Microsoft won’t renew the contracts (合同) for dozens of news production contractors working at its MSN website and plans to use AI (人工智能) to replace them.

The roughly 50 employees were informed that their services would no longer be needed beyond June 30, but a team of full-time journalists will remain.

The Microsoft spokesman said in a statement, “Like all companies, we analyze and make judgments on our activities and services on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment (投资) in some places and, from time to time. rearrangement in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic.”

MSN will use AI to replace the production work its journalists had been doing. That work includes using an automated system to identify trending news stories from dozens of publishing partners and to help improve the content by rewriting headlines or adding better accompanying photographs or slide shows.

“I spend all my time reading about how automation and AI are going to take all our jobs - now it’s taken mine,” one of the terminated (被终止的) contractors said. “But with fewer human beings to monitor the technology, AI may not be fully familiar with strict editorial guidelines and could end up letting through inappropriate stories.”

MSN has undergone a number of changes since its launch as Microsoft Network in 1995. Once it offered original content and links to news, weather, and sports. In 2013, it reduced original news content and began cutting employees. By 2014, it launched a redesigned version that partner red with other news sites-paying them to redistribute their content. Today, the news service relies entirely on those partnerships with no original news content of its own. Selecting and editing stories rather than actually generating them made it easier for MSN to increasingly rely on an automated editing system.

Nowadays, people all over the world are becoming more and more connected, as if the world were getting smaller – as if we were living in a “global village”.

Technology is largely responsible for bringing people together. Channels of communication, such as the mobile phone and the internet, have made it possible to speak instantly with someone on the other side of the planet, enabling us to form close connections with people of completely different cultures. The television, meanwhile, is a window on the world, giving us quick and easy access to other cultures and lifestyle.

Cultural exchange helps us to be more inclusive and to overcome culture shock. But intrusiveness doesn’t mean that our cultures will merge into one another. Rather, it’s about countries and people making a joint effort to come together to create a more harmonious and understanding world, so that we can all enjoy the mutual benefits.

Electric vehicles are close to the “turning point” of rapid mass adoption thanks to the decreasing cost of batteries, experts say.

Global sales of electric vehicles rose 43% in 2020, but even faster growth is expected when continuing falls in battery prices result in the price of electric cars under the same petrol and diesel (柴油) models, which may happen between 2023 and 2025. According to a study by Prof Tim Lonton, at the University of Exeter, the tuning point has already been passed in Norway, where tax breaks (税收减免) mean electric cars are cheaper and the market share of battery-powered cars increased to 54% in 2020 in Norway, compared with less than 5% in most European nations.

The falls in battery prices in the last decade have been dramatic and faster than predicted thanks to a massive production and cuts in costs, such as reducing the amount of expensive cobalt (钻) required. BloombergNEF’s analysis predicts lithium-ion (锂离子) battery cots will fall so sharply that electric cars can match the price of petrol and diesel cars by 2023. McKin-sey’s Global Energy Perspective 2021, published on 15 January, forecasts that “electric vehicles are likely to become the most economic choice in the next five years worldwide”.

Electric cars, vital in efforts to fight climate crisis, are quieter and start to go faster, so people do not want to return to a petrol or diesel vehicle once they have one. A survey of 2,000 electric car owners found 91% said they did not want to go back.

“The survey shows the strong and lasting impact of switching to a clean car. The evidence in favor of electric vehicles grows more convincing even in a year as destructive as 2020,” said Melanie Shufflebotham, at Zap-Map, which maps charging points.