IELTS CAM Inspired 20 - Reading Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS Mock Test 20 - Reading Test 3 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 7
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
The history of frozen food
About 2,000 years ago — the Caucasus
• A method that combined chilling and drying kept
1.
nutritious for later use.
1849 — USA
• Rail cars cooled with ice let
2.
be sent long distances without spoiling.
1883 — Argentina
• The earliest frozen cargo sent to Britain consisted of two types of
3.
.
From 1913 — USA (innovations introduced by Emil Vandergrift)
• rapid freezing, which stopped
4.
from ruining the food
• goods were sold wrapped in
5.
so shoppers could see what they were getting
Early 1940s — USA
• Demand for frozen food rose during a wartime lack of
6.
.
1950s — USA
• Owning a
7.
at home became widespread.
Question 8 - 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
8
During the early 1800s, ice was carried across the ocean for the single purpose of keeping food from spoiling.
9
The machine-freezing method first developed in Argentina had no effect on the taste of the food.
10
During his time in the north, Vandergrift earned a good profit from the fur trade.
11
Merrow Foods spent very little on marketing when it launched the Supper Tray.
12
The tray used for the Supper Tray was of a kind that already existed.
13
The frozen-food industry in the United States is now bigger than that of any other country.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 19
Reading Passage 2 has six sections, A-F.
Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.
List of Headings
I
Long-established remedies
II
Signs that worse is to come
III
A partnership that benefits both sides
IV
Encouraging optimism
V
A dispute over whether a label fits
VI
Efforts to reduce the damage
VII
A pair of aims for informing the public
14
Paragraph A
15
Paragraph B
16
Paragraph C
17
Paragraph D
18
Paragraph E
19
Paragraph F
Question 20 - 21
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
According to the writer, which TWO of the following contribute to the harm suffered by coral reefs?
A
the gradual loss of oxygen from sea water
B
a decline in the number of predatory species
C
the spread of tourism around reefs
D
the increasing acidity of the ocean
E
a fall in the amount of sunlight reaching the sea
Question 22 - 23
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO aims are held by the scientists working at the Naples institute?
A
They intend to move healthy corals onto reefs that have been harmed.
B
They are testing a coating that would shield coral from heat.
C
They want to find corals that can cope with warmer, more acidic water.
D
They are breeding fish that assist in coral recovery.
E
They hope to make certain corals reproduce more often.
Question 24 - 26
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
24
Coral is actually made up of tiny animals known as
.
25
By capturing sunlight, the algae make
which are passed to the polyps.
26
In exchange, the algae are given a degree of
by their coral hosts.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 33
Match each statement with the correct expert, A, B or C.
List of Findings
A
Solveig Amundsen
B
Anselm Reuter
C
Dita Varga
27
Keeping people safe may mean deliberately limiting what robots are permitted to do.
28
People tend to overstate how much danger robots really present.
29
Matching the inventiveness of the human mind is something machines are unlikely to manage for a very long time.
30
The day may come when the fair or unfair handling of robots becomes a question we cannot dodge.
31
Machines are probably more useful to us on our own world than out in space.
32
The predictions in the best science fiction may turn out no more mistaken than the claims of second-rate science.
33
Smarter machines are something a fair number of people actively hope to see.
Question 34 - 36
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-D, below.
List of Endings
A
the reshaping of distant worlds to suit human purposes.
B
the damage that artificial intelligence has already caused.
C
the advances that machine intelligence has already achieved.
D
the exploration of space by robotic craft.
Amundsen and Reuter hold comparable positions on the ethics of
34
Reuter and Varga see eye to eye about
35
Varga and Amundsen take opposing views on
36
Question 37 - 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
37
According to Amundsen, what lies behind people's dread of machines?
A
It reveals a fundamental gap between the way humans and machines think.
B
It has grown sharper as robots have become more sophisticated.
C
It springs from our habit of treating inanimate objects as though they had human minds.
D
It rests on widespread confusion about how machines actually work.
38
What potential development does Reuter regard as worrying?
A
machines coming to outnumber people
B
linked computer systems beginning to think for themselves and pursue their own aims
C
robots acquiring capabilities that humans do not possess
D
artificial intelligence taking charge of every part of daily life
39
In her answer about science fiction, what does Varga stress?
