Welcome to Mr Aslanov’s Lessons QUESTION-TYPE BASED TESTS FunEnglishwithme +99894 6333230
F. So in addition to these potentially creative plans there lies a certain dehumanisation. The idea that
companions can be replaced with machines, for example, suggests amechanical and degraded notion of
human relationships. On one hand, these developments express human creativity — our ability to invent,
experiment, and to extend our control over the world. On the other hand, the aim to create a robot like a
human being is spurred on by dehumanised ideas — by the sense that human companionship can be
substituted by machines; that humans lose their humanity when they interact with technology; or that we are
little more than surface and ritual behaviours, that can be simulated with metal and electrical circuits.
G. The tension between the dehumanised and creative aspects of robots has long been explored in
culture. In Karel Capek's
Rossum's Universal Robots, a 1921 play in which the term 'robot' was first coined,
although Capek's robots had human-like appearance and behaviour, the dramatist never thought these robots
were human. For Capek, being human was about much more than appearing to be human. In part, it was
about challenging a dehumanising system, and struggling to become recognised and given the dignity of
more than a machine. A similar spirit would guide us well through twenty-first century experiments in
robotics.
Questions 1-6 Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage. It took Honda
1 ……… years to make ASIMO, a human-looking robot that attracted broad interests
from audiences. Unlike ASIMO, which has to be controls through a computer installed in the
