IELTS CAM Inspired 18 - Reading Test 2 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 18 - Reading Test 2 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 8
Complete the notes below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Stonehenge
Construction
Stage 1:
• tools used to dig the encircling earthwork may have been made from cattle
1.
• the pits within the circle may formerly have held a ring of
2.
Stage 2:
• greenstones from the Carrow Hills were set upright
• theories about how the greenstones were transported:
– archaeological:
• the builders shaped rollers and sledges from
3.
•
4.
hauled the stones along on enormous baskets
– geological:
• geologists suggested the stones were carried to the plain by
5.
Stage 3:
• limestone blocks were set out in an outer ring or crescent
Builders
• in the 1600s it was proposed that Celtic
6.
had built it
Purpose
• most specialists accept that the monument was formerly used for
7.
purposes
• during the 1960s, one suggestion was that it functioned as a type of
8.
Question 9 - 13
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
9
The stone slabs added in the monument's final stage were placed only around its outer edge.
10
The greenstones were relocated more than once after being set in place.
11
More people visit the monument at the summer solstice than at any other time of the year.
12
The artefacts discovered there support the view that the monument was built by several distinct groups.
13
Critics of Leon Marsh's theory agree that the builders were capable of predicting the movements of the sun and stars.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 19
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
14
In the first paragraph, what does the writer suggest about AI?
A
The specialised nature of today's systems is expected to be short-lived.
B
The pace of future progress in AI is hard to forecast.
C
More insight can be gained from studying AI that plays board games.
D
Specialists cannot agree on the tasks these systems will master.
15
What is the writer's main purpose in the second paragraph?
A
outlining the features that human and machine minds have in common
B
tracing how machine intelligence has developed over time
C
pointing out which human abilities are the most sophisticated
D
setting out the reasons machines could outthink people
16
Why does the writer refer to the story of The Monkey's Paw?
A
to contrast competing ideas of what progress means
B
to stress how essential working together will be
C
to show how goals that are not clearly stated can lead to harm
D
to highlight the monetary benefits of a particular choice
17
What difficulty does the writer identify in the fourth paragraph?
A
persuading people to conduct themselves more ethically
B
making machines more reliably well-disposed toward humans than humans are
C
bringing about a better existence for every species on Earth
D
settling which of our values the machines ought to adopt
18
What does the writer imply about machines in the fifth paragraph?
A
In certain respects they will outperform people.
B
Their safety will turn into a central concern.
C
Their eventual effect on the world is difficult to gauge.
D
A wider role for them will be resisted by many people.
19
Which statement best captures the writer's point in the sixth paragraph?
A
Smarter machines will bring about worse abuses of power.
B
Our own flaws will complicate the task of building the machines we require.
C
Few people possess the expertise needed to program such machines.
D
Machine learning and human learning have very little in common.
Question 20 - 23
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
20
The writer considers the loss of human autonomy to be the most serious of these dangers.
21
People are, for the most part, willing to let machines restrict the choices available to them.
22
Relinquishing certain freedoms has at times been regarded as a mark of progress.
23
According to the writer, machines could safely be given general intelligence without also being granted moral authority.
Question 24 - 26
Complete the summary using the list of phrases, A-F, below.
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes on your answer sheet.
Using AI in a state-run health service
Within some state-run health systems, AI now has a modest say in how are allocated. Giving it a larger say would bring greater efficiency and clear benefits for patients. Such a change would, however, leave particular without the level of they currently enjoy. The aims set for the AI must therefore be suitable, so that discriminatory treatment can be avoided.
A
professional authority
B
lower rates of illness
C
computing specialists
D
available resources
E
medical practitioners
F
specialised duties
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 33
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
27
Feltrano's ideas continue to attract interest long after his death.
28
The plague of the 1300s spread no further than Europe.
29
Feltrano had already taken an interest in city planning before the plague arrived in Milan.
30
City planning came to be regarded as a proper academic subject during the fifteenth century.
31
The Adda is the longest of the rivers flowing through Lombardy.
32
The complete exploitation of a building's internal space only came about in the twentieth century.
33
Feltrano intended the canals in his city to supply residents with drinking water.