A
the way science fiction shapes how we regard robots
B
the extent to which people's reactions to robot stories differ
C
how central robots are to the whole genre of science fiction
D
the way the genre's picture of robots has altered over time
40
When Amundsen discusses the line between what is real and what is imagined, she is mainly:
A
cautioning people not to mistake the one for the other
B
tracing the ways in which each has shaped the other
C
accounting for why scientists see them differently from everyone else
D
urging people to take up a different way of looking at them
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Frozen Food
A US perspective on the development of the frozen food industry
That ice could keep food from spoiling was worked out very early on. Winter ice, the evidence suggests, was already being set aside for the warmer months as much as 10,000 years ago. A neat example comes from around two thousand years back, when highland farmers in the Caucasus found their own way of making turnips last: left to freeze overnight, the turnips were pressed underfoot to drive out the water, then spread to dry in the sun. What survived looked unappealing, but its nutritional value stayed intact.
Right into the closing decades of the nineteenth century, ice taken straight from nature was what most refrigeration depended on. Boston merchants in the early 1800s even had vast slabs of Arctic ice hauled by sea across the Atlantic, purely to stop food going bad. In 1849 the first insulated railway wagons appeared, packed with ice so that cheese could travel from the dairies of Vermont down to Boston without turning.
The breakthrough came in 1867, when engineers in Argentina worked out how to produce ice by machine. Their apparatus drove a gas — ammonia at first, and in later designs Freon — through a condenser by means of a compressor. Passing through the condenser, the pressurised gas shed part of its heat; it was then let out sharply into a low-pressure evaporator coil, where it turned liquid and cold. Air blown across this coil was thereby chilled and fed into a sealed compartment until the temperature inside dropped to freezing.
The original aim had been modest: keeping Argentine wine drinkable through the summer heat. Before long, though, the country's fruit growers saw a bigger opportunity — fitted aboard a ship, the same machinery might carry their fruit to distant markets. So in 1883 a consignment of frozen peaches and pears left for Britain. The fruit arrived edible but not unspoiled: as it froze, tiny crystals formed inside its cells, and the swelling ice split those cells open, robbing the flesh of both taste and texture.
The modern industry can be said to have its roots among the Inuit of northern Canada. A chemistry student from Rochester, New York, named Emil Vandergrift, found himself short of funds in 1908, and it was this that took him north to Baffin Island to make a living trapping and trading furs. What caught his attention there was the Inuit practice of letting fish freeze almost instantly in the polar air — fish that, many months on, still looked and tasted freshly caught.
Back in the United States from 1913, Vandergrift set about building mechanical freezers that could freeze food rapidly. One improved model followed another, and on the strength of them he founded a firm in Portland, Maine, trading in frozen fish. The business changed hands in 1925 and was renamed the Northern Provision Company; Vandergrift, though, stayed on as head of research, and the division he led went on inventing.
Several of the advances that made a frozen-food industry feasible trace back to Vandergrift himself. His quick-freezing methods held down the harm done by crystals, and he worked out how to freeze a product inside the very packet it would later be sold in. It was he, too, who brought in Clearwrap, the earliest see-through wrapping for food, so that buyers could judge the contents for themselves. His goods also came in handy, ready-portioned packs that needed little effort to prepare.
Difficulties remained. Through the 1930s, hardly any grocer would lay out money on freezers for custom that had yet to materialise, so Vandergrift let them have cheap freezer cabinets on hire. Insulated rail wagons he likewise rented, so his goods could reach every corner of the country. The snag lay with shoppers: few owned a freezer roomy or efficient enough to make the most of what was on offer.
The early 1940s brought rising sales, as the Second World War worked in the industry's favour. With metal being diverted into munitions, canned food was rationed to conserve it, while frozen food stayed plentiful and cheap. By the 1950s, too, home-refrigeration technology had advanced far enough for the average household to afford it. Roughly 35 million American families had a freezer at home by 1956, and manufacturers were making these appliances larger year on year.
Households of the 1950s were increasingly after convenience at mealtimes, so the timing could hardly have been better for the 'Supper Tray'. Merrow Foods, a poultry producer with canned and frozen lines sold across the country, took up several of Vandergrift's freezing methods in 1956; with a catchy name and an enormous advertising spend, it put out the first Supper Tray. Inside was frozen chicken with potatoes and vegetables, portioned into one of those segmented aluminium trays that airlines used. Shoppers took to it at once, and Merrow shifted 15 million within twelve months — drawn by a familiar brand, a single serving and a dinner an oven made ready in barely half an hour. By 1961 Americans were spending some $3 billion a year on frozen food, of which about $600 million went on prepared meals of the Supper Tray kind.
