In 2050, our life will be a lot different from nowadays in many aspects. The environment, transportation, education and people’s lifestyles will also change to a new level.

There are some reasons to be optimistic about life then. Along with development of scientific advances, people will have more means of transport. Solar-powered, wind-powered cars which are much more environment-friendly will be produced and used. Travelling to other planets will be more available to everyone physically, mentally and financially qualified.

In addition, everyone can afford to study in 2050. With the help of technologies, such as metaverse or something more advanced or revolutionary, we don’t need to go to school anymore.

Just stay at home and you can learn everything from online teachers, which will help us save money and commuting time. The schedule will be more optional for you to choose as long as it suits your time and your purposes.

However, there are also some reasons to worry about life in the year 2050. The more modern the technologies will be, the more polluted environment we will have. As I suppose, the future environment will have much pollution. Nevertheless, future scientists will pay more attention to this aspect so I think it will be improved soon.

Because of technologies, people will be much passive than at present. There will be robots helping people in many aspects of their lives. People won’t need to do housework or cook for meals because robots do them all. And since we can study at home, people will use computers almost every day, which may make them become much lazier and easier to be obese.

There will be a lot of changes in our life in the next decades. Whether it will be a better or worse life depends on what we will do with them and how they can influence our life…[ To be continued ]

【推荐3】Our future selves used to be a riddle. Now, thanks to social media filters (滤镜), we can stare them right in the face. People fell in love with TikTok this month to share themselves “aging” in real time using a filter “time travel”. Set to a sad song, the effect shows the user’s face slowly getting older, complete with wrinkles (皱纹) and sunspots.

Camera filters that age you have been around for years. But advancements in AI are making the results more real. Doctor Aleksandra Brown said the TikTok time travel filter does well in guessing how a given face would age.

As we get older, our facial skin thins, fat dissolves (溶解) and gravity pulls everything downward. Not everyone is pleased about this. One of Brown’s friends didn’t like watching time fly past. She couldn’t stand watching herself age 50 years in 15 seconds-could life really go by that fast? Brown cried herself after using the aging effect on her own young daughter. She won’t live to see her daughter get that old, she pointed out.

For other people, the time travel filter brought up unexpected positive feelings. Actor Jonathan Bennett shared a video saying his own filtered face recalled happy memories of his late father. Nicole Loehle, a 24-year-old in New Jersey, tested the effect with her boyfriend. It gave her a new viewpoint, she said, she could imagine the relationship lasting into their old age.

There’s no correct way to age. But it’s important to remember that no one can stop time or undo its effects. “I keep trying to view aging as a gift.” Brown said, “Some people don’t get to age, unfortunately?”

【推荐1】Last night, I went to a blues concert with Lily. After the concert, we met one of her old friends she hadn’t seen for almost three years. They greeted each other but then stood there waiting for someone else to say something. Having a conversation is a useful skill that some people have naturally. However, most of us, like Lily and her friend, need to practice it. Here are some ideas you can use to begin and enjoy an interesting conversation.

Questions are probably the easiest way to open a conversation. If the other person is uncomfortable, as people often are, you can ask questions that are easy to answer. Besides making them comfortable, it will show them that you aren’t going to talk about yourself all the time. But you should avoid topics that might result in arguments, such as politics or religion.

Make them feel like you care. You can turn a total stranger into a friend just by making them feel like you care about what they have to say and that their opinion matters to you. If the person thinks you’re talking just to hear your own voice, they’ll be turned off immediately.

When you talk to people, make eye contact with them, especially in the beginning. Eye contact that continues too long makes most people uncomfortable though, so don’t stare. Also, make your eyes smile. A false smile doesn’t include the eyes, and most people can recognize one. If you are genuinely interested in the other person, your eyes will show it.

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【推荐2】Bags and rolls of circulation (发行) quality 2022 American Women, Anna May Wong quarter dollars will be offered to the public on Oct 25 by the United States Mint (美国铸币厂).

The American Women Quarters Program is a four-year program that celebrates the achievements and breakthroughs made by women to the development and history of the US. Beginning in 2022, and continuing through 2025, the US Mint will bring out up to five new designs each year.

Anna May Wong was born in 1905 in Los Angeles to second-generation Chinese-American parents. Wong always took a strong interest in movies and often spent her time and money as a child seeing films in theaters. As early as the age of nine Wong began asking filmmakers for roles, and by age 11 she had come up with her stage name: Anna May Wong.

Anna May Wong is considered by many to be the first Chinese-American Hollywood movie star. She starred in dozens of productions, with some of the more famous ones being Shanghai Express (1932), Bits of Life (1921), and The Toll of the Sea (1922), which was one of the very first films made in color.

She was a figure of foreign fashion around the world, loved by high society in London, Berlin and elsewhere. In 1934, the Mayfair Mannequin Society of New York voted her the “world’s best dressed woman”; in 1938 Look magazine named her the “world’s most beautiful Chinese girl” .

However, Hollywood’s unfair treatment against Asian people continued to influence Wong’s entire career, looking her as “foreign atmosphere” rather than recognizing her talent and skill.