Question 34 - 40
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Girolamo Feltrano's ideal city
A large collection of Feltrano's papers sets out his design for a new city on the banks of the Adda. The city was meant to make the of merchandise easier and to keep its spaces free of pollution. Although the design shared many of the values held by his contemporaries, several of its features struck people as unusual. Among these were features now found in certain modern high-rise blocks, such as external running up the face of a building.
Feltrano was much more than an architect. His command of was clear from the man-made waterways he included in the city. He further held that the height of the houses along a street should equal its width, so as to limit damage if an earthquake occurred — a that a good many Italian cities respect to this day.
While some cities from times contain features that also appear in Feltrano's plans, his own ideas were not tried until long after he died. The layout of , remodelled in the nineteenth century, is one place where his vision can be recognised. His thinking still speaks to today's world, where letting cities expand is no longer seen as the best way forward.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Stonehenge
A prehistoric monument whose construction is thought to have spanned some 1,200 years, Stonehenge has long puzzled scholars. It stands on the Hollin Plain, in the west of the country, and consists of about 90 enormous standing stones arranged in a ring.
That the ruin went up in a sequence of stages, the first of them no fewer than 4,500 years ago, is widely accepted among archaeologists. To begin with, the region's Neolithic inhabitants carved out a great circular ditch and bank, a henge, using simple implements that some believe were shaped from cattle shoulder blades. Within the ring lie deep holes of the same age which, in the view of certain scholars, could once have contained a circle of tall wooden pillars.
Some centuries afterwards, the theory goes, roughly 70 greenstones, 38 of them still in place today, were raised upright by the builders and set out as either a ring or a horseshoe. The origin of these stones has been tracked to the Carrow Hills, a range lying about 250 kilometres away. Each boulder weighs as much as five tonnes, so how a people with neither advanced tools nor engineering knowledge moved them so far remains a puzzle.
One theory that has circulated among archaeologists for decades holds that, to shift the greenstones away from the Carrow Hills, the builders made sledges and rollers from cut logs. The boulders were supposedly loaded next onto rafts, which carried them along the coast and then inland up the River Merren towards the plain; a fleet of boats towing each stone has also been suggested. In a more recent account, the stones travelled on oversized baskets running on ball bearings and grooved planks, the whole load hauled along by teams of horses.
From the 1970s onwards, geologists too began contributing to the argument about the monument's origins. The familiar picture of tireless labourers dragging, rolling and carting massive stones all the way from the Carrow Hills was called into question by researchers who proposed that the greenstones had reached the plain through the action of ice sheets rather than any human effort. Such reasoning has left most archaeologists unconvinced, for they struggle to see how natural forces alone could have supplied precisely the number of stones the ring required.
Around 1900 BCE the builders embarked on a third phase. Now large limestone blocks, locally termed greywackes, were set out in an outer ring or crescent, while a number were combined into the striking three-part forms, known as triliths, that rise at the monument's core. Of these blocks, some 40 can still be seen on the site, though there may well have been many more to begin with. Building did not cease until about 1500 BCE, radiocarbon dating shows, and the greenstones in particular were shifted to fresh positions on several occasions.
Yet whose hands actually raised the monument? A seventeenth-century antiquarian, Edmund Harlowe, argued that it had been built by priests, figures who wielded considerable religious, legal and political authority within Celtic communities. The notion won a wide following thanks to Josiah Grendon, a later antiquarian who had dug up ancient graves on the spot. To this day, those who regard themselves as modern-day priests still assemble at the site each summer solstice. All the same, radiocarbon dating in the mid-twentieth century established that the monument had already stood for over a thousand years by the time the Celts settled the area.
A broad consensus has now formed among historians and archaeologists that the monument was the work of several separate tribes, each responsible for a different phase of the building. Lending support to this idea are the bones, tools and other objects recovered from the site. Neolithic farmers, in all likelihood native to the islands, are credited with the earliest stage. Later, it is thought, communities with better tools and a more collective way of life left their mark. Whether these newcomers had crossed from mainland Europe, or were local people descended from the first builders, remains disputed.
Uncertain as the details of the monument's designers and construction may be, its purpose is more obscure still. Most scholars today do agree on one point, that the site once functioned as a gathering place, but exactly what other roles it filled remains something they cannot pin down.
