Listen to five people talking about the effects of technology on their careers. Choose from the list what each speaker says. There is one extra answer.

Read the text and check the correct answers:

A rose garden?

A woman arrives home by driverless car. She unlocks her front door using a voice command. Inside, she calls out the name of her electronic assistant and asks it to turn on the lights, the TV and to adjust the heating. Her home is full of smart devices, including a robot vacuum cleaner, which has cleaned up while she was out. Her fridge is full of groceries bought online, but she gets her electronic assistant to order a meal for delivery. Nearly everything she buys is bought online: her clothes, furniture, even pet food. She settles down when her meal arrives to watch TV from a streaming service.

None of this is science fiction anymore. It is daily life for more and more people. We may not own driverless cars yet, but nearly all of us have a smartphone and other smart gadgets. We’ve embraced these changes and probably don’t spend much time considering any of the downsides. What are the effects of our smart devices on the environment? How should we dispose of aging tech? What do we sacrifice by living in a world controlled by software, apps, and the internet?

Few of us have thought about how privacy has changed. We give a lot of personal data to online services that use it in order to sell us more things. They may also sell that information to others interested in making money from us. Then, there is the question of whether our private lives are recorded by the electronic assistants in our homes. Who might be listening to that information or storing it?

Another criticism is that not everyone can become totally immersed in our new tech world. There is a big digital divide between rich, developed nations and poor, underdeveloped ones. Exclusion from the new tech revolution isn’t just a case of some people not owning such a great TV or the latest smartphone. The issue is that people become excluded from access to developing technology, and this could affect future job prospects as our world becomes more dominated by AI.

In short, the new technological revolution is wonderful and could lead to an exciting new world, but even in a lovely rose garden, you have to watch out for the small thorns.