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  3. Earlier this week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the Doomsday Clock wouldn’t tick any closer to midnight,

Earlier this week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the Doomsday Clock wouldn’t tick any closer to midnight,

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问题     Earlier this week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the Doomsday Clock wouldn’t tick any closer to midnight, but that it wouldn’t tick any further away, either. The clock will remain at "three minutes to midnight," where the Bulletin set it last year after growing concerned about nuclear modernization programs and climate change.
    As I wrote in the tech section today, the Clock provides a rare opportunity to talk about "existential risk" :those threats so vast that they could endanger all of humanity. Existential risk is undergoing a bit of a renaissance right now: Nick Bostrom, the Cambridge philosopher whocoined the term, is the subject of skeptical magazine profiles; and millions of tech-made dollars have gone into funding " good A. I." research. In fact, there’ s a sort of debate right now among Silicon Valley technologists: Does climate change or artificial intelligence pose a greater existential risk to humanity?
    To more climate-attuned forecasters, this can seem a little silly. " Worrying about sentient A.I. as the ice caps melt is like standing on the tracks as the train rushes in, worrying about being hit by lightning," once tweeted Bret Victor, a former designer at Apple. Some of the computing industry’s figureheads—among them Peter Thiel and Elon Musk—disagree, or, at least, find A.I. sufficiently worrisome to invest their wealth in stopping it.
    What always strikes me about this is that both sides can imagine their own form of historical irony. Imagine two throwaway lines in a circa-2100 historical review: "Yet even as the planet’s atmosphere reached the point of no return, some of America’s keenest technical minds poured millions into preventing sentient artificial intelligence, a technological feat now believed to be centuries away." Or ...
    "Despite urgent warnings from some of the most talented engineers on the planet about what was to come, the United States government stayed focused on the danger of climate change."
For me, it demonstrates the limits of conspicuously meta-historical thinking. History is easy to predict in retrospect; to actually live through it is to see thousands of terrifying possibilities that never come to pass. I think vastly more wealth should go to stopping climate change than evil A.I.—but maybe wealth should also go toward handling global pandemics, or reducing extreme poverty, or funding America’s sclerotic democratic institutions.
    For me, the thought that that history might one day judge our own era is a happy one. But that’s because, if history is still getting written in 2100, it means there will be people to write it.
The author’ s attitude towards the U.S. democratic institutions can be said to be that of
选项 A、indulgence.
B、curiosity.
C、skepticism.
D、satisfaction.
答案C
解析 (1)根据题干关键词democratic institutions定位至第6段。(2)根据文章，“回顾历史，人类从数千种可能的威胁中生存下来”(第6段：terrifying possibilities)。“我认为钱应该花在阻止气候变化方面”(第6段：stopping climate change)，“也应该花在处理传染病、减少贫穷，以及为美国的sclerotic(僵化)公共机构提供资金”(第6段：funding)。作者把“气候变化、疾病、平穷和公共机构”视为需要解决的问题，据此推测，确定选项[C]正确。
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