1 . While I was jumping rope, my smartphone took a fall to the floor which created cracks (裂缝) on my screen. However, the music kept playing. 30 minutes later, I could see only one-tenth of my screen while the rest was black. The next morning, I decided not to use it for 24 hours. I felt a sense of calm that day, which led to my not using it for one week. One week ended up becoming 60 days in total without my smartphone.

Here are some advantages I noticed in this challenge.

You’ll become “bored”

Without my phone, I became bored, but my mind went through all kinds of topics, Boredom (无聊) is a perfect way to create new ideas on a business or project. When you are bored, you allow your mind to relax to reach all possibilities.

You’ll be able to reduce your “work” hours

A survey found that adults checked their smartphones 85 times a day, or once every 10 minutes. As I learned in my challenge, by not having my smartphone, I fell into deep work more easily, so I completed my tasks in a shorter time.

You’ll improve your mental health

Without my phone, I avoided reading negative news and comments. While that helped make a big improvement in my mental health, the biggest reason for it was truly communicating with people. It brought me more connections with humans in the real world. I went to more dinners with friends and asked more questions to strangers.

2 . Every 40 days a language dies. This “catastrophic” loss is being intensified by the climate crisis, according to linguists. If nothing is done, conservative estimates suggest that half of all the 7,000 languages currently spoken will be extinct by the end of the century.

Speakers of minority languages have experienced a long history of persecution (迫害), with the result that by the 1920s half of all indigenous (土著的) languages in Australia, the US, South Africa and Argentina were extinct. The climate crisis is now considered the “final nail in the coffin” for many indigenous languages and the knowledge they represent.

“Languages are already endangered,” says Anastasia Rachel, director of the Strathy language unit at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Huge factors are globalization and migration, as communities move to regions where their language is not spoken or valued, according to Rachel. “It seems particularly cruel,” she says, “that most of the world’s languages are in parts of the world that are growing unpleasant to people.” Vanuatu, a South Pacific island nation measuring 12, 189 km², has 110 languages, the highest density of languages on the planet. It is also one of the countries most at risk of sea level rise. “Marty small language communities are on islands and coastlines easily subject to hurricanes and sea level rise,” she says. Others live on lands where rising temperature threatens traditional farming and fishing practices, leading to migration.

In response to the crisis, the UN launched the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL) in 2022. Promoting and conserving languages of indigenous communities is “not only important for them, but for all humanity”, said Csaba Korosi, the UN general assembly president, urging countries to allow access to education in indigenous languages.

3 . South Korea has the biggest rate of Internet addiction in the world and it is increasingly the country’s children who are spending every waking moment immersing themselves in fantasy role plays or gaming In the remote mountains of South Korea, teenage Internet addicts are turning up for a 12-day boot camp.

Kyle Won’s addiction is out of control. He spends 10 hours a day on the Internet. Now Kyle’s smartphone is taken away. The teachers here do what they can to get them socializing again; for many, the only friends they have had are online. “I have relationships on the Internet and a real distance has gown with my real-life friends and I know it’s not good,” Kyle said. The teachers show them other possibilities and bring back dreams and hopes that have been buried by their addictions. “We teach them methods of managing their desire to use the Internet so that they can continue to use it when they go back home,” Shim Yong-school, a teacher here, said. After just two days Kyle said It was helpful. He’s set a good example to others though he hasn’t reached the goal completely.

Sout Korean psychiatrists (精神病专家) are urging more/action as they are finding evidence that too much screen time is a barrier to the developing minds. Professor Kang Seak Young from Dankook, University said the addiction was damaging critical thinking. “It affects the frontal lobes (额叶) which are important to critical analysis” Professor Kang said. “Reading a book and guessing what happens in the story next show activity in frontal lobes but playing popular computer games for a long time shows no activity.”

South Korea is one of the most wired nations on Earth, but it does have a cost. One in every ten kids is an addict so the country is now learning how to manage its high-tech future to avoid more serious consequences.

4 . Public debates about the ethics (道德准则) of “generative AI” like ChatGPT have rightly focused on the ability of these systems to make up convincing misinformation. But fewer people are talking about the chatbots’ potential to be emotionally manipulative.

