经济学人精读节选100篇Robots are suddenly getting cleverer. What’s changed? 机器人突然变得更聪明了。有什么变化？
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本期选文来源：The Economist|June 8th 2024 ，需要经济学人原版PDF|全文中英翻译|MP3|大家下拉至文末下载|也可以自助开通本站会员后加入专属QQ社群或下拉至文末获取全文文档PDF中英翻译PDF,MOBI,EPUB,AZW3,MP3🎵等多种格式。
经济学人精读节选100篇Robots are suddenly getting cleverer. What’s changed? 机器人突然变得更聪明了。有什么变化？
【1】“WHAT DO YOU see right now?” a man asks a humanoid robot standing behind a table. “I see a red apple on a plate in the centre of the table, a drying rack with cups and a plate, and you standing nearby, with your hand on the table,” the robot replies. “Great—can I have something to eat?” says the man. “Sure thing,” says the robot. It flexes its arms, picks up the apple with its right hand, passes it to its left hand, and then hands it to the man. He asks the robot to explain its actions. “So I gave you the apple, because it’s the only, er, edible item I could provide you with from the table,” it replies.
单词解析：humanoid: 类人动物；仿真机器人 adj.有人的特点的；人形机
例句：Study of Humanoid Receptor Based on Artificial Life 基于人工生命的拟人感受器研究
【2】This demonstration, shown in a video released by Figure, a robotics startup, in March, caused widespread amazement. It shows a robot that can hold spoken conversations, recognise and manipulate objects, solve problems and explain its actions. And Figure is not alone in producing such impressive results. After years of slow progress, robots suddenly seem to be getting a lot cleverer. What changed?
单词解析：manipulate: vt. 操纵；(熟练地)操作；(暗中)控制；使用；影响；正骨；治疗脱臼
例句：The technology uses a pen to manipulate a computer 这项技术使用一支笔来操作电脑。
【3】The magic ingredient is artificial intelligence(AI). Academic researchers, startups and tech giants are taking advances in AI, such as large language models (LLMs), speech synthesis and image recognition, and applying them to robotics. LLMs are known for powering chatbots like ChatGPT—but it turns out that they can help power real robots, too. “The algorithms can transfer,” says Peter Chen, chief executive of Covariant, a startup based in Emeryville, California. “That is powering this renaissance of robotics.”
单词解析：executive: n. (公司或机构的)经理，主管领导，管理人员；(政府的)行政部门；总经理；(统称公司或机构的)行政领导，领导层 adj.行政的；实施的；高级的；经理的；决策的；经营管理的；有执行权的；供重要人物使用的记忆execut(e) 执行 + -ive 形容词后缀
例句：She took over as chief executive of the Book Trust. 她接任书业托拉斯的总裁。
【4】The robot in Figure’s video had its speech-recognition and spookily lifelike speech-synthesis capabilities provided by OpenAI, which is an investor in the company. OpenAI shut down its own robotics unit in around 2020, preferring instead to invest in Figure and other startups. But now OpenAI has had second thoughts, and in the past month it has started building a new robotics team—a sign of how sentiment has begun to shift.Figure.
单词解析：sentiment:n. 情绪；(基于情感的)观点，看法；(失之过度或不恰当的)伤感，柔情，哀伤
【5】A key step towards applying AI to robots was the development of “multimodal” models—AI models trained on different kinds of data. For example, whereas a language model is trained using lots of text, “vision-language models” are also trained using combinations of images (still or moving) in concert with their corresponding textual descriptions. Such models learn the relationship between the two, allowing them to answer questions about what is happening in a photo or video, or to generate new images based on text prompts.
单词解析：multimodal:n. 多峰 adj.多模式
例句：A Niche-based Genetic Algorithm for the Optimization of Multimodal functions 一种基于小生境的遗传算法及其应用
【6】The new models being used in robotics take this idea one step further. These “vision-language-action models” (VLAMs) take in text and images, plus data relating to the robot’s presence in the physical world, including the readings on internal sensors, the degree of rotation of different joints and the positions of actuators (such as grippers, or the fingers of a robot’s hands). The resulting models can then answer questions about a scene, such as “can you see an apple?” But they can also predict how a robot arm needs to move to pick that apple up, as well as how this will affect what the world looks like.
单词解析：physical: adj. 身体的；物理学的；物质的；有形的；肉体的；现实的；躯体的 .体检；体格检查
例句：She’s not very physical. 她不爱摩摩挲挲的。
【7】In other words, a VLAM can act as a “brain” for robots with all sorts of bodies—whether giant stationary arms in factories or warehouses, or mobile robots with legs or wheels. And unlike LLMs, which manipulate only text, VLAMs must fit together several independent representations of the world, in text, images and sensor readings. Grounding the model’s perception in the real world in this way greatly reduces hallucinations (the tendency for AI models to make things up and get things wrong).
单词解析：hallucinations: n. 幻觉；幻视，幻听(尤指生病所致)；幻象；幻视(或幻听)到的东西
例句：what today we would call hallucinations. 而如今，我们会称之为幻听或幻觉。
【8】Dr Chen’s company, Covariant, has created a model called RFM-1, trained using text, images, and data from more than 30 types of robots. Its software is primarily used in conjunction with “pick and place” robots in warehouses and distribution centres located in suburban areas where land is cheap, but labour is scarce. Covariant does not make any of the hardware itself; instead its software is used to give existing robots a brain upgrade. “We can expect the intelligence of robots to improve at the speed of software, because we have opened up so much more data the robot can learn from,” says Dr Chen.
