牛津高中英语M6U2 what is happiness to you 的language points只要从后面单词表journalism开始到motivation部分就可以,要有phrase 和例句等等,不要发连接,救急,十分感谢_百度作业帮
牛津高中英语M6U2 what is happiness to you 的language points只要从后面单词表journalism开始到motivation部分就可以,要有phrase 和例句等等,不要发连接,救急,十分感谢
牛津高中英语M6U2 what is happiness to you 的language points只要从后面单词表journalism开始到motivation部分就可以,要有phrase 和例句等等,不要发连接,救急,十分感谢
1. 残疾；无能,无力n. disability
adj. disabled
2. 年少的,初级的junior3. 仅仅,只不过；简单地 simply
4. 运动项目,比赛项目event5. 精力充沛的,充满活力的energetic
6. 分开的,分离的apart7. 克服,战胜overcome
8. 完成,实现accomplish/accomplishment9. （使）适应,改编adapt
10. 积极的,正面的；肯定的positive11. 乐观的optimistic
11. 鼓舞,激励inspire
13. 令人钦佩的,值得赞美的admirable n. admiration
14. 无法忍受的unbearable15. 不幸的adj. unfortunate
不幸n. misfortune
16. 生动的,栩栩如生的vivid17. 安排arrange
18. 分配allocate19. 足够需要的,够用的adequate
20. 困惑的,烦恼的confused21. 无任哪一个,任何一个 whichever
22. 独立的 independent
23. 指导,引导n. guidance
24. 天真无邪的adj. innocent25. 交流,沟通,传达communicate
26. 保证,担保guarantee27. 工作日workday
28. 陪伴n. company29. 最小的,最低极限的；最小值minimum
30. 成熟的mature31. 安全的,可靠的 secure
32. 动机,动力motivation33. 伤害,损害 vt. Injure
34. 努力,奋斗,挣扎vi.& n. struggleII. Phrase translation1. 住院 in hospital
2. 远离,和…不在一起,除了…之外 apart from
3. 投身于…,献身于…devote oneself/time to
4. （使）高兴cheer up
5. 情绪好/坏in good/bad spirits
6. 遍及全世界across/throughout/all over the world
7. 注意到…,将…铭记在心take note of
8. 与…有关relate to
9. 在那时,在那个阶段 at that point
10. 匆忙地,急切地in a rush
11. 适应 adapt to
12. 花时间与某人在一起spend time with sb
13. 与…斗争,struggle with
14. 认为某人是. …describe sb as
15. 模范a role model
16. 兼职工作a part-time job
17. 一丁点,稍微一点a little bit
18. 将某人紧急送往医院rush sb to hospital
19. 保持积极态度stay positive
20. 头先着地land on one’s head
21. 避免做某事avoid doing
22. 回顾,回忆look back on
23. 陪伴某人keep sb company
24. 前往…leave for/make for/head for
25. 花时间放松take time to relax /spend time relaxing
26. 对…感到惊讶,因…而迷惑be amazed by
27. 在某人的指导下under sb’s guidanceIII. Word study1. struggle
(P18 Line4)
争斗,搏斗,打斗 struggle with/to do
n. 打斗,搏斗,斗争,努力
The two boys are struggling with each other.
The thief struggled to escape(逃跑), but failed.
After a long struggle, she gained control of the business.
经过长期努力,她在业务上已经能够应付自如.a power struggle
the class struggle
阶级斗争1. In 1862 the American slaves won their struggle _____ freedom after many years’fighting
_____ slave owners.A. with
B. for, with
C. with, for
D. with, against2. Beaten down on the ground, he _______ to his feet and held up his head ,________ at his enemy.A. raised, stared
B. struggled, staring
C. fought, staring
D. tried, stared3. Fish _____ survival when the water level drops in the lake.A. fight for
B. struggle for
C. fight against
D. struggle against2. disability (P18 Line4)
n. 残疾,无能,无力
people with disability/disabilities
Lacking experience is a severe disability for her.她缺乏经验,这是个很不利的条件.
adj. 残疾的
a disabled child in a wheelchair
the disabled 残疾人The disabled are well looked after in the country.
