy, so that firms and individuals can see how its decisions are reached. Until then, Solberg cautions, we must be sure we truly grasp the dilemmas this new world raises, around expertise, the borders of occupations, and control.
The economist Professor Halvard Aune expects the coming decades to reshape everyone's working life from start to finish. The old sequence, full-time study, then full-time work, then a pension and retirement, belongs to the past, he says. In its place he pictures a career built in several stages, with retraining recurring throughout and with spells of several jobs, or none, chosen deliberately at different points.
When talk turns to disappearing jobs, Aune sees a flawed assumption behind the gloomy forecasts. They take the total number of jobs to be fixed. Suppose that thirty years from now robots do half of today's hundred jobs; it does not follow that only fifty remain for people. The total grows, I would expect a hundred and fifty jobs by then.
Dr Rasmus Holt, of the Centre for Enterprise and Labour Research and Vestmark Law School, likewise regards apocalyptic visions of future work as wide of the mark. Unemployment is caused not by the arrival of new technologies but by the laws that choke off the flow of capital into the labour market.
In newly published work, Holt asks whether automation, AI and robotics are steering us towards a jobless future, and does so by tracing where unemployment really comes from. The historical record leaves no doubt that upheaval can throw people out of work. But retraining and redeployment, backed by the right social policies, can deal with that.
He goes on: If AI and robotics are going to reshape jobs, I want governments to treat that as a chance to strengthen the rules and lock in solid job security. The law can be rewritten to ready us for a fairer division of work and leisure. Holt's conclusions read as a summons to those running companies, governments and banks: get ahead of the change with bold measures that secure full employment, decent incomes and a flourishing economic democracy.
What these technologies hold out is extraordinary, he adds. They give humanity the means to live in ways no one could once have pictured. The industrial revolution carried people beyond mere subsistence farming, and the corporate revolution opened the door to mass production; now a third revolution has been declared. Yet it will not be a matter of technology alone: the revolution still to come will be a social one.
