The AI (人工智能) has changed our lives. There are four useful AI inventions here.

The brush pen, one of the “Four Treasures of the Study”, was invented thousands of years ago. However, the oldest pen was just a piece of bamboo or a stick. It was difficult for people to write well on thin silk.

It is said that Meng Tian, a general of the Kingdom（王国）Qin, improved the pen. When Meng was leading an army to fight against the Kingdom of Chu, he had to report the situation to his king in time. But his pen was too hard and caused him much trouble, so he was thinking of ways to improve it.

One day Meng made his way home with some wild rabbits on the horse back. Fat and heavy, one rabbit’s tail left a long trail（痕迹）on the ground when they moved on. Suddenly a good idea came to his mind when he saw it, “If I tie the rabbit’s hair to a stick, would it be easy to write with?”

On arriving home, he tied the rabbit’s hair to a stick and tried writing with it. But the rabbit’s hair was too smooth to write well and wasted a lot of silk. So he threw away his “invention” into a stone hole in the yard.

However, Meng never gave up and kept trying all the time. A few rainy days later, he happened to find his “invention” fatter in a stone hole. He picked it up with hope. The brush worked beautifully on silk. Meng succeeded at last.

Smartphones are getting boring. The new models are either a bit faster or have nicer cameras, but they are basically no different from the ones already in our pockets. This is why scientists are hoping, and working for something new, something that will change our lives just as greatly as smartphones do. At the moment, the next invention might be smart glasses.

Just imagine. Instead of having to pick up your phone and look at the screen, all of the information you need simply appears just in front of you, in your glasses. Satellite navigation directions would appear right there on the road. And your smart glasses could guide you to the right shelf in the supermarket!

Smart glasses could also be used in industry. They could show engineers the instructions they need to fix things more quickly. A doctor could carry out a huge operation, guided in real time by someone on the other side of the world.

This may not happen. But most of the technologies to invent them are already there. For example, one key technology is called AR, which can make digital 3D objects appear as if they are part of the real world. We’ve used it a lot on our video call. Similarly, huge progress has been made in spatial audio（空间音频）. This is when a sound is made to give it a sense of place, like what you hear in an empty room. Some high-end earphones can already do that. Future glasses will of course need to recognize your voice to do tasks. This technology has been widely used in our daily life.

So, why aren’t we all wearing smart glasses yet? So far, no one has invented a good way to send images（影像）of our world onto glasses. However, with the rapid development of technology, smart glasses could arrive much sooner than we think.