be able to do enable sb to do The pass enables me to travel half-price on trains. 我用这张通行证坐火车半价.A rabbit’s large ears enable it to hear the slightest sound. 兔子的大耳朵能听到极细小的声音.1. They showed great _____ when they found out about their baby’s ________.A. pride, disabled
B. optimism, disabled
C. courage, disability
D. sympathy, disability2. The fire spread quickly but everyone _______ get out of the hotel.A. had to
B. was able to
C. enabled
D. could3.
in hospital (P18 Line16) 生病住院/ in bed卧床/ at school在学校/ go to town进城/in town在
城里/in prison/ go to school/attend school去上学/go to church去做礼拜
in the hospital 在医院参观/工作这些表示特定概念的名词前通常不加冠词,不表示具体的地方.4. junior (P18 Line25)
地位或身份低的 （通常无比较级）be junior to sb He is several years junior to Mr. Cooper. 他比库柏先生小几岁.用于父子同名时,指儿子在姓名之后用Jur/ Jr/ Jun如：Sammy Davies Jr
小萨米•戴维斯反义词senior be senior to 比某人年长He is 10 years senior to
me. 他比我大十岁.=He is ten years older than me.He is senior to me, since he joined the firm before me. 他比我资格老,因为他进公司比我早.子女和父母同名时,用于父母名字后 John Brown Senior 老约翰•布朗5.
describe(P18 Line28)
describe sb/sth to sb
+ 从句The police asked the witnesses to describe the two suspects. 警察让她描述一下那两名男子.It’s difficult to describe how I feel. 很难形容我的感受.describe…as
把…称为,描绘为,形容为…She is described as an angel. 她被称为天使.Don’t describe him as hard and cruel.不要将他描绘的既苛刻又残忍. description
beyond description
难以形容6. devote oneself
one’s life
one’s time
to sth/ doing sth
向某人/某事奉献了
one’s energy
one’s money
The doctor is determined to devote his whole life to _researching_(研究)Aids virus.
He devotes all his efforts to the task. devoted
adj. 热爱的,忠实的,全心全意的
a devoted son/ friend/ supporter
孝子/忠实的朋友/不遗余力的支持者Her son, to whom she was so devoted, went abroad 10 years ago. Devoted (深爱) to their children, the parents work day and night for their education.Madam Curie was devoted to the study of science.devotion n.
one’s children
对子女深爱
devotion to
one’s task
全心全意的工作
duty 忠于职守7.
rush vi. (P19Line36)
冲,匆忙的做某事
rush/dash out of…
rush sb/sth to sp将某人急送某地rush sb into doing sth
催促某人做某事: urge sb to do/into doing sthThe children rushed/dashed out of the school. 孩子们冲出学校.
People rushed to buy the shares. 人们抢着买股份.Ambulances rushed the injured to hospital.
救护车将伤者火速送往医院.
Relief supplies were rushed in.
救济品已急速送到.
I’m not going to be rushed into anything.
我不会受人催促草率地做任何事情.a rush of excitement/happiness/pain…. 一阵激动/幸福/疼痛make a rush for 冲向…
the rush hour 交通高峰期8.
n. (P19 Line42)
欢呼,喝彩,高兴,振奋reply with cheers
报以喝彩声
burst into cheers/burst out cheering
突然欢呼起来
She accepted the gift with good cheers.
她欣然接受了那份礼物.Cheers!
干杯（喝一点）Bottoms up! 干到底.
欢呼,喝彩,使…振奋
He cheered me up when I was in trouble.我有困难时,他使我振作起来.
. cheerful
adj. 快乐的,使人振奋的a cheerful smile
快乐的微笑
cheerful news
让人高兴的消息cheerful colors
悦目的色彩
a cheerful room
使人感到愉快的房间--- I’m thinking of the test tomorrow. I’m afraid I can’t pass this time.---____! I’m sure you’ll make it.
A. Go ahead
B. Gook luck
C. No problem
D. Cheer up9.
spirit (P19 Line43)
He is troubled in spirit.
他内心苦恼.in poor/ low spirits
心情低落,精神不振
in high spirits
情绪高昂10.
inspire (P19 Line63)
inspire sb to do sth
The speech inspired the players to achieve greater success.
讲话激励着运动员们取得更大成功.
inspire 原义表示“ 赋予某人灵感（尤指写作,绘画,作曲等）”
adj. 有创造力的,有雄心壮志的,得到灵感的,常修饰人
an inspired poet
有创造力的诗人 inspiring
adj. 鼓舞人心的, 使人感兴趣的 a book on an inspiring subject
一本题材令人感兴趣的书 without inspiration
毫无灵感 I sat down to write an essay (文章),but found I was completely without inspiration.