Today the American frozen-food business turns over more than $70 billion a year. Of that, around $28 billion comes from food bought to eat at home, while the remaining $42 billion or so is sold through restaurants, canteens, hospitals and schools — a segment that makes up roughly one-third of all food-service sales.
A. At the Tyrrhenian Marine Institute in Naples, researchers have just completed a vast artificial reef, assembled piece by piece over many months. Into the enormous tank they have introduced samples of some of the sea's most striking corals - branching staghorn, brain coral, delicate sea fans and plate coral among them - together with the kinds of fish that flourish alongside such corals, damselfish, wrasse and cardinalfish included. Housing the reef is the institute's newly opened gallery, Hidden Multitudes, which celebrates the tiny invertebrate animals on which so much of the planet's life depends. At the heart of the display stands the reef tank, fronted by a viewing window fully seven metres across. 'Nowhere on Earth supports more varied life than a coral reef, and we want visitors to grasp just how remarkable these places are,' said Lucia Marchetti, the institute's lead curator of marine invertebrates. 'But we are just as keen to draw attention to the scientific and conservation work now under way to rescue reefs from the dangers posed by a warming climate.' The aim is for the public to see the efforts being made to preserve these marvels.
B
A coral is really a colony of minute creatures called polyps, each fitted with tentacles that seize the small animals drifting past in the water. The polyps themselves are colourless; the vivid pinks, oranges, blues and greens we link with coral in fact come from algae lodged inside their tissues. The relationship serves both sides. The algae are offered protection by the coral that houses them, and in exchange the nutrients they produce as they photosynthesise in sunlight flow back to the polyps. It is this convenient partnership that has let reefs build up - structures that, while they cover well under a tenth of a per cent of the seabed, still shelter more than a quarter of all marine species, among them molluscs, sponges, shellfish and fish.
C
This variety explains why reefs are so often called 'the rainforests of the sea' - a description that not every naturalist accepts. Among the doubters is the veteran wildlife broadcaster Gethin Rowe. 'People tell you nothing surpasses the rainforest,' Rowe has remarked, 'but I disagree. The moment you arrive, you find yourself asking where all the birds and animals have got to - up in the trees, naturally, out of sight. If it is beauty and abundant life you are after, a coral reef is the place. Slip on a mask, lower your face beneath the surface, and what you see is astonishing.'
D
These wonderful sights, sadly, are now in grave danger, and the most pressing hazard is heat. As sea temperatures climb, they set off bleaching episodes that drain reefs of colour and, in time, destroy them. Nor is that the whole story. The seas are also turning more acidic and steadily losing their oxygen; sea levels are creeping upward; currents are shifting; and human pollution adds to the burden, even as a warming world eats away at reef habitats. Enormous stretches of reef - among them large portions of Australia's Great Barrier Reef - have already gone, and researchers warn that, without swift action against greenhouse gases and rising temperatures, in excess of 70% of reefs may vanish by 2040. Marchetti points out that corals must already endure punishing conditions, from wave battering to much else besides. 'Whenever something begins to go awry in the oceans, corals are the first to respond, and that is precisely what we are witnessing today. The reefs are dying, and in doing so they are warning us that our planet is not in good health.'
E
Even so, scientists are working to identify tougher strains of coral capable of withstanding our overheated seas, and part of that work will take place at the Naples institute. 'Laboratories have been built directly behind the reef tank, and there our scientists will examine different coral species,' Marchetti explained. One goal is to discover which corals cope best in warm, acidic water. A second is to raise the rate at which corals reproduce. 'A coral will normally spawn only once in a year,' she noted, 'yet research in aquariums has already coaxed some corals into spawning artificially, which can support efforts to rebuild reefs. Were this achievable for every species, we might set up spawning programmes that run several times a year - a real boost to reef recovery.'
F
Work of this kind is going on in laboratories across the globe, and the Naples centre is tied into that international web of research. A finding made at one site can then be checked at others, and the young corals that result can be put on show in the Hidden Multitudes tank. 'What matters most is that the advances we achieve in helping coral cope with a warming world can be placed before the public, giving people reason to believe reefs can still be saved,' said Marchetti. 'Rescuing the world's coral reefs is now an ecological priority of the highest order.'
