Imagine the busy streets of New York City, an enormous place with millions of people. Every day, the streets are crowded with people going about their daily lives. Now imagine a small robot in the middle of all of those people. Most people would not even notice the ten-inch smiling robot, called a Tweenbot, rolling along the busy sidewalk. This strange machine may interest some people, while others would ignore it completely. A researcher interested in studying how helpful people really are uses such robots in her experiments.

The Tweenbots experiment is the idea and creation of Kacie Kinzer, which was to make a robot that could navigate the city and reach its destination only if it was aided by pedestrians. Tweenbots rely on the kindness of warm-hearted strangers. Made simply of cardboard, wheels, and a device to turn the wheels, the Tweenbots face many dangers on the city streets. They could be run over by cars or smashed by careless kids. Each of Kinzer's robots is fitted with a flag that displays instructions for the robot's destination. The only way these robots will reach their final point is if someone lends them a hand. Tweenbots are essentially a social experiment aimed at providing people a chance to show how caring they are.

On a daily basis, people in New York City are often in a hurry to get around. However, the Tweenbots, through their inability to look after themselves, took people out of their normal routines. The people who noticed the helpless little robots were actually interested in helping the Tweenbots find their way home. Tweenbots move at a constant speed and can only go in a straight line. If one was to get stuck, or was going in the wrong direction, it would be up to strangers to free it or turn it in the right direction. Surprisingly, no Tweenbot was lost or damaged, and each one arrived at its target in good condition. In fact, most people treated the robot in a gentle manner, and some even treated it as though it were a small living being.

Everyone gets anxious when the world takes an uncertain turn. And often, we treat that anxiety with a little panic buying.

A study published last year in the Journal of Consumer Research found that people buy things in troubled times as a means of keeping control over their lives. The researchers noted that utility items (实用物品) – specifically, cleaning products – tend to move most quickly from store shelves. The hoarding (囤积) of toilet paper, as perhaps the most fundamental cleaning product, may represent our most fundamental fears. An invisible enemy moves slowly and quietly towards us. We need to hold on to something in uncertain times. Maybe hoard of toilet paper brings promises.

The thing is, it's not actually going anywhere. For all the sharp words and even sharper elbows thrown around by the crazy toilet paper shoppers, they seem to be missing one essential fact: There is no toilet paper shortage.

As The New York Times points out, shop owners that see their shelves emptied often fill up the shelves again in a day, often in just a few hours.

"You are not using more of it. You are just filling up your closet with it," Jeff Anderson, president of paper product manufacturer Precision Paper Converters, tells the Times.

The thing is, the toilet paper-obsessed shoppers have been infected with something many times more contagious(感染性的) than any coronavirus: fear.

"People are social creatures. We look to each other for cues (暗示) for what is safe and what is dangerous," Steven Taylor, a clinical psychologist at the University of British Columbia, tells Fox News. "And when you see someone in the store panic-buying, that can cause a fear contagion effect. People become anxious ahead of the actual infection. They haven't thought about the bigger picture, like what are the consequences of hoarding toilet paper."

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As the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) keep growing, some companies are hiring "AI prompt (提示) engineers" to help them get the best out of the emerging technology. Are these jobs set to become a universal presence, or are they a passing fad (时尚)? Generative AI creates text or images in response to prompts entered by the user. This can be as simple as asking for something in plain English, similar to using a search engine. But there is a key to it: including the right references and keywords that can guide AI towards the desired outcome.

"By buying a pre-built prompt given by prompt engineers, you can ensure the AI model will generate what you want. The average price is $3.50, but some prompts can cost hundreds of dollars," says Ben Stokes, the founder of Prompt Base. Most of the prompt engineers on the site don't have a technical background. The engineers tend to come from a photography or graphic design background, and those working on prompts for generating text used to work in marketing or copy writing.

Aaron Sines at US recruitment firm Razoroo has been placing engineers into AI jobs for five years, but only came across the term "prompt engineer" earlier this year. Sines says that a lot of the companies approaching him looking for a "prompt engineer" are actually seeking a more rounded AI researcher with technical skills. He believes AI models could become better at extracting (提取) information from humans about what they want, making the idea of a specialized prompt engineer obsolete, but thinks there will always be a need for humans to oversee AI models during development and application.

Zhan Qin at Zhejiang University in China says complex prompts, and the prompt engineers who create them, are unlikely to disappear any time soon because AI models aren't like traditional algorithms (算法) that work on logic and can be entirely understood by humans. "Some prompts are short. But there are a lot of very, very long prompts. Even the generators of those prompts do not know the exact meanings behind those magical words," says Qin.