Many researchers use the term artificial intelligence (AI) to describe the thinking and intelligent behavior by machines. While AI can be helpful to human beings, scientists warn it can also be a threat.

Stuart Russell, who teaches computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, says humans should make AI products that we like.

“In the future,"Russell says, “many of today's jobs that require a lot of physical labor will be replaced by machines with artificial intelligence. These include agricultural jobs, and ones with repetitive duties like telephone call centers. Al machines can also replace jobs like ones in the financial industry-jobs that require studying a lot of data."

The health industry is one area that artificial intelligence is already changing. AI can process huge amounts of data, so doctors can use the most up-to-date information to diagnose and treat patients.

IBM's Watson technology is already in use at hospitals in North and South America, Europe and Asia. Watson helps doctors keep up with information.

There is also a dangerous side of artificial intelligence. One example is combining drone technology and AI to create autonomous weapons.

Stuart Russell is working to create international treaties to ban such weapons. He says the risk is that people will use the technology to develop a kind of “poor men's nuclear weapon”.

IBM's Banavar points out the value of artificial intelligence, including search engines and the autopilot function on planes.

The debate about whether artificial intelligence is good or bad for humans continues. Researchers agree there is no question that the technology is here, and that will continue to change the life on our planet.

Gadgets (小工具，小玩意) Make Study Fun

Now in a world piled high with smart phones, tablets and e-readers, technology has entered the classroom in ways unimaginable. Taking classes can be fun too. All you have to do is swipe your fingers on your phone screen and download some apps, which can make your study more fun and efficient.

Fictional, computer-generated human faces are so convincing they can fool even trained observers. They can be easily downloaded online and used for Internet scams(诈骗)and fake social media profiles.

Al programs called generative adversarial networks (生成对抗网络), or GANs, can learn to create fake images that are less and less distinguishable from real images, by competing two neural networks against each other.

Nightingale and her colleague Hany Farid at the University of California, Berkeley, asked 315 participants, recruited on a crowdsourcing website, to say whether they could distinguish a selection of 400 fake photos from 400 photographs of real people. Each set consisted of 100 people from each of four ethnic groups: white, Black, East Asian and South Asian.

This group had an accuracy rate of 48.2 percent—slightly worse than chance. A second group of 219 participants were given training to recognize computer-generated faces. This group had an accuracy rate of 59 percent, but this difference is negligible (可忽略的), says Nightingale.

The researchers also asked a separate group of 223 participants to rate a selection of the same faces on their level of trustworthiness, on a scale of 1 to 7. They rated the fake faces as 8 percent more trustworthy, on average, than the real faces—a small yet significant difference, according to Nightingale. That might be because artificial faces look more like “average” human faces, and people are more likely to trust typical-looking faces, she says.

Looking at the extremes, the four faces rated most untrustworthy were real, whereas the three most trustworthy faces were fake.

“We need stricter ethical guidelines and more legal frameworks in place because, inevitably, there are going to be people out there who want to use these images to do harm, and that’s worrying,” says Nightingale.

To reduce these risks, developers could add watermarks to their images to flag them as fake. she says. “In my opinion, this is bad enough. It’s just going to get worse if we don’t do something to stop it.”