In fact, ChatGPT can bring more opportunities to many industries, such as customer service, marketing, speech recognition, and more. ChatGPT can help businesses engage with customers more effectively, improve the customer experience, and give businesses more time and resources to focus on other tasks. Come to see While ChatGPT can replace humans in certain situations, it is not a complete replacement for humans. In many cases, human-to-human communication is still the most effective way. Therefore, the emergence of ChatGPT will not lead to the unemployment of all people, but will cause structural changes in the labor force and the redistribution of occupations.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) recently said that China filed 38,000 artificial intelligtion-related generative AI patents from 2014-23, while the United States filed 6,276 of the 50,000 patents filed by all countries. Of the 50,000 applications, 25 percent were filed last year.The top five inventor regions are: China (38,210 inventions), the United States (6,276 inventions), the Republic of Korea (4,155 inventions), Japan (3,409 inventions) and India (1,350 inventions).

There has been constant low-level sniping in the West against China's record on climate change, in particular its expansion of coal mining, and its target of 2060 rather than 2050 for carbon zero. I have viewed this with mild if irritated amusement, because when it comes to results, then China, we can be sure, will deliver and most Western countries will fall short, probably well short. It is now becoming clear, however, that we will not have to wait much longer to judge their relative performances. The answer is already near at hand. We now know that in 2023 China's share of renewable energy capacity reached about 50 percent of its total energy capacity. China is on track to shatter its target of installing 1200GW of solar and wind energy capacity by 2030, five years ahead of schedule. And international experts are forecasting that China's target of reaching peak CO2 emissions by 2030 will probably be achieved ahead of schedule, perhaps even by a matter of years. Hitherto, China has advisedly spoken with a quiet voice about its climate targets, sensitive to the fact that it has become by far the world's largest CO2 emitter and aware that its own targets constituted a huge challenge. Now, however, it looks as if China's voice on global warming will carry an authority that no other nation will be able to compete with. There is another angle to this. China is by far the biggest producer of green tech, notably EVs, and renewable energy, namely solar photovoltaics and wind energy. Increasingly China will be able to export these at steadily reducing prices to the rest of the world. The process has already begun. It leaves the West with what it already sees as a tricky problem. How can it become dependent on China for the supply of these crucial elements of a carbon-free economy when it is seeking to de-risk (EU) or decouple (US) its supply chains from China? Climate change poses the greatest risk to humanity of all the issues we face today. There are growing fears that the 1.5-degree Celsius target for global warming will not be met. 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded. Few people are now unaware of the grave threat global warming poses to humanity. This requires the whole world to make common cause and accept this as our overarching priority. Alas, the EU is already talking about introducing tariffs to make Chinese EVs more expensive. And it is making the same kind of noises about Chinese solar panels. The problem is this. Whether Europe likes it or not, it needs a plentiful supply of Chinese EVs and solar panels if it is to reduce its carbon emissions at the speed that the climate crisis requires. According to the International Energy Authority, China "deployed as much solar capacity last year as the entire world did in 2022 and is expected to add nearly four times more than the EU and five times more than the US from 2023-28." The IEA adds, "two-thirds of global wind manufacturing expansion planned for 2025 will occur in China, primarily for its domestic market." In other words, willy-nilly, the West desperately needs China's green tech products. Knee-jerk protectionism demeans Europe; it is a petty and narrow-minded response to the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced. Instead of seeking to resist or obstruct Chinese green imports, it should cooperate with China and eagerly embrace its products. As a recent Financial Times editorial stated: "Beijing's green advances should be seen as positive for China, and for the world." The climate crisis is now in the process of transforming the global political debate. Hitherto it seemed relatively disconnected. That period is coming to an end. China's dramatic breakthrough in new green technologies is offering hope not just to China, but to the whole world, because China will increasingly be able to supply both the developed and developing world with the green technology needed to meet their global targets. Or, to put it another way, it looks very much as if China's economic and technological prowess will play a crucial role in the global fight against climate change. We should not be under any illusion about the kind of challenge humanity faces. We are now required to change the source of energy that powers our societies and economies. This is not new. It has happened before. But previously it was always a consequence of scientific and technological discoveries. Never before has humanity been required to make a conscious decision that, to ensure its own survival, it must adopt new sources of energy. Such an unprecedented challenge will fundamentally transform our economies, societies, cultures, technologies, and the way we live our lives. It will also change the nature of geopolitics. The latter will operate according to a different paradigm, different choices, and different priorities. The process may have barely started, but it is beginning with a vengeance. Can the world rise to the challenge, or will it prioritize petty bickering over the vision needed to save humanity? On the front line, mundane as it might sound, are EVs, wind power, and solar photovoltaics. The author is a visiting professor at the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University and a senior fellow at the China Institute, Fudan University. Follow him on X @martjacques.

