While the start of a new school year is always exciting, this year was even more so for some elementary school students in Auckland, New Zealand. They became the world's first kids to be "taught" by a digital teacher. Before you start imagining a human-like robot walking around the classroom, Will is just an avatar that appears on the student's desktop, or smart phone screen, when ordered to come.

The autonomous animation platform has been modeled after the human brain and nervous system, allowing it to show human-like behavior. The digital teacher is assigned to teach Vector's "Be sustainable with energy" — a free program for Auckland elementary schools.

Just like the humans it replaced, Will is able to instantly react to the students' responses to the topic. Thanks to a webcam and microphone, the avatar not only responds to questions the kids may have, but also picks up non-verbal cues. For instance, if a student smiles at Will, he responds by smiling back. This two-way interaction not only helps attract the students' attention, but also allows the program's developers to monitor their engagement, and make changes if needed.

Nikhil Ravishankar believes that Will-like avatars could be a novel way to catch the attention of the next generation. He says," I have a lot of hope in this technology as a means to deliver cost-effective, rich, educational experience in the future."

The program, in place since August 2018, has been a great success thus far. Ravishankar says, "What was fascinating to me was the reaction of the children to Will. The way they look at the world is so creative and different, and Will really captured their attention." However, regardless of how popular it becomes, Will is unlikely to replace human educators any time soon.

The 2010s brought no shortage of miraculous technologies, from tablet computers to 4G mobile internet. But these had surprisingly little effect on the economy. During that decade productivity growth in the developed countries averaged a miserable (少得可怜的) 1% a year, holding down average wages. Innovative firms embraced new tech, but many less adventurous ones did not bother. The experience showed that technological breakthroughs and improvements in average living standards do not always go hand in hand.

Generative AI, its developers say, will be different. Not since the invention of the internet has a new technology so captured the public imagination. The technology is consumer-friendly: within days of its release to the public, Chat GPT, the most famous AI chat bot, had millions of users. It is easy to see how this innovation could improve all types of work at all types of firms, from increasing the accuracy of doctors’ diagnoses to helping programmers write software code more efficiently.

With that said, for AI to truly spread out in the economy, it needs to make its mark beyond the most innovative companies. And this will take time. Although the internet began to be used by some companies in the early 1990s, it was not until the late 2000s that two-thirds of American businesses had a website. About 70 world’s largest firms still show no interest in AI, according to our analysis. Some evidence even suggests that usage of Chat GPT and its competitors is falling — perhaps as people have tried it out, and then decided it is not for them.

Indeed, even the most powerful technologies take time to be adopted, because companies tend to use a mix of software and services, some of which may be years or even decades old. Replacing outdated systems can be costly and complicated. Moreover, in the many industries either run or heavily regulated by the government, such as healthcare, education and construction, bosses and trade unions often resist the application of new technology, worried that it will lead to job losses. In time AI could well transform how people live their lives and do their jobs. But the road to widespread usage, and any resulting productivity boom, will be a long one.

A Beijing-based gene firm on Monday announced the debut (首次亮相) of the world’s first, cloned wild article wolf via video. 100 days after its birth in a Beijing lab. Experts said its birth pioneers the breeding of more rare and endangered animals through cloning technology.

“To save the endangered animal, we started the research cooperation with Harbin Polarland on cloning the arctic wolf in 2020. After two years of painstaking efforts, the arctic wolf was cloned successfully. It is the first case of its kind in the world,” Mi Jidong, the company’s general manager of the Beijing-based Sinogene Biotechnology Co., said at a press conference in Beijing.

Born on June 10, the wolf, named Maya, is in very good health. Its donor cell came from the skin sample of a wild female arctic wolf, which had been introduced from Canada to Harbin Polarland. The cloning of the arctic wolf was accomplished by constructing 137 new embryos (胚胎), followed by the transfer of 85 embryos to the uteri of seven dogs, of which one was born as a healthy wolf-Maya, Zhao noted. The selection of a dog as Maya’s surrogate (代孕) was made because dogs share genetic ancestry with ancient wolves and it’s more likely to succeed through cloning technology, experts said.

He Zhengming, the head of Chinese Experimental Animal Resources Research Institute for Food and Drug Control, said that the cloned animals still have the ability to reproduce if they have intact fertilized eggs. The cloning technology can copy all genetic information for selective breeding, and in this way, it diversifies the population of endangered animals.

From the world’s first mammal clone “Dolly”, cloning technology has provided the possibility to diversify the populations of some species such as cattle, pigs and horses. When endangered species in some places are identified, cloning of cells preserved from freezing technologies could also generate new life, experts said.

However, some raised controversy relating to the cloned arctic wolf. Sun Ouanhui, a scientist from the World Animal Protection organization, insisted that cloning technology has made great progress since its birth, but it is still being perfected and in the exploratory stage of research, and there are many technical and ethical issues that need to be tackled and treated with caution.