TOEFL iBT Academic Discussion and Writing AI

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☆Question

Does the potential of AI to improve our lives and boost economic growth outweigh the ethical and socio-economic concerns, or should we be more cautious in the adoption and development of AI?

 

 

☆Let’s Think

Do research on the following questions and discuss them with others.

1.        What is Sophie’s point? Provide a case in point.

2.        What is Liam’s point? Provide a case in point.

3.        Who do you agree with? Share your opinion.

 

☆Hints for Points

1.        In “2001: A Space Odyssey”, Stanley Kubrick shows how a computer program kills humans when it takes humans as obstacles of the task it has been programed to do.

2.        No one knows how artificial intelligence works.

3.        In 2015, world-renowned thinkers cautioned us about the threat of AI. According to them, since AI evolves much faster than humans do, it is possible that humans will lose control of AI in the near future.

4.        Military use of AI needs caution. Autonomous weapons must be banned.

5.        It was thought that computers are more morally correct than humans, but it has been known that they learn prejudice through interactions with humans.

6.        AI is a machine. It does not have the same biological body we have, so it’ll never have the same consciousness or workings of mind we humans have.

7.        People often prefer to interact with humans rather than to do it with machines.

8.        AI will do supplementary jobs such as routines and dangerous tasks.

9.        AI is an enhancement of our brain activities. Like other advanced devises such as electric dictionary and smart phones, our productivity will rise through the use of Ai.

 

☆Responses for Ideas and Expressions

Response 1: I’m all for utilizing AI in various aspects of our lives, because it performs much better than humans in some types of tasks. I’m not concerned about job displacement very much. AI needs human operators to watch and manage it. In cases of hiring, AI that sorts out job applications before the human resources manager sees them choses photos of the same type of faces that look like those of successful applicants in the past based on its data input. An AI-robot hotel in Tokyo, although it enjoyed many visitors who love to see new things at the beginning, started to hire humans several months after its opening because of malfunctions and lack of flexibility. As long as we watch security related to AI, there is no need to warry about it replacing us in offices. (136 words)

 

Response 2: My fear is that AI can transform our mental conditions. In “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, Phillip K. Dick predicted a future where androids are so similar to humans as to make it difficult to tell the difference. Although humas can tell androids lack something human, they sometimes act more humanely than real humans. He also predicted a world which is run by singularity, a consciousness that exist in a network of computers. There, humans are not allowed to make decisions. Although these things are yet to happen, I feel changes are already happening in such situations in which they translate a foreign language much better than us, making us lose confidence in ourselves and dependent on machine translation; hence loss of creativity from free working of our mind. (130 words)

 

 

☆Response plan

Topic Sentence:

Supporting Details:

Write your response in 10 minutes. Show each other your responses. Write down questions or suggestions to each other’s response.