【推荐1】In recent years American society has become increasingly dependent on its universities to find solutions to its major problems. It is the universities that have been charged with the principal responsibility for developing the expertise（专业知识）to place men on the moon; for dealing with our urban problems and with our worsening environment; for developing the means to feed the world’s rapidly increasing population. The effort involved in meeting these demands presents its own problems. In addition, however, this concentration on the creation of new knowledge significantly impinges on the universities’ efforts to perform their other principal functions, the transmission and interpretation of knowledge--the imparting of the heritage of the past and the preparing of the next generation to carry it forward.

With regard to this, college and universities today find themselves in a serious situation. On one hand, there is the American commitment, especially since World War Ⅱ, to provide higher education for all young people who can profit from it. The result of the commitment has been a dramatic rise in enrollments in our universities, coupled with a thorough shift from the private to the public sector of higher education. On the other hand, there are serious and continuing limitations on the resources available for higher education.

While higher education has become a great "growth industry", it is also at the same time a tremendous drain on the resources of the nation. With the vast increase in enrollment and the shift in priorities away from education in state and federal budgets, there is in most of our public institutions a significant decrease in per capita expenses for their students. One crucial aspect of this drain on resources lies in the persistent shortage of trained faculty, which has led, in turn, to a declining standard of competence in instruction.

Intensifying these difficulties is, as indicated above, the concern with research, with its competing claims on resources and the attention of the faculty. In addition, there is a strong tendency for the institutions’ organization and functioning to cater to the demands of research rather than those of teaching.

【推荐3】We all know the feeling—you want to check what someone you care about has been up to on social media (社交媒体), and suddenly you find you are refused. It’s the start of mixed feelings—when did this happen? Did I do anything wrong? What are they trying to hide from me?

And that’s what half of Chinese parents have to deal with when they try to browse (浏览) their children’s WeChat Moments, also known as “Friends’ Circle”. According to a survey by Tencent, about 52 percent of WeChat users aged 18 to 29 block their parents on Moments. The young interviewees said that parents “are worried about everything”, along with reasons such as fear of parents’ disagreement, avoiding parents’ nagging (唠叨), and protecting their private life. Xie Yun, a 26-year-old, said that while she didn’t block her parents completely, they were in a specific group with which she only shared positive posts. “I don’t want my parents to see failures in my life,” she said. Once her parents saw a Moments picture of her hand getting burned while cooking, and they traveled all the way to her city to make sure she was all right.

The report also found that more than 49 percent of Chinese parents use WeChat as a main tool to communicate with their children. Roughly 36 percent of the parents who took the survey said they checked every post made by their children. When asked how they would respond to being blocked, some parents said they would start a conversation with their children to find out the reason, while others said they wouldn’t care. And some parents just were shrewder than their kids in this hide-and-seek game online. “I didn’t realize I was blocked until I compared what I could see on my phone to what my son’s aunt could see,” said Chen, a mother of a 27-year-old son. “I chose to remain silent on this and now I’m following my son’s posts through his aunt.”

【推荐2】Carpe diem—seize the day—is one of the oldest philosophical mottos in western history. First used by the Roman poet Horace more than 2,000 years ago, it still keeps an extraordinary resonance (共鸣) in popular culture.

It is unusual that an expression from a long-dead language generates more than 25 million online search results. Yet just as striking is the fact that there is not one carpe diem, but many. While usually translated as “seize” the day, the original Latin is sometimes interpreted as “harvest”, or “enjoy” the day. These variations (变化) tell us that carpe diem means different things to different people. For some it’s about taking a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, while for others it is about living calmly in the present moment. We might casually use the term carpe diem when chatting with a friend, but how many of us are aware of its many personalities hidden beneath the surface?

In our age of distraction, where we are checking our phones an average of 110 times a day, grasping these different meanings is more important than ever. They are an antidote (解毒药) to the reality that we are, as Shakespeare put it, “food for worms”. Life is short and our time is running out.

But here’s the problem: carpe diem has been hijacked (绑架). Who, or what, are the hijackers? First, the spirit of “seize the day” has been secretly hijacked by consumer culture, which has recast it as Black Friday shopping rushes and one-click buying: Just Do It has come to mean Just Buy It.

Alongside this is the growing fashionable belief of efficiency and time management that has driven us towards tight-scheduled living, turning the spontaneity (自然发生) of Just Do It into a culture of Just Plan It.

A third hijacker is digital entertainment that is replacing energetic life experiences with screen-based pleasures. Rather than Just Do It, we increasingly Just Watch It instead.

Finally, carpe diem has been hijacked by the mindfulness movement. While mindfulness has many proven benefits, from reducing stress to helping with depression, one of its unintended consequences has been to encourage the narrow idea that seizing the day is primarily about living in the here and now. Just Do It has become Just Breathe.

Challenged by these hijackers, the art of seizing the day is disappearing and we urgently need to do something about it, or else risk losing touch with the carpe diem wisdom of humanity that has accumulated over the past two thousand years.

【推荐3】It all started when I typed a perfectly reasonable prompt (提示词)into one of several apps on the market that can create an image based on text. “Skull space laser dinosaur starship explosion, ” I wrote. The app processed for a few seconds, and returned four images, one of which was strangely accurate: a dinosaur-looking skull screamed out of an empty space, trailing fire. Text-to-image AIs identify images by looking at the text that people have used to describe those pictures online. When the app got my prompt, it studied images that random people had described as “dinosaur” or laser and soon then used what is called a diffusion model (扩散模型) to add a bunch of random chaos to those pictures. Once they were suitably completed, it “upscaled” them, removing noise and sharpening focus. Its work is so good that an artist using it recently won first place for digital images at the Colorado State Fair.

But there is the question of all the other pictures online that are being transformed into AI-generated masterpieces. As many artists have pointed out, their works are being used without payment. The image-generating algorithm (算法) creates illustrations and even movies by using data sets stocked with art stolen from artists who post their works online.

Some AI researchers argue that their algorithms aren’t stealing from artists so much as learning from them just as human artists learn from each other. But a more ethical approach would be for companies to acknowledge their debt to artists and create a model of voluntary collective licensing, much like what radio stations first did in radio’s early days. Back then, musicians created groups like BMI to collectively license their music to radio stations-then BMI would pay artists based on how often their songs were played. Perhaps artists and art institutions today could form a “collecting society” that would allow companies to license their artwork for data sets.

To create ethical AI systems, we need to acknowledge the people whose work makes those systems so magical. We can’t simply take advantage of every image online - we need humans to manage those data sets and we need to pay them to do it.