New Deal Design, one of the world’s leading tech design studios, has invented an artificial intelligence-quipped toy to fight the “distraction economy” by developing children’s attention spans.

Called Spot, the toy is aimed at learning and discovery. It functions primarily as a handheld scanner that kids can point at an object around them, such as a flower or a bird, to hear it talk back. Using its AI software, Spot recognizes the object and voices a little monologue (独白) from it, processing information to suit children aged five to nine.

There’s also a secondary function that comes into play at bedtime, when Spot uses its in-built projecto (投影仪) to present a story made up around the day’s discoveries.

Spot is a concept at this stage, one that grew, out of the research New Deal Design conducted into children’s development. The designers found that the right kind of toy could encourage focus, as opposed to instant satisfaction. They wanted to cultivate a kind of junior-level mindfulness that would set kids up with positive life skills.

In terms of appearance, Spot has a complicated look, with its 3D camera fixed in the head. The models are smooth, including a wooden handle, a button and a base. The choice of materials was inspired by traditional kids’ building blocks.

When Spot recognizes an object, it blinks to signal it has locked the target. Its head also locks into place to avoid any shaking. As an example, New Deal Design describes a girl called Max, who among other things, encounters a robin while out with the toy. Via Spot, the bird says, “Hi Max, my name is Robin! Did you know…”

At that night’s Story Time, Spot starts “Once upon a time there was a little girl named Max who met a robin. One day, Max asked the robin…” New Deal Design says that day summaries like this helps kids to relax and get better sleep. Seeing themselves at the centre of stories also helps to build self-confidence and self-awareness.

Look up over the white sand beaches of Mauritius and you may see a huge sail. It’s much like the kind used by kite surfers but the size of a three-bedroom apartment. The sail isn’t a tourist attraction — it’s creating electricity for this island off the east coast of Africa.

Launched in December 2021 by SkySails Power, the massive wing is the world’s first fully autonomous commercial “airborne wind energy”system. For the past two months, it has been delivering a little under its goal of 100 kilowatts — typically enough to power up to 50 homes.

To harvest wind energy from the heights where wind blows fastest, the key may be to fly a kite. These systems come in container and can be dropped off wherever there’s a road or dock (码头). They can also be tied to a fixed ship in deep waters.

Their height is adaptable, so they can be moved up or down to wherever the wind blows the hardest, which often changes with the seasons.

SkySails actually started back in 2001 with a different purpose: building soft kite wings to pull massive ships along at sea. In 2015 SkySails shifted focus to producing electricity with SkySails Power.

SkySails’ system relies on a roughly 150 square metre wing to ride on the wind. There are no turbines (涡轮机) up in the air, and the line isn’t an electric wire. Instead, the energy is generated on the ground, from the pull on the line. “The brake on the winch (绞车) is generating the electricity, “says Fagiano, the chief officer. Software flies the kite autonomously in a figure-of-eight pattern to get the strongest pull possible to produce energy. The system then changes the wing’s flight pattern so it can be pulled in with minimal resistance, expending a little energy to wind it back. This pattern repeats, creating far more energy than it consumes.

The sails have less impact on the skyline than traditional turbines and are quieter too, says Fagiano. And they make economic sense for anyone currently paying more than $0.30 per kilowatt hour from traditional generators.

If you are not reading this on a screen then you hold in your hands one of humanity’s world-changing inventions. Yet that power has not been matched by fame: paper delights in self-modesty, pointing you to the words on its surface and so acting only as a stage for ideas and arguments that have changed history.

Without that stage, the written and printed word would have attracted only a small audience. All the alternatives to paper commonly used throughout our pre-digital history have been too rare, too heavy, too expensive or too inconvenient to deliver words to a wide number of people, let alone a mass readership.

Paper has enabled writers to reach unprecedented(前所未有) numbers throughout history. Among them were the Buddhist missionary translators from South and Central Asia who brought their religion to China almost two thousand years ago. The paper age has its outstanding personalities: Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose collected works when combined fill more than 200 volumes.

For many of us, it has only been the rise of digital media that has finally opened our eyes to papers striking existence everywhere__Of course, paper has found thousands of roles for itself, writing aside. Your bedside lamp glows through a paper cover and the cups in the office coffee machine are made from paper. It can be as common and practical as a bus ticket or it can be treasured and expensive as the carrier of the worlds best-loved painting.

It is clear that many predictions of paper’s extinction have been premature—and greatly overstated. Much of the 400 million tons of paper produced annually is absolutely necessary to our way of life. The bigger question, of course, concerns the one role paper has had that has been transformative for the world, namely as the carrier of written or printed text. Already, it is leaving much of the difficult work of words to digital media, and many of its centuries-old roles have already been largely transferred to the screen. There is also a sense in which paper has itself become a subject, rather than simply a medium. This began to become clear in art several decades ago, as paper became not simply the backdrop (背景) for art but, in a few cases, the stuff of the art itself.

This doesn’t mean that papers uses as a vehicle for words will end, but it does signal a slowing down. More than that, it signals that paper’s greatest virtues are no longer good enough. Those virtues enabled unprecedented periods of cultural expansiveness, just as they encouraged knowledge, beliefs and ideas to move further down the socio-cconomic ladder. Yet such transformative qualities are shared by paper’s digital opponent(对手), and paper can no longer compete on speed of delivery, scale of information immediately available, or ease of access.

Paper’s historic dynamism(活力) has received its first great challenge and, in many aspects, it appears to be losing. Nostalgia(怀旧) simply dismisses paper to a museum piece. But there are reasons to think that the dynamism that paper has exhibited over some 20 centuries will not be transferred totally to digital media. There are a few practical reasons. Electric power is always needed for digital media, of course. More importantly, anything online can, potentially, be hacked into. Your own reading choices can be viewed from the other side of the world. Even what you write can be viewed and changed or deleted. But it is the ownership of knowledge that matters most. As Amazon recently reminded a kindle reader who had lost the text of a book he was reading, you do not "own" your books on Kindle, as you own a physical book. You simply have the right to access them.

The digital revolution certainly provides unprecedented access to knowledge. But it is access only. Text that you can hold, shelve and own, due to paper, will always have a magic all its own.