Three specialists, each eminent in a different field, respond to questions about how humans and robots relate.
The opening question, 'Should we send robots to settle other planets?', went first to Professor Anselm Reuter, whose field is cosmology and astrophysics. By the close of this century, he predicted, robotic craft will have charted the whole solar system. 'After that, asteroids could be mined, so that sizeable structures might be built in space rather than every raw material being hauled up from Earth. To my mind that is a soberer, kinder prospect than terraforming a world.' Any planet people did settle, he added, ought to be safeguarded under an arrangement much like the one protecting Antarctica here on Earth.
Professor Dita Varga, an engineer who designs robots, took a more sceptical line on occupying other worlds and mining minerals from them. 'Unless the resources can actually be shipped home, I see no urgent reason to move onto another planet. Even here, most of Earth lies out of our reach. Sending our machines to gather what we need closer to home strikes me as a wiser way to use them.'
To Professor Solveig Amundsen, a social anthropologist, the very word 'colonisation' carried an uneasy moral charge. 'Whatever we set out to do, on Earth or on Mars alike, should spring from real curiosity about the Other, an effort to encounter it, rather than a wish to stamp our own template upon it.'
The second question asked how long before machine intelligence would overtake our own. Reuter noted that machines can now defeat people at chess, yet quickly qualified the point. 'What a robot still handles poorly is reading its physical surroundings; picking up and shifting real chess pieces defeats it in a way that would not trouble a small child. The machines that come after, though, may before the century is out deal with the world around them, and with us, every bit as deftly as we do. That is when the ethical puzzles surface. Would anything be wrong in putting such robots to use? Should it bother us if they end up idle, bored or frustrated?'
Varga, taking the same question, argued that in a narrow sense the threshold had already been crossed. 'At finding their way about, holding information and tracking down particular items, machines leave us far behind. What not one of them can yet do is match the reliable, flexible grip a person has on what they see or hear. A machine coming anywhere close to human creativity inside the next fifty years would be a very tall order indeed.'
Amundsen steered the discussion elsewhere, suggesting that our unease about machines growing too clever reveals more about us than about them. The habit, as she saw it, grows out of our readiness to treat lifeless things as though alive: we shape machines in our own likeness, assume they reason and act as we do, and so view them as dangers with wills of their own. 'The instant we lay the trouble at the machines' door, we start imagining them as mightier than they truly are, and in time that is precisely what they become.'
Turning to the third question, whether progress in artificial intelligence ought to frighten us, Reuter suggested that the people who really should feel nervous are the forecasters pinning their hopes on the so-called singularity. 'A further danger is that, as our dependence on linked computer systems keeps deepening, those networks begin behaving like one vast mind of their own, chasing ends that do us no good. The safeguard, to my mind, is to hold robots down to the level of mere idiot savants: dazzling at calculation and at handling data, by all means, yet never sharp enough to outmanoeuvre us.'
Varga observed that artificial intelligence has done damage already, the computer virus being the plainest example. 'Even so, the real intelligence there sits with whoever wrote the virus out of malice. What matters is that computers do us vastly more good than their viruses ever do us harm. Robotics, too, will be abused here and there before long, but its gains ought in the same way to outweigh whatever losses accompany it.'
Amundsen answered by turning the fear itself into the thing worth examining. 'What we should ask is why the dread of robots and artificial intelligence lingers, when not one of them has actually risen against us to contest our dominance.' Since machines have never yet proved dangerous, she reasoned, there is scant ground for assuming they suddenly will. Besides, she pointed out, a good many people feel no dread at all, welcoming intelligent machines rather than fearing them.
On the closing question, about what science fiction might teach us regarding robots, Reuter offered a wry piece of counsel. 'Now and then I tell my students that good science fiction rewards reading more than mediocre science does: livelier, and probably in the end no likelier to prove mistaken.'
Varga, by contrast, dwelt on how shrewdly the genre has anticipated what was coming. 'Science fiction has often been uncannily good at foreseeing the future, sketching a whole span of imagined worlds, from endearing, helpful machines to bleak societies under robot rule. What strikes me is that scarcely any of it pictures a future without robots.'