During the 1960s, an astronomer named Leon Marsh proposed that the mass of megalithic stones had served as a kind of observatory, its various points aligning with astronomical events, among them solstices, equinoxes and eclipses, that fall at differing moments in the year. His idea has drawn a good deal of interest in the decades since, yet detractors argue that the builders most likely lacked the knowledge required to forecast such events, and that the heavy cloud cover overhead would in any case have hidden the sky from view.
More recently still, traces of sickness and injury in the human bones dug up at the site prompted a team of archaeologists to suggest that it may have been regarded as a place of healing, quite possibly because the greenstones were credited with the power to cure.
(If advanced artificial intelligence (AI) is to be kept dependably in step with what humans value, will it end up having to enforce those values on us?)
Barely a month has passed in these years without some fresh AI milestone. Consider the program that taught itself the board game of Go in a single afternoon, then beat every human champion — and every earlier human-built machine — it was set against; already that is old news. Triumphs of this sort, true, belong to what gets called narrow AI, in which a system is confined to one highly specialised job. Yet plenty of specialists regard that confinement as no more than a passing phase. Within a few decades we could be looking at artificial general intelligence (AGI): machines matching human performance right across the range of tasks people can take on.
And should that day arrive, there is little cause to think the story ends there. The bodily limits that hold human thinking back would simply not apply to machines. Running on roughly the wattage of a household bulb, our brains handle information at sluggish biochemical rates, and their dimensions are capped by what can pass through the birth canal. What they manage despite such drawbacks is astonishing — yet, set against the true ceiling of thought, they may sit as far below it as the naked eye sits below the vast dish of a radio observatory.
The moment machines outstrip us at designing still-cleverer machines, the climb toward those limits could speed up sharply. Where would that leave us — and could we build a coexistence with such machines that was both safe and rewarding? There is an encouraging side: AI is already handy and lucrative across countless applications, and a super-capable AI ought to prove super-handy and super-lucrative in turn. The snag is that the mightier a system grows, the more crucial it becomes to state its aims precisely. Stories everywhere warn of those who asked for the wrong thing and paid dearly; in W. W. Jacobs's The Monkey's Paw, a couple's wish for a modest sum of money is granted — arriving as the payment they receive after their son is killed at work.
What we therefore have to build are powerful systems that qualify as 'human-friendly' — whose objectives sit dependably alongside the things we value. Part of what makes the undertaking so hard is that we are nowhere near dependably human-friendly ourselves. Toward one another, and toward the many species that share the planet with us, our conduct can be appalling. Should superintelligent machines prove no better on this score than we are, the outlook is bleak: we will merely have handed a formidable new intelligence the means to magnify the worst of our own flawed nature.
Safety, in other words, demands machines that are superhuman not merely in intellect but in ethics. They ought to be reaching for the moral heights rather than sinking into the low ground where so many of us pass a fair share of our time. Happily, the cleverness required will be there. Wherever paths up to that higher ground exist, such machines will pick them out more readily than we can, and nudge us along them.
This rosy picture, though, runs into two large difficulties: setting the machines off along the right path in the first place, and working out what actually arriving at the destination would involve. The first is a difficulty of instruction — we have to describe what the machines are to seek clearly enough to be sure they will locate it, whatever 'it' finally proves to be. That is anything but straightforward, since we are partisan by nature and at odds with ourselves over the very ideals in question. The distress of strangers we frequently overlook, and now and then we add to it, if only at one remove. So how are we to steer machines toward anything better?
The problem of the destination is a different matter. In surrendering ourselves to these moral guardians and gatekeepers, we could be giving up a share of our autonomy — and autonomy is a large part of what makes us human. Machines that keep to the moral high ground more faithfully than we do would presumably curb various lapses we currently think nothing of. We might, for instance, forfeit the liberty to show favouritism toward our own communities.
Losing the freedom to behave badly is not necessarily a loss at all: stripping ourselves of the right to send children into factory labour, or to light a cigarette in a restaurant, counts as advancement. But are we prepared for ethical machine-made enforcers trimming back our choices? So deft might they be at the task that their presence escapes us altogether — though hardly any of us would greet such a prospect gladly.
