Costco made headlines for bumping up its minimum wage to at least $15 an hour. The warehouse store has a reputation for treating its workers generously, a policy I observed while working there in 2015. In many ways, it’s as enjoyable a place to work as it is to shop. 【小题1】

Employees enjoy plenty of benefits. Costco now sets its minimum wage for hourly employees at $15 an hour. That’s in addition to offering benefits like healthcare for all employees, regardless of part-time vs. full-time status. While I was at Costco, they gave employees complimentary(免费赠送的) memberships to the store. 【小题2】 And to top things off, Costco paid employees time and a half just for working on Sundays.

Costco is a great destination for health food. People who haven’t shopped at warehouse clubs might expect the “buy in bulk” mentality to mean the aisles are lined with junk food. 【小题3】 Greek yogurt, coconut water, protein powder, and lean meats are just some of the things that line the shelves at Costco. And the produce section is filled with delicious apples, bananas, berries, salads and more, making it a hot-spot where nutritionists food shop.

【小题4】 When I tell friends I still shop at Costco, they don’t understand what my husband and I buy there, since we don’t have kids and live in a small New York apartment. But there are plenty of options for any family size, and it doesn’t mean you have to keep ten spare jars of tomato sauce in your kitchen. Things like Kirkland Signature protein bars and olive oil are shelf stable for our small household. Cleaning supplies like kitchen sponges are sold in reasonably sized packages, too. It just depends what you’re looking for.

People really do buy that famous giant bear. The giant teddy may seem like an Internet novelty, and plenty of people (myself included) have stopped to take photos with the 8-foot-tall friend. But I saw more than one person buy the giant stuffed animal—usually grandparents purchasing it as a gift for their grandkids. 【小题5】

Many people think that the world is about to step into the fourth industrial revolution. This time, machines can do a lot of work in the charge of human beings, even better than human beings. In the future, the world can be more efficient, but unemployment (失业) will become more common.

It raises a troubling question for all of us-when will a machine be able to do my job? There are no certain answers, but some of the world’s top artificial intelligence (人工智能) researchers are trying to find out.

Katja Grace, a research associate at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, and her colleagues have surveyed 352 scientists and compiled (汇编) their answers into predictions about how long it may take for machines to outperform humans on various tasks.

The good news is that many of us will probably be safe in our jobs for some time to come. The researchers predict there is a 50% chance that machines will be capable of taking over all human jobs in 120 years.

“One of the biggest surprises was the overall lateness of the predictions,” says Grace. “I expected the amazing progress in machine learning in recent years, plus the fact that we were only talking to machine learning researchers, to make the estimates earlier."

“I am a bit skeptical of some of the timelines given for tasks that involve physical manipulation (操作),” says Jeremy Wyatt, professor of robotics and AI at the University of Birmingham. “It is one thing doing it in the lab, and quite another having a robot that can do a job reliably in the real world better than a human.”

Manipulating physical objects in the real world, an environment that changes randomly, is a complex job for a machine.

Perhaps the hardest jobs for machines to perform are those that take years of training for humans to excel at These often involve intuitive (凭直觉的) decision making and abstract thinking -things that computers have been struggling with.

The experts predict robots will not be taking over as surgeons (外科医生) until around 2053, while it could take 43 years before machines are competing with mathematicians for space in top academic journals.