Biz-E-Training

AI – Friend or foe?

In his video for the Big Think website, MIT professor, Luis Perez-Breva reassures us that artificial intelligence shouldn’t be seen so much as a threat but rather as a benign, high-tech extension of the automation we’ve seen in the workplace ever since Henry Ford first set up his car production assembly lines.

Before you watch

Before you watch, check some of the key vocabulary you will hear in the video. Use one of the words below to complete each of the flashcard sentences.

robotic machine / mass manufacturing / artificial intelligence / keywords / machine learning

While you watch

Watch the video to listen to Luis Perez-Breva’s interesting take on artificial intelligence, and answer the questions that appear on the screen.

After you watch

Now that we know a little more about Artificial Intelligence, let’s focus on some of the interesting language used in the video.

Useful language
Complete the summary of the video using one of these words in each space.

Use a dictionary to check the meaning of words you’re not sure about. Here’s a good online dictionary you can use: Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries.

Phrasal verbs
Luis uses some phrasal verbs when speaking about AI. Choose the correct phrasal verb to complete each sentence.

Language tip

Communicating effectively often involves reporting what other people have said or written. A simple way to do this is to use the verbs ‘say’ or ‘tell’. So for, example, we can report something Luis Perez-Breva tells us in the video in this way:

He tells us that when it comes to artificial intelligence people get all these things confused.

There are many alternatives to ‘say’ or ‘tell’ that we can use to give an indication of either how something was said or how we feel about what was said.

In the summary of the video above, for instance, the verb ‘stress’ is used to indicate that Luis was making a particularly important point:

Luis Perez-Breva stresses that automation and artificial intelligence are not the same thing.

If we are not sure about what someone says or perhaps we disagree with it we can use a different report verb to indicate this:

Luis Perez-Breva claims that replacing us is not the real purpose of automation.

Here the reporting verb ‘claim’ distances us from the speaker’s view and indicates that it’s not necessarily shared by us.

Use this short activity, to see how reporting verbs can be used.

Choose the verb you would use to report what the speaker said.

You can learn more about this key area of English here: Using reported speech.

Further reading

These resources will provide further insights into the role artificial intelligence and robots play in the Industry 4.O phenomenon.