我坐下写文章,但发现我完全没有灵感.The club _____ the football player _____ a large amount of money.A. in
v. (P19 Line64)钦佩 → admirable
adj. 令人钦佩的,令人羡慕的,值得羡慕的
admiration . n . 钦佩,羡慕,赞美
admire sb for sth
因…而羡慕,赞美,钦佩某人
They admire our neat garden.
他们称赞我家整洁的花园.
I admire him for his courage in reform.
我钦佩他改革的勇气.an admirable performance 优美的表演Her handling of the crisis fills me with admiration. 她对这一危机的处理使我赞叹不已.I have great admiration for his courage. 我十分佩服他的勇气.11. sympathy
n. (P21) 同情心 （不可数）
show/feel great sympathy for sb
She has never showed any sympathy for the poor.
她从不同情穷人.
Out of sympathy for
the homeless child, she gave him shelter for the night.
出于对这个无家可归的孩子的同情,她留他过夜.
sympathize
sympathize with sb/sth
同情,支持12. relate
(P22) vt. “讲述,叙述”
He related his trouble to his teacher and asked for his advice.
vi. 涉及,关系到,与…有关 relate to
To what events did your remarks relate? 你的话指的是什么?
be related to
relating to
关系,联系,亲戚
亲戚,相对的,相关的
relationship
n. 关系We’ll discuss the paragraph relating to(涉及) the October Revolution.
This plant is said to be related to that one. 据说这种植物与那种植物同属一类.13. arrange vt,/vi 安排①arrange sth 安排… 整理好…She arranged all her business affairs before going on holiday.她在度假前把业务都安排好了.②arrange for sb/sth to do sth 使某人或某物做某事③arrange with sb about sth/to do sth 与某人约定,商定I’ve arranged with the neighbours about feeding the cats.我已和邻居商量好喂猫的事.I arranged with my parents to borrow some money.我与父母商定借些钱.1. Steve is such an efficient boy that he can ______ more in a day than any other boy in his class.A. accomplish
B. arrange
D. allocate2. Miss LI said that she’d _______ a car to pick up the guests from Japan at the airport.A. agreed
B. arranged for
C. intended for
D. allowed15. adequate adj. 足够的,充分的abundant, richadequate time / moneybe adequate for/to sthTheir earnings are adequate for their needs.他们挣的钱足够需要.adequately adv.
adequacy n.16．quit v. (quitted, quitted)停止,推出abandon, give up, leave off quit sth
I heard that he had quitted his job_.我听说他辞去了工作. quit doing
You should quit making fun of people on these occasions.你不要在这种场合捉弄别人adj. 摆脱,了结
be quit of sthShe is glad to be quit of him.她为摆脱他而高兴.Though he is ill, he has not quit _______.A. smoke
B. to smoke
D. smoking17.
encouragement n. 鼓励,激励,支持
encourage v.鼓励,鼓舞
encourage sb to do sth
encouraging adj.令人鼓舞的,
encouraged adj.受到鼓舞的用适当的词填空The teacher’s words were a great encouragement to him.教师的话对他是极大的鼓舞.His friends encouraged him to lose weight.他朋友鼓励他减肥.He felt encouraged by the progress he’d made.他因取得成绩而欢欣鼓舞.We were encouraged by the encouraging news.我们对这个令人鼓舞的消息所鼓励.18.
ahead of…在…之前,领先,其前面可用well,far,等修饰
ahead of time 提前He is well ahead of me in maths.她的数学比我好得多.His education theory was far ahead of times.他的教育理念远远走在时代前面.There were six other people ahead of him in the waiting room.在等候室里,他前面还有六个人.19.
accomplishment n.完成,成功
accomplish v. 完成,实现celebrate your accomplishment 庆祝你的成功accomplish one’s aim/task 达到目的,完成任务He is a man who will never accomplish.他是一个永远一事无成的人.14.
