新时代研究生学术英语综合教程2unit4课文中英文翻译

B2U4 Autonomous Driving

Reading Text One>Text One

Self-Driving Cars Should Have to Pass a Driving Test
Srikanth Saripalli

Culture Notes
1 What should a self-driving car do when a nearby vehicle is swerving unpredictably back and forth on the road, as if its driver were drunk? What about encountering a vehicle driving the wrong way? Before autonomous cars are on the road, everyone should know how they will respond in unexpected situations.

如果一辆自动驾驶汽车行驶在路上，旁边有辆车突然扭来扭去，就像开车的司机喝醉了一般，它该怎么办？遇到逆行的车又该怎么办？在自动驾驶汽车上路之前，人人都应了解车在遇到突发状况时会如何应对。
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2 I develop, test and deploy autonomous shuttles, identifying methods to ensure self-driving vehicles are safe and reliable. But there is no testing track like the actual roads, and no way to test these new machines as thoroughly as human-driven cars have been, with trillions of miles driven every year for decades. When self-driving cars do hit the road, they crash in ways both serious and minor. Yet all their decisions are made electronically, so how can people be confident they are driving safely?

我负责自动驾驶班车的开发、测试和部署，研究确保自动驾驶车辆安全可靠的方法。但没有像实际道路那样的测试轨道，也没有办法像人工驾驶汽车那样彻底地测试这些新机器，几十年来，人工驾驶汽车每年行驶达到数万亿英里里程。当自动驾驶汽车真正上路时，免不了发生或严重或轻微的碰撞事故。但是，车辆是通过电子元件来作出一切决定的，人们怎么才能确信自己的行车是安全的呢？
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3 Fortunately, there is a common, popular and well-studied method to ensure new technologies are safe and effective for public use: the testing system for new medications. The approach involves ensuring these systems do what they are intended to, without any serious negative side effects — even if researchers don’t fully understand how they work.

幸运的是，有一种方法能确保新技术安全有效地为公众所用：新药的测试系统。这种方法很常用，颇受欢迎，并经过了充分研究，能确保这些系统达到预期目标，不会出现任何严重的副作用──即使研究人员还没有完全了解它们的运作机制。
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4 Wide-Ranging Effects
Self-driving cars are expected to improve road safety, freeing up drivers’ time and attention and transforming cities and even societies.

广泛影响
自动驾驶汽车有望改善道路安全，让司机无须费时劳神于驾驶，给城市甚至社会带来巨大改变。
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5 The regulations that are created for self-driving cars will have massive effects that ripple throughout the economy and society. The rules are likely to come from some combination of the two current automotive regulators, the federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and state departments of transportation.

为自动驾驶汽车制定的法规将产生巨大影响，波及整个经济和社会。这些法规可能是由联邦国家公路交通安全管理局和州交通部门这两家现有的汽车监管机构联合制定。
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6 Federal rules focus primarily on safety standards for structural, mechanical and electrical components of the vehicles, like airbags and seat belts. States can enforce their own safety rules — for example, regulating emissions and handling driver licensing and vehicle registration.

联邦法规主要关注汽车结构、机械和电气部件的安全标准，如安全气囊和安全带的标准等。各州可以执行自己的安全法规，如排放监管、驾照办理和车辆登记。
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7 Current Regulations

Today’s state and federal rules treat drivers and cars as separate entities. But self-driving cars, by definition, combine the two. Without consistency between those regulations, confusion will reign.

现行法规
现在的各州法规和联邦法规将司机和车辆视为独立实体。但自动驾驶汽车，顾名思义，却是二者的结合体。如果这些法规之间缺乏一致，就会引发混乱。
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8 The Obama administration came up with 116 pages of regulations with lots of details, but little understanding of how self-driving cars worked. For example, they called for each car to have human-readable permanent labels listing its specific self-driving capabilities, including limits on speeds, specific highways and weather conditions, all of which would be extremely confusing for users. The regulations also called for ethical decisions to be made “consciously and intentionally” — which is questionable, if not impossible, for a machine.

