1 . “Blame My Brain” by Nicola Morgan, reviewed by Rosalie Warren

As someone who constantly blames my brain for all sorts of things (not my fault — my brain did it!), I was _______ by the title of Nicola Morgan’s book and only slightly disappointed to learn that it was _______ teenagers. Since I have many days when I feel that I am barely out of my teens (though the mirror, sadly, does not bear this out), I decided that the book might still be relevant to me, and indeed to my relationships with my no-longer-teenage children.

The subtitle is “The amazing teenage brain revealed” and amazing is, I soon _______, exactly what the teenage brain is. I learned that one of the things that _______ to the brain in our early teenage years is a flurry of growth of the dendrites (connections between neurons), followed a few years later by a major pruning session where many of the relatively unused connections are culled and the remaining ones are strengthened and coated with a fatty myelin layer ready for adult life. Not _______, all this activity is not without its downside for the person “within”, and it goes along way towards _______ why teenagers can be so difficult to live with and to cope with themselves.

There are also brain-based explanations of why teenagers need so much sleep, why they don’t tidy their rooms, why they come _______ when the rest of the world is going to sleep and why some of them, at least, are risk-takers. There’s stuff about alcohol and drugs and why such things are not good for the brain, but all of it is written in a very _______ and understanding way that I think teenagers will warm to.

Nicola Morgan is not a neurologist or a _______ scientist, but she clearly had done a great deal of research and ________ experts including Professor Simon Baron-Cohen and Professor Susan Greenfield, among many other eminent names in the field. Morgan has a gift for simplifying and explaining ________ subject matter with a light but precise touch, and she is careful to ________ between established facts and theories and speculations of her own and other people’s.

There’s plenty of humour and a good few well-deserved digs at the stupidity of parents and other well-meaning but misguided adults, which teenagers will ________. There are diagrams, tests, photos relating to questions like What emotions can you recognize? Do you ________ other emotions with anger? What kind of thinker are you? Which mental tasks do you find comparatively easy or difficult? There’s also sound advice for addiction, self-harm, depression and other ________ illnesses, and some pointers towards recognizing when you may need to seek help.

The illustrations by Andy Baker are great, too. And oh yes — there’s some interesting discussion on the differences between girls’ brains and boys’, if there are any. You’ll have to read it to find out...

2 . History has not yet _______ what we will definitively call the postmillennial cohort (2000年后出生的人) that now _______ more than 60 million people in the U.S. These kids and _______ with no concept of life _______ the Internet have so far been called the App Generation and Generation Z. They’ve been referred to as Homelanders, having grown up under the ghost of terorism. They’ve also been _______ the Plurals, for their historic diversity, as well as the Founders, at least by MTV.

Whatever we _______ naming them, marketers and academies are turning their attention to this group, which has billions in _______ and is already shaping the culture. This generation is growing up “totally and utterly connected,” says California State University psychologist Larry Rosen. Experts like Rosen have concerns about these kids’ Google-inspired expectations that everything be _______. They worry about their inability to _______ even five seconds of boredom. And they worry about the demands that come with ________ several identities online, from Facebook to Twitter to Snapchat. “There’s so much pressure on young people, who are still ________ their identities, to present this crystallized, idealized identity online,” says the University of Washington’s Katie Davis.

Historian Neil Howe sees ________ with the Silent Generation, the spoilt, risk-avoiding, “nice” generation of kids who grew up during the Great Depression and World War II, although some marked differences are found. Today’s youths are also coming of age among geopolitical trouble and fears about the economy, he says, ________ schools emphasize an intense far-reaching sensitivity to other kids. He suspects this ________ will be known for being well behaved and perhaps boring the culture by playing it safe. “There are typical examples that occur repeatedly,” Howe says, “even if they go by different ________.”

The world of live action role-playing

For many people, the days of playing make-believe (假扮) ended in childhood. But for some, the game of make-believe lives on in Live Action Role-Playing, or LARP. This is a game where people act out characters in a(n)     1     plot. A gamemaster creates the plot and then puts together an event where people     2     the story. Those who find a particular plot interesting sign up for the event. Then the gamemaster, or the players themselves, make up their characters for the story. At the event, each person comes in costume and behaves as their character.

