【推荐2】Faced with an attempt by a new chatbot to imitate (模仿) his own songs, the musician Nick Cave delivered a strong response: It was “an absolutely horrible attempt”. He understood that AI was in its babyhood, but could only conclude that the true horror might be that “it will forever be in its babyhood”. While a robot might one day be able to create a song, he wrote, it would never grow beyond “a kind of burlesque (滑稽的模仿)”, because robots-being composed of data-are unable to suffer, while songs arise out of suffering.

Fans of Cave and his band will agree that his music is inimitable, but that doesn’t mean they would necessarily be able to tell the difference. A few days before Cave’s remarks, experts were asked to distinguish between four genuine artworks and their AI imitations. Their conclusions were wrong five times out of 12, and they were only unitedly right in one of the four picture comparisons.

These are party games, but they point to an unfolding challenge that must be managed as a matter of urgency because, like it or not, Al art is upon us. The arrival of the human-impersonating ChatGPT might have increased general awareness, but artists across a wide range of disciplines are already exploring its potential, with the dancer Wayne McGregor and London’s Young Vic Theatre among those who have created AI-based works.

A strongly-worded report from Communications and Digital Committee (CDC) issued a wake-up call to the government, urging it to raise its game in educating future generations of tech-savvy professionals, and tackling key regulatory challenges. These included reviewing reforms to intellectual property law, strengthening the rights of performers and artists, and taking action to support the creative sector in adapting to the disturbances caused by swift and stormy technological change.

While developing Al is important, it should not be pursued at all costs, the CDC stressed. It deplored the failure of the Department for Digital, Culture, and Media to offer a defence against proposed changes to intellectual property law that would give copyright exemption (版权豁免) to any work, anywhere in the world, involving AI text and data mining.

The challenges of AI are both philosophical, as Cave suggested, and practical. They will unfold over the short and long term. State-of -the-art creative industries have a key role to play in shaping and exploring the philosophical ones, but they must have the practical help they require to survive and be successful. They need it now.

【推荐3】When you're a teen you start being more aware of what other people think. There seems to be a “right” thing to wear, or say, or do. There also seem to be things that you shouldn’t do-things that could be embarrassing, or lose your points with friends. This can lead to social anxiety.

Some kids feel so anxious that they develop something called social anxiety disorder (障碍), which is diagnosed (诊断) when you worry so much about how you appear to others that you stop doing things you need to and want to do for fear of embarrassing yourself.

Kids with social anxiety disorder aren't just nervous when they’re at parties or giving a speech in class. Even small interactions (互动), like answering a question in class or eating with friends in the cafeteria can feel extremely scary to kids with social anxiety disorder. That's because they fear they might accidentally do something embarrassing or offensive, and it will make others judge or even reject them.

And while kids who are just shy will gradually warm up to new people and situations over time, kids with social anxiety don't. Shyness might hold you back to some degree from doing things, but it won't deeply influence your ability to do your job as a teenager, which is to function in school, function in your family, and to have friends and be a part of your peer-related community. But social anxiety will.

Many teens experience anxiety disorders. Being brave and telling someone how you feel might seem scary, but if you can get over that obstacle, someone will want to listen. Asking for help can be hard, but it really is important.

【推荐1】Using the power of artificial intelligence (AI), scientists have revealed new insights into the creation and destruction of mass extinction. Contrary to conventional knowledge, their study suggests that larger extinctions are not always a form of “creative destruction” that allows new organisms (生物体) to radiate and evolve. Instead, it suggests that mass extinction is rarely associated with new species of radiation.

Dr. Hoyal Cuthill, the lead study author from the University of Essex in the UK and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, said in a statement, “Some of the most challenging things to understand the history of life are the vast timelines involved and the number of species. New machine learning applications can help us understand this information in human-readable form. This means that we can, so to speak, hold the evolution of half a billion years in the palm of our hand and gain new insights from what we see.”

They concluded that mass extinction and later radiation were not connected as previously thought. Within 5 percent of the most significant periods of disruption (中断), AI detected “big five” mass extinctions, seven more mass extinctions, two mass extinction-radiation events, and 15 mass radiations. Most importantly, it discovers that massive radiation and extinction rarely occurred with each other, changing the view that greater extinction leads to a kind of deep cycle-like species radiation of nature. It appears that larger extinctions are certainly not the engine of evolutionary radiation. Take the Cambrian eruption for example and it was about 41 million years ago when a large group of animals first appeared on the record of the first fossil record and the dawn of a high mobile animal equipped with modern physical features.

This new study found that a handful of other notable explosions of biodiversity, including the Cambrian eruption, usually occurred at a time when they were largely isolated (隔离) from extinction. Dr. Nicholas Guttenberg, a study co-author from the Tokyo Institute of Technology explained, “Ecosystems are dynamic and you don’t need anything to exist to allow something new to appear.”

【推荐2】No one can say whether human-like robots will have a sweet dream, but they will almost certainly need periods of rest that offer benefits like what sleep provides for living brains, according to new research from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

“We study spiking neural networks (尖峰神经网络), which are systems that learn much as living brains do,” said Yijing Watkins, a computer scientist from LANL. “We trained a neuromorphic processor in a way how humans and other biological systems learn from their environment during childhood development.” Watkins and her research team found that the network simulations (模拟) became unstable after continuous periods of unattended learning. When they exposed the networks to states that are analogous to what living brains experience during sleep, stability was recovered. “It was as though we were giving the neural networks a good night’s rest,” said Watkins.

The discovery came about as the research team worked to develop neural networks that are as close as how humans and other biological systems learn to see. The group initially struggled with stabilizing simulated neural networks undergoing unattended dictionary training, which involves classifying objects without providing examples to compare them to. The researchers exposed the networks to an artificial simulation of sleep as nearly a final effort to stabilize them. They experimented with various types of noise. The best results came when they used waves of so-called Gaussian noise. These waves can make sure that the neural networks keep stable.

The group’s next goal is to apply their algorithm (算法) to Intel’s Loihi, a product which uses spiking neural networks to work. They hope allowing Loihi to sleep from time to time will enable it to stably process information from a camera in real time. If it can confirm the need for sleep in artificial brains, we can probably expect the same to be true of human-like robots and other intelligent machines that may come about in the future.