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Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to cope with work that is dangerous, boring, burdensome, or just plain nasty. That compulsion has resulted in robotics―the science of conferring various human capabilities on machines. And if scientists have yet to create the mechanical version of science fiction, they have begun to come close. As a result, the modem world is increasingly populated by intelligent gizmos whose presence we barely notice but whose universal existence has removed much human labor. Our factories hum to the rhythm of robot assembly arms. Our banking is done at automated teller terminals that thank us with mechanical politeness for the transaction. Our subway trains are controlled by tireless robot-drivers. And thanks to the continual miniaturization of electronics and micro-mechanics, there are already robot systems that can perform some kinds of brain and bone surgery with submillimeter accuracy―far greater precision than highly skilled physicians can achieve with their hands alone. But if robots are to reach the next stage of laborsaving utility, they will have to operate with less human supervision and be able to make at least a few decisions for themselves―goals that pose a real challenge. "While we know how to tell a robot to handle a specific error," says Dave Lavery, manager of a robotics program at NASA, "we can’’ t yet give a robot enough ’’ common sense’’ to reliably interact with a dynamic world." Indeed the quest for true artificial intelligence has produced very mixed results. Despite a spell of initial optimism in the 1960s and 1970s when it appeared that transistor circuits and microprocessors might be able to copy the action of the human brain by the year 2010, researchers lately have begun to extend that forecast by decades if not centuries. What they found, in attempting to model thought, is that the human brain’’ s roughly one hundred billion nerve cells are much more talented―and human perception far more complicated―than previously imagined. They have built robots that can recognize the error of a machine panel by a fraction of a millimeter in a controlled factory environment. But the human mind can glimpse a rapidly changing scene and immediately disregard the 98 percent that is irrelevant, instantaneously focusing on the monkey at the side of a winding forest road or the single suspicious face in a big crowd. The most advanced computer systems on Earth can’’ t approach that kind of ability, and neuroscientists still don’’t know quite how we do it.

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Do animals have rights This is how the question is usually put. It sounds like a useful, ground- clearing way to start. 71. Actually, it isn’’t, because it assumes that there is an agreed account of human fights, which is something the world does not have.On one view of rights, to be sure, it necessarily follows that animals have none. 72. Some philosophers argue that rights exist only within a social contract, as part of an exchange of duties and entitlements. Therefore, animals cannot have rights. The idea of punishing a tiger that kills somebody is absurd ,for exactly the same reason, so is the idea that tigers have rights. However, this is only one account ,and by no means an uncontested one. It denies rights not only to animals but also to some people―for instance, to infants, the mentally incapable and future generations. In addition, it is unclear what force a contract can have for people who never consented to it: how do you reply to somebody who says I don’’t like this contract The point is this: without agreement on the rights of people, arguing about the rights of animals is fruitless. 73. It leads the discussion to extremes at the outset: it invites you to think that animals should be treated either with the consideration humans extend to other humans, or with no consideration at all. This is a false choice. Better to start with another, more fundamental, question: is the way we treat animals a moral issue at allMany deny it. 74. Arguing from the view that humans are different from animals in every relevant respect, extremists of this kind think that animals lie outside the area of moral choice. Any regard for the suffering of animals is seen at a mistake―a sentimental displacement of feeling that should properly be directed to other humans.This view, which holds that torturing a monkey is morally equivalent to chopping wood, may seem bravely logical . In fact it is simply shallow: the confused centre is right to reject it. The most elementary form of moral reasoning―the ethical equivalent of learning to crawl―is to weigh other’’s interests against one’’s own. This in turn requires sympathy and imagination: without which there is no capacity for moral thought. To see an animal in pain is enough, for most, to engage sympathy. 75. When that happens, it is not a mistake: it is mankind’’s instinct for moral reasoning in action, an instinct that should be encouraged rather than laughed at.

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The appeal of the world of work is first its freedom. The child is compelled to go to school; he is under the 1 of authority. Even what he 2 to school may be decided for him. As he grows up,he sees 3 it is to be free 4 school and to be able to choose his job and change it if he doesn’’t like it,to have money in his pocket and 5 to come and go as he wishes in the world. The boys and girls, a year or two older than he is, whom he has long observed, revisit school utterly 6 and apparently mature. Suddenly masters and mistresses seem 7 out of date as his parents and the authority of school a 8 thing. At the moment the adult world may appear so much more real than the school world 9 the hunger to enter it cannot be appeased by exercises in school books, or talk of 10 examinations necessary for entry into professions or the more attractive occupations. This may not be the wisest 11 but it is a necessary part of growing up, for everyone must come sooner or later to the 12 of saying Really, I’’ve had enough of being taught; I must do a proper job. Some youths, maturing rapidly because of outside influences,come to this decision 13 than they ought. Yet in a way this is not a bad frame of mind to be in 14 leaving school. At work, the young man makes one of the first great acceptances of life-he accepts the 15 of the material or the process he is working with. The job must be done in accord with some rigid process he cannot 16 . He sees the point of it and in doing so comes to 17 with life. Nothing done in school 18 its will in quite the same way;if it is wet games can be cancelled;if the math master is ill one can 19 with something else. But even the boy delivering papers, like the driver taking out his bus, discovers that one cannot 20 because there is snow on the ground, or the foreman is irritable, or he himself is in a bad mood that morning.