Leia o texto a seguir para responder à questão.

The problem with artificial intelligence? It's neither artificial, nor intelligent.

    Elon Musk and Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak have recently signed a letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of AI systems. The goal is to give society time to adapt to what the signatories describe as an “AI summer”, which they believe will ultimately benefit humanity, as long as the right guardrails are put in place. These guardrails include rigorously audited safety protocols.

    It is a laudable goal, but there is an even better way to spend these six months: retiring the hackneyed label of “artificial intelligence” from public debate.

[...]

    However, many critics have pointed out that intelligence is not just about pattern-matching. Equally important is the ability to draw generalisations. Marcel Duchamp's 1917 work of art Fountain is a prime example of this. Before Duchamp's piece, a urinal was just a urinal. But, with a change of perspective, Duchamp turned it into a work of art. At that moment, he was generalising about art.

[...]

    Human intelligence is not one-dimensional. It rests on what the 20th-century Chilean psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco called bi-logic: a fusion of the static and timeless logic of formal reasoning and the contextual and highly dynamic logic of emotion. The former searches for differences; the latter is quick to erase them. Marcel Duchamp's mind knew that the urinal belonged in a bathroom; his heart didn't. Bi-logic explains how we regroup mundane things in novel and insightful ways. We all do this — not just Duchamp.

    AI will never get there because machines cannot have a sense (rather than mere knowledge) of the past, the present and the future; of history, injury or nostalgia. Without that, there’s no emotion, depriving bi-logic of one of its components. Thus, machines remain trapped in the singular formal logic.

[...]

    But the reason why tools like ChatGPT can do anything even remotely creative is because their training sets were produced by actually existing humans, with their complex emotions, anxieties and all. If we want such creativity to persist, we should also be funding the production of art, fiction and history — not just data centres and machine learning.

    That’s not at all where things point now. The ultimate risk of not retiring terms such as “artificial intelligence” is that they will render the creative work of intelligence invisible, while making the world more predictable and dumb.

    So, instead of spending six months auditing the algorithms while we wait for the “AI summer,” we might as well go and reread Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That will do so much more to increase the intelligence in our world.

Fonte: MOROZOV, Evgeny. The problem with artificial intelligence? It’s neither artificial nor intelligent. The Guardian, 30 mar. 2023. Disponível em: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/30/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-human-mind

Leia o texto a seguir para responder à questão.

Back To School But Not To Screens: States Ramp Up Cellphone Bans

        Work has been easier for public high school teacher Brian Kerekes since last August, when he first experienced the impacts of a newly enacted Florida law to restrict students’ cellphone use during class. The longtime statistics instructor, who started a new school year on Monday, now spends less time circling the classroom policing students and more time educating them on how to gather and interpret data.

        Before Florida passed the ban in May 2023 — becoming the first of at least eight U.S. states to prohibit or restrict cellphone use in schools — phones proved a constant disruption in Kerekes’ classroom at Tohopekaliga High School in the central Florida city of Kissimmee.

        “Students were either using them to talk to someone in a different class or talk to someone on the other side of the room or just to zone out, get on TikTok or whatever,” Kerekes, who's been a teacher for 17 years, said in an interview.

        Fellow teachers nationwide face the same challenge, which explains why more states and districts are moving to limit or outright ban cellphones in the classroom, and even during the school day altogether.

        The rules will look different from state to state and district to district, but all stem from the same concerns.

        Seventy-two percent of high school teachers cite cellphones as a major distraction in the classroom, according to a fall 2023 Pew Research Center study. Educators also worry that constant access to social media can adversely impact kids’ mental health.

        U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy went so far as to issue a health advisory last year, warning that enough evidence exists to show social media can be unsafe for children and teens. “We are in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis,” he said, “and I am concerned that social media is an important driver of that crisis, one that we must urgently address.”

