【推荐1】With artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic technology improving at impressive rates, there are some who worry that there’s a risk of artistic and creative people being replaced. A new study by the Korean Institute of Industrial Technology, however, is showing exactly why that can’t and shouldn’t happen. It all started when the South Korean company posed this question: Can robots replace conductors?

Over a year ago, work to develop automaton (自动化) began. At first, it was designed like a machine, and didn’t live up to expectations. Then the company sought ways to improve it. In the end, it was given two arms with joints to copy wrists and elbows, allowing it to move a stick similarly to how a human conductor would move it. It was named the EverR 6 robot, and stands at 1.8 meters. It was finally time to figure out how it could follow through on its musical role.

“We got involved in this project to see how far robots can go in more creative fields like the arts, and what the challenges are,” Dong-wook Lee, a senior researcher at the Korean Institute of Industrial Technology said.

In order to pull this off, Dong-wook Lee cooperated with the Busan Philharmonic Orchestra. The 12-minute piece they planned to perform, “Feel” by Il-hoon Son, was created specifically for this event. It was created with the strengths of both EverR 6 and the human conductor, Soo-yeol Choi, in mind.

To pull off this impressive performance, the robot was preprogrammed to conduct through 30 cycles of beat patterns. Meanwhile, it was up to the human conductor to lead the orchestra in creating an improvisational (即兴的) score, adding depth to the otherwise planned piece.

Together, they pulled off a masterful performance that the audience seemed more than happy to have had the opportunity to witness it firsthand!

With the concert having gone so well, this is only the start of EverR 6. Still, no matter the improvements they’re able to make to this Android robot, the human conductor isn’t concerned about being replaced.

“Let’s leave the accuracy to the robots,” Soo-yeol Choi said, “but the musical and artistic aspects to a human conductor.”

【推荐2】It is a strange coincidence(巧合) that as humanity attempts to greatly reduce its carbon emissions(排放), it is also rushing to develop a technology that could, in theory, consume an unlimited amount of energy.

Doing things against facts is a dangerous game, but you can picture a world in which, having chosen to start dealing with climate change properly in the 1990s, we would be just wrapping up the gentle path to net-zero emissions in time for a rapid AI increase fuelled by green power. Instead, we find ourselves at risk of running a 21st-century technology on a 20th-century energy supply.

If you live in the US, every time you use an AI model, around 20 per cent of the electricity required will be produced by burning coal. The explosive growth of AI makes this an even more pressing concern. According to one analysis, if Google chose to shift to an entirely AI-powered search business, its electricity consumption could match that of some countries.

Such estimates may be magnified, but evidence of rising power consumption from AI is all around. Microsoft is placing bets on nuclear plants to power its data centres, while the English government has promised to boost its national computing capacity by 50 per cent by 2025, which would help it keep pace with rapid AI developments in the world.

Thankfully, we may soon reach a turning point. As is reported, this year the global power department came close to reaching peak greenhouse gas emissions, as the switch from fossil(化石) fuels to clean and renewable sources is well underway. The question now is whether we can quicken the pace of decarbonisation (脱碳) to match the coming growth in energy consumption as AI becomes increasingly rooted in our society. Silicon Valley’s intelligent machines may grab the headlines and the imagination, but the people really inventing the future are working in the energy department.

【推荐3】The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has to recall hundreds of foods every year. Like cookie snack packs with pieces of blue plastic hiding inside, dressing and sauce containing salmonella (沙门氏菌) or various jams containing with lead (铅).

It can take a few months before a recall is issued. But now researchers have come up with a method that might fast-track that process, leading to early detection and, ultimately, faster recalls. The AI system relies on the fact that people increasingly buy foods and spices online. And people tend to write reviews of products they buy online, which are like bread crumbs (包屑) to food-safety officials sniffing (嗅) out dangerous products.

The researchers linked FDA food recalls from 2012 to 2014 to amazon reviews of those same products. They then trained machine-learning algorithms (算法) to distinguish between reviews for recalled items and reviews for items that had not been flagged. And the trained algorithms were able to predict FDA recalls three quarters of the time. They also identified another 20, 000 reviews for possibly unsafe foods, most of which had never been recalled. The results are published in Journal of the American Medical In formatics Association.

The World Health Organization estimates that 600 million people worldwide get sick annually from polluted food, and more than 400,000 people die from it. “Sohaving tools that enable us to detect this a lot faster and hopefully investigate and do recalls faster will be useful not just in the U. S. but in other countries around the world as well.” Study author Elaine Nsoesie of Boston University. She did add one warning even recalled products can still get five-star reviews. So stars alone don’t tell the whole sickening story. The proof unfortunately, may still be in the pudding.