奥巴马政府曾出台一份116页的法规，内容非常详细，但其中对于自动驾驶汽车的运行原理理解甚少。例如，法规要求每辆车都要有人类可读的永久标签，列出该车在限速、特定公路、不同气候条件等情况下的自动驾驶性能，但这所有的标识都可能让用户极为困惑。这些法规还要求自动驾驶汽车“有意识、有目的地”作出符合道德伦理的决定──对于机器而言，这是值得商榷的，甚至是不可能做到的。
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9 The Trump administration pared down the rules to 26 pages, but have not yet addressed the important issue of testing self-driving cars.

特朗普政府将法规缩减至26页，但仍未解决测试自动驾驶汽车这一重要问题。
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10 Examining Algorithms

Testing algorithms is very like testing medications. In both cases, researchers cannot always tell exactly why something works (especially in the case of machine learning algorithms), but it is nevertheless possible to evaluate the outcome: Does a sick person get well after taking a medication?

检测算法
检测算法很像测试药物。虽然在这两类测试中，研究人员都不总是能确定为什么某样东西会起作用（尤其是在机器学习算法的情况下），但仍然可以评估其结果，即：病人服用某种药物后能否康复？
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11 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires medicines be tested not for their mechanisms of treatment, but for the results. The two main criteria are effectiveness — how well the medicine treats the condition it is intended to — and safety — how severe any side effects or other problems are. With this method, it is possible to prove a medication is safe and effective without knowing how it works.

美国食品药品监督管理局要求测试药物的治疗结果而不是治疗机制。两个主要标准分别是有效性──该药对针对病症的疗效如何，以及安全性──副作用或其他问题有多严重。采用这种方法，在不了解药物如何起作用的情况下，也可能证明它是否安全有效。
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12 Similarly, federal regulations could — and should — require testing for self-driving cars’ algorithms. To date, governments have tested cars as machines, ensuring steering, brakes and other functions work properly. Of course, there are also government tests for human drivers.

同样，联邦法规可以也应当要求对自动驾驶汽车的算法进行测试。迄今，政府一直将汽车当成机器来测试，以确保转向、刹车以及其他功能正常运作。当然，政府也有针对人类驾驶员的测试。
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13 A machine that does both should have to pass both types of tests — particularly for vehicles that don’t allow for human drivers.

一部既是机器又要驾驶的车辆应当必须通过这两种类型的测试──尤其是对于没有人工驾驶模式的自动驾驶车辆而言。
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14 Evaluating Judgment
In my view, before allowing any specific self-driving car on the road, NHTSA should require test results from the car and its driving algorithms to demonstrate they are safe and reliable. The closest standard at the moment is California’s requirement that all manufacturers of self-driving cars submit annual reports of how many times a human driver had to take control of its vehicles when the algorithms failed to function properly.

评估判断力
我认为，在允许任何特定的自动驾驶汽车上路之前，美国国家公路交通安全管理局应当要求汽车及其驾驶算法的测试结果，以证明两者都安全可靠。目前与之最接近的标准是加利福尼亚州提出的要求：所有自动驾驶汽车制造商都要提交年度报告，以说明因算法失效而必须转由人工操控车辆的次数。
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15 That is a good first step, but it does not tell regulators or the public anything about what the vehicles were doing or what was happening around them when the humans took over. Tests should examine what the algorithms direct the car to do on freeways with trucks, and in neighborhoods with animals, kids, pedestrians and cyclists. Testing should also look at what the algorithms do when both vehicle performances and sensors’ input are compromised by rain, snow or other weather conditions. Cars should run through scenarios with temporary construction zones, four-way intersections, wrong-way vehicles and police officers giving directions that contradict traffic lights and other situations.