        While social media can connect kids, make them feel less alone and offer an entertaining and creative outlet, it also exposes them to harmful content, Murthy pointed out in the advisory released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And, as educators such as Kerekes note, some students use their phones to bully fellow students online during the school day, and in the most extreme cases, to set up fights and film them.

The hope is that cellphone bans will reduce such incidents. Kerekes said he’s hearing they have.

Fonte: KATZ, Leslie. Back To School But Not To Screens: States Ramp Up Cellphone Bans. Forbes, 13 ago. 2024. Disponível em: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2024/08/13/back-to-school-but-not-to-screens-more-students-face-cellphone-bans/

Leia o texto para responder à questão. 

    In my research recently published in an open access journal, I used a popular language model, GPT-4 by OpenAI, to create simple summaries of scientific papers. These summaries generated by artificial intelligence (AI) used simpler language and more common words, like “job” instead of “occupation”, than summaries written by the researchers who had done the work.

    In one experiment, I found that readers of the AI-generated summaries had a better understanding of the science than readers of the human-written summaries. A second experiment investigated what effects the simpler summaries might have on people’s perceptions of the scientists who performed the research. In this experiment, participants rated the scientists whose work was described in the simpler texts as more credible than the scientists whose work was described in the more complex texts.

    Have you ever read about a scientific discovery and felt like it was written in a foreign language? New scientific information is probably hard to understand — especially if you try to read a science article in a research journal. In an era where understanding science is crucial for informed decision- -making, the abilities to comprehend and communicate complex ideas are more important than ever. Trust in science has been declining for years, and one contributing factor may be the challenge of understanding scientific jargon.

    As AI continues to evolve, its role in science communication may expand, especially if using generative AI becomes more commonplace. Simple science descriptions are preferable to and more beneficial than complex ones, and AI tools can help. But scientists could also achieve the same goals by working harder to minimize jargon and communicate clearly — no AI necessary.

(David Markowitz. https://theconversation.com, 30.10.2024. Adaptado.) 

Why does Nature Loss Matter?

Nature is our life-support system. From the fresh air we (1) breathe to the clean water we (2) drink, nature (3) provides the essentials we all rely on for our survival and well-being. And it also holds the key to our (4) prosperity, with millions of livelihoods and much of our economic activity also depending on the natural world. These immense (5) benefits to humanity, estimated to be worth around US$ 125 trillion a year, are only possible if we maintain a rich (6) diversity of wildlife.

Available in: https://explore.panda.org/newdeal?gclid=Cj0KCQjwgO2XBhCaARIsANrW2X0IIHXhC2iCZHBBoQAx6UyJdDDUy2p-hWYPGlbDTblY7kfNin2Y2GoaAvVGEALw_wcB#why. Access in: 16 Aug. 2022.

The World Might Be Running Low on Americans

    The world has been stricken by scarcity. Our post-pandemic pantry has run bare of gasoline, lumber, microchips, chicken wings, ketchup packets, cat food, used cars and Chickfil-A sauce. Like the Great Toilet Paper Scare of 2020, though, many of these shortages are the consequence of near-term, Covid-related disruptions. Soon enough there will again be a chicken wing in every pot and more than enough condiments to go with it.

    But there is one recently announced potential shortage that should give Americans great reason for concern. It is a shortfall that the nation has rarely had to face, and nobody quite knows how things will work when we begin to run out.

    I speak, of course, of all of us: The world may be running low on Americans — most crucially, tomorrow’s working-age, childbearing, idea-generating, community-building young Americans. Late last month, the Census Bureau released the first results from its 2020 count, and the numbers confirmed what demographers have been warning of for years: The United States is undergoing “demographic stagnation,” transitioning from a relatively fast-growing country of young people to a slow-growing, older nation.

    Many Americans might consider slow growth a blessing. Your city could already be packed to the gills, the roads clogged with traffic and housing prices shooting through the roof. Why do we need more folks? And, anyway, aren’t we supposed to be conserving resources on a planet whose climate is changing? Yet demographic stagnation could bring its own high costs, among them a steady reduction in dynamism, productivity and a slowdown in national and individual prosperity, even a diminishment of global power.

