“Acknowledged, Detective. This is my...”

He hung up and told the driverless UNATS Robotics car to get him down to the railway station as fast as it could, angry with himself and with Ada—whose middle name was Trouble, after all—for making him deal with a robot before he’d had his breakfast. The name had been his ex-wife’s idea, something she’d insisted on.

His ex-wife. He hadn’t thought of her in years. Well, months. Weeks, certainly. She’d been a brilliant computer scientist at the UNATS Robotics school at the University of Toronto. Now she was settled in her own research lab in Beijing, providing the kinds of software solutions for robot applications.

He itched to wiretap her, to read her email or listen in on her phone conversations. He could have done that when they were still together, but he never had. If he had, he would have found out what she was planning.

He could have talked her out of it.

“And then what, Artie?” said the nagging voice in his head. He couldn’t stop her from chasing her own dream— making the smartest robot in the world, especially with their little daughter in her belly.

“Shut up!” he told the nagging voice.

In a few minutes, he was at the front gate of the railway station.

There she was, standing by a teenage girl who had the same blue eyes as his.

Chatbots

What if instead of clicking on link after link on a company’s website, you could type a question and get an immediate, customized answer? Some companies are working to make this a reality using chatbots. Chatbots are computer programs that can communicate with human beings by phone, on messaging apps or on websites.

There are two types of chatbots: open and closed. A closed chatbot follows a script, which may or may not involve using AI (artificial intelligence) to understand users’ messages. An open chatbot uses AI both to figure out what users want and to generate responses. Open chatbots are able to learn from their conversations and thus improve their ability to communicate over time. This means that open chatbots can respond to a wider range of inquiries, compared with closed chatbots. Communicating with them feels more natural, but if they have not been correctly trained, users may have a bad experience with them.

One significant advantage of chatbots is that they are available all the time, even in the middle of the night. Plus, a single chatbot can cater to multiple users at once. This means that users can get immediate answers to their questions rather than waiting for a human representative. Chatbots have the potential to overcome several technological problems people face. These include difficulty in searching websites and trouble finding basic information and answers to simple questions.

However, in order for chatbots to work, humans are still indispensable (不可或缺的). Someone has to program the chatbots initially, train them, and maintain and improve the chatbot system. Further, even open chatbots may not have the answers to detailed questions, and many people simply prefer speaking to a human rather than a chatbot. Thus, chatbots are unlikely to completely replace human agents. Rather, they will help users resolve simple problems so that customer service representatives can focus on more difficult issues.

7 December is International Civil Aviation Day. Of course, we immediately think of the Wright brothers, the great pioneers who invented and put the first airplane into the sky.

The more you study the efforts the brothers made, the more you admire them. These were men who had a dream—to do what only the birds had been able to do. For thousands of years it had only been a dream and a mad one, too. It’s mad because it seemed against nature and mad also because of the dangers involved. But the Wrights flew up to 100 times a year. It was the process of trial and error that led to them producing a machine that could actually carry people through the air safely.

They were brave men. They showed courage, without which human beings would never have made any progress. A Wright brothers expert, David McCullough, gave an example of their courage. He noted that the brothers never flew together. Why? “If one got killed, the other would still be alive to carry on with the mission (使命)，” he wrote in his book The Wright Brothers.

Determination was all that they had in the beginning. They weren’t from fancy, rich backgrounds. No business or university sponsored (资助) their efforts. They had to do everything themselves. They put their lives on the line every time they climbed into the pilot’s seat.

The philosopher Aristotle had something to say about courage. He said that it is “the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees (保证) all the others”. Surely the story of the Wright brothers backs up these words. Courage is also part of the American belief that anything is possible if you put your whole heart and soul into it. The Wright brothers certainly had a can­do attitude, and they taught us one great lesson: We need ambition and courage if we want to see our plans through to the end.