Amundsen brought things to a close by noting that people nowadays routinely cut the world in two, reality on one side and fiction and fantasy on the other. That boundary, she explained, was not always present; it was traced by scientists and technologists anxious to fence off a domain of their own. 'The line is far blurrier than it appears, which is exactly why the two realms now and then collide. On occasion we have to draw these separate ways of understanding back together if the full picture is what we are after. Manage that, and perhaps we will no longer be so terrified that a thing fashioned in our own image will turn against us.'
* terraforming: modifying a planet's atmosphere to suit human needs ** singularity: the point at which robots become able to create ever more sophisticated versions of themselves
That ice could keep food from spoiling was worked out very early on. Winter ice, the evidence suggests, was already being set aside for the warmer months as much as 10,000 years ago. A neat example comes from around two thousand years back, when highland farmers in the Caucasus found their own way of making turnips last: left to freeze overnight, the turnips were pressed underfoot to drive out the water, then spread to dry in the sun. What survived looked unappealing, but its nutritional value stayed intact.
Right into the closing decades of the nineteenth century, ice taken straight from nature was what most refrigeration depended on. Boston merchants in the early 1800s even had vast slabs of Arctic ice hauled by sea across the Atlantic, purely to stop food going bad. In 1849 the first insulated railway wagons appeared, packed with ice so that cheese could travel from the dairies of Vermont down to Boston without turning.
The breakthrough came in 1867, when engineers in Argentina worked out how to produce ice by machine. Their apparatus drove a gas — ammonia at first, and in later designs Freon — through a condenser by means of a compressor. Passing through the condenser, the pressurised gas shed part of its heat; it was then let out sharply into a low-pressure evaporator coil, where it turned liquid and cold. Air blown across this coil was thereby chilled and fed into a sealed compartment until the temperature inside dropped to freezing.
The original aim had been modest: keeping Argentine wine drinkable through the summer heat. Before long, though, the country's fruit growers saw a bigger opportunity — fitted aboard a ship, the same machinery might carry their fruit to distant markets. So in 1883 a consignment of frozen peaches and pears left for Britain. The fruit arrived edible but not unspoiled: as it froze, tiny crystals formed inside its cells, and the swelling ice split those cells open, robbing the flesh of both taste and texture.
The modern industry can be said to have its roots among the Inuit of northern Canada. A chemistry student from Rochester, New York, named Emil Vandergrift, found himself short of funds in 1908, and it was this that took him north to Baffin Island to make a living trapping and trading furs. What caught his attention there was the Inuit practice of letting fish freeze almost instantly in the polar air — fish that, many months on, still looked and tasted freshly caught.
Back in the United States from 1913, Vandergrift set about building mechanical freezers that could freeze food rapidly. One improved model followed another, and on the strength of them he founded a firm in Portland, Maine, trading in frozen fish. The business changed hands in 1925 and was renamed the Northern Provision Company; Vandergrift, though, stayed on as head of research, and the division he led went on inventing.
Several of the advances that made a frozen-food industry feasible trace back to Vandergrift himself. His quick-freezing methods held down the harm done by crystals, and he worked out how to freeze a product inside the very packet it would later be sold in. It was he, too, who brought in Clearwrap, the earliest see-through wrapping for food, so that buyers could judge the contents for themselves. His goods also came in handy, ready-portioned packs that needed little effort to prepare.
Difficulties remained. Through the 1930s, hardly any grocer would lay out money on freezers for custom that had yet to materialise, so Vandergrift let them have cheap freezer cabinets on hire. Insulated rail wagons he likewise rented, so his goods could reach every corner of the country. The snag lay with shoppers: few owned a freezer roomy or efficient enough to make the most of what was on offer.
The early 1940s brought rising sales, as the Second World War worked in the industry's favour. With metal being diverted into munitions, canned food was rationed to conserve it, while frozen food stayed plentiful and cheap. By the 1950s, too, home-refrigeration technology had advanced far enough for the average household to afford it. Roughly 35 million American families had a freezer at home by 1956, and manufacturers were making these appliances larger year on year.
