【推荐2】Jason Barnes is a young musician who lives in Georgia. Eight yean ago. Jason lost his right arm just below his elbow in an accident. Jason got a prosthetic (假体的) arm. But this arm could only do a few things. Jason still wanted to play music. So he went to see Gil Weinberg, who makes musical robots. To play the piano, Jason needed five fingers that could move just the way he wanted. This was a big challenge.

Living arms move when muscles respond to commands from the brain. When you think "open fingers", your brain sends electrical signals along nerves. Some prosthetic arms use sensors (传感器) to try to read these nerve signals. But they don't work very well. Nerves are tiny, and their signals are faint. Sensors might be able to tell that you want to move a finger. But they aren't very good at telling which finger you want to move.

Jason doesn't have his hand anymore, but be still has the arm muscles that move his fingers. When Jason thinks about moving his fingers, those muscles still move. To read the muscles inside Jason's arm, the team used ultrasound (超声波). The roboticists taught a computer to read the ultrasound sensor as Jason thought about moving his fingers. The computer learned which muscles moved when Jason wanted his fingers to move in a certain way. Thinking about moving his fingers makes the muscles in his upper arm move. The computer sees the moving muscles and tells the motors in Jason's robotic fingers to move the right way.

The team hopes the "Skywalker hand", their prosthesis, will someday work as well as a real hand. The sensors, motors, and computers inside the hand are not complex. But they need to get smaller and cheaper before lots of these hands can be made. Weinberg and his team are working on this right now. Soon, they hope that anyone who loses a hand will be able to get a new robotic one with five fingers that they can move just by thinking

【推荐3】Istanbul citizens have a new way to pay for rides on public transport. You might expect this payment method would have something to do with a smart phone app, but you’d be wrong. Some of Istanbul’s train stations now have vending machines that offer fare credit in exchange for recycling plastic bottles or cans.

To take advantage of this unusual offer, riders need a stored-value transit card (储值公交卡). Since these cards offer discounted fares, almost all riders have them. Passengers can drop their plastic bottles into a machine of this kind, which will give a value to the recycled materials based on their structures and sizes. This vending machine then adds that value to the recycler’s card. After that, the machine cuts the bottles or cans into pieces to prepare them for processing.

Can you pay for your ride with nothing but cans and bottles? It’s possible. According to The New York Times, you’d need more than two dozen standard-size plastic bottles to earn a free trip, so most recycling efforts lead to a discounted fare instead of a free trip.

The first recycling machines were fixed at the ITU-Ayazaga subway station. The city plans to introduce at least 100 more machines in stations and other public places like schools in the near future, according to Lonely Planet. Though the transit cards, called Istanbul Cards, are for subways, you can also use them on other forms of public transport like buses.

Turkey produces the most waste of any European country after Germany and France. Unlike these two countries, recycling is very limited in Turkey. The vending machines are one way that the city plans to encourage recycling. Istanbul’s high technology efforts are the latest in what seems to be becoming a trend.

【推荐1】I’m used to seeing small leaps in technological progress, but occasionally, there are things that will still shock me. At the end of last year, a company called Open AI released a truly jaw-dropping demonstration of a new AI technology that feels almost like technology has skipped ahead by a few generations.

This new AI technology is called ChatGPT, a computer program that can understand and respond to human language. It is trained on a lot of text, so it can understand what people are saying and respond in a way that sounds like a real person. What’s even more amazing is that ChatGPT seems frighteningly human in its ability to understand questions and answer them competently. “Write a story about Leonardo da Vinci in the style of Roald Dahl,” you can ask it, and it’ll spin up a pretty good children’s story.

One area where I’ve found ChatGPT to be enormously useful is its ability to write computer code. This has particularly amazed me as unlike the English language, when you write code it has to be very precise (精确的) and carefully structured — but when I asked it to write me a program that would put some data into a database for me, in a particularly complex way, within seconds it generated something that would have taken me hours to do manually (人工地). ChatGPT isn’t completely human, however. For example, it sometimes generates things that sound true, but are actually just nonsense. This is because of the way the AI learns through pattern recognition. There’s no real intelligence operating there — it is just repeating something based on what it has “read” before. ChatGPT is better at some tasks than others: it can write a brilliant invitation email, but its ability to rhyme leaves a lot to be desired.

And this is why I’m pretty convinced that ChatGPT is going to change the world, sooner rather than later. It’s already hugely impressive, but what exists at the moment is just a demonstration. Once the same AI is built into other apps and can connect to the live internet to learn more, it will become even more advanced. Our computers will no longer be just our word processors, but our writing partners too.