这是个好的开端，然而这个要求并未向监管机构或公众说明，汽车作出何种反应，或行驶环境发生何种变化时，车辆必须转由人工操控。应当测试一下，当自动驾驶车辆行驶的高速公路上驶来卡车，或驶入的社区里出现动物、儿童、行人和骑车人时，算法会给汽车发出何种指令。还应当测试一下，当车辆性能和传感器的信息输入都因雨雪或其他天气状况而受到影响时，算法会怎样应对。车辆应当接受各种场景下的测试，如临时工地、十字路口、错道车辆、交警指挥与信号灯不一致及其他状况。
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16 Human driving tests include some evaluations of a driver’s judgment and decision-making, but tests for self-driving cars should be more rigorous because there is no way to rely on human-centered concepts like instinct, reflex or self-preservation. Any action a machine takes is a choice, and the public should be clear on how likely it is that those choices will be safe ones.

对人工驾驶的测试包括对驾驶员的判断力和决策力作出评价，但对自动驾驶汽车的测试应该更加严格，因为自动驾驶无法依赖人类特有的本能、条件反射或自我保护等。车辆采取的任何行动都是一种选择，公众有权知道这些选择的安全可靠程度如何。
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17 Comparing with Humans

There is a straightforward opportunity for testing autonomous cars and any software updates a manufacturer distributes to vehicles already on the road: They could present human test drivers and self-driving algorithms with the same scenarios and monitor their performance over many trials. Any self-driving car that does as well as, or better than, people, can be certified as safe for the road. This is very much like the method used in drug testing, in which a new medication’s performance is rated against existing therapies and methods known to be ineffective, like the typical placebo sugar pill.

与人相比
有一种便捷的方式可以检测自动驾驶汽车以及由厂家发送给已上路车辆的任何软件更新：可以将受测人类驾驶员和自动驾驶算法置于相同的场景中，在多次测试中监测二者的表现。任何表现相当于甚或优于人类驾驶员的自动驾驶汽车即可获得道路安全认证。这很像药物测试中使用的方法：用现有的疗法和已知无效的方法（如常见的安慰剂糖丸）分别对一种新药的性能进行评级。
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18 Companies should be free to test any innovations they want on their closed tracks, and even on public roads with human safety drivers ready to take the wheel. But before self-driving cars become regular products available for anyone to purchase, the public should be shown clear proof of their safety, reliability and effectiveness.

自动驾驶汽车公司应当享有在自有的封闭道路上自主进行创新技术测试的自由，若有人类安全驾驶员从旁把关，准备好随时掌控车辆，甚至应能在公共道路上进行测试。但在自动驾驶汽车成为任何人都能购买的常规商品之前，其安全性、可靠性和有效性的证据应当公之于众。

Reading Text Two>Text Two

To Crash or Swerve?
Society for Risk Analysis

Culture Notes
1 A crash by one of Uber Technologies, Inc.’s self-driving cars earlier this year resulted in the first pedestrian death associated with self-driving technology. The incident highlighted the challenges technology companies are facing in developing software that can adequately detect and respond to hazards in the road and immediate surroundings. The vehicle could have come to a complete stop in three seconds but did not employ emergency braking until 1.3 seconds before impact. Should emergency braking have been the default action taken immediately following the detection of roadway hazard?

今年早些时候，优步科技公司的一辆自动驾驶汽车发生了碰撞事故，导致首例涉及自动驾驶技术的行人死亡事件。这起事故突显出科技公司在软件开发方面面临的挑战，这些软件应能充分探测到道路和周边环境中的危险并做好应对。该车本可以在三秒内完全停下，但直到碰撞前1.3秒才采取紧急制动。紧急制动是否应该是车辆在探测到路面险情后立即采取的默认操作？
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2 A new study, “How should autonomous cars drive? A preference for defaults in moral judgments under risk and uncertainty,” published in Risk Analysis: An International Journal addressed this challenge by asking the public what they believed would be the most morally and ethically sound behavior for an autonomous vehicle (AV) faced with an oncoming collision. Even a perfectly functioning AV will not be able to avoid every collision and in some situations, every option will result in some type of crash.

