RPA（Robotic process automation）的中文全称是（）。

A.机器人流程自动化

B.机器人过程自动化

C.机器人作业自动化

D.机器过程自动化

Artificial Intelligence

I'm sure that Hans Moravec is at least as sane as I am, but he certainly brought to mind the classic mad scientist as we sat in his fifth-floor office at Carnegie-Mellon University on a dark and stormy night. It was nearly midnight, and he mixed for each of us a bowl of chocolate milk and Cheerios, with slices of banana piled on top.

Then, with banana-slicing knife in hand, Moravec, the senior research scientist at Carnegie Mellon's Mobile Robot Laboratory, outlined for me how he could create a robotic immortality for Everyman, a deathless universe in which life would go on forever. By creating computer copies of our minds and transferring, or downloading, this program into robotic bodies, Moravec explained, humans could survive for centuries.

"You are in an operating room. A robot brain surgeon is in attendance ... Your skull but not your brain is anesthetized (麻醉). You are fully conscious. The surgeon opens your braincase and peers inside." This is how Moravec described the process in a paper he wrote called "Robots That Rove". The robotic surgeon's attention is directed at a small clump of about one hundred neurons somewhere near the surface. Using high-resolution 3-D nuclear-magnetic-resonance holography, phased-array radio encephalography, and ultrasonic radar, the surgeon determines the three-dimensional structure and chemical makeup of that neural clump. It writes a program that models the behavior. of the clump and starts it running on a small portion of the computer sitting next to you.

That computer sitting next to you in the operating room would in effect be your new brain. As each area of your brain was analyzed and simulated, the accuracy of the simulation would be tested as you pressed a button to shift between the area of the brain just copied and the simulation. When you couldn't tell the difference between the original and the copy, the surgeon would transfer the simulation of your brain into the new, computerized one and repeat the process on the next area of your biological brain.

"Though you have not lost consciousness or even your train of thought, your mind--some would say soul--has been removed from the brain and transferred to a machine," Moravec said, "In a final step your old body is disconnected. The computer is installed in a shiny new one, in the style, color, and material of your choice."

As we sat around Moravec's office I asked what would become of the original human body after the downloading. "You just don't bother waking it up again if the copying went successfully." he said. "It's so messy. Humans have got so many problems that you might just want to leave it retired. You don't take your Junker car out if you've got a new one."

Moravec's idea is the ultimate in life insurance. Once one copy of the brain's contents has been made, it will be easy to make multiple backup copies, and these could be stashed in hiding places around the world, allowing you to embark on any sort of adventure without having to worry about aging or death. As decades pass into centuries you could travel the globe and then the solar system and beyond--always keeping an eye out for the latest in robotic bodies into which you could transfer your computer mind.

If living forever weren't enough, you could live forever several times over by activating some of your backup copies and sending different versions of yourself out to see the world. "You could have parallel experiences and merge the memories later," Moravec explained.

In the weeks and months that followed my stay at Carnegie-Mellon, I was intrigued by how many researchers seemed to believe downloading would come to pass. The only point of disagreement was when--certainly a big consideration to those of us still knocking around in mortal bodies. Although some of the researchers I spoke with at Carnegie-Mellon,

A．Y

B．N

C．NG

A．Y

B．N

C．NG

Moravec's idea of robotic immortality is approved by the author.

A．Y

B．N

C．NG

The new trend in robotic development in the coming future is that robots will______.

A．become more and more popular among families

B．be made just like the ones in Hollywood movies

C．be used more widely in agricultural, contexts

D．be able to do housework with high intelligence

A．Y

B．N

C．NG

Robotic Surgery

Stuart Forbes celebrated his 60th birthday on April 11. A week later, he was diagnosed with prostate (前列腺) cancer. "It was quite a month," says Forbes, a blunt Vietnam veteran who runs a consulting firm outside Boston. When biopsies confirmed he had an aggressive form. of the disease, Forbes started looking for a surgeon. The first recommended a traditional radical prostatectomy (前列腺切除术), which would require an eight-to-10 inch incision and at 1east two days in the hospital Forbes was also warned that he would likely lose almost all the nerves on the left side of the prostate, which could permanently affect his sexual function. "I thought, 'I need to really look at all my options' ," says Forbes. He considered high-intensity focused ultrasound ablation (切除), a relatively new technology that's been used in Europe. But it's expensive and would require transatlantic trips. He looked into various forms of radiation, as well as proton-beam therapy. Then, in June, his girlfriend took him to a symposium on robotic surgery. "I saw the machine and how it worked," remembers Forbes. "It was just incredible. I said, 'That's it'."

In August, Dr. Ashutosh Tewari, director of robotic prostatectomy at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Well Cornell, removed Forbes's walnut-size prostate and lymph nodes and reattached his bladder to his urethra (尿道)without once putting his hands inside the patient. Using Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci robotic system and operating through five tiny incisions, Tewari conducted the entire procedure from across the room. He sat at a console and turned two knobs to remotely manipulate tiny surgical instruments attached to adjustable robotic arms. Forbes was walking within hours of his surgery and was discharged the next day. He compares the discomfort from the largest incision (about two inches long, and the only one to require stitches) to a bad pimple. By midweek he was walking three miles daily. In 10 days he was back at work. After three weeks he was playing golf again; by late October he'd regained normal urinary, and most sexual function. "I'm about as excited as anyone can be about this procedure," he says.

Using robots to perform. surgery once seemed a futuristic fantasy. Not anymore. An estimated 36 600 robotic procedures will be performed this year-- from heart-bypass surgeries to kidney transplants to hysterectomies (子宫切除术). That's up nearly 50 percent from last year, and analysts predict the figure will nearly double in 2006 to more than 70 000 procedures. Since the da Vinci was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in July 2000 (the only robotic system to get the FDA nod), about 350 of the units have been purchased, including 30 in the last quarter alone, at about ＄1.3 million a piece. Surgeons who use the system have found that patients have less blood loss and pain, lower risk of complications, shorter hospital stays and quicker recovery times than those who have open surgery.

The robotic system has already transformed the field of prostate surgery, for which it was approved in May 2001. That year it was used in less than 1 percent of all prostatectomies. This year more than 20 percent will be done with the robot. And that figure is expected to double next year. "It's becoming the standard of care for prostatectomies," says Dr. Santiago Horgan, director of minimally invasive and robotic surgery at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).

The first major study to compare open and robotic prostatectomies was published in the British Journal of Urology in 2003 by Dr. Mani Menon, head of the Vattikuti Urology Institute at Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital. (The hospital has now done about 2 050 of the robotic procedures --more than any other in the nation. ) The study of 300 patients found that those who had open surgery lost five times as much blood, had four times the risk of complications and remained in the h

A．Y

B．N

C．NG

How is virtual reality surgery performed？

A．It is performed by a computer-designed high precision device.

B．Surgeons wear virtual reality helmets to receive feedback provided by a computer.

C．Surgeons move robotic instruments by means of a computer linked to them.

D．A 3-D image records the movements of the surgeons during the operation.