Such concerns can sound fanciful, yet in part they are already upon us. Across a number of publicly funded health services, AI already has a hand in settling how funding and equipment are shared out. Widen that role and it might handle the task far more efficiently than any human administrator could, serving both the taxpayers who support the system and the patients who depend on it. The price would be that certain people — senior clinicians, say — would surrender some of the sway they currently hold. And because we would want everyone treated even-handedly and every policy kept fair, the aims written into the AI would have to be set down correctly.
What confronts us is a potent new technology that is, quite literally, a new manner of thinking. Our own safety hangs on aiming these fresh thinkers the right way and getting them to behave well on our behalf. Whether that can be done remains uncertain; but if it can, it will call for a spirit of cooperation and a readiness to lay self-interest aside.
We tend to treat broad intelligence and moral reasoning alike as faculties belonging to human beings alone. Safety, however, appears to insist that the two arrive as a set: hand machines general intelligence and we will have to hand them moral authority besides. And precisely where would that leave us? Reason enough to weigh the destination carefully now — and to take care over what it is we wish for.
Girolamo Feltrano's vision of the perfect city was centuries ahead of its time
The name of Girolamo Feltrano has become almost a synonym for the word 'genius'. A model of the Renaissance ideal, he united a scientific cast of mind with real artistic gifts and a deep sympathy for others. Almost five centuries have passed since Feltrano died at the Villa Orsenna, his final home near Pavia in northern Italy. Far from fading into obscurity, his thinking has been carried down the years and can still take us by surprise.
The Renaissance, which drew Europe out of the fifteenth century and into the modern world, came in the wake of the fourteenth-century plague — an outbreak that set off a global crisis and killed perhaps 200 million people across Europe and Asia. Our own era stands at the brink of a comparable emergency: left unchecked, climate change is forecast to bring mass displacement, extinctions and death. In each case, nothing short of sweeping change could remake the way people lived and protect them from ruin.
It was around 1487, once plague had carried off half the population of Milan, that Feltrano first began studying the problems of urban design. Following a fashion of his day, he set about a scheme for an 'ideal city' — a project whose enormous cost ensured it was never built. Since poorly conceived cities are themselves a leading cause of today's climate change, it is natural to wonder how different our own cities might have looked had his ideas been realised.
The Renaissance is famous for its remarkable strides in painting and architecture, yet it is rarely recalled that the fifteenth century also witnessed the birth of urban planning as a true academic discipline. Not until the leading men of the age lent their support to sweeping city schemes in Italy — the remodelling of Urbino and the enlargement of Vigevano among them — had the disciplined, deliberate design of a city been anything but largely absent from Western thought. Undertakings of this sort almost certainly prompted Feltrano to rethink the shape of the medieval city, with its cramped, winding lanes and its houses stacked one against another.
Feltrano's untidy way of working — his scattered notes and sketches — makes it hard to assemble any single, coherent picture of his ideal city. Nevertheless, the enormous surviving body of his papers lets a series of strikingly original ideas be pieced together, all centred on a new city to be founded beside the Adda, the river that runs down from the Alps and threads for more than three hundred kilometres through Lombardy. He imagined the city built for the easy movement of goods and for clean, open surroundings, wanting wide, well-ordered streets and spacious, comfortable buildings. High, solid walls were to enclose it, crowned with 'towers and battlements of every useful and pleasing kind'.
If his aim for a rational, modern city was very much of its moment, its details carried his own signature. Feltrano wanted the city to rise across several levels, joined on the outside of its buildings by open-air stairways. A hint of this survives in some of today's tower blocks, though at the time it was highly uncommon; indeed, the idea of making the fullest use of a building's inner space would wait until the Modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s before it was put into practice.
The upper levels were kept for residents, free to wander among fine palaces and avenues, while everything below was handed over to services, trade, industry and repairs. The real novelty, though, lay in the way his design united architecture with hydraulics. Feltrano's command of this field showed in the artificial canals he ran through the city; governed by clocks and holding basins, they were meant to let boats travel easily inland. He held, too, that the width of a street ought to equal the average height of the houses beside it — a principle still honoured across many Italian cities, both to let in sunlight and to soften the harm done by earthquakes.
