Earlier this week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the Doomsday Clock wouldn’t tick any closer to midnight,

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问题     Earlier this week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the Doomsday Clock wouldn’t tick any closer to midnight, but that it wouldn’t tick any further away, either. The clock will remain at "three minutes to midnight," where the Bulletin set it last year after growing concerned about nuclear modernization programs and climate change.
    As I wrote in the tech section today, the Clock provides a rare opportunity to talk about "existential risk" :those threats so vast that they could endanger all of humanity. Existential risk is undergoing a bit of a renaissance right now: Nick Bostrom, the Cambridge philosopher whocoined the term, is the subject of skeptical magazine profiles; and millions of tech-made dollars have gone into funding " good A. I." research. In fact, there’ s a sort of debate right now among Silicon Valley technologists: Does climate change or artificial intelligence pose a greater existential risk to humanity?
    To more climate-attuned forecasters, this can seem a little silly. " Worrying about sentient A.I. as the ice caps melt is like standing on the tracks as the train rushes in, worrying about being hit by lightning," once tweeted Bret Victor, a former designer at Apple. Some of the computing industry’s figureheads—among them Peter Thiel and Elon Musk—disagree, or, at least, find A.I. sufficiently worrisome to invest their wealth in stopping it.
    What always strikes me about this is that both sides can imagine their own form of historical irony. Imagine two throwaway lines in a circa-2100 historical review: "Yet even as the planet’s atmosphere reached the point of no return, some of America’s keenest technical minds poured millions into preventing sentient artificial intelligence, a technological feat now believed to be centuries away." Or ...
    "Despite urgent warnings from some of the most talented engineers on the planet about what was to come, the United States government stayed focused on the danger of climate change."
For me, it demonstrates the limits of conspicuously meta-historical thinking. History is easy to predict in retrospect; to actually live through it is to see thousands of terrifying possibilities that never come to pass. I think vastly more wealth should go to stopping climate change than evil A.I.—but maybe wealth should also go toward handling global pandemics, or reducing extreme poverty, or funding America’s sclerotic democratic institutions.
    For me, the thought that that history might one day judge our own era is a happy one. But that’s because, if history is still getting written in 2100, it means there will be people to write it.
Bret Victor’ s comparison is quoted to indicate that

选项 A、climate change cannot be accurately predicted.
B、global warming should gain more attention.
C、artificial intelligence poses a greater threat.
D、investments in A.I. will be withdrawn.

答案B

解析 (1)根据题干关键词Bret Victor定位至第3段。(2)题干中的comparison所指是:“在冰盖融化时,对人工智能担忧,就宛如当火车驶来时站在铁轨上,还担心闪电会击中自己”(第3段:like)。(3)那么,Victor要说明的话题是什么呢?下文内容便提供了回答。“他继续给关注气候变化的技术人员提供了指导”,他更为关心的是气候问题。从对比关系来看,他“对气候关注的做法”并不被其他人所赞同——其他人关注于人工智能。据此,确定选项[B]正确。
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