Members of the National Samsung Electronics Union stage a rally near the company's Hwaseong Campus in Gyeonggi Province, Monday, beginning a three-day strike. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul By Nam Hyun-woo The biggest labor union at Samsung Electronics initiated a three-day strike on Monday, threatening to disrupt the company's chip manufacturing lines unless management agrees to a wage hike and higher incentives. This marks the first strike by unionized workers in the tech giant's 55-year history. The National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU) claimed that about 4,000 unionized workers from Samsung's plants nationwide participated in a rally at the company's Hwaseong Campus in Gyeonggi Province. Police estimated that approximately 3,000 union members were present at the rally. According to its own survey, the union reported that a total of 6,540 members expressed their intention to participate in the strike. They emphasized that disruptions in manufacturing are anticipated, with over 5,000 members from facility, manufacturing, and development divisions joining the strike. The comments seem to address market expectations that the walkout is unlikely to cause significant disruptions in the chipmaker's operations, largely because most manufacturing lines are automated. The union said that it may launch another strike for an undetermined period, unless management responds to the union’s demand. Since January, the union has been pressing management for a higher wage increase rate for all members, fulfillment of promises regarding paid leave, and improvements to incentive criteria. With negotiations at an impasse, the union announced on May 29 that it would launch a strike. The NSEU has some 30,000 members, accounting for 24 percent of all Samsung employees. Among the union members, about 80 percent work at the device solutions division, which manufactures semiconductors.

The Sun is extremely active right now, blasting the Earth with the biggest solar storms in 20 years. This is what it is doing to the rest of the Solar System. If you happened to look skywards on a few nights in May 2024, there was a good chance of seeing something spectacular. For those at relatively low latitudes, there was a rare chance to see the flickering red, pink, green glow of our planet's aurorae. A powerful solar storm had sent bursts of charged particles barrelling towards Earth and, as they bounced around in our planet's atmosphere, they unleashed spectacular displays of the Northern and Southern Lights. The dazzling displays of aurora borealis were visible far further south than they might normally be – and far further north in the case of aurora australis thanks to the power of the geomagnetic storm, the strongest in two decades. Although some people experienced only a faint, eerie glow, others were treated to a myriad of colour as far south as London in the UK and Ohio in the US. Reports even came in from just to the north of San Francisco, California. But while this spike in activity from the Sun left many on Earth transfixed by the light display it produced, it has also had a profound effect elsewhere in the Solar System. As most of us wondered at the colours dancing across the night's sky, astronomers have been peering far beyond to see the strange ways such intense bursts of particles affect other planets and the space between them. "The Sun can fire material outwards in any direction like a garden sprinkler," says Jim Wild, a professor of space physics at Lancaster University in the UK. "The effects are felt throughout the Solar System." Our Sun is currently heading towards, or has already reached, its solar maximum – the point in an 11-year cycle where it is most active. This means the Sun produces more bursts of radiation and particles from solar flares and events known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). If these are sprayed in our direction, they can supercharge the Earth's magnetic field, causing magnificent aurorae but also posing problems for satellites and power grids. "Things really seem to be picking up right now," says Mathew Owens, a space physicist at the University of Reading in the UK. "I think we're about at solar maximum now, so we may see more of these kinds of storms in the next couple of years." Around the Sun, multiple spacecraft are observing this increase in activity up close. One of those, the European Space Agency's (Esa) Solar Orbiter, has been studying the Sun since 2020 on an orbit that takes it within the path of Mercury. Currently the spacecraft is "on the far side of the Sun as seen from Earth", says Daniel Müller, project scientist for the Solar Orbiter mission at Esa in the Netherlands. "So we see everything that Earth doesn't see." The storm that hit Earth in May originated from an active region of solar flares and sunspots, bursts of plasma and twisting magnetic fields on the Sun's surface, known as its photosphere. Solar Orbiter was able to see "several of the flares from this monster active region that rotated out of Earth's view", says Müller, bright flashes of light and darkened regions called sunspots on the Sun's surface. One of the goals of Solar Orbiter is "to connect what's happening on the Sun to what's happening in the heliosphere," says Müller. The heliosphere is a vast bubble of plasma that envelops the Sun and the planets of the Solar System as it travels through interstellar space. What Müller and his colleagues hope to learn more about is where the solar wind – the constant stream of particles spilling out from the Sun across the Solar System – "blows into the interstellar medium", he says. "So we are particularly interested in anything energetic on the Sun that we can find back in the turbulence of the solar wind." This particular cycle, cycle 25, appears to be "significantly more active than what people predicted", says Müller, with the relative sunspot number – an index used to measure the activity across the visible surface of the Sun – eclipsing what was seen as the peak of the previous solar cycle. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in the US had predicted a maximum monthly average of 124 sunspots a day in May, but the actual number was 170 on average, with one day exceeding 240, according to Müller. But the exact cause of the Sun's 11-year-long cycle and its variabilities remains a bit of a mystery. • Alien aurora: The strange displays that light up other worlds • Why Einstein was wrong about black holes • The Moon is slipping away from the Earth – and our days are getting longer The effects of these changes in solar activity, however, extend far across the Solar System. Earth is not the only planet to be hit by solar storms as they billow across interplanetary space. Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, has a much weaker magnetic field than Earth – about 100 times less – and lacks a substantial atmosphere. But solar activity can cause the surface of the planet to glow with X-rays as solar wind rains down. Venus also lacks a substantial magnetic field, but the planet does still create auroras as the solar wind interacts with the planet's ionosphere. At Mars, the effect of solar activity is more obvious. Here, a Nasa spacecraft called Maven (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) has been studying the planet's atmosphere from orbit since 2014. "We were on the declining side of solar cycle 24 [then]," says Shannon Curry, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder in the US and the lead on the mission. "We are now coming up on the peak of cycle 25, and this latest series of active regions has produced the strongest activity Maven has ever seen." Between 14 and 20 May the spacecraft detected exceptionally powerful solar activity reaching Mars, including an X8.7 – solar flares are ranked B, C, M, and X in order from weakest to strongest. Results from the event have yet to be studied, but Curry noted that a previous X8.2 flare had resulted in "a dozen papers" published in scientific journals. Another flare on 20 May, later estimated to be an even bigger X12, hurled X-rays and gamma rays towards Mars before a subsequent coronal mass ejection launched a barrage of charged particles in the same direction. Images beamed back from Nasa's Curiosity Rover on Mars revealed just now much energy struck the Martian surface. Streaks and dots caused by charged particles hitting the camera's sensors caused the images to "dance with snow", according to a press release from Nasa. Maven, meanwhile, captured glowing aurora as the particles hit the Mars' atmosphere, engulfing the entire planet in an ultraviolet glow. The flares can cause the temperature of the Martian atmosphere to "dramatically increase," says Curry. "It can even double in the upper atmosphere. The atmosphere itself inflates. The entire atmosphere expands dozens of kilometres – exciting for scientists but detrimental for spacecraft, because when the atmosphere expands there's more drag on the spacecraft." The expanding atmosphere can also cause degradation of the solar panels on spacecraft orbiting Mars from the increase in radiation. "The last two flares caused more degradation than what a third of a year would typically do," says Curry. Mars, while it has lost most of its magnetic field, still has "crustal remnant magnetic fields, little bubbles all over the southern hemisphere", says Curry. During a solar event, charged particles can light those up and excite particles. "The entire day side lights up in what we call a diffuse aurora," says Curry. "The entire sky glows. This would most likely be visible to astronauts on the surface." By the time solar storms reach further out into the solar system, they tend to have dissipated but can still have an impact on the planets they encounter. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all have aurorae that are in part driven by charged particles from the Sun interacting with their magnetic fields. But one of the key effects of solar activity on interplanetary space that astronomers are eager to study is something called "slow solar wind", a more sluggish, but denser stream of charged particles and plasma from the Sun. Steph Yardley, a solar astronomer at Northumbria University in the UK, says solar wind is "generally classed about 500km/s (310 miles/s)", but slow wind falls below this. It also has a lower temperature and tends to be more volatile. Recent work by Yardley and her colleagues, using data from Solar Orbiter, suggests that the Sun's atmosphere, its corona, plays a role in the speed of the solar wind. Regions where the magnetic field lines, the direction of the field and charged particles are "open" – stretching out into space without looping back – provide a highway for solar wind to reach high speeds. Closed loops over some active regions – where the magnetic field lines have no beginning and end – can occasionally snap, producing slow solar wind. The variability in the slow solar wind seems to be driven by the unpredictable flow of plasma inside the Sun, which makes the magnetic field particularly chaotic. The X-class flares and coronal mass ejections seen in May transformed the interplanetary medium as they flung out material across the solar system. Solar Orbiter detected a huge spike in ions moving at thousands of kilometres per second immediately after the 20 May flare. Computers on board other spacecraft – the BepiColombo probe, which is currently on a seven-year journey to Mercury, and Mars Express, in orbit around the Red Planet – both saw a dramatic increase in the number of memory errors caused by the high energy solar particles hitting the memory cells. The day after the coronal mass ejection, magnetometers on board the Solar Orbiter also saw large swings in the magnetic field around the spacecraft as a huge bubble of plasma made up of charged particles thrown out from by the event washed past it at 1,400km/s (870 miles/s). Increased solar activity is a boon for scientists. "If you track the number of papers produced by solar physicists, you can almost see an 11-year cycle in there," says Owens. "We are all more scientifically productive when there's a lot of activity to study." As the Sun continues into solar maximum, the Solar System will see more and more activity streaming from its surface. Yet while all the planets witness at least some of the activity, our planet bears the brunt more than most. "Earth is slightly unique in that space weather can have interesting effects on human technologies," says Wild. "There's an extra dimension here on Earth." Perhaps one day those anthropogenic effects might be felt elsewhere, too. "If you're going to fly to Mars and you have a six-month flight through the interplanetary environment, you're going to potentially suck up a lot of space weather events," says Wild. "How you protect your astronauts is an interplanetary issue that we need to get our heads around."