大学 英语报刊阅读教程 unit 3 文档

Unit 3. Science and Technology

--1.computer VS. Brains

Inventor Ray Kurzweil ,in his 2005 futurist manifesto "The singularity is near‖, extrapolates current trends in computer technology to conclude that machines will be able to out-think people within a few decades. in his eagerness to salute our robotic overlords ,he neglects some key differences between brains and computers that make his prediction unlikely to come true.

Brains have long been compared to the most advanced existing technology—including ,at one point, telephone switchboards. Today people talk about brains as if they were a sort of biological computer, with pink mushy hardware ― and ―software ‖ generated by life experiences.

However ,any comparison with computers misses a messy truth. Because the brain arose through natural selection, it contains layers of systems that arose for one function and then were adopted for another, even though they don’t work perfectly. An engineer with time to get it right would have started over, but it’s easier for evolution to adapt an old system to a new purpose than to come up with an entirely new structure. Our colleague David Linden has compared the evolutionary history of the

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