guarantee vt. 保证,保障guarantee sthThere is no doubt that our government can guarantee our basic human rights.毫无疑问我们的政府能够保障我们的基本人权.We guarantee to look into the case at once.我们保证马上调查此案.n. 保证,保单,抵押品a guarantee of quality质量的保证
under guarantee 在保修期内.I offer my house as a guarantee.我拿房子作抵押.The salesgirl ___ the TV set for at least ten years,but it went wrong only one year after we bought it.A. ensure
B. guaranteed
C. protected
D. promised15.
assist vt. –help 帮助assist sb to do sth assist sb with sth/ in doing sth Good books will assist you to get more knowledge.好书会帮助你获得更多知识.He assisted me with good ideas and encouragement.他帮助我出好主意并加以鼓励.The police will assist you in finding your daughter’s address.警察会帮你找到你女儿的地址的.用assist, help, aid填空(1)They aided the people in the floored area with money.(2)Would ten dollars help you out?(3)I did my best to comfort her, but it didn’t seem to help.(4)I was employed to assist the manager with his duties.17.
company n.
I enjoy his company.我喜欢他的陪伴.for company 做伴,一起
in company 当着别人的面
in company with sb 和某人一起I hate going out alone, so I take my daughter for company.我不喜欢单独出去,所以带女儿做伴.It’s bad manners to whisper in company.当着别人的面窃窃私语是不礼貌的.I, in company with many others, feel this decision was wrong.我,还有其他许多人,都认为这个决定是错的.keep sb company
陪伴某人accompany vt. 陪伴,带有The text is accompanied by illustration.正文附有插图.---- I must leave?---- Why don’t you stay here and ________?A. keep little Mary company
B. keep company with little MaryC. company little Mary
D. company with little Mary18. I knew I wanted to go for it.(P23L2)go for 争取,试图得到,选择；袭击；喜爱；适用于John is going for his second gold medal.约翰正在争取他的第二块金牌.It sounds a great idea . Go for it! 这听起来是个好主意.努力实现吧. What he said about you goes for me too. 他关于你的一席话对我也适用.19. . feel caught 左右为难(P26L2)I felt caught between going on studying and work when I graduated.当我毕业时,我在继续深造和工作之间感到左右为难.My bike was caught between two buses.我的自行车夹在了两辆公共汽车之间.He got caught in a rainstorm on the way home.在回家的路上他遇到了暴风雨.20. No one will be sad because humans will have learned to fix many of the problems that affect us now.(P31L38)fix ①此处为“解决”“处理”It’s not late to fix the problem, although time is clearly getting short.尽管时间已明显变得很少,但还是来得及解决这个问题.②决定,确定,归罪于Have you fixed a place for the meeting?你确定了开会的地点没有?Don’t fix all the blame on other people.不要将一切错误都归罪于别人.We fixed on you to break the news to him.我们决定由你去把这个消息告诉他.③fix sth on sb 注视,吸引With his eyes fixed on me, I felt nervous.由于他的眼睛直盯着我,我很紧张.IV.Sentence patterns1. make sb/sth + adj
(P17) He has a strange way of making his classes lively and interesting.make 后面还可以跟名词/do/done 及介词短语作宾语补足语若名词为表示头衔职位的词,则名词前不用冠词.e.g. Bush was made President of the USA again in 2004.: He made him captain of the football team.(队长)We don’t need to make him learn.The waste put into the river makes the river polluted. (污染)He was made at a loss at the question.（困惑）1.You can’t imagine the trouble I had ________ when I first came to China.A. make myself understand
B. making myself understand
C. make myself understood
D. making myself understood2.Pleasant as they made it ______, we felt tired after the long journey.A. travel
B. traveling
C. traveled
D. to travel2. Whichever way I look at it, I’ll never be really good at anything unless I quit doing everything else.(P26 17)whichever ①any thatTake whichever seat you like.坐你喜欢的位子.②no matter whichIt has the same result, whichever way you do it.无论你用哪种方法做,结果都是一样的.1._________ team wins on Saturday will go through to the national championships. A. No matter what
B. No matter which
C. Whatever
D. Whichever2.__________ much difficulty we may meet with, we will finish the work in time. A. However
B. Whatever
C. Whichever D. Though3. All I had to do was go to school.(P30L11)当主语中含有do时,其表语如果是动词不定式,则往往省略to.All I had to do was enjoy my adolescene_.我要做的就是享受我的青少年生活.What I want to do is return the books to the library.我想做的是把书还给图书馆.但All I wanted was to help him. (帮助)The last thing ____ is _____ all the papers and lock the door.A.put away
B.put down
C.to put up
D.to put throught拓展我除了等待别无他法.I can do nothing but wait.