A handful of these elements had surfaced in Greek cities, yet no one before Feltrano had set out a compact, multi-level modern city so completely worked out in technical terms. Several of his ideas, in fact, would not be attempted until the nineteenth century. The division of a city by function — utilities and infrastructure below, and broad, airy boulevards and walkways for inhabitants above — can be seen in Ildefons Cerdà's celebrated expansion of Barcelona, laid out from 1860.
Today Feltrano's ideas are not merely sound; they mark out a path for urban planning to follow. Many specialists believe that the compact city — climbing upward rather than spreading horizontally, woven together with nature and above all with water, and easy to move around — could make modern cities greener and easier to live in. It is one more measure of how nearly Feltrano foresaw the concerns of present-day urbanism, and how far ahead of his own age he stood.
That the ruin went up in a sequence of stages, the first of them no fewer than 4,500 years ago, is widely accepted among archaeologists. To begin with, the region's Neolithic inhabitants carved out a great circular ditch and bank, a henge, using simple implements that some believe were shaped from cattle shoulder blades. Within the ring lie deep holes of the same age which, in the view of certain scholars, could once have contained a circle of tall wooden pillars.
Some centuries afterwards, the theory goes, roughly 70 greenstones, 38 of them still in place today, were raised upright by the builders and set out as either a ring or a horseshoe. The origin of these stones has been tracked to the Carrow Hills, a range lying about 250 kilometres away. Each boulder weighs as much as five tonnes, so how a people with neither advanced tools nor engineering knowledge moved them so far remains a puzzle.
One theory that has circulated among archaeologists for decades holds that, to shift the greenstones away from the Carrow Hills, the builders made sledges and rollers from cut logs. The boulders were supposedly loaded next onto rafts, which carried them along the coast and then inland up the River Merren towards the plain; a fleet of boats towing each stone has also been suggested. In a more recent account, the stones travelled on oversized baskets running on ball bearings and grooved planks, the whole load hauled along by teams of horses.
From the 1970s onwards, geologists too began contributing to the argument about the monument's origins. The familiar picture of tireless labourers dragging, rolling and carting massive stones all the way from the Carrow Hills was called into question by researchers who proposed that the greenstones had reached the plain through the action of ice sheets rather than any human effort. Such reasoning has left most archaeologists unconvinced, for they struggle to see how natural forces alone could have supplied precisely the number of stones the ring required.
Around 1900 BCE the builders embarked on a third phase. Now large limestone blocks, locally termed greywackes, were set out in an outer ring or crescent, while a number were combined into the striking three-part forms, known as triliths, that rise at the monument's core. Of these blocks, some 40 can still be seen on the site, though there may well have been many more to begin with. Building did not cease until about 1500 BCE, radiocarbon dating shows, and the greenstones in particular were shifted to fresh positions on several occasions.
Yet whose hands actually raised the monument? A seventeenth-century antiquarian, Edmund Harlowe, argued that it had been built by priests, figures who wielded considerable religious, legal and political authority within Celtic communities. The notion won a wide following thanks to Josiah Grendon, a later antiquarian who had dug up ancient graves on the spot. To this day, those who regard themselves as modern-day priests still assemble at the site each summer solstice. All the same, radiocarbon dating in the mid-twentieth century established that the monument had already stood for over a thousand years by the time the Celts settled the area.
A broad consensus has now formed among historians and archaeologists that the monument was the work of several separate tribes, each responsible for a different phase of the building. Lending support to this idea are the bones, tools and other objects recovered from the site. Neolithic farmers, in all likelihood native to the islands, are credited with the earliest stage. Later, it is thought, communities with better tools and a more collective way of life left their mark. Whether these newcomers had crossed from mainland Europe, or were local people descended from the first builders, remains disputed.
Uncertain as the details of the monument's designers and construction may be, its purpose is more obscure still. Most scholars today do agree on one point, that the site once functioned as a gathering place, but exactly what other roles it filled remains something they cannot pin down.
During the 1960s, an astronomer named Leon Marsh proposed that the mass of megalithic stones had served as a kind of observatory, its various points aligning with astronomical events, among them solstices, equinoxes and eclipses, that fall at differing moments in the year. His idea has drawn a good deal of interest in the decades since, yet detractors argue that the builders most likely lacked the knowledge required to forecast such events, and that the heavy cloud cover overhead would in any case have hidden the sky from view.