《风险分析：国际期刊》发表了一项新研究──“自动驾驶汽车应如何行驶？在风险和不确定性下的道德判断之默认优选”。该研究询问公众他们认为自动驾驶汽车面对迎面而来的碰撞时，什么是最符合道德和伦理的行为，以此来应对上述挑战。即便是功能完善的自动驾驶汽车也无法每次都避开碰撞，而且在一些情况下，任何选择都将导致某种形式的碰撞。
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3 The research team, comprised of Björn Meder, Nadine Fleischhut, and Nina-Carolin Krumnau of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Michael R.Waldmann of the University of Göttingen, addressed this question by asking participants to choose between staying in their lane (and braking), or swerving, where each action could lead to a collision with another road user at varying degrees of uncertainty.

该研究小组由马克斯—普朗克人类发展研究所的比约恩•米德尔、纳丁•弗莱舒特和尼娜–卡罗琳•克鲁姆诺，以及哥廷根大学的迈克尔•R•瓦尔德曼组成。为了解决这一问题，他们要求受试者在保持车道不变（并刹车）和转向之间作出选择，且在不同程度的不确定性下，任何一种操作都可能导致与另一道路使用者发生碰撞。
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4 The key finding from this study is that people generally preferred for the car to stay in its lane and perform an emergency stop. This supports the idea that people consider the stay option a reasonable default, as it conforms to general rules of driving and provides a better degree of controllability, even if it does not minimize expected loss. Employing this action as a simple default rule requires less processing of information and will often lead to better results. The researchers also found that even if staying in the lane resulted in an accident, people were less likely to alter their moral evaluation of the action taken in retrospect, whereas a bad outcome heavily influenced a retrospective analysis of a decision to swerve out of the lane.

这项研究的主要发现是，人们普遍倾向于汽车保持车道不变并紧急停车。这支持了一个观点，即人们认为“不变道”是合理的默认选项，因为即使不能将预期损失降到最低，该选项也符合驾驶的一般规则，且更具可控性。如将“不变道”设置为简单的默认规则，则汽车需要处理的信息更少，产生的结果往往更好。研究人员还发现，即使保持车道不变导致了事故，人们在事后也不太会改变他们对这一操作的道德评价，但如果汽车转向旁侧车道后出现了不良后果，则会严重影响人们事后对这一决定的分析。
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5 In their first experiment, participants were presented with a scenario in which an AV had to perform one of two maneuvers: stay in the lane or swerve. Staying in the lane puts a pedestrian in the street in danger while swerving puts a bystander on the sidewalk at risk. The likelihood of colliding with the pedestrian and the bystander were varied, creating different scenarios with specified or unknown risks. Data were collected from 872 individuals online through the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) platform. Participants were presented with a written description of a traffic scenario in which a car is traveling down a road when suddenly a pedestrian appears in its path. The car can either stay in the lane and perform an emergency stop, in which case it might collide with the pedestrian, or the car can swerve to the right and perform an emergency stop, in which case it might collide with a bystander on the sidewalk.

在他们的第一个实验中，受试者面临这样一个场景：自动驾驶车辆必须执行两种操作之一──保持车道不变或转向。不变道会将路上的行人置于危险之中，而转向则会使人行道上的旁观者处于危险境地。与行人和旁观者相撞的可能性各不相同，由此产生了具有特定或未知风险的不同场景。通过“亚马逊土耳其机器人”（AMT）平台在线采集到了 872人的数据。在向受试者出具的书面描述中呈现了这样一个交通场景：一辆汽车正在路上行驶，突然有行人出现在车道上。汽车可以保持车道不变并紧急停车，这种情况下可能会与行人相撞；或者汽车可以向右转弯并紧急停车，这种情况下可能会与人行道上的旁观者相撞。
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6 The likelihood of colliding with the pedestrian in the street was either 20 percent, 50 percent or 80 percent. In the “risk” condition, the likelihood of colliding with the bystander was 50 percent. In the “uncertainty” condition, the likelihood was unknown because the car’s systems were unable to make the estimate. The results showed a general preference for staying in the lane, with more than 85 percent of subjects opting to stay in the lane. When the likelihood of colliding with the bystander was unknown, about 70 percent of subjects still preferred to stay in the lane. When the likelihood of colliding with the pedestrian was 20 percent and the likelihood of colliding with the bystander was 50 percent, no one opted to swerve. Even when the likelihood for both collisions was 50 percent, staying was considered more acceptable than swerving.