I can’t choose but wait. / I have no choice but to wait. /I can’t help but wait.4. by the timeby the time引导时间状语从句符合以下规律：
从句will have done
did By the time we arrived yesterday, the film star had left.我们到达时,电影明星已走了.By the time we arrive, the film star will have left.By the time the meeting was over, it was announced that an agreement ________.
A. has been reached
B. had been reached
C. has reached
D. had reachedCan robots be creative?
Resume Reading — Robots Can’t Dance
Can a robot be creative? Advances in cloud robotics—machines connected to supercomputers in the cloud—have given self-driving cars, surgical robots, and other “smart” devices tremendous powers of computation. But can a robot, even one supercharged with artificial intelligence, be creative? Will a mechanical Picasso paint among us?
Ken Goldberg is the ideal person to ask. For one thing, when he was getting his Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, Goldberg built a robot that painted. For another, Goldberg, 53, is a computer engineer, roboticist, and artist himself. He grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he forged his creative path. “I was an outsider, at odds with what other kids were doing, and became very interested in art,” he says.
Today Goldberg is Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also directs a lab on automation sciences, a center for medical robots, an initiative on data and democracy, and a center for new media. He’s published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers on topics such as automation algorithms and his artwork has been exhibited at the Pompidou Center, Whitney Biennial, and Berkeley Art Museum.
Goldberg has strong views on creativity and how it differs in computers and people. His energy and intellect are infectious as his mind races from one idea to another. Our conversation ranged over his own projects and heroes, from gothic literature to Google Glass, Freud to philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. We spoke at his UC Berkeley lab and at a restaurant in Mill Valley, California, near his home, where he lives with his wife, Tiffany Shlain, a filmmaker and the founder of the Webby Awards, and their two daughters, Odessa and Blooma.
What’s been your most creative moment in science?
I spent a summer in graduate school trying to find the mathematical proof of completeness for an algorithm I had written to orient polygonal objects. I lived alone and every day I would write out ideas. To keep my sanity I made paintings of the rickety old stone stairs in the alley outside of my apartment. I woke up one morning and realized I could prove it using a step function. It was a true Aha! moment. The proof has been cited over 400 times.
Einstein talked about how the greatest scientists are also artists. For him all great achievements in science must start from intuitive knowledge.
Agreed. Intuition is a hunch, sensing there’s an opportunity—how to set up the problem. As an artist it’s finding the right idea or concept. Making an opera about Klinghoffer, for example—that’s not an obvious subject for composer John Adams to have come up with. In both science and art, one must rely on a gut feeling about which direction to go.
Tell us about your painting robot.
I liked the idea of a robot being able to demonstrate that a machine can go through the motions of painting but can’t capture the eloquence, the subtlety, the nuance of a human painter. What also fascinated me was how people responded to the robot. The performative aspect of a moving robot was very hypnotic and fascinating to them.
Sounds like that laid the groundwork for your “Telegarden.” Tell us about that. In 1993 I was teaching at USC. My students came to me and showed me this amazing thing called the World Wide Web. We sat around brainstorming about what we could contribute. Since we were working in robotics and had robots in the lab we thought, “Why don’t we connect a robot to this Web and let people control it from anywhere in the world?” We got super excited about the idea of having a robot do something that was ironic. We wanted to have it tend a garden. A garden is interesting because in some way it’s the last thing you expect a robot to be doing. I loved the juxtaposition of the natural and the digital worlds. The installation had a planter with 18 inches of soil and an industrial robot arm in the center with a Web interface. Over 100,000 people visited. They could visit the garden from a Web page and participate by helping to water it, and then if they watered for a certain amount of time, they would get their first seed to plant. Interesting social dynamics emerged. People would ask others to watch their plants when they were away, which created a sense of community. Yet at the same time there was something incongruous about people sitting at their computers planting seeds. And this led you to coin the term “telepistemology.” Right. One afternoon I got an email out of the blue from a student in Texas who asked how he could be sure the garden was real. I was surprised because it seemed obvious. Then I realized it was a very deep question because many hoaxes had been done on the web, and it’s not too hard to imagine the whole thing could have been faked. We wondered, how would we prove that it was real? Around that time I came to Berkeley and met with the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, who is one of my heroes. He told me this is a very old question at the heart of epistemology: What is knowledge? What do we know? How do we know it? We would meet every two weeks to wrestle with this question and we