跟读练习: Beware the Power of Prediction | Carissa Véliz | TED - 通过YouTube学习英语口语

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Let me tell you about the future.
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Let me tell you about the future.
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Predictions are the boxing ring where fights over the future take place.
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As the story goes, King Louis XI kept an astrologer in court.
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One day, the astrologer predicted that a lady of the court would die within a week.
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When she did, Louis was shaken.
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Either the astrologer had murdered the woman to prove his accuracy, or he was so prescient that he could threaten Louis himself.
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The astrologer had to be murdered.
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(Laughter) The king ordered his servants that upon his signal, they were to throw the astrologer out the window to a certain death.
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You'd be surprised, by the way, by how many seers in history have met this fate.
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Some advice to astrologers: keep away from kings and heights.
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(Laughter) When the astrologer arrived to meet Louis, the King asked him one last question.
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"Given your prophetic abilities, tell me, how long will you live?" Not missing a beat, the astrologer replied, “I will die three days before Your Majesty.” (Laughter) And Louis never gave the signal.
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(Laughter) Did the astrologer find his answer in the stars?
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I don't think so.
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(Laughter) I think he understood the power of prediction and used it to get himself life insurance.
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Smart astrologer.
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Even though we tend to associate prediction with knowledge, I'd like to invite you to consider the possibility that most of the predictions that you encounter in an everyday setting are closer to the realm of power than that of knowledge.
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It might seem that the days in which we sought astrologers and soothsayers to tell us about the future are very distant, but often we use AI as the new Oracle of Delphi, and tech executives whisper in the ears of our leaders, much like court astrologers used to.
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Granted, the technology is different, but the political role is not.
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Predictions are often power plays in disguise.
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They justify value-laden decisions under the pretense of facts.
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Better understanding prediction matters more than ever because we're relying on forecasting more than ever with AI.
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And based on how we talk about prediction, we're being much too naive about it.
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But AI is science, you might think.
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It's cutting-edge technology, right?
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Well, it depends on the kind of AI and how we use it.
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AI can be a great technology to make predictions about molecules in the search for new antibiotics, but predictions about human beings are fundamentally different than those about things.
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Predictions about the weather don't influence the weather.
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Predictions about people influence people.
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Social predictions tend to act like magnets.
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They bend reality towards themselves.
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They affect the reality they purport to predict.
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An algorithmic prediction about future disease can make someone's insurance premiums go up, leading to worse health outcomes from stress alone.
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Predictions sound like descriptions of the world, like facts, but they're not.
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Analyzed closely as assertions, they are what philosophers called “speech acts.” That is, language that does something other than describe the world.
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When you tell a child to clean up their room, you're not describing the state of the room, you're issuing an order.
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Similarly, social predictions are veiled commands.
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They implicitly tell us how to act.
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For example, when a tech executive says that in the future we will use AI for everything and everywhere, he's trying to get you to act in a way that will fulfill his vision of the future.
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You know, the one that happens to line his pockets.
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And when you believe that prediction, as if it were telling you something about the future, when you give in to the fear of missing out, and you go and you buy the AI and you contribute to the self-fulfilling prophecy, what you are actually doing is obeying.
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Have you noticed how often people who make predictions about technology say that the future they are describing is inevitable?
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That's a red flag.
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Those predictions are designed to act as conversation stoppers.
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They're telling you, "Don't question me.
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Just accept what I'm saying as a fact." I'd like for this talk to be a conversation starter.
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I hope it'll persuade you to ask more questions.
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Predictions invite manipulation.
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Their power to shape the future creates the temptation to tamper with it and benefit from it.
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Take prediction markets.
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The argument for having them is that they can be a source of knowledge.
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In theory, markets don't lie.
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If people make bets and they stand to lose if they get it wrong, they'll try to get it right.
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And by having many people place bets, we can harness the wisdom of the crowds.
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But that assumes a very naive view of prediction as a quest for knowledge.
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If you consider prediction as a quest for power, a very different picture emerges.
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If you have enough money, you can use it to influence public perception by heavily betting on something.
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Politicians have bet on themselves.
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In February this year, six anonymous accounts earned 1.2 million dollars betting for the attack on Iran.
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Some of those wallets were funded hours before.
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Finally, predictions create and then cover up injustice.
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Algorithmic predictions are building this Kafkaesque world in which we can no longer contest decisions because they're not based on clearly defined criteria.
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If I reject your loan application because you don't fulfill a particular requirement, that's a verifiable fact.
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If I'm wrong, you can challenge me.
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But if I reject your loan application on the basis of a prediction, there's no way you can contest that.
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Predictions are never facts.
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Facts belong to the past.
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Predictions are unverifiable, unfalsifiable.
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Since they are about the future, they cannot be challenged for being false, thereby creating the perfect recipe for hidden injustice.
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Predictions are often unfair because they're not based on who people are, but on who we think they will become.
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When we predict someone's future as if it was the weather, we're treating them with disrespect.
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Too much as things, and not enough as agents who have a say in that future, who can and should be allowed to defy their odds.
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We're facing some pretty grim predictions from some of our most prominent prophets.
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Larry Ellison, the chairman of our predictive software company, appropriately named Oracle, has predicted a modern surveillance state in which citizens will be on their best behavior because we're being watched all the time.
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But the illusion of a world without crime is a world filled with a very different kind of crime.
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Authoritarianism.
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Is that the world we want?
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(Applause) What can we do to not sleepwalk into it?
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Plenty. Prophets gain their power from people believing them.
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If we decide to defy this prediction instead of obeying it, we will choose products that are more respectful of privacy, for starters.
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Hannah Arendt wrote that it's pointless to argue with a murderer about whether their future victim is dead or alive.
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The only appropriate response is to rescue the person whose death is predicted.
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Well, today's prophets are predicting the death of our democracy, and the only appropriate response is to rescue it.
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(Applause) In ancient Rome, it was illegal to predict the death of the emperor, for the very simple reason that they ended up with a murdered emperor on cue.
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I'm not suggesting that we do away with prediction.
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I'm going to continue to use my weather app every single day.
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But we need a public debate about the acceptable and unacceptable uses of prediction.
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And we're currently not having it.
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Meanwhile, dozens of algorithms are making decisions about your life right now.
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It might be that in the case of insurance, we might want to make predictions at a population level, but not for individuals because it creates unfair, self-fulfilling prophecies.
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Plus, if we're being billed according to individualized predictions, that means that we’re basically paying for our own way, and insurance loses its reason for being solidarity and the pooling of risk.
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It might be that in cases in which fairness matters, we might prefer transparent and contestable criteria to predictive statistical pattern matching.
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Let me start to bring things together.
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Even though self-fulfilling prophecies are nothing new, they are being supercharged by AI in ways that make it more urgent than ever to think more deeply about predictions.
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First, predictions are never facts.
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They are speech acts.
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Second, they invite manipulation.
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Third, they create and cover up injustice.
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The one idea that I would like for you to take home today is that predictions can be weapons of power.
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But they only work if we believe them.
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If Oedipus had laughed off the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, instead of completely freaking out about it -- (Laughter) He would have never left for Thebes and made the prophecy come true.
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We turn to prophets because we're anxious about uncertainty, but uncertainty is good news.
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It means that the future is unwritten, that it's ours to write.
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And we can face the blank page with creativity, with curiosity, with the excitement of a sense of adventure.
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Efforts to predict the future go hand-in-hand with efforts to control it.
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So beware of prophets and prophecies.
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It's only when we acknowledge that we don't know what the future holds and act accordingly that we can be sure to live in a free society.
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Don't bow to people's predictions as if they were facts.
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Be like Joe Frazier.
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When Muhammad Ali predicted his own victory in the 1971 heavyweight championship, Frazier took it as a provocation and ended up defeating the previously undefeated great Ali in the fight of the century.
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So next time you hear a gloomy prediction about the social world, don't get discouraged.
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Find the Joe Frazier within you.
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Rebel against tyrannical predictions.
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Let's be brave enough to imagine and fight for a better world.
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Perhaps then all of us can make the future bright after all.
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Thank you. (Applause and cheers)