Households of the 1950s were increasingly after convenience at mealtimes, so the timing could hardly have been better for the 'Supper Tray'. Merrow Foods, a poultry producer with canned and frozen lines sold across the country, took up several of Vandergrift's freezing methods in 1956; with a catchy name and an enormous advertising spend, it put out the first Supper Tray. Inside was frozen chicken with potatoes and vegetables, portioned into one of those segmented aluminium trays that airlines used. Shoppers took to it at once, and Merrow shifted 15 million within twelve months — drawn by a familiar brand, a single serving and a dinner an oven made ready in barely half an hour. By 1961 Americans were spending some $3 billion a year on frozen food, of which about $600 million went on prepared meals of the Supper Tray kind.
Today the American frozen-food business turns over more than $70 billion a year. Of that, around $28 billion comes from food bought to eat at home, while the remaining $42 billion or so is sold through restaurants, canteens, hospitals and schools — a segment that makes up roughly one-third of all food-service sales.
B. A coral is really a colony of minute creatures called polyps, each fitted with tentacles that seize the small animals drifting past in the water. The polyps themselves are colourless; the vivid pinks, oranges, blues and greens we link with coral in fact come from algae lodged inside their tissues. The relationship serves both sides. The algae are offered protection by the coral that houses them, and in exchange the nutrients they produce as they photosynthesise in sunlight flow back to the polyps. It is this convenient partnership that has let reefs build up - structures that, while they cover well under a tenth of a per cent of the seabed, still shelter more than a quarter of all marine species, among them molluscs, sponges, shellfish and fish.
C. This variety explains why reefs are so often called 'the rainforests of the sea' - a description that not every naturalist accepts. Among the doubters is the veteran wildlife broadcaster Gethin Rowe. 'People tell you nothing surpasses the rainforest,' Rowe has remarked, 'but I disagree. The moment you arrive, you find yourself asking where all the birds and animals have got to - up in the trees, naturally, out of sight. If it is beauty and abundant life you are after, a coral reef is the place. Slip on a mask, lower your face beneath the surface, and what you see is astonishing.'
D. These wonderful sights, sadly, are now in grave danger, and the most pressing hazard is heat. As sea temperatures climb, they set off bleaching episodes that drain reefs of colour and, in time, destroy them. Nor is that the whole story. The seas are also turning more acidic and steadily losing their oxygen; sea levels are creeping upward; currents are shifting; and human pollution adds to the burden, even as a warming world eats away at reef habitats. Enormous stretches of reef - among them large portions of Australia's Great Barrier Reef - have already gone, and researchers warn that, without swift action against greenhouse gases and rising temperatures, in excess of 70% of reefs may vanish by 2040. Marchetti points out that corals must already endure punishing conditions, from wave battering to much else besides. 'Whenever something begins to go awry in the oceans, corals are the first to respond, and that is precisely what we are witnessing today. The reefs are dying, and in doing so they are warning us that our planet is not in good health.'
E. Even so, scientists are working to identify tougher strains of coral capable of withstanding our overheated seas, and part of that work will take place at the Naples institute. 'Laboratories have been built directly behind the reef tank, and there our scientists will examine different coral species,' Marchetti explained. One goal is to discover which corals cope best in warm, acidic water. A second is to raise the rate at which corals reproduce. 'A coral will normally spawn only once in a year,' she noted, 'yet research in aquariums has already coaxed some corals into spawning artificially, which can support efforts to rebuild reefs. Were this achievable for every species, we might set up spawning programmes that run several times a year - a real boost to reef recovery.'
F. Work of this kind is going on in laboratories across the globe, and the Naples centre is tied into that international web of research. A finding made at one site can then be checked at others, and the young corals that result can be put on show in the Hidden Multitudes tank. 'What matters most is that the advances we achieve in helping coral cope with a warming world can be placed before the public, giving people reason to believe reefs can still be saved,' said Marchetti. 'Rescuing the world's coral reefs is now an ecological priority of the highest order.'
The opening question, 'Should we send robots to settle other planets?', went first to Professor Anselm Reuter, whose field is cosmology and astrophysics. By the close of this century, he predicted, robotic craft will have charted the whole solar system. 'After that, asteroids could be mined, so that sizeable structures might be built in space rather than every raw material being hauled up from Earth. To my mind that is a soberer, kinder prospect than terraforming a world.' Any planet people did settle, he added, ought to be safeguarded under an arrangement much like the one protecting Antarctica here on Earth.
Professor Dita Varga, an engineer who designs robots, took a more sceptical line on occupying other worlds and mining minerals from them. 'Unless the resources can actually be shipped home, I see no urgent reason to move onto another planet. Even here, most of Earth lies out of our reach. Sending our machines to gather what we need closer to home strikes me as a wiser way to use them.'
