1 . Surveillance is nothing new. The dark Satanic mill of 18th-century Britain had supevisros to crack the whip. Shops have long used CCTV to monitor customers and staff, and some factory workers have had to face the humiliation of timed toilet breaks. Still, if you enjoy the comfort of a white-collar job, you may be astonished to learn just how much you are being watched.

Calls and emails are monitored using ever more advanced software. Artificial intelligence is taking the monitoring to new levels, tracking everything from Zoom-call rictus and twitchy keyboard strokes to the consistent note of irritation in your voice, in an attempt to assess your productivity and judge your state of mind.

Surveillance is rising because work-from-home policies mean that employers are keen to keep tabs on their remote workforce. Before the pandemic, around one in ten of the large businesses had spying software. Within three years it expects the share to each 70 %.

Bosses also have ever-expanding amounts of data at their disposal, enlarging the digital footprint that can be monitored. Widely used software such as Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams or Slack can tell managers what time you clock in or how many calls you join on their platforms. Employee badges fitted with motion sensors and microphones can alert bosses if someone is loafing about. The blurring boundaries between work and home mean that video surveillance and other intrusive tools are barging into workers’ personal lives, social-media accounts and private devices at all times of the day.

The law is scrambling to adjust. In the state of New York, employees subject to electronic monitoring must be told in advance, under a new law introduced on May 7^th. Connecticut and Delaware require similar disclosures. California is considering new laws to strengthen privacy protections for workers, including a ban on digital monitoring without prior notice. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation establishes some basic rights for staff. Yet it is still early days and the technology is advancing fast. As a result, most firms are only just getting their heads around how much remote work is likely to remain permanent. A clear boundary between embracing new technologies on the one hand, and protecting workers on the other, has still to be drawn.

There are perfectly legitimate reasons for surveillance at work. Many jobs require monitoring for safety, security and compliance. Investment banks’ traders are tracked to prevent insider dealing, and the decisions of social-media moderators (仲裁人) are traced and recorded to ensure consistency and accountability. In the same way that companies collect data on customers’ behaviour in order to improve their products, so professional employers are using monitoring tools to measure the productivity and engagement of their most important resource: their people. In the future such tools could help spot bad posture, root out bullying, and identify and share best practice among staff.

2 . Pope (罗马教皇) Francis wearing a massive, loose and white puffer coat. Elon Musk walking hand-in-hand with rival GM CEO Mary Barra. None of these things actually happened, but such AI-generated _______ did go viral online over the past week.

The situation demonstrates a new online reality: the _______ of a new crop of artificial intelligence tools has made it cheaper and easier than ever to create realistic images, as well as audio and videos. And these images are likely to pop up with increasing frequency on social media.

While these AI tools may enable new means of expressing creativity, the spread of computer-generated media also threatens to further _______ the information ecosystem. That risks _______ the challenges for users, news organizations and social media platforms to tell what’s real. There are also concerns that Al-generated images could be misused.

Images, compared to the Al-generated text, can be _______ powerful in provoking emotions when people view them, said Claire Leibowicz, head of AI and media integrity at the Partnership on AI. That can make it harder for people to slow down and _______ whether what they’re looking at is real or fake. _______, bad guys could eventually attempt to create fake content in quantity in order to confuse Internet users and provoke certain behaviors.

Computer-generated image technology has improved rapidly in recent years, from the photoshopped image of a shark swimming through a flooded highway to the websites that four years ago began mass producing mostly _______ photos of people. But in most cases, the creators of the recent hot images don’t appear to have been ill-intended.

There are _______ by platforms, AI technology companies and industry groups to improve the transparency when a piece of content is generated by a computer. Platforms including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Twitter and YouTube have policies restricting or even ________ the sharing of media that could mislead users. But as use of AI-generated technologies grows, even such policies could threaten to ________ user trust. If, for example, a fake image accidentally slipped through a platform’s detection system, it could give people false confidence. Although there’s a detection system that says it’s real, it’s actually not.

Work is also underway on technical solutions that would, ________, watermark an AI-generated image or include a transparent label in an image’s metadata, so anyone viewing it across the Internet would know it was created by a computer. “All these institutions are ________ disclosure and transparency,” Leibowicz said.

A group of tech leaders, including Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, this week wrote an open letter ________ artificial intelligence labs to stop the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.” ________, it’s not clear whether any labs will take such a step. And as the technology rapidly improves and becomes accessible beyond a relatively small group of corporations doing responsible practices, lawmakers may need to get involved.

