Alex is reading a book about AI, artificial intelligence(人工智能) . He finds the book a little difficult but very interesting. Though the word AI is very popular now, he enjoys reading it very much. He has learned a new idea about AI from the book.

When people ask AI a question,, it answers the question in a very short time. So people may feel that AI can think and answer questions as human beings do. Before Alex read this book, he believed this, too. However, this book says it will never happen. Actually, AI only uses a lot of information to get the best answer. So when it has more information, the answer will be much closer to the perfect one. AI technologies will be clever tools for human beings to use. This book also says almost half of our jobs will be done by AI technologies in the near future. People will soon find more AI technologies in our lives, such as checking the tickets, the price, people’s faces and fingers.

So, we believe that we will have much happier lives with these AI technologies around us.

In the 1966 science-fiction (科幻) film Fantastic Voyage, a team of scientists and doctors are put into the body of an ill man to fix his body.

Such an idea, while fun, sounds surprising to many. But what if it were possible to treat an illness like cancer (癌症) by putting tiny pieces of something into the body to not only find the cancer, but also destroy it without harming anything else? Although it may seem like science fiction, tools like this are now being developed and may, in fact, become common in the near future – thanks to research now being done in the field of nanotechnology (纳米科技).

The main thing to know about nanotechnology is that it’s small – really small. Using this technology, it will be possible to discover cancer at a certain level where there are perhaps only a thousand bad cells (细胞). Compare this to what happens today: Doctors can discover cancer only after the dangerous cells have increased into the millions. One of the advantages of discovering and treating cancer at an early period is that the cells are less likely to become resistant to medicine treatment. In later period, cancer cells often change and get used to certain medicine so quickly that many medicines become ineffective.

Once a certain type of cancer is discovered, nanotechnology will also completely improve the way it is treated. Right now, most cancer treatments kill not only cancerous cells but the healthy ones as well, causing a number of side effects in people, such as hair loss and bad pain. Nanotechnology will allow doctors to destroy cancerous cells without harming healthy cells.

Unluckily, even though nanotechnology has great possibility for medical achievement, there are serious concerns that it could have bad environmental and health effects. Many scientists believe that governments should give more money for safety-related studies – to make sure that these tiny pieces of something do not get into our food and water and cause serious problems.

Meanwhile, research into the uses of nanotechnology continues and it’s developing quickly. Even ten years ago, many of these uses “would have seemed pretty unrealistic,” says Chemist Vicki Colvin. Perhaps that old movie, Fantastic Voyage, isn’t hard to believe after all.