单词解析：suburban: adj. 郊区的；城外的；呆板的；平淡乏味的n.郊区居民
例句：His clothes are conservative and suburban. 他衣着保守而传统。
【9】Using these new models to control robots has several advantages over previous approaches, says Marc Tuscher, co-founder of Sereact, a robotics startup based in Stuttgart. One benefit is “zero-shot” learning, which is tech-speak for the ability to do a new thing—such as “pick up the yellow fruit”—without being explicitly trained to do so. The multimodal nature of VLAM models grants robots an unprecedented degree of common sense and knowledge about the world, such as the fact that bananas are yellow and a kind of fruit.
【10】Another benefit is “in-context learning”—the ability to change a robot’s behaviour using text prompts, rather than elaborate reprogramming. Dr Tuscher gives the example of a warehouse robot programmed to sort parcels, which was getting confused when open boxes were wrongly being placed into the system. Getting it to ignore them would once have required retraining the model. “These days we give it a prompt—ignore open boxes—and it just picks the closed ones,” says Dr Tuscher. “We can change the behaviour of our robot by giving it a prompt, which is crazy.” Robots can, in effect, be programmed by non-specialist human supervisors using ordinary language, rather than computer code.
单词解析：elaborate: adj. 复杂的；详尽的；精心制作的v.精心制作；详细描述；详尽阐述；详细制订
例句：She had prepared a very elaborate meal. 她做了一顿精美的饭菜。
【11】Such models can also respond in kind. “When the robot makes a mistake, you can query the robot, and it answers in text form,” says Dr Chen. This is useful for debugging, because new instructions can then be supplied by modifying the robot’s prompt, says Dr Tuscher. “You can tell it, ‘this is bad, please do it differently in future.’” Again, this makes robots easier for non-specialists to work with.
【12】Being able to ask a robot what it is doing, and why, is particularly helpful in the field of self-driving cars, which are really just another form of robot. Wayve, an autonomous-vehicle startup based in London, has created a VLAM called Lingo-2. As well as controlling the car, the model can understand text commands and explain the reasoning behind any of its decisions. “It can provide explanations while we drive, and it allows us to debug, to give the system instructions, or modify its behaviour to drive in a certain style,” says Alex Kendall, Wayve’s co-founder. He gives the example of asking the model what the speed limit is, and what environmental cues (such as signs and road markings) it has used to arrive at its answer. “We can check what kind of context it can understand, and what it can see,” he says.
【13】As with other forms of AI, access to large amounts of training data is crucial. Covariant, which was founded in 2017, has been gathering data from its existing deployments for many years, which it used to train RFM-1. Robots can also be guided manually to perform a particular task a few times, with the model then able to generalise from the resulting data. This process is known as “imitation learning”. Dr Tuscher says he uses a video-game controller for this, which can be fiddly.
单词解析：crucial: adj. 关键的；至关重要的；关键性的
例句：This last point is crucial.刚讲的这一点是关键的。
【14】But that is not the only option. An ingenious research project at Stanford University, called Mobile ALOHA, generated data to teach a robot basic domestic tasks, like making coffee, using a process known as whole-body teleoperation—in short, puppetry. The researchers stood behind the robot and moved its limbs directly, enabling it to sense, learn and then replicate a particular set of actions. This approach, they claim, “allows people to teach arbitrary skills to robots”.
单词解析：puppetry: n.木偶制作(或表演)艺术
例句：What, you want to learn puppetry? 什么，你们想学习木偶戏啊？
【15】Investors are piling in. Chelsea Finn, a professor at Stanford who oversaw the Mobile ALOHA project, is also one of the co-founders of Physical Intelligence, a startup which recently raised $70m from backers including OpenAI. Skild, a robotics startup spun out of Carnegie Mellon University, is thought to have raised $300m in April. Figure, which is focusing on humanoid robots, raised $675m in February; Wayve raised $1.05bn in May, the largest-ever funding round for a European AI startup.
单词解析：n.(房屋、桥梁等的)桩，桩结构 v.堆放；放置；叠放；蜂拥；拥挤；装入；摞起 pile的现在分词
例句：There was a great big pile of books on the table. 桌上有很大一摞书。
【16】Dr Kendall of Wayve says the growing interest in robots reflects the rise of “embodied AI”, as progress in AI software is increasingly applied to hardware that interacts with the real world. “There’s so much more to AI than chatbots,” he says. “In a couple of decades, this is what people will think of when they think of AI: physical machines in our world.” Wayve的Kendall
【17】As software for robotics improves, hardware is now becoming the limiting factor, researchers say, particularly when it comes to humanoid robots. But when it comes to robot brains, says Dr Chen, “We are making progress on the intelligence very quickly.”
长难句分析：
1）原文：As software for robotics improves, hardware is now becoming the limiting factor, researchers say, particularly when it comes to humanoid robots.
2）解析：
As software (for robotics)(后置定语) improves, || hardware is [now] becoming the limiting factor, || researchers say, || [particularly] when it comes to humanoid robots.
2）句子语法结构详解：
* as 为连词，引导状语从句。
* improves 为谓语，采用一般现在时。动词采用第三人称单数形式。
* hardware 开头为陈述句。
* becoming 为系动词作谓语，采用现在进行时。
* factor 为名词作表语。
* researchers 开头为陈述句。
* say 为谓语，采用一般现在时。
* when 为连词，引导时间状语从句。
* comes 为谓语，采用一般现在时。动词采用第三人称单数形式。
* is 为助动词。the 为定冠词。
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