The defeat of Lee Sedol, the world's strongest Go (围棋) player, by a Google artificial intelligence (AI) program, looks like another milestone towards a world where computers can do almost anything a human can. It is not. There are uncountable things that only a human can do, and that no computer seems close to. The problem is that the purely human things are not economically useful to anyone. The things that computers can be taught to do are by contrast economically fantastic. But even the most powerful programs are not human, just as a shovel (铲车). They have no feelings. What they have is power, but this power is growing at a rate that should frighten us all.

    It might be less frightening if computers were truly intelligent, but even the most powerful networks are less human than monstrous Martians (火星人). Their power will be used to make money for the firms that finance their development, and then for others quick and clever enough to take advantage of the new world. It is far more likely that they will increase inequality and still further remove the middle classes as we move towards an hourglass (以金钱来衡量的) society in which everyone is either very rich or very poor and likely indebted.

    One of the ill effects of the spread of more intelligent computer networks is, at the same time, the spread of what might be called artificial stupidity. If AI is employed largely to replace unskilled labour, it is most productive when labour is kept unskilled or redefined that way. So much of the work in service industries is now simplified until it might be automated (自动化). And robots will never need pensions(养老金). AI is slowly reducing skilled work, like some forms of medical diagnosis (诊断), at the same time, as older doctors complain that the traditional human skills of diagnosis are falling out of medical training. The belief that everything worthwhile can be measured and then managed is far more damaging to humanity than the threat of artificial intelligence on its own.

    But no victory in complicated Go games can bring us closer to truly human-like computers.

    It was a cold winter day. A woman drove up to the Rainbow Bridge tollbooth (收费站). “I'm paying for myself, and for the six cars behind me,” she said with a smile, handing over seven tickets. One after another, the next six drivers arriving at the tollbooth were informed, “Some lady up ahead already paid your fare.”

    It turned out that the woman, Natalie Smith, had read something on a friend's refrigerator: “Practice random(随意的，随机的) kindness and aimless acts of beauty.” The phrase impressed her so much that she copied it down.

    Judy Foreman spotted the same phrase on a warehouse wall far away from home. When it stayed on her mind for days, she gave up and drove all the way back to copy it down. “I thought it was beautiful,” she said, explaining why she'd taken to writing it at the bottom of all her letters, “like a message from above.” Her husband, Frank, liked the phrase so much that he put it up on the classroom wall for his students, one of whom was the daughter of Alice Johnson, a local news reporter. Alice put it in the newspaper, admitting that though she liked it, she didn't know where it came from or what it really meant.

    Two days later, Alice got a call from Anne Herbert, a woman living in Marin. It was in a restaurant that Anne wrote the phrase down on a piece of paper, after turning it around in her mind for days.

    “Here's the idea,” Anne says. “Anything you think there should be more of, do it randomly.” Her fantasies (imagination) include painting the classrooms of poor schools, leaving hot meals on kitchen tables in the poor part of town, and giving money secretly to a proud old lady. Anne says, “Kindness can build on itself as much as violence can.”

    The acts of random kindness spread. If you were one of those drivers who found your fare paid, who knows what you might have been inspired to do for someone else later. Like all great events, kindness begins slowly, with every single act. Let it be yours!

    83-year-old Antonio Vicente has spent the last four decades of his life fighting against the current. As Brazilian landowners cut down rainforests to make room for profitable (盈利的) plantations and cattle grazing grounds, he struggled to bring the thick jungles of his childhood back to life.

    In 1973 Antonio took up the challenge of restoring the forest on a 31-hectare piece of land that had been destroyed for cattle grazing. Ironically enough, he bought the land in Brazil's Sao Paulo region, using credits（贷款）that the military government was giving out to promote deforestation(砍伐森林) and agricultural technology. But Antonio didn't use the money to promote the national agriculture but wanted to revive the forest.

    "You are stupid. Planting trees is a waste of land. You won't have income. If it's full of trees, you won't have room for cows or crops," Antonio's neighbors told him. But he knew the damage caused by deforestation was far greater than financial profit. Antonio had grown up on a rural farm, and watched his father and the other villagers cut down forests at the owners' orders, either for charcoal production or to clear land for grazing cattle. He had watched the ancient water sources dry up and people struggling to survive.

    With only some donkeys and a few hired workers Antonio brought back the forest to his land. What started out as a weekend hobby soon became a permanent way of life. Antonio often recalls spending days and nights in his young jungle, surrounded by rats and foxes, and eating banana for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

    As the forest grew, the water returned, and Antonio says that there are now over 20 water sources on his land that were no longer there when he bought it. Then the animals started making a home there. Today, the forest is alive with sounds of birds and insects living there, and more species are settling in every year.