To Professor Solveig Amundsen, a social anthropologist, the very word 'colonisation' carried an uneasy moral charge. 'Whatever we set out to do, on Earth or on Mars alike, should spring from real curiosity about the Other, an effort to encounter it, rather than a wish to stamp our own template upon it.'
The second question asked how long before machine intelligence would overtake our own. Reuter noted that machines can now defeat people at chess, yet quickly qualified the point. 'What a robot still handles poorly is reading its physical surroundings; picking up and shifting real chess pieces defeats it in a way that would not trouble a small child. The machines that come after, though, may before the century is out deal with the world around them, and with us, every bit as deftly as we do. That is when the ethical puzzles surface. Would anything be wrong in putting such robots to use? Should it bother us if they end up idle, bored or frustrated?'
Varga, taking the same question, argued that in a narrow sense the threshold had already been crossed. 'At finding their way about, holding information and tracking down particular items, machines leave us far behind. What not one of them can yet do is match the reliable, flexible grip a person has on what they see or hear. A machine coming anywhere close to human creativity inside the next fifty years would be a very tall order indeed.'
Amundsen steered the discussion elsewhere, suggesting that our unease about machines growing too clever reveals more about us than about them. The habit, as she saw it, grows out of our readiness to treat lifeless things as though alive: we shape machines in our own likeness, assume they reason and act as we do, and so view them as dangers with wills of their own. 'The instant we lay the trouble at the machines' door, we start imagining them as mightier than they truly are, and in time that is precisely what they become.'
Turning to the third question, whether progress in artificial intelligence ought to frighten us, Reuter suggested that the people who really should feel nervous are the forecasters pinning their hopes on the so-called singularity. 'A further danger is that, as our dependence on linked computer systems keeps deepening, those networks begin behaving like one vast mind of their own, chasing ends that do us no good. The safeguard, to my mind, is to hold robots down to the level of mere idiot savants: dazzling at calculation and at handling data, by all means, yet never sharp enough to outmanoeuvre us.'
Varga observed that artificial intelligence has done damage already, the computer virus being the plainest example. 'Even so, the real intelligence there sits with whoever wrote the virus out of malice. What matters is that computers do us vastly more good than their viruses ever do us harm. Robotics, too, will be abused here and there before long, but its gains ought in the same way to outweigh whatever losses accompany it.'
Amundsen answered by turning the fear itself into the thing worth examining. 'What we should ask is why the dread of robots and artificial intelligence lingers, when not one of them has actually risen against us to contest our dominance.' Since machines have never yet proved dangerous, she reasoned, there is scant ground for assuming they suddenly will. Besides, she pointed out, a good many people feel no dread at all, welcoming intelligent machines rather than fearing them.
On the closing question, about what science fiction might teach us regarding robots, Reuter offered a wry piece of counsel. 'Now and then I tell my students that good science fiction rewards reading more than mediocre science does: livelier, and probably in the end no likelier to prove mistaken.'
Varga, by contrast, dwelt on how shrewdly the genre has anticipated what was coming. 'Science fiction has often been uncannily good at foreseeing the future, sketching a whole span of imagined worlds, from endearing, helpful machines to bleak societies under robot rule. What strikes me is that scarcely any of it pictures a future without robots.'
Amundsen brought things to a close by noting that people nowadays routinely cut the world in two, reality on one side and fiction and fantasy on the other. That boundary, she explained, was not always present; it was traced by scientists and technologists anxious to fence off a domain of their own. 'The line is far blurrier than it appears, which is exactly why the two realms now and then collide. On occasion we have to draw these separate ways of understanding back together if the full picture is what we are after. Manage that, and perhaps we will no longer be so terrified that a thing fashioned in our own image will turn against us.'
* terraforming: modifying a planet's atmosphere to suit human needs ** singularity: the point at which robots become able to create ever more sophisticated versions of themselves
The opening question, 'Should we send robots to settle other planets?', went first to Professor Anselm Reuter, whose field is cosmology and astrophysics. By the close of this century, he predicted, robotic craft will have charted the whole solar system. 'After that, asteroids could be mined, so that sizeable structures might be built in space rather than every raw material being hauled up from Earth. To my mind that is a soberer, kinder prospect than terraforming a world.' Any planet people did settle, he added, ought to be safeguarded under an arrangement much like the one protecting Antarctica here on Earth.
