In the beginning of the movie I, Robot, a robot has to decide whom to save after two cars plunge into the water—Del Spooner or a child. Even though Spooner screams “Save her! Save her!” the robot rescues him because it calculates that he has a 45 percent chance of survival compared to Sarah’s 11 percent. The robots decision and its calculated approach raise an important question: would humans make the same choice and which choice would we want our robotic counterparts to make?

    Isaac Asimov evaded the whole notion of morality in devising his three laws of robotics, which hold that I. robots cannot harm humans or allow humans to come to harm; 2. Robots must obey preservation, unless doing so conflicts with laws 1 or 2. These laws are programmed into Asimov’s robots—they don’t have to think, judge, or value. They don’t have to like humans or believe that hurting them is wrong or bad. They simply don’t do it.

    The robot who rescues Spooner’s life in I, Robot follows Asimov’s zeroth law: robots cannot harm humanity (as opposed to individual humans or allow humanity to come to harm—an expansion of the first law that allows robots to determine what’s in the greater good. Under the first law. A robot could not harm a dangerous gunman, but under the zeroth law, a robot could kill the gunman to save others.

    Whether it’s possible to program a robot with safeguards such as Asimov’s laws is debatable. A word such as “harm” is vague (what about emotional harm? Is replacing a human employee harm?), and abstract concepts present coding problems. The robots in Asimov’s fiction exposes complications and loopholes in the three laws, and even when the laws work, robots still have to assess situations.

    Assessing situations can be complicated. A robot has to identify the players, conditions, and possible outcomes for various scenarios. It’s doubtful that a computer program can do that-at least, not without some undesirable results. A roboticist at the Bristol robotics laboratory programmed a robot to save human proxies (替身) called “H-bots” from danger. When one H-bot of headed for danger, the robot successfully pushed it out the way. But when two H-bots became imperiled, the robot choked 42 percent of the time, unable to decide which to save and letting them both “die.” The experiment highlights the importance of morality. How can a robot decide whom to save or what’s best for humanity, especially if it can’t calculate survival odds?

46. D）How robots should be programmed.

解析：首先在题目中找到定位词question和the example in the movie，然后回原文定位至第1段。定位段指出，机器人的决定及其计算后的做法引出了一个重要的问题：人类会做出同样的选择吗？以及我们希望我们的机器人做出何种选择？最后看选项：A）机器人是否可以做出更好的决定，原文中未提及机器人做的决定是好是坏，不存在更好这一说，故错误；B）机器人是否遵循阿西莫夫的零法则，与定位句信息不一致，且零法则相关内容出现在文章下面的部分，故排除；C）机器人会在什么情况下做出糟糕的判断，原文对此未给出定论，故错误。下文主要探讨了阿西莫夫为机器人探讨的定律，以及编程是否应该考虑道德问题，可见，D选项正确。