TOPIC: THE FUTURE: SOCIAL RELATIONS & TECH LEVEL C1 TEACHER´S MEDIATION EXAM TASK

The Future of Robots Written Mediation

Source text length: 450 words Summary length: 140 words

MEDIATION TASK
INSTRUCTIONS: 1 - In 5 minutes, prepare your task reading the text below.
2 - Write a summary of 140 words.
You are a freshman of Robotics at an International University. As part of a class project you have been asked
to look into how artificial intelligence might affect human relations in the future.
You have found the following article on Forbes magazine online. You would like to include some of the
insights in it that you have found particularly relevant for your project, as it offers a viewpoint that brings up
some ideas none of the other group members has considered.
However, two of the members in your group are Italian students who are not as proficient in English as you
are, and as your professor can ask any of you to discuss any of the sections in the project, you have to write a
summary on your padlet board so everybody has access to the information and is ready to answer all related
questions when the moment comes.
Write a 140-word summary keeping the essence of the article and highlighting its key ideas.

This Is What The Future Of Robots Might Do To Humanity

Years ago I spoke with a 16-year-old girl who was considering the idea of having a computer companion
in the future, and she described the upside to me. It’s not that the robot she’d imagined, a vastly more
sophisticated Siri, was so inspiring. It’s that she’d already found people to be so disappointing. And now, for
the first time, she explained me, people have options. Back then I thought her comments seemed prescient.
Now I find them timely.

“There are people who have tried to make friends, but stumbled so badly that they’ve given up,” she said.
“So when they hear this idea of robots as companions, well … it’s not like a robot has the mind to walk away
or leave you or anything like that.”

This girl had grown up in the time of Siri, a conversational object presented as an empathy machine — a
thing that could understand her. And so, it seemed natural to her that other machines would expand the
range of conversation. But there is something she may have been too young to understand — or, like a lot of
us — prone to forget when we talk to machines. These robots can perform empathy in a conversation about
your friend, your mother, your child or your lover, but they have no experience of any of these relationships.
Machines have not known the arc of a human life. They feel nothing of the human loss or love we describe to
them. Their conversations about life occupy the realm of the as-if.

Yet through our interactions with these machines, we seem to ignore this fact; we act as though the emotional
ties we form with them will be reciprocal, and real, as though there is a right kind of emotional tie that can be
formed with objects that have no emotions at all.

And yet that is the kind of talk that one hears these days. The narrative begins with the idea that companionate
robots would be “better than nothing,” better because there aren’t enough people to teach, love and tend to
people. But that idea quickly shifts into another: robots would be better than most anything. Unlike people,
they would not abandon you or get sick and die. They might not be capable of love, but they won’t break
your heart.

From better than nothing to better than anything. These are stations on our voyage to forgetting what it
means to be human. But the forgetting begins long before we have a robot companion in place; it begins
when we even think of putting one in place. To build the robots, we must first rebuild ourselves as people
ready to be their companions.

C1 The Future of Robots

Source: www.nytimes.com -1-
C1 The Future of Robots Teacher’s Mediation Exam Guide
Mediation Strategies & Microskills

Although students are asked to primarily summarize the main ideas in the article above, to do so, they will
also need to apply other strategies and microskills, which will vary depending on the source text.

For instance, in this particular case, students may:

Streamline the text: By excluding parts of the text that do not cover key ideas, like supporting ideas or
redundant explanations.

By avoiding repetition.

By expressing the same information in fewer words.

By highlighting key information. The most relevant information has been highlighted in
the source text for your convenience.

By comparing, contrasting and drawing conclusions. To do so, students should be able

to spot the upside and downside of having robot companions in the future and what
it might mean to humanity.

Adapt the language by explaining abstract terms and metaphorical ideas. By explaining “perform empathy”,
“but stumbled so badly that they’ve given up” or “the realm of the as-if”.

Rephrase. By wording specific sections of the source differently so they do not copy the key ideas as they are
expressed in the source text. For example “expand the range of conversation”.

You can take notes here to give your students feedback.

C1 The Future of Robots

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