【推荐1】I’ve spent much of my life dealing with written and spoken words. Now I’m a technologist making use of natural language processing for human good. Given that I work in artificial intelligence(AI), I’m realizing something dangerous happening. Machines are ruining the way we communicate.

AI voices are normalized and yet cold, no matter which accent(口音)you set your Siri or Amazon Alexa into. It’s difficult to normalize language to be inoffensive because sometimes we do make people feel uncomfortable or even make them annoyed. Yet this is exactly what we’re asking artificial intelligence to do for us on a billion-person scale. Once these rules are carried out by machines, they’re unavoidable and create much bigger issues.

We notice that there is an active desire to only include standardized language in AI-powered tools in an attempt to avoid including potentially hateful or offensive language. And these AI-powered tools are exactly what we use to complete our thoughts almost at any given time. They are everywhere—in our emails, word processors, and web pages. The machines are pushing us into a common tongue, and we accept it as a matter of convenience. But what’s the cost? We’re trading uniqueness and accuracy for convenience. We’re also handing the power of acceptable speech to machines not people.

In the real world, people don’t communicate like a Wikipedia(维基百科) article. We use tone(语气), humor and facial expressions. We can tell where people were born based on their accents and wording. Humans are truly unique, and our communication is constantly changing. So we should demand AI systems that promote individuality and uniqueness. We should demand to know how AI is developed and the data used to build it. Because we all deserve this.

【推荐2】SpaceX launched its straight out-of-science fiction Starship several miles into the air from a remote corner of Texas on Wednesday, but the test flight ended in a fireball at touchdown.

The rocketship—50 meters tall and 9 meters wide—soared out over the Gulf of Mexico. After about five minutes, it reached an altitude of 12.5 kilometers. That's almost 100 times higher than the previous test flights. Then it turned sideways as planned and came back to Earth near the Mexican border. When it touched down, however, the rocketship exploded.

The entire flight lasted six minutes and 42 seconds. SpaceX broadcast it live on its website. Despite the crash, Musk, the owner of SpaceX, called it a “success” and tweeted, “Mars, here we come!”

SpaceX said that the rocket was precisely guided to the landing point. The fuel tank pressure was low, however, when the engines were successfully restarted for touchdown, which caused Starship to come down a little bit too fast.

Starship is actually the upper stage of Musk's moon-and Mars-ships. It will be carried on the top of a bigger rocket, known as Super Heavy, which is still in development. The entire vehicle will tower 120 meters—9.4 meters taller than NASA's Saturn V rocket that carried men to the moon almost three decades ago. SpaceX intends to use Starship to put massive satellites into orbit around Earth, besides delivering people and cargo to the moon by 2024 and Mars in 2026.

While accepting an award in Berlin last week, Musk said he's highly confident of a human flight to Mars in six years—“if we get lucky, maybe four years”. But Musk admitted for the first time after the test failure that his timelines could be too optimistic.