语境与背景

在本次TED演讲中，卡莉莎·韦利兹探讨了预测的力量及其对我们生活的影响。她以历史上的故事引入主题，讲述了路易十一国王与其占星师之间的故事，强调了预测如何与权力交织在一起。她提到，虽然现代科技如人工智能给我们带来了许多便利，但我们也必须警惕预测所带来的潜在操控和影响。学习这些内容有助于提高我们对英语及其在日常生活中作用的理解。

每日沟通的五个关键短语

  • “我将为您预测” - 表示做出某种预测的时刻。
  • “你能看到未来吗？” - 询问对未来的看法或预测。
  • “这是不争的事实” - 强调某种看法应该被接受。
  • “未来是不可避免的” - 表达对未来事件的必然性。
  • “我们必须询问更多的问题” - 鼓励人们对预测进行质疑。

逐步跟读指南

为了提高英语发音和口语能力，尤其是在涉及预测和决策的对话中，您可以按照以下步骤进行练习：

  1. 选择视频片段：播放卡莉莎·韦利兹的演讲，并找到关键段落进行练习。
  2. 初步理解：先通读字幕，理解大意，确保您掌握了主要的思想和主题。
  3. 反复跟读：模仿演讲者的发音和语调，逐句跟读，注意节奏和语音的变化。这是提高英语发音的关键过程。
  4. 重点短语练习：特别关注上面列出的五个短语，尝试在不同的情境中使用它们，提高自己的口语表达能力。
  5. 记录并反馈：录下您自己的跟读，然后与原视频进行对比，找出需要改进的地方。通过这样的雅思口语练习，您的口语能力会有显著提升。

通过这种方法，您可以进行有效的shadowspeak练习，逐渐掌握流利的英语表达，这不仅有助于提高您的沟通能力，还能增强您对复杂主题的理解和表达信心。

什么是跟读法？

跟读法 (Shadowing) 是一种有科学依据的语言学习技巧，最初开发用于专业口译员的培训，并由多语言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。这个方法简单而强大：您在听英语母语原声的同时立即大声重复——就像是一个延迟1-2秒紧跟说话者的影子。与被动听力或语法练习不同，跟读法强迫您的大脑和口腔肌肉同时处理并模仿真实的讲话模式。研究表明它能显着提高发音准确性，语调，节奏，连读，听力理解和口语流利度——使其成为雅思口语备考和真实英语交流最有效的方法之一。

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