実践ビジネス英語 ディクテーション (11/30,12/1)
こんにちは。NHKラジオ「実践ビジネス英語」”Talk the Talk”のディクテーションです。
Lesson 16のテーマは、‘The Coming Robot Revolution’（来るべきロボット革命）でした。Vignetteでは、AIの急速な発達で人間が仕事を奪われるおそれが現実味を帯びてきていることが主な話題になりました。独創性さえAIが実現する可能性があるといいます。
“Talk the Talk”では、身近なロボット導入の例やAIの翻訳能力などについて話されています。
杉田先生のおっしゃった” The future comes one day at a time”という部分が心に響きました。
★英文の終わりに語注をつけました。
The Coming Robot Revolution
（S: 杉田敏先生 H: Heather Howardさん）
S: Our current vignette talks about the threat robots pose to human beings in terms of employment.
For example, retail cashier is named as an endangered job due to the introduction of self-checkout terminals.
H: l’m maybe seeing an early stage of that at my neighborhood grocery store.
Not too long ago they introduced semi-self-checkout terminals.
There are still cashiers who ring up the groceries and scan our point cards, but now, we customers handle the money part ourselves.
We put our money or credit card into the register, and take our own change and/or a receipt.
It makes the whole process go faster as I’m paying for my groceries, the cashier is already ringing up the next person’s items.
This would be the ideal, wouldn’t it?
For robots to just enhance human’s ability to do their jobs or free them up for other tasks.
But one day soon the cashiers may vanish from that store and the customer and the terminal will do everything on their own.
S: True. Paul Pearson says in the vignette that he’s already seen the future in a Chinese restaurant in Singapore, where customers place their orders by using a touchscreen and robot waiters deliver dishes to the table.
That’s happening at conveyor belt sushi bars in Japan, too.
And in the back room, a robot is probably making rice balls for pieces of raw fish to be placed on.
You’ll also find a plethora of noodle-making robots in Chinese restaurants in China.
And people in your industry have to watch their backs too, don’t they, Heather?
H: Absolutely, technology for editing, writing and translating is getting better and better.
But I don’t think you can ever eliminate people in this area entirely, because really effective editing, writing and translating has to involve human emotion.
Good texts are based on an understanding of human feeling, and inspire feelings as well.
And not just the broad basic categories of emotion―anger, fear, etc., which machines are apparently learning to recognize―but an endless array of nuance within those categories.
And all those nuances are influenced by everything from the writer and the reader’s personal histories to current events taking place around the world.
Can a machine ever truly grasp all those things together, which can change day by day, moment by moment?
And how will a computer ever have that feeling that something is just right? Or just wrong without clear reason why?
S: I think Pat McMillan is right when he says the robots challenge us to do more than a mundane job and become more creative.
Writers and translators too will have to push themselves harder and harder to think outside the box.
H: It’s interesting to speculate what the future will look like.
Will we all wake up one day and discover we’ve been fired?
And the email telling us this won’t even have been written by a human person?
And the only jobs available would be fetching spare parts for our machine masters?
S: I don’t think we’ll find ourselves surrounded by robots all of a sudden.
The future comes one day at a time as the robot revolution keeps taking shape.
For instance, innovation will change the world of cars and trucks as well as call center workers.
Millions of retail jobs could also be lost as more and more people shop online.
H: We humans will have to use our creativity in this area as well to make sure robots remain our friends and helpers, not our replacements.
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Words and Expressions
a plethora of: 大量の～、過剰な～
watch one’s back: 油断をしない、気を抜かない
think outside the box: 既成概念にとらわれない考え方をする
お疲れさまでした。お読みくださり、ありがとうございます♪
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