More recently still, traces of sickness and injury in the human bones dug up at the site prompted a team of archaeologists to suggest that it may have been regarded as a place of healing, quite possibly because the greenstones were credited with the power to cure.
Barely a month has passed in these years without some fresh AI milestone. Consider the program that taught itself the board game of Go in a single afternoon, then beat every human champion — and every earlier human-built machine — it was set against; already that is old news. Triumphs of this sort, true, belong to what gets called narrow AI, in which a system is confined to one highly specialised job. Yet plenty of specialists regard that confinement as no more than a passing phase. Within a few decades we could be looking at artificial general intelligence (AGI): machines matching human performance right across the range of tasks people can take on.
And should that day arrive, there is little cause to think the story ends there. The bodily limits that hold human thinking back would simply not apply to machines. Running on roughly the wattage of a household bulb, our brains handle information at sluggish biochemical rates, and their dimensions are capped by what can pass through the birth canal. What they manage despite such drawbacks is astonishing — yet, set against the true ceiling of thought, they may sit as far below it as the naked eye sits below the vast dish of a radio observatory.
The moment machines outstrip us at designing still-cleverer machines, the climb toward those limits could speed up sharply. Where would that leave us — and could we build a coexistence with such machines that was both safe and rewarding? There is an encouraging side: AI is already handy and lucrative across countless applications, and a super-capable AI ought to prove super-handy and super-lucrative in turn. The snag is that the mightier a system grows, the more crucial it becomes to state its aims precisely. Stories everywhere warn of those who asked for the wrong thing and paid dearly; in W. W. Jacobs's The Monkey's Paw, a couple's wish for a modest sum of money is granted — arriving as the payment they receive after their son is killed at work.
What we therefore have to build are powerful systems that qualify as 'human-friendly' — whose objectives sit dependably alongside the things we value. Part of what makes the undertaking so hard is that we are nowhere near dependably human-friendly ourselves. Toward one another, and toward the many species that share the planet with us, our conduct can be appalling. Should superintelligent machines prove no better on this score than we are, the outlook is bleak: we will merely have handed a formidable new intelligence the means to magnify the worst of our own flawed nature.
Safety, in other words, demands machines that are superhuman not merely in intellect but in ethics. They ought to be reaching for the moral heights rather than sinking into the low ground where so many of us pass a fair share of our time. Happily, the cleverness required will be there. Wherever paths up to that higher ground exist, such machines will pick them out more readily than we can, and nudge us along them.
This rosy picture, though, runs into two large difficulties: setting the machines off along the right path in the first place, and working out what actually arriving at the destination would involve. The first is a difficulty of instruction — we have to describe what the machines are to seek clearly enough to be sure they will locate it, whatever 'it' finally proves to be. That is anything but straightforward, since we are partisan by nature and at odds with ourselves over the very ideals in question. The distress of strangers we frequently overlook, and now and then we add to it, if only at one remove. So how are we to steer machines toward anything better?
The problem of the destination is a different matter. In surrendering ourselves to these moral guardians and gatekeepers, we could be giving up a share of our autonomy — and autonomy is a large part of what makes us human. Machines that keep to the moral high ground more faithfully than we do would presumably curb various lapses we currently think nothing of. We might, for instance, forfeit the liberty to show favouritism toward our own communities.
Losing the freedom to behave badly is not necessarily a loss at all: stripping ourselves of the right to send children into factory labour, or to light a cigarette in a restaurant, counts as advancement. But are we prepared for ethical machine-made enforcers trimming back our choices? So deft might they be at the task that their presence escapes us altogether — though hardly any of us would greet such a prospect gladly.
Such concerns can sound fanciful, yet in part they are already upon us. Across a number of publicly funded health services, AI already has a hand in settling how funding and equipment are shared out. Widen that role and it might handle the task far more efficiently than any human administrator could, serving both the taxpayers who support the system and the patients who depend on it. The price would be that certain people — senior clinicians, say — would surrender some of the sway they currently hold. And because we would want everyone treated even-handedly and every policy kept fair, the aims written into the AI would have to be set down correctly.
What confronts us is a potent new technology that is, quite literally, a new manner of thinking. Our own safety hangs on aiming these fresh thinkers the right way and getting them to behave well on our behalf. Whether that can be done remains uncertain; but if it can, it will call for a spirit of cooperation and a readiness to lay self-interest aside.
