1 . Laughter comes in many forms, from a polite and quiet laugh to a great hearty laugh. Scientists are now developing an AI system to recreate different laughs in proper social contexts. The team behind the laughing robot Erica said that the system could improve natural conversations between people and an AI robot. “We think that one of the important functions of conversational AI is empathy(共情),” said Dr Koji Inoue, the lead author of the research. “So we decided that one way a robot can empathize with its users is to share their laughter.”

The team have set out to teach their AI system the art of conversational laughter. They gathered training data from more than 80 daily dialogues between male subjects and the robot that was initially operated by four actresses remotely. The dialogue data was grouped into social laughs (where polite or embarrassed laughter isn’t involved) and laughter of joy. Based on the audio files, the algorithm(算法) learned the basic characteristics of social laughs, which tend to be softer, and merry laughs, with the aim of mirroring these inappropriate situations.

“Our biggest obstructor in the work was identifying the actual cases of shared laughter because as you know, most laughter is actually not shared at all,” said Inoue. “We had to carefully decide exactly which laughs we could use for our analysis and we couldn’t just assume that any laugh can be responded to. It was really not easy work.” The team said laughter could help create robots with their own distinct character although it could take more than 20 years before it would be possible to have a casual chat with a robot like we would with a friend.

“One of the things we’d keep in mind is that a laughing robot or algorithm will never be able to understand you or the meaning of laughter,” points out Prof. Sandra Wachter of the Oxford Internet Institute. “But with their development, they might get very good at tricking you into believing they understand what’s going on.”

2 . Developed by US company OpenAI, ChatGPT has got viral, winning 100 million internet users since it came out in November 2022. People can ask the robot to write stories and emails, create instructions for cooking a certain food, translate languages, and answer all kinds of questions. In its own words, it is “a language model trained in a large amount of internet text to help users get human-like text.”

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Compared with Siri or other chatbots, ChatGPT uses a much bigger information center for training. It also uses stronger software and hardware to learn things by itself. For example, if it provides a wrong answer to your question, you can tell it the right one and it will correct itself. “It’s a totally different chatbot,” computer scientist Liu Xiaoguang from Nankai University said. “The knowledge level ChatGPT shows is the same as a university student. That’s why it shocked the world.”

But one big problem with ChatGPT is that it makes mistakes or even gives false information. When Rezza, a 28-year-old from Indonesia, used the robot to write an passage, it “gave out many examples which other writers actually hadn’t mentioned at all”, he told a local newspaper. Since the robot is trained using words from the internet, it can also pick up biases (偏见) about certain groups. These are all things that need to be dealt with.

4 . My 83-year-old mother came to live with me a year ago last November. She was very ill and I had to put my life on hold to care for her.

Each morning, I got her up and dressed her and made her breakfast and sat with her. I rushed for a bowl when she felt sick, and lit fires to keep her warm. I cooked and talked her into eating some. It’s a hard job caring for a sick or dying parent, whoever you are. But it was especially hard for me, I feel, because I am a doctor myself. I couldn’t help looking at her in two different ways. The medical professional saw a body and checked it with the cold heart that medicine requires. But the daughter saw the woman who had given birth to me, sent me off to college and had been an important role for a long time in my life for over half a century.

Also, my mother didn’t appreciate how hard it was for me to care for her. I remember an exchange between her and the nurse who came to see her once a week.

“You could get some more help with care.” “Oh, I don’t think I need that,” Mom said.

Mom didn’t understand that the help would have taken some of the hard work off me. None of the treatments her doctors gave her worked, and finally her life became about free of pain. She refused painkillers (止痛药) for a long time, but finally the pain beat her. And when she accepted painkillers she accepted the fact that she would die.

Illness and needs took us across personal boundaries (边界) I’d never considered before. And yet, while living and being and dying with Mom I saw something valuable coming. We became closer. We shared so many stories from our past that it was as if our memories had become one.

In the past our relationship had been difficult. We had often argued. But when the end came, both of us simply accepted that we looked at the world in different ways. We were daughter and mother and we loved each other. That was all that mattered.

5 . Once there was a farmer who had a fine olive orchard (橄榄园). He was very hard-working, and the ________always prospered (繁荣) under his care. But he knew that his three sons looked down upon the farm work, and were eager to become rich.

When the farmer was ________ and felt that he would die, he ________ the three sons to him and said, “My sons, there is a pot of gold ________ in the olive orchard. Dig for it, if you wish it.”

The sons tried to know in what part of the orchard the ________ was hidden, but their father would tell them nothing more.

After the farmer was ________, the sons started to find the pot of gold. Since they did not ________ where the hiding-place was, they agreed to begin in a line, at one ________ of the orchards, and to dig until one of them should find the money.

They dug until they had turned up the soil from one end of the orchard to the other, around the tree- roots and between them. ________ no pot of gold was to be found. It seemed as if someone must have stolen it. The three sons were bitterly ________ to have all their work for nothing.

The next olive ________, the olive trees in the orchard bore more fruit than they had ________ given; when it was ________, it gave the sons a whole pot of gold.

And when they saw how much money had ________ from the orchard, they suddenly understood what the wise father had ________ when he said, “There is a pot of gold hidden in the orchard. Dig for it if you wish it.”

8 . Jane got some terrible illness when she was four. After years of treatment (治疗), she finally became healthy.

Two years ago, while Jane was watching the Olympics, a dream came into her sweet little head — to be a swimmer.

She practiced hard and finally joined the local swimming team. The team practice, however, was a difficult start. She coughed for her first few weeks. Hearing her coughing heavily one night, I decided to pull her from it all. But Jane woke me up early the next morning, wearing her swimsuit ready to go! I told her she shouldn’t swim after a whole night’s coughing, but she just refused to rest at home.

From that day on, Jane kept swimming and didn’t miss any practice. She wanted to be the best swimmer someday.

My girl was growing and changing right before my eyes into this strong-minded person. There are moments when she felt upset of course — often she would be the last swimmer in the race. It was difficult for Jane to accept that she wasn’t a winner ever. But that didn’t stop her from trying.

Then came the final awards ceremony (颁奖仪式) at the end of the year. Jane didn’t expect any award but was still there for her friends. As the ceremony was nearing the end, I suddenly heard the head coach (教练) saying loudly, “The highest honor (荣誉) goes to Jane!”

It was the greatest moment of my daughter’s life. With all she had been through in her ten years, this was the hour of true success.