realized it was interesting because technology had always had an influence on epistemology. When Galileo developed a telescope, and when the microscope was developed—this caused a radical shift in thinking that led Descartes to the sense of doubt that was the basis for the scientific method. What were Dreyfus’s views on AI and creativity? He’s always been a critic of artificial intelligence at any level. He was vocal about this in the 1960s when everybody was predicting that computer systems were going to be intelligent within the decade. He was one of the lone dissenters. He wasn’t a computer scientist but a philosopher saying, “No, you’re missing that a fundamental aspect of intelligence is experience and that requires embodiment.” He knew that to understand the world you needed to be inside the world, you needed to experience its behaviors and responses to you. Well, he was right. We may be making progress in being able to do things like recognize a cat in a photograph. But there’s a huge gulf between that and doing something creative.THE TELEGARDEN: Goldberg and company allowed Web users to view and interact with a remote garden filled with living plants. Members could plant, water, and monitor the progress of seedlings via the movements of an industrial robot arm.In 1968, Marvin Minsky said, “Within a generation we will have intelligent computers like HAL in the film, 2001.” What made him and other early AI proponents think machines would think like humans? Even before Moore’s law there was the idea that computers are going to get faster and their clumsy behavior is going to get a thousand times better. It’s what Ray Kurzweil now claims. He says, “OK, we’re moving up this curve in terms of the number of neurons, number of processing units, so by this projection we’re going to be at super-human levels of intelligence.” But that’s deceptive. It’s a fallacy. Just adding more speed or neurons or processing units doesn’t mean you end up with a smarter or more capable system. What you need are new algorithms, new ways of understanding a problem. In the area of creativity, it’s not at all clear that a faster computer is going to get you there. You’re just going to come up with more bad, bland, boring things. That ability to distinguish, to filter out what’s interesting, that’s still elusive. Today’s computers, though, can generate an awful lot of connections in split seconds. But generating is fairly easy and testing pretty hard. In Robert Altman’s movie, The Player, they try to combine two movies to make a better one. You can imagine a computer that just takes all movie titles and tries every combination of pairs, like Reservoir Dogs meets Casablanca. I could write that program right now on my laptop and just let it run. It would instantly generate all possible combinations of movies and there will be some good ones. But recognizing them, that’s the hard part. That’s the part you need humans for. Right, the Tim Robbins movie exec character says, “I listen to stories and decide if they’ll make good movies or not.” The great majority of combinations won’t work, but every once in a while there’s one that is both new and interesting. In early AI it seemed like the testing was going to be easy. But we haven’t been able to figure out the filtering. Can’t you write a creativity algorithm? If you want to do variations on a theme, like Thomas Kinkade, sure. Take our movie machine. Let’s say there have been 10,000 movies—that’s 10,000 squared, or 100 million combinations of pairs of movies. We can build a classifier that would look at lots of pairs of successful movies and do some kind of inference on it so that it could learn what would be successful again. But it would be looking for patterns that are already existent. It wouldn’t be able to find that new thing that was totally out of left field. That’s what I think of as creativity—somebody comes up with something really new and clever. Can you think of an example? One simple and beautiful example is a performance piece by Emma Sulkowicz, an art student at Columbia University, who said she was raped. She carried her mattress around campus for weeks. It was astoundingly elegant and simple and utterly original. Could a robot do that sort of thing? No. But—and this is my sentimental side—I don’t want it to happen. I want that to be something that we keep for ourselves as humans.POWER AND WATER: Goldberg, in collaboration with Margaret Lazzari, designed a robotic painting machine and 12 large-scale paintings, executed by hand and by the robot. The images were based on events surrounding the building of the Los Angeles Aqueduct between 1906 and 1913.Courtesy of the artist You and your wife made a
about the “uncanny.” What is the uncanny? It’s one manifestation of a broad theory that Freud wrote about in his 1919 essay, “The Uncanny.” We have a deeply unsettled reaction to something when it’s on the borderline between alive and dead or real and fictional. It goes back to gothic literature and questions about the line between man and machine. It arises out of the study of the automaton and thinking of the human body as a mechanism. That motivated automata makers to make systems that looked increasingly human-like and try to blur that line. It led to anxiety about what is real, what is human? What is alive versus what isn’t? You have a whole literature built around vampires and zombies and Frankenstein. It’s really at the root of all horror stories and it’s very operative in the realm of robotics. If you make a robot that’s too much like a human it becomes profoundly repulsive. So if you’re trying to create