    July 16th was a bad day for Mr. Arthur Johnson. In the morning, he set out from his home in Santa Barbara, California. It was the start of his summer holidays and he decided to visit Wends at Las Vegas, then he hoped to go fishing in Lake Mead, 40 km from Las Vegas.

    Johnson's troubles started while he was driving happily across the Mojave Desert. His car went wrong and he tried to repair it. Then, to make matters worse, his attempts to start the car used up the battery (电池) and left it useless. After Johnson had waited an hour in the hot sun, a Canadian driver, John Williams, stopped and tried to help him. When both men failed, Williams promised to telephone a workshop to ask it to send a truck to pull the car away and repair its fuel pump.

    Johnson left the keys in his car and sat in the shade of a large tree. Soon he fell asleep. While he was sleeping, a repair truck arrived from San Pedro (the nearest town) and pulled his car away. Later on, Johnson woke up and thought that somebody had stolen his car. He started to walk back towards San Pedro but a police car stopped him to find out why he was walking in the desert.

    Johnson looked like a man wanted in Los Angels for robbery, so the police detained him at San Pedro for the night. The next day, Johnson telephoned his friends in Los Angeles. They drove to San Pedro and made the police believe that Johnson was a harmless salesman, so they set him free.

The surface of Venus has never seemed very hospitable. Temperatures change around 470℃(900°F), the result of a runway greenhouse effect, and the pressure of its atmosphere, thick with carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid(硫酸), is some 90 times that of Earth's. Lead(铅) would flow like water on Venus, and water cannot have existed in liquid form for perhaps a billion years.

    Now NASA'S Magellan spacecraft seems to have found one more horror in the nasty landscape: active volcanoes. Last week the space agency released the first detailed map of Venus and the most dramatic images ever made of its surface. The picture offer the best evidence to date that a planet once assumed dead is actually a lively pot of geological change.

    The most amazing image is of Venus's second tallest mountain, Maat Mons, which rises 8km(5 miles) . Most of the planet's many peaks, including 9.5-km-(6-mile-) high Maxwell Montes, look bright in the radar pictures Magellan takes from its orbit above the permanent could cover. That means they are strong reflectors of radar waves. But Maat Mons is dark; like the Stealth bomber, it absorbs much of the radar falling on it.

    This interesting fact, say project scientists, is a strong hint that the mountains has recently been covered with lava(熔岩). Rock that sits on the surface of mountaintops appears to weather quickly in the hot , chemically reactive atmosphere, creating a soil that is rich in iron sulfide(硫化铁). It is this mineral, the scientists believe, that can easily be seen on radar. If Maat Mons doesn't have any, it has probably been resurfaced, perhaps within the past few years.

    Such resurfacing has undoubtedly taken place in Venus lowlands: earlier images of the planet showed vast areas that are remarkably free of craters(火山坑). That would be easy to explain on a Planet like Earth, where cratering from meteor strikes is erased by steady erosion. But while there is some evidence of wind erosion on Venus, the best explanation for the lack of cratering is periodic lava flow. Magellan has found direct evidence of such flows, including domelike upwellings and hardened streamed of rock trailing down the sides of Venusian peaks. There are also signs of other geologic activities, including dramatic faulting and several distinct incidents of mountain building. But the evidence can't indicate whether they really occurred millions of years ago. The case for active Venusian volcanoes is not yet proved, but Magellan, which is now well into its second complete survey of the planet's surface, may eventually settle the issue.

    Kong Zi, also called Confucius (551B.C-479B.C, and Socrates (苏格拉底) (469B.C-399B.C) lived only a hundred years apart, and during their lifetimes there was no contact between China and Greece, but it is interesting to look at how the world that each of these great philosophers came from shaped their ideas, and how these ideas in turn, shaped their societies.

    Neither philosopher lived in times of peace, though there were more wars in Greece than in China. The Chinese states were very large and feudal (封建的), while the Greek city-states were small and urban. The urban environment in which Socrates lived allowed him to be more radical (激进的) than Confucius. Unlike Confucius, Socrates was not asked by rules how to govern effectively. Thus, Socrates was able to be more idealistic, focusing on issues like freedom, and knowledge for its own sake. Confucius, on the other hand, advised those in government service, and many of his students went out to government service.

    Confucius suggested the Golden Rule as a principle for the conduct of life: "Do not do to others what you would not want others to do to you." He assumed that all men were equal at birth, though some had more potential than others, and that it was knowledge that set men apart. Socrates focused on the individual, and thought that the greatest purpose of man was to seek wisdom. Like Confucius, he believed that the superior class should rule the inferior (下层的) classes.

    For Socrates, the family was of no importance, and the community of little importance. For Confucius, however, the family was the center of the society, with family relations considered much more important than political relations.

    Both men are respected much more today than they were in their lifetimes.