Write an abstract to the article Robots To Clean Your Kitchen And Play A Game Of Hockey?

9. Discuss the questions:

1) Will the world change in the future due to the development of computer technologies?

2) Do you agree with an opinion that writers of science fiction often foresee the future?

3) What movies about the future intergration of computer technologies into human lives have you seen? Describe one of them (10 sentences).

4) Do majority of these films have cheerful endings or are they obscured by gloomy anticipations?

5) How can different technical implants be good for a human’s health and life achievements? Will there be androids in the future?

6) Should robots merely be considered tools, such as guns and computers, and regulated accordingly?

7) Are we ethically allowed to give away our caretaking responsibility for our elderly and children to machines, which seem to be a poor substitute for human companionship (but perhaps better than no—or abusive—companionship)?

8) Will robotic companionship for other purposes, such as drinking buddies, pets, or sex partners, be morally problematic?

9) At what point should we consider a robot to be a “person, ” eligible for rights and responsibilities? If that point is reached, will we need to emancipate our robot “slaves”?

10) As they develop enhanced capacities, should cyborgs have a different legal status than ordinary humans? Consider that we adults assert authority over children on the grounds that we’re more capable.

11) The West sees robots as menacing, Japan sees them as helpful – how about you?

12) What kind of economic chaos would there be if robots took over our jobs?

13) Do you think robots will ever have emotions or be able to love?

10. Read and translate the abstracts from a novel:

“Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the con sensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief he'd worked for other, wealthier thieves, employer s who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data. He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn he'd never make. He stole from his employers. He kept something for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam. He still wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it mattered now.”

“His job was to make sure the intrusion program he'd written would link with the Sense/Net systems when Molly needed it to. He watched the countdown in the corner of the screen. Two. One. He jacked in and triggered his program. " Mainline, " breathed the link man, his voice the only sound as Case plunged through the glowing strata of Sense/Net ice. Good. Check Molly. He hit the Simstim and flipped into her sensorium. The scrambler blurred the visual input slightly. She stood before a wall of gold-flecked mirror in the building's vast white lobby, chewing gum, apparently fascinated by her own reflection. Aside from the huge pair of sunglasses concealing her mirrored insets, she managed to look remarkably like she belonged there... He could feel the micro pore tape across her ribcage, feel the flat little units under it: the radio, the Simstim unit, and the scrambler. The throat mike, glued to her neck, looked as much as possible like an analgesic dermadisk. Her hands, in the pockets of the pink coat, were flexing systematically through a series of tension-release exercises. It took him a few seconds to realize that the peculiar sensation at the tips of her fingers was caused by the blades as they were partially extruded, then retracted. He flipped back. His program had reached the fifth gate. He watched as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across the deck, making minor adjustments. Translucent planes of color shuffled like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card. The gate blurred past. He laughed. The Sense/Net ice had accepted his entry as a routine transfer from the consortium's Los Angeles complex. He was inside. Behind him, viral subprograms peeled off, meshing with the gate' s code fabric, ready to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it arrived.”

(from A Neuromancer by W. Gibson)

11. Match the words with their translation:

12. Answer the questions:

1. Who are the main characters of the novel? What are their names? 2. What differs them fom orinary human beings? 3. How does Case earn for living? 4. What was Case discovered in? 5. Where could Case flip into? 6. Would you like somebody to intrude into your brains? Would you like to know what other people think?

13. Read and translate the article: