Read Mayfly by Peter Watts, one of my favorite hard sf short stories that deals with a child being raised in a computer, sorta.
Also, here's the article in question in question. It's written as a sort of joke about the supposedly serious article on the same topic in daily mail which I haven't read yet.
The
tamagotchiyou have raised for 25 years and is currently going through grad school is about to die because the servers are going offline, please fill this form to download yourtamagotchi'sson's data before it is too late.