We tend to treat broad intelligence and moral reasoning alike as faculties belonging to human beings alone. Safety, however, appears to insist that the two arrive as a set: hand machines general intelligence and we will have to hand them moral authority besides. And precisely where would that leave us? Reason enough to weigh the destination carefully now — and to take care over what it is we wish for.
The name of Girolamo Feltrano has become almost a synonym for the word 'genius'. A model of the Renaissance ideal, he united a scientific cast of mind with real artistic gifts and a deep sympathy for others. Almost five centuries have passed since Feltrano died at the Villa Orsenna, his final home near Pavia in northern Italy. Far from fading into obscurity, his thinking has been carried down the years and can still take us by surprise.
The Renaissance, which drew Europe out of the fifteenth century and into the modern world, came in the wake of the fourteenth-century plague — an outbreak that set off a global crisis and killed perhaps 200 million people across Europe and Asia. Our own era stands at the brink of a comparable emergency: left unchecked, climate change is forecast to bring mass displacement, extinctions and death. In each case, nothing short of sweeping change could remake the way people lived and protect them from ruin.
It was around 1487, once plague had carried off half the population of Milan, that Feltrano first began studying the problems of urban design. Following a fashion of his day, he set about a scheme for an 'ideal city' — a project whose enormous cost ensured it was never built. Since poorly conceived cities are themselves a leading cause of today's climate change, it is natural to wonder how different our own cities might have looked had his ideas been realised.
The Renaissance is famous for its remarkable strides in painting and architecture, yet it is rarely recalled that the fifteenth century also witnessed the birth of urban planning as a true academic discipline. Not until the leading men of the age lent their support to sweeping city schemes in Italy — the remodelling of Urbino and the enlargement of Vigevano among them — had the disciplined, deliberate design of a city been anything but largely absent from Western thought. Undertakings of this sort almost certainly prompted Feltrano to rethink the shape of the medieval city, with its cramped, winding lanes and its houses stacked one against another.
Feltrano's untidy way of working — his scattered notes and sketches — makes it hard to assemble any single, coherent picture of his ideal city. Nevertheless, the enormous surviving body of his papers lets a series of strikingly original ideas be pieced together, all centred on a new city to be founded beside the Adda, the river that runs down from the Alps and threads for more than three hundred kilometres through Lombardy. He imagined the city built for the easy movement of goods and for clean, open surroundings, wanting wide, well-ordered streets and spacious, comfortable buildings. High, solid walls were to enclose it, crowned with 'towers and battlements of every useful and pleasing kind'.
If his aim for a rational, modern city was very much of its moment, its details carried his own signature. Feltrano wanted the city to rise across several levels, joined on the outside of its buildings by open-air stairways. A hint of this survives in some of today's tower blocks, though at the time it was highly uncommon; indeed, the idea of making the fullest use of a building's inner space would wait until the Modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s before it was put into practice.
The upper levels were kept for residents, free to wander among fine palaces and avenues, while everything below was handed over to services, trade, industry and repairs. The real novelty, though, lay in the way his design united architecture with hydraulics. Feltrano's command of this field showed in the artificial canals he ran through the city; governed by clocks and holding basins, they were meant to let boats travel easily inland. He held, too, that the width of a street ought to equal the average height of the houses beside it — a principle still honoured across many Italian cities, both to let in sunlight and to soften the harm done by earthquakes.
A handful of these elements had surfaced in Greek cities, yet no one before Feltrano had set out a compact, multi-level modern city so completely worked out in technical terms. Several of his ideas, in fact, would not be attempted until the nineteenth century. The division of a city by function — utilities and infrastructure below, and broad, airy boulevards and walkways for inhabitants above — can be seen in Ildefons Cerdà's celebrated expansion of Barcelona, laid out from 1860.
Today Feltrano's ideas are not merely sound; they mark out a path for urban planning to follow. Many specialists believe that the compact city — climbing upward rather than spreading horizontally, woven together with nature and above all with water, and easy to move around — could make modern cities greener and easier to live in. It is one more measure of how nearly Feltrano foresaw the concerns of present-day urbanism, and how far ahead of his own age he stood.