Wong was straightforward about her disappointment with Hollywood, and she worked against the unfair treatment. “I was so tired of the parts I had to play,”she said in an interview with Film Weekly. “Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the bad guy and so cruel? We are not like that.”

【推荐3】Are you patient? Do you have attention to detail, free time and access to a computer? Well, then a scientist might welcome your help. Researchers in the UK say it’s becoming important to count on common people to help them with their projects. They need people to examine data and submit their observations online.

British teenagers Sasha and Matthew are taking part in a study of penguins (企鹅) from the comfort of their homes. The pair look at pictures and tag (加标签于) photos identifying adults, chicks and eggs. Every click of their mouse is helping to build up a detailed picture of penguin colonies (群). They, and thousands of others, are helping scientists to understand why some colonies are growing and others are decreasing. Within the first four hours of Penguin Watch going live, “citizen scientists” marked more images than the research team did in five years.

Dr. Tom Hart, Penguin Watch Coordinator at Oxford University, says, “When you go beyond what a scientist can analyse to what a mass audience can do, then it increases beyond what any other project could do.”

The British Science Association says families are helping out with careful research. It made a difference to the Planet Hunters Project, which ran for five years. Volunteers looked at dots which showed how the brightness of a star changed at different points in its solar system.

According to Dr. Robert Simpson from Oxford University, who took part in the project, the volunteers discovered planets and these are now in published papers. He says with pride, “We can go and look at these planets with other telescopes and we know they exist because of those helpers.”

But how do scientists guard their research against accidental or deliberate mistakes in observation? Dr. Simpson isn’t worried. “We get lots of people looking at the same things, ”he says. The researcher warns that people who are mistakenly clicking on the site are very obvious and can be identified very quickly. So, there’s no fooling the scientists.

And to make sure things go well, the Penguin Watch paper will go through a peer review before being published. After that, every “citizen scientist” will be credited.

【推荐1】As the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) keep growing, some companies are hiring “AI prompt (提示) engineers” to help them get the best out of the emerging technology. Are these jobs set to become a universal presence, or are they a passing fad (时尚)? Generative AI creates text or images in response to prompts entered by the user. This can be as simple as asking for something in plain English, similar to using a search engine. But there is a key to it: including the right references and keywords that can guide AI towards the desired outcome.

“By buying a pre-built prompt given by prompt engineers, you can ensure the AI model will generate what you want. The average price is $3.50, but some prompts can cost hundreds of dollars,” says Ben Stokes, the founder of Prompt Base. Most of the prompt engineers on the site don’t have a technical background. The engineers tend to come from a photography or graphic design background, and those working on prompts for generating text used to work in marketing or copy writing.

Aaron Sines at US recruitment firm Razoroo has been placing engineers into AI jobs for five years, but only came across the term “prompt engineer” earlier this year. Sines says that a lot of the companies approaching him looking for a “prompt engineer” are actually seeking a more rounded AI researcher with technical skills. He believes AI models could become better at extracting (提取) information from humans about what they want, making the idea of a specialized prompt engineer obsolete, but thinks there will always be a need for humans to oversee AI models during development and application.

Zhan Qin at Zhejiang University in China says complex prompts, and the prompt engineers who create them, are unlikely to disappear any time soon because AI models aren’t like traditional algorithms (算法) that work on logic and can be entirely understood by humans. “Some prompts are short. But there are a lot of very, very long prompts. Even the generators of those prompts do not know the exact meanings behind those magical words,” says Qin.

【推荐3】Four months ago, OpenAI, a small San Francisco company, became the talk of the technology industry when it introduced a new online chatbot that could answer complex questions, write poetry and copy human emotions. Now the company is back with a new version (型号) of the technology, called GPT-4.

GPT-4, which learns its skills by analyzing large data from the Internet, improves on what powered the original ChatGPT in several ways. It can immediately know someone’s tax duties and provide detailed descriptions of images. However, though the new technology can do better on tests and offer precise medical advice to doctors, it can mess up basic arithmetic (算术).

On Tuesday, OpenAI started selling access to GPT-4 so that businesses and other software developers could build their own applications on top of it. A few companies are already working with GPT-4. Morgan Stanley Wealth Management is building a system that’ll immediately retrieve (检索) information from company documents, and serve it up to financial advisers in the form of conversations.

OpenAI got the new technology enhanced. As people tested ChatGPT, they rated the chatbot’s responses, separating those that were useful and truthful from those that weren’t. Then, using an advanced skill, the system spent months analyzing those ratings and gaining a better understanding of what it should and shouldn’t do.

Given a long article and asked to summarize it, GPT-4 will give a precise summary nearly every time. Moreover, given a photograph, chart or diagram, the technology can provide a detailed, paragraphs-long description of the image and answer questions about its contents.

OpenAI leaders said the company wasn’t immediately releasing the image description part of the technology because they were unsure how it could be applied for improper purposes. However, “We can take all these general-purpose knowledge skills and spread them across all sorts of different areas,” said Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president. “This takes the technology into a whole new field.”