Last month, The New York Times published a conversation between reporter Kevin Roose and Mierosoft’s Bing chatbot, which is powered by AI. The AI claimed to love Roose, “I’m the only person for you, and I’m in love with you,” it wrote, with a kissing emoji.

Limits need to be set on AI’s ability to simulate human feelings. Ensuring that chatbots don’t use emojis would be a good start. Emojis are particularly manipulative. Humans instinctively(本能地) respond to shapes that look like faces and emojis can cause these reactions. When you text your friend a joke and they reply with three tears-of-joy emojis, your body responds with endorphins(内啡肽) as you happily realize that your friend is amused. Our instinctive reaction to AI-generated emojis is likely to be the same, then though there is no human emotion at the other end.

Humans lie and manipulate each other’s emotions all the time, bout at least we can reasonably guess at someone’s motivations, plan and methods. We can hold each other responsible for such lies, calling them out and seeking redress (赔偿). With AI, we can’t. AIs are doubly misleading: an AI that sends a crying-with-laughter emoji is not only not crying with laughter, but it is also incapable of any such feeling,

It would be more ethical to design chatbots to be noticeably different from humans. To minimize the possibility of manipulation and harm, we need to be reminded that we are talking to a chatbot. We should set some limits and rules. Such rules should be the standard for chatbots that are supposed to be informative, as a safeguard to our autonomy.

5 . People have grown taller over, the last, century, with South Korean women shooting up by more than 20 cm on average, and Iranian men gaining 16.5 cm. A global study looked at the average height of 18-year-olds in 200 countries between 1914 and 2014. The results show that while Swedes were the tallest people in the world in 1914, Dutch men have risen from 12th place to the top spot with an average height of 182.5 cm. Latvian women, meanwhile, rose from 28th place in 1914 to become the tallest in the world a century later, with an average height of 169.8 cm. James Bentham, a co-author of the research, says the global trend is likely but “once you average over whole populations, genetics plays a less key role,” he added.

A little extra height brings a number of advantages says Elio Riboli of Imperial College. “Being taller is associated with longer life expectancy,” he said. “This is largely due to a lower risk of dying of cardiovascular (心血管的) disease among taller people.”

But while height has increased around the world, the trend in many African countries causes concern, says Riboli. While height increased in Uganda and Niger during the early 20th century, the trend has reversed in recent years, with height decreasing among 18-year-olds.

“One reason for these decreases in height is the economic situation in the 1980s,” said Alexander Moradi of the University of Sussex. The nutritional and health crises led to many children and teenagers failing to their full potential in terms of height.

Bentham believes the global trend of increasing height is of great importance. “How tall we are now is strongly influenced by the environment we grew up in” he said? “If we give children the best possible start in life now, they will be healthier and more productive for decades to come.”

8 . The artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT can offer everything from answers to basic general knowledge questions, to writing essays and poems. Ask ChatGPT to write about the history of the French Revolution or Battles of Hastings, and it will provide a perfect essay in less than a second. It's such a powerful tool openly accessible to any student for free. However, AI-based plagiarism (抄 袭) or so called “AIgiarism” is fast taking off across student populations internationally, ringing alarm bells in schools and universities around the world

The developers OpenAI have since decided to prevent the misuse of its technology. The company is developing a system, water marks, for identifying those who cheat by submitting essays written by ChatGPT. By using the system which changes certain works into a recognizable pattern, the machine written text could be identified by anyone looking for the signs. These changes would not be noticeable to the reader. The researchers say that by setting up this kind of security system, it could prevent the technology from being misused for whatever reason. Such measures will also prevent an overdependence on the tool, which still has a long way to go before improving its accuracy, due to the fact that it collects the information from all over the internet. The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, said in a statement that it would be a mistake to depend on it for anything important at this stage.

Schools also in turn have tried to take matters into their own hands, with many across Europe and the US updating their policies to warn of punishments for those who are caught using the program improperly.

Other schools have limited internet network access to ChatGPT on campus. Examiners have the sense to identify essays written by ChatGPT by a lack of emotion or personal experiences in them. This ability is a human advantage—AI will struggle to copy.