something you would want in your home, you don’t want it to look too human-like. This wonderful cultural phenomena is still very relevant today, where we can actively trigger the uncanny and it’s a very visceral real response. How is it triggered today? By something like Botox. When someone has too much Botox, there’s a creepiness to them. They’ve shifted their humanness a little too far and you start to feel anxiety. Google Glass triggers this. It creates this anxiety and ambiguity about whether the person wearing it is completely human or half-android. It also triggers the fear of surveillance. So you might say that Google Glass is the uncanny “double whammy.” It’s about simulacra and surveillance. It combines two aspects that people really don’t seem comfortable with. Have you ever taken the Turing Test? One reason why I got involved with robotics and AI was that when I was about 9, my cousins sat me down at a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and said, go ahead, talk to it. It was ELIZA, which I now know has about one page of code. I didn’t think it was human but I was intrigued by it. Part of its genius, the way it maintained the illusion of an intelligent conversation, was that it kept throwing back questions. “Why do you think so?” “Can you tell me more?” But as a friend of mine said, it’s not so much the computer passing the Turing Test as the human failing it. We do that all the time. We think that we’re talking to something but it’s actually that we’re not paying attention. Could you imagine having a robot companion? I never did until I saw Robot & Frank with Frank Langella. The Frank character was so real I found myself identifying with him. I imagined myself in his position: home alone and needing help or company—with a robot showing me stuff, telling me jokes. It’s not inconceivable that a robot could generate topics by mining my email and photographs and travelogues and suggesting a discussion about treehouses because it found a childhood photo of one and bookmarked articles on the topic.You know how kids need to be educated about social media? Will we also need robot education? If it moves like a human and talks like a human, won’t people get confused? That’s interesting. But we actually have a good inherent test about this. When my girls play with Siri they have fun but they know it’s not a real being. This is a dark scenario. But what if a child were raised in an orphanage by robot nannies? Right, it’s one thing to have a robot caretaker for an old codger like me, but when you turn that around and say the robot is taking care of my 3-year-old, it seems like there is something really wrong. But we park our kids in front of the TV to watch Sesame Street. We all do this. If you had something that could interact with them, to teach them a language or something like that, it could be interesting. Do sophisticated robots challenge humans to be more aware of qualities that are unique to us? If you have a robot caretaker six days a week then you will probably very quickly appreciate the human on the seventh day in a whole new way. I think robots help us appreciate human qualities that robots lack. I don’t want to say forever, but for as long as I can imagine there is going to be a sizeable gap. What has working with robots taught you about being human? It has taught me to have a huge appreciation for the nuances of human behavior and the inconsistencies of humans. There are so many aspects of human unpredictability that we don’t have a model for. When you watch a ballet or a dance or see a great athlete and realize the amazing abilities, you start to appreciate those things that are uniquely human. The ability to have an emotional response, to be compelling, to be able to pick up on subtle emotional signals from others, those are all things that we haven’t made any progress on with robots. What’s the most creative thing a robot has done? One of my favorites is by the engineer and media artist Raffaello D’Andrea. He worked with a sculptor and they
that would suddenly collapse. There was a pause and then all the pieces would start to move, find each other, and reassemble into a chair. There’s something very elegant about this idea of a chair that’s designed to fall apart and come back together on its own. It brings up all these whimsical ideas of magic and yet it’s a beautiful and very complex machine. Can robots help humans be more creative? That happens every day. All the new tools for making movies and making music have been enormously beneficial for creativity. And computers and robots are relieving us of tedious tasks like handling documents and filing. That allows us to spend more of our time being creative. Think of the time you would spend doing research for a book, going to the library, digging up information, walking through the stacks and finding out that the perfect book is gone, somebody else has taken it. Now you have access to all this information at your fingertips. Dozens of times when I thought I had a new idea I would go on the Internet and probe around only to find that somebody else had exactly the same idea and did it. I save myself all the trouble of trying to be creative with some thing that somebody has already done. And that frees me up to spend my creative energy on something else.
Jeanne Carstensen is a writer in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Modern Farmer, and other publications.
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Chapter one
Innovators
Chapter two
Inspiration
Chapter three
Chapter four
In Your Head
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