Although pretty much anything goes in LARP, nearly every event involves players completing a(n)     3     together. A gamemaster writes a goal into the plot and usually prepares challenges for the players. For example, a character may hold up the mission, making it hard to     4     the goal. LARP events can be as long as the gamemasters want them to be. They can last anywhere from a few hours to several days.

The genius of LARP is that each event can be any kind of story. The most     5     ones come from fantasy, historical, horror or science fiction genres (体裁). With such a variety of story types, LARP attracts all kinds of people. Some players enjoy LARP as a(n)     6     to practice creating or costume-making. Other players enjoy the challenge of going into different worlds and using their brains to solve puzzles. There are also those who simply want to have fun and make friends.

One     7     LARP players have is coming out of their LARP experiences and returning to the real world. This is especially common after a long event. Most players experience a “bleed,” which describes parts of their LARP experience     8     into their everyday life. Since all the senses — seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting — are at work,     9     becomes difficult. However, researchers agree that the overall effects of LARP are     10    . People of different backgrounds come together to grow their skills, play and express creativity.

4 . Facing AI extinction

In a recent White House press conference, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre couldn’t suppress her laughter at the question: Is it “crazy” to worry that “literally everyone on Earth will die” due to artificial intelligence? _________, the answer is no.

While AI pioneer such as Alan Turing cautioned that we should expect “machines to take control”, many contemporary researchers _________ this concern. In an area of unprecedented growth in AI abilities, why aren’t more expects weighing in?

Before the deep-learning revolution in 2012, I didn’t think human-level AI would emerge in my lifetime. I was familiar with arguments that AI systems would insatiably seek power and resist shutdown — and obvious _________ to humanity if it were to occur. But I also figured researchers must have good reasons not to be worried about human _________ risk (x-risk) from AI.

Yet after 10 years in the field, I believe the main reasons are actually cultural and historical. By 2012, after several hype cycles that didn’t pan out, most AI researchers had stopped asking ‘what if we succeed at replicating human intelligence’, _________ their ambitions to specific tasks like autonomous driving.

When concerns resurfaced outside their community, researchers were to quick to dismiss outsiders as _________ and their worries as science fiction. But in my experience, AI researchers are themselves often ignorant of arguments for AI x-risk.

One basic argument is by analogy: humans’ _________ abilities allowed us to out-compete other species for resources, leading to many extinctions. AI systems could likewise deprive us of the resources we need for our survival. Less _________, AI could displace humans economically and, through its powers of manipulation, politically.

But wouldn’t it be humans wielding AIs as tools who end up in control? Not necessarily. Many people might choose to deploy a system with a 99 per cent chance of making them phenomenally rich and powerful, even if it had a 1 per cent chance of _________ their control and killing everyone.

Because no safe experiment can definitively tell us whether an AI system will actually kill everyone, such concerns are often dismissed as unscientific. But this isn’t an excuse for ignoring the risk. It just means society needs to reason about it in the same way as other complex social issues. Researchers also emphasize the difficulty of predicting when AI might _________ human intelligence, but this is an argument for caution, not complacency.

Attitudes are changing, but not quickly enough. AI x-risk is admittedly more _________ than important social issues with present-day AI, like bias and misinformation, but the basic solution is the same: regulation. A robust public discussion is long overdue. By refusing to engage, some AI researchers are neglecting _________ responsibilities and betraying public trust.

Big tech sponsors AI ethics research when it doesn’t hurt the bottom line. But it is also lobbying to exclude general-purpose AI from E. U. regulation. Concerned researchers recently called for a(n) _________ in developing bigger AI models to allow society to catch up. Critics say this isn’t politically realistic, but problems like AI x-risk won’t _________ just because they are politically inconvenient.

This brings us to the ugliest reason researchers may dismiss AI x-risk: funding. Essentially every researcher (myself included) has received funding from big tech. At some point, society may stop believing reassurances from people with such strong conflicts of _________ and conclude, as I have, that their dismissal betrays wishful thinking rather than good counterarguments.