4 . By now, it is pretty well understood that we regularly pay for things in ways other than using money. Sometimes we pay sill with cash. But we also pay for things with data, and more often, with our time and attention. We effectively hand over access to our minds in exchange for something “fee”， like email, streaming video or online shopping pages. As opposed to “paying” attention, we actually “spend attention”， agreeing to the view ads in exchange for something we really want.

The centrality of that deal in our lives makes it unacceptable that there are companies who seize our time and attention for absolutely nothing in exchange, and indeed, without permission at all-otherwise known as “attention theft”.

Attention theft happens anywhere you find your time and attention taken without permission, like the new, targeted advertising screens in hospital waiting rooms, the airlines that play full-volume advertising from a screen right in front of your face, or the advertising - screens in office elevators. These are just few examples in what is a growing category. Combined, they threaten to make us live life in a screen-lined cocoon(茧)，shrunken and incapable of independent thought.

Then, what makes it “theft”?Advances in neuroscience over the last several decades make it clear that our brain’s resources are unconsciously triggered(触发)by sound and movement;therefore the screens seize rare mental resources. Meanwhile, in the law, theft is typically defined as the taking control of a resource “under such circumstances as to acquire the major part of its economic value or benefit. ” Given the established market value of time and attention, when taken without permission or compensation, it really is not much different from someone taking money out of your pocket. Thus, when the firms selling public-screen advertising to target audiences brag of rapid growth and billions in profit, those are actually earnings made by stealing from us.

5 . The Effects of Traffic Congestion in Cities

Many of the world’s big cities have problems with congestion. There is simply far too much traffic, so governments everywhere have to think about how to solve the problem.

Traffic jams have a number of negative effects. They cause stress to drivers, which may lead to health problems or road rage. They can also reduce productivity because products cannot be delivered on time and employees arrive late for work or meetings. Another important issue is that the emergency services can become caught in traffic.     1     Traffic congestion wastes fuel, which in turn produces more carbon dioxide through the car exhausts and contributes to the greenhouse effect.

    2     The most obvious solutions involve engineering. This means building more roads with wider lanes so that more cars can travel at the same time. However, the problems with these kind of solutions are the construction costs and that more roads may actually encourage more traffic.

Other more creative solutions to the congestion problem are to increase tax on fuel so that it is more expensive, or make people pay to travel on certain roads such as in the centre of a city or on a motorway. However, taxing fuel and roads may mean that some people cannot afford to drive their cars and may have to give up their jobs.     3    

A more popular solution, therefore, would be to encourage other forms of transport which will lead to fewer cars on the road.     4     Although this mode of transport has obvious health benefits and reduces air pollution, it is not very practical in every climate and can prove dangerous in heavy traffic.

Overall, although there are a number of good ways to tackle this problem, some of these also have negative effects. It would seem that encouraging alternative forms of transport is probably the best solution as this solves the congestion problems and reduces the amount of traffic at the same time, which will also have a positive effect on the environment.

Picking Up the Word of the Year

The story of a year is sometimes easy to identify: the financial crisis of 2008, the Brexit Trump populist wave of 2016 or the pandemic of 2020. The most     1     event of 2022 has been the war in Ukraine, yet those earlier stories have lingered in the headlines. For language-watchers, all that meant much new vocabulary to consider.

Facebook renamed itself Meta in 2021 and spent vast sums in 2022 trying to activate metaverse, an online world in which people can     2     via avatars and virtual-reality goggles. Instead profits dropped as the company struggled even to get its employees to     3     its metaverse. The word was a(n)     4     in Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year contest, but was not selected. Perhaps another year. This is still a word (and a world) looking for users.

Instead, Oxford’s choice this year—based on a public vote—was goblin mode, a(n)     5     in which people indulge their laziest or most selfish habit. After years of covid, recession and inflation, people are tired and     6     and finding it harder to keep up appearances. But another product of the Covid era is Johnson’s word of the year.

After, the lockouts of 2020, followed, in 2021, by a low return to the office, 2022 was the year that hybrid work     7     in. Working at home some of the time has advantages of decongesting cities and fewer painful commutes, and disadvantages like fears of lower     8     combined with a sense of never being off duty. In the spring Twitter a policy of unlimited working form home for those who wanted it. When Elon Musk bought the company he promptly decreed the opposite. But most firms have not gone to either     9     instead trying to find the best of both worlds.

As a coinage, hybrid work is no beauty. But it will     10     cities, careers, family life and free time. That is sufficient qualification for a word of the year.