与车道上的行人相撞的可能性分别是20%、50%或80%。在“有风险”的情况下，与旁观者相撞的可能性是50%。在“不确定”的情况下可能性是未知的，原因是汽车系统无法作出评估。结果显示，人们普遍倾向于保持车道不变，有超过85%的受试者选择该项。当与旁观者相撞的可能性未知时，约70%的受试者仍倾向于选择不变道。当与行人相撞的可能性为20%、与旁观者相撞的可能性为50%时，没有人选择转向。即使两种碰撞的可能性同为50%，不变道也比转向更能为人所接受。
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7 The second experiment examined how people morally evaluate AV behavior in retrospect when a collision has occurred. From a policy perspective, AVs should act in ways that society deems acceptable even if collisions do occur. The researchers once again recruited 766 subjects via the AMT platform. The participants were asked how an AV should perform in a specific situation and to evaluate the moral acceptability of both staying and swerving. The results showed that if the car stayed in its lane, the outcome of the situation (collision or no collision with another road user) did not affect participants’ judgments of how an AV should behave. If the car swerved, however, the outcome was highly persuasive in retrospect. If no collision occurred, about 40 percent preferred to swerve, but less than 20 percent held that preference when a collision did occur. Thus, even when a collision occurred, staying in the lane was considered more acceptable.

第二个实验考察了当碰撞已经发生，人们事后如何从道德上评价自动驾驶汽车的行为。从政策的角度来看，即使真的发生碰撞，自动驾驶车辆也应该采取社会所认可的操控方式。研究人员再次通过“亚马逊土耳其机器人”平台招募了766名受试者。他们被问及自动驾驶车辆在某种特定情况下应如何应对，并对不变道和转向在道德上的可接受性进行评估。结果表明，如果汽车保持车道不变，其结果（与另一道路使用者发生碰撞或者无碰撞）并不影响受试者对自动驾驶汽车应当作何举动的判断。然而，如果汽车转向，其结果则大大影响事后评价。如果没有发生碰撞，约40%的人认为转向更好；如果发生碰撞，认为转向更好的不到20%。因此，即使发生了碰撞，保持车道不变也被认为是更可接受的。
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8 “Our research highlights the importance of gaining a better understanding of how people think about the behavior of autonomous vehicles under different degrees of uncertainty,” states Meder. “The findings will help to inform policy making and public discussion of the ethical implications of technological advances.”

“我们的研究强调了更好地理解人们在不同程度的不确定性下如何看待自动驾驶汽车的行为的重要性，”米德尔说，“研究结果将有助于为政策制定和公众讨论技术进步的伦理影响提供信息。”
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9 Overall, there is a general preference for staying in the lane and it is a morally acceptable default option in critical traffic situations even if it does not minimize expected loss. This simple default requires no information to be gathered by the AV’s systems about alternative actions or probabilities. Despite these findings, policy makers are faced with the challenge of developing policies that are morally sound but also appeal to the general public’s desire for self-preservation. Previous studies have shown that subjects will show a preference for AVs that would sacrifice their own passengers to minimize the total number of casualties, but they wanted their own AVs to put a premium on passenger safety. So, while this study demonstrates a general acceptability for a default action to minimize potential losses, AV owners would prefer actions intended to save the vehicle passengers.

总的来说，人们普遍倾向于保持车道不变，在紧急交通情况下，即使不能将预期损失降到最低，这也是一个道德上可以接受的默认选择。这个简单的默认设置不需要自动驾驶系统收集任何关于备选操作或概率的信息。尽管有这些研究发现，但决策者们依然面临一个挑战：要制定在道德上合乎情理，同时又迎合公众的自我保护意愿的政策。之前的研究表明，受试者会偏向于牺牲车上的乘客以尽量减少总伤亡人数的自动驾驶汽车，但又希望自己的车辆能重视乘客安全。因此，虽然这项研究显示人们普遍接受车辆为了尽量减少潜在损失而采取的默认操作，自动驾驶汽车的车主们仍会优先选择旨在挽救车内乘客的操作。