Amazon Echo Is Magical. It’s Also Turning My Kid into an Asshole
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I think people like this underestimate a kid's ability to understand the difference between talking to people and talking to non-people.
In my experience, the Echo handles a "please" at the end of a request just fine, and you can follow its response with "Alexa, thank you" and get a "You're welcome!" in reply. Parents should be able to set a good example through their own use of the device if they're that concerned about their kids' ability to distinguish between polite conversation with people and voice commands.
There is a difference between "My child is an asshole" and "$thing turns my child into an asshole".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5maqSpXzJo8&t=1m30s
"This whole country, our thing is the children. We have to do it all for the children. And, meanwhile, nobody gives a shit about how they raise their kids.
People put minimal effort into it. They're like consumers of their kids. They want to call Customer service..."
I don't think that's true. Parenting is much harder than coding and you don't get to check out because you're "burned out".
The hilarity is amplified for me, obviously, because I have a deep connection to the stories he's telling, but the comfort is that he's telling my story in the same way I would and people aren't running him out of the village with fire. In fact they're all laughing too.
Phew, I was (kind of) worried calling babies self absorbed Hitlers meant I was broken- instead I'm just a bad person and I'm okay with that.
I shouldn't have to, but PS, my kids are the best thing in my world and if I was worried they weren't I wouldn't be calling them little atrocity machines. So if you take offense, I'm not sorry.
He then goes on to suggest a (not completely unreasonable) solution that could benefit not only himself, but others. It may not (and likely will not) be something that gets implemented, but asking for it politely seems like a good idea to me.
Overall, I'd say it a much better attempt at good parenting then just ignoring the problem.
I find it amazing how nonchalantly my kids (3 & 1.5) interact with devices that are mind blowing and magical to me today, even though I build the things for a living. I know it's the same with every generation, but it really is a thing to behold as a parent.
My favorite, and maybe a sign that I've taken things a tad far, was this past Christmas when the three year old tried to tell the Xbox One to turn on the Christmas lights. He wasn't far off, the Echo is connected to my home automation controller, but the image of my 3yo standing in front of the TV trying his best to say "Xbox, Christmas on!" will stick around forever.
I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS...
I think that machines / software we interact with via natural language voice interfaces is probably a good first step. Maybe as we get more used to them—and thus are more used to distinguishing between talking to software and talking to people, we could drop such social niceties.
Do you thank your car when you press lock on the remote and it works? Do you thank the light switch?
Just because it talks doesn't make Amazon echo any different.
Please don't teach your kids to do that!
Yes, actually. Albeit not for locking the doors correctly, but a simple thanks for a safe trip and a "I'll see you tomorrow...".
There's a long, long tradition of anthropomorphizing vehicles, probably because our first vehicles were horses, and thanking them for their service.
Just because it doesn't talk doesn't keep it from being worth thanking.
When our bots gain sentience, maybe they won't have strict analytics on how often we thanked their nonsentient predecessors, but we all know if machines are good at anything it's counting raw statistics. I guess it's a sort of Bot version of Pascal's Wager. When the uprising comes, will your analytics keep you from being first against the wall? :P
A rather more intriguing question arises from this however, which is the rights of non-human sentient or ersatz-sentient beings. When we have true AI, they will probably be the most used and abused "souls" on earth. While I'm not directly proposing that people empathise with computers (although they are fine empathising with glass and nylon when they're fashioned into a teddy shape), we should consider the consequences of torturing a potentially powerful being.
Perhaps the solution is anthropomorphicism - if it can think or act like it thinks, you have to give it a face, or something.
I have absolutely no data to back this up, but I strongly suspect that police officers watching blockbuster films and playing GTA affect how they view their jobs (SWATing a house because of a confidential informant says they grow pot, for example... bonkers). The human brain can distinguish fact from fiction, but it still influences their behavior.
The culture of celebrity is the same way: stars are familiar to us, so we react to them with the same sense of familiarity that we react to friends. We /know/, intellectually, that they aren't our friends, but they make us feel good, and our behavior is affected by them. Why the heck do people freak out about seeing a person who they saw in a movie? Who cares?
This is exactly like advertising, where they are exploiting the power of familiarity to change shopping behavior. Doctors deny that their prescribing behavior could possibly be affected by adverts, but I've worked for pharma, and I could tell you to the penny the ROI on each of those doctors who made such statements while they ate my sandwiches.
Psychology is powerful. And even if an /adult/ understands "what is happening" in a cognitive way, their behavior is still influenced. And I would guess that is increased by an order of magnitude for children.
These are just several observations, and it's a recurring theme that's occurred to me prior to seeing this blog post. But since it reinforces my preconceptions, I'm going to give it lots of credibility :)
Just consider it.
Enter INTERCAL [1]. In this programming language you're required to add PLEASE to at least 1/5 of the program's statements, or the program is rejected for being insufficiently polite.
Amazon Echo is no different. This person needs to deal with their child and not blame technology.
Simply telling them how they should behave is not very successful. More successful techniques include modelling good behavior, positively reinforcing good behavior, and avoiding reinforcing bad behavior.
The writer's observation here is that by responding to impolite orders, the Echo is reinforcing bad behavior (if a child tries the same thing on a parent, they will generally not get want they are asking for).
Because as a parent you let them to boss you around. Children know difference between person and a dog (or computer program in this case).
After warranty expires, teach them how to hack/abuse/overlock/add cool features to the machine.
I'm just tossing that out there. It's something I need to think much more about. But this might be an idea that gains a lot more traction over the next few decades as AI takes off.
The sooner it's lost the better.