Professor Dita Varga, an engineer who designs robots, took a more sceptical line on occupying other worlds and mining minerals from them. 'Unless the resources can actually be shipped home, I see no urgent reason to move onto another planet. Even here, most of Earth lies out of our reach. Sending our machines to gather what we need closer to home strikes me as a wiser way to use them.'
To Professor Solveig Amundsen, a social anthropologist, the very word 'colonisation' carried an uneasy moral charge. 'Whatever we set out to do, on Earth or on Mars alike, should spring from real curiosity about the Other, an effort to encounter it, rather than a wish to stamp our own template upon it.'
The second question asked how long before machine intelligence would overtake our own. Reuter noted that machines can now defeat people at chess, yet quickly qualified the point. 'What a robot still handles poorly is reading its physical surroundings; picking up and shifting real chess pieces defeats it in a way that would not trouble a small child. The machines that come after, though, may before the century is out deal with the world around them, and with us, every bit as deftly as we do. That is when the ethical puzzles surface. Would anything be wrong in putting such robots to use? Should it bother us if they end up idle, bored or frustrated?'
Varga, taking the same question, argued that in a narrow sense the threshold had already been crossed. 'At finding their way about, holding information and tracking down particular items, machines leave us far behind. What not one of them can yet do is match the reliable, flexible grip a person has on what they see or hear. A machine coming anywhere close to human creativity inside the next fifty years would be a very tall order indeed.'
Amundsen steered the discussion elsewhere, suggesting that our unease about machines growing too clever reveals more about us than about them. The habit, as she saw it, grows out of our readiness to treat lifeless things as though alive: we shape machines in our own likeness, assume they reason and act as we do, and so view them as dangers with wills of their own. 'The instant we lay the trouble at the machines' door, we start imagining them as mightier than they truly are, and in time that is precisely what they become.'
Turning to the third question, whether progress in artificial intelligence ought to frighten us, Reuter suggested that the people who really should feel nervous are the forecasters pinning their hopes on the so-called singularity. 'A further danger is that, as our dependence on linked computer systems keeps deepening, those networks begin behaving like one vast mind of their own, chasing ends that do us no good. The safeguard, to my mind, is to hold robots down to the level of mere idiot savants: dazzling at calculation and at handling data, by all means, yet never sharp enough to outmanoeuvre us.'
Varga observed that artificial intelligence has done damage already, the computer virus being the plainest example. 'Even so, the real intelligence there sits with whoever wrote the virus out of malice. What matters is that computers do us vastly more good than their viruses ever do us harm. Robotics, too, will be abused here and there before long, but its gains ought in the same way to outweigh whatever losses accompany it.'
Amundsen answered by turning the fear itself into the thing worth examining. 'What we should ask is why the dread of robots and artificial intelligence lingers, when not one of them has actually risen against us to contest our dominance.' Since machines have never yet proved dangerous, she reasoned, there is scant ground for assuming they suddenly will. Besides, she pointed out, a good many people feel no dread at all, welcoming intelligent machines rather than fearing them.
On the closing question, about what science fiction might teach us regarding robots, Reuter offered a wry piece of counsel. 'Now and then I tell my students that good science fiction rewards reading more than mediocre science does: livelier, and probably in the end no likelier to prove mistaken.'
Varga, by contrast, dwelt on how shrewdly the genre has anticipated what was coming. 'Science fiction has often been uncannily good at foreseeing the future, sketching a whole span of imagined worlds, from endearing, helpful machines to bleak societies under robot rule. What strikes me is that scarcely any of it pictures a future without robots.'
Amundsen brought things to a close by noting that people nowadays routinely cut the world in two, reality on one side and fiction and fantasy on the other. That boundary, she explained, was not always present; it was traced by scientists and technologists anxious to fence off a domain of their own. 'The line is far blurrier than it appears, which is exactly why the two realms now and then collide. On occasion we have to draw these separate ways of understanding back together if the full picture is what we are after. Manage that, and perhaps we will no longer be so terrified that a thing fashioned in our own image will turn against us.'
* terraforming: modifying a planet's atmosphere to suit human needs ** singularity: the point at which robots become able to create ever more sophisticated versions of themselves
