‘Alexa, are you turning my kid into a jerk?’
Virtual aides don’t care about manners
Three years after Amazon Echo launched as a frivolous oddity, its maker plans to put Alexa inside smartphones, refrigerators, vacuums and Ford cars. The Alexafication of all things places digital attendants everywhere at our beck and call, and those of our kids, too.
Last year, Hunter Walk, a former YouTube product manager and San Francisco dad, posted a blog entry on Alexa’s subservience as a potential worry for parents: If a kid learned she could order Alexa around without so much as a please or thank you, why not a person?
Experts at the crossroads of pediatrics, psychology and A.I. say there’s a lot we don’t know about how virtual assistants might affect young, developing minds, but parents can take proactive steps to help children better understand and interact with humanoid helpers.
Concerns over kids’ screen time seem almost quaint in an age of screenless devices. Apple’s debut this week of its own smart speaker, the HomePod, further cemented the tech industry’s vision of virtual assistants baked into daily life. Google, Microsoft and Samsung have their own digital assistants, too.
But research on how kids understand digital assistants is “so limited,” said Jenny Radesky, a University of Michigan pediatrician who studies how digital media shape children. Studies on children and robots suggest chil- dren see them as semi-animate, she said, as objects that think and feel but don’t eat or breathe.
A kid who says something naughty to Alexa and receives positive reinforcement — perhaps laughter from an onlooker or a game response from the assistant — might repeat the same behavior in a different social context, Radesky said.
Amazon said in a statement that the Echo is designed for family use, and “we work to ensure Alexa’s responses are appropriate for all ages.” Alexa can respond to “Echo,” “Amazon,” or “Computer,” but not niceties like “please” or “thank you.”
Peter Kahn, a psychologist at the University of Washington,
The debate over kids’ screen times seems almost quaint now.
said parents shouldn’t worry that their tyke will treat a classmate like they do Alexa. “It’s more complicated than that,” he said.
As we interact with virtual assistants more and human beings less, Kahn worries that the quality of our human connections will suffer.
And as smarter, more life-like computers become increasingly alluring, Kahn said, irreplaceable aspects of human interaction could atrophy in the process.
One solution, Kahn said, is for families with smart speakers to deepen their relationships through intentional, loving interactions.
Alexa can already sing lullabies to children and read them bed-
time stories. But a machine can’t know a child the way a parent does, Kahn said.
The evolution toward screenless devices — “ambient computing,” the industry calls it — may be a good thing for parents, said Jim Taylor, a psychologist who wrote Raising Generation Tech: Preparing Your Children for a Media-Fueled
World. Without faces buried in screens, parents have a better chance of teaching kids what they so often miss, he said: Technology is a tool, not a toy.
Radesky, the pediatrician, cowrote the latest guidelines for media use from the American Academy of Pediatrics. They advise parents to help their children leverage technology as a tool to meet human goals, she said “rather than obsess about the way it’s affecting us.”
It’s up to adults to help children conceptualize virtual assistants in a healthy way, Radesky said, and much of that comes through modeled behavior.
Show kindness to virtual assistants in front of kids, she said. Help them think critically. Remind them that virtual assistants are always listening.
And don’t give them the idea that an answer a gadget gives is inherently more or less valuable than what they might get from a book, another person or their own reasoning.
“I am more concerned that assistants like Siri or Alexa might implicitly teach children that knowledge is quickly, easily attainable — almost commodified,” she said.