    And there is no real reason we have to endure such a transition, not even an environmental one. Even if your own city is packed like tinned fish, the U.S. overall can accommodate millions more people. Most of the counties in the U.S. are losing working-age adults; if these declines persist, local economies will falter, tax bases will dry up, and local governments will struggle to maintain services. Growth is not just an option but a necessity — it’s not just that we can afford to have more people, it may be that we can’t afford not to.

    But how does a country get more people? There are two ways: Make them, and invite them in. Increasing the first is relatively difficult — birthrates are declining across the world, and while family-friendly policies may be beneficial for many reasons, they seem to do little to get people to have more babies. On the second method, though, the United States enjoys a significant advantage — people around the globe have long been clamoring to live here, notwithstanding our government’s recent hostility to foreigners. This fact presents a relatively simple policy solution to a vexing long-term issue: America needs more people, and the world has people to send us. All we have to do is let more of them in.

    For decades, the United States has enjoyed a significant economic advantage over other industrialized nations — our population was growing faster, which suggested a more youthful and more prosperous future. But in the last decade, American fertility has gone down. At the same time, there has been a slowdown in immigration.

    The Census Bureau’s latest numbers show that these trends are catching up with us. As of April 1, it reports that there were 331,449,281 residents in the United States, an increase of just 7.4 percent since 2010 — the second-smallest decade-long growth rate ever recorded, only slightly ahead of the 7.3 percent growth during the Depression-struck 1930s.

    The bureau projects that sometime next decade — that is, in the 2030s — Americans over 65 will outnumber Americans younger than 18 for the first time in our history. The nation will cross the 400-million population mark sometime in the late 2050s, but by then we’ll be quite long in the tooth — about half of Americans will be over 45, and one fifth will be older than 85.

    The idea that more people will lead to greater prosperity may sound counterintuitive — wouldn’t more people just consume more of our scarce resources? Human history generally refutes this simple intuition. Because more people usually make for more workers, more companies, and most fundamentally, more new ideas for pushing humanity forward, economic studies suggest that population growth is often an important catalyst of economic growth.

    A declining global population might be beneficial in some ways; fewer people would most likely mean less carbon emission, for example — though less than you might think, since leading climate models already assume slowing population growth over the coming century. And a declining population could be catastrophic in other ways. In a recent paper, Chad Jones, an economist at Stanford, argues that a global population decline could reduce the fundamental innovativeness of humankind. The theory is simple: Without enough people, the font of new ideas dries up, Jones argues; without new ideas, progress could be imperiled.

    There are more direct ways that slow growth can hurt us. As a country’s population grows heavy with retiring older people and light with working younger people, you get a problem of too many eaters and too few cooks. Programs for seniors like Social Security and Medicare may suffer as they become dependent on ever-fewer working taxpayers for funding. Another problem is the lack of people to do all the work. For instance, experts predict a major shortage of health care workers, especially home care workers, who will be needed to help the aging nation.

    In a recent report, Ali Noorani, the chief executive of the National Immigration Forum, an immigration-advocacy group, and a co-author, Danilo Zak, say that increasing legal immigration by slightly more than a third each year would keep America’s ratio of working young people to retired old people stable over the next four decades. 

    As an immigrant myself, I have to confess I find much of the demographic argument in favor of greater immigration quite a bit too anodyne. Immigrants bring a lot more to the United States than simply working-age bodies for toiling in pursuit of greater economic growth. I also believe that the United States’ founding idea of universal equality will never be fully realized until we recognize that people outside our borders are as worthy of our ideals as those here through an accident of birth.

Text

Volunteering is fun! 

Disponível em: https://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/magazine/life-around-world/volunteering-fun. Texto adaptado. Acesso em: ago. 2020.