2015年职称英语理工类阅读理解：Digital Realm.docVIP

Digital Realm In the digital realm,the next big advance will be voice recognition.The rudiments are already here but in primitive form.Ask a computer torecognize speech,and it is likely to think you want it towreck a nice beach.But in a decade or so well be able to chat away and machines will soak it all in5.Microchips will be truly embedded in our lives when we can talk to them.Not only to our computers; well also able to chat our automobile navigation systems,telephone consoles6,browsers,thermostats,VCRs,microwaves and any other devices we want to boss around7. That will open the way to the next phase of the digital age:artificial intelligence.By our providing so many thoughts and preferences to our machines each day,theyll accumulate enough information about how we think so that theyll be able to mimic our minds and act as our agents.Scary,huh? But potentially quite useful.At least until they dont need us anymore and start building even smarter machines they can boss around. The law powering the digital age up until now has been Gordon Moores:that microchips will double in power and halve in price every 18 months or so.Bill Gates rules because early on he acted on the assumption that computing power—the capacity of microprocessors and memory chips—would become nearly free; his company kept churning out more and more lines of complex software to make use of the cheap bounty.The law that will power the next few decades is that the bandwidth the capacity of fiber-optic and other pipelines to carry digital communications will become nearly free. Along with the recent advances in digital switching and storage technologies,this means a future in which all forms of content—movies,music,shows,books,data,magazines,newspapers,your aunts recipes and home videos—will be instantly available anywhere on demand.Anyone will be able to be a producer of any content; youll be able to create a movie or magazine,make it available to the world and charge for it,just like Time Wa