Moxie, a Social Robot That Helps Kids with Social-Emotional Learning
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
I've struggled with that aspect of child rearing with my 6 y/o since she was able to speak. She is far more willing to learn at a deep level from teachers than from us, even though her mother is an experienced elementary school teacher.
For better or worse, parents are human beings, and (even unconsciously) may stigmatize behaviors or feelings that a child may experience, making it difficult for the child to bring up these issues with the parents.
There is also the case where children may be neurologically atypical in a way that makes interacting with other humans difficult. This is another opportunity for a robot to shine.
You're not wrong -- helping children develop social and soft skills does fall under the job description of being a good parent. But even parents with the best intentions may need help from time to time, and I would argue that a parent who can recognize the value in something like this (as a supplement, not a replacement for parenting) has the child's best interests in mind.
As a society, this should be a common aim -- to 'socialize' our children.
Growing up, albeit not in the US, strangers would scold us kids for being noisy/bratty/destructive/etc. And our parents would be on the stranger's side, adding their two cents on top.
Can't imagine that today. IMO the loss of the freedom to treat your local neighborhood as one big, loosely connected family (as a child and adult) is one of the biggest reasons for increase in depression, anxiety and lack of social/soft skills. Another reason is that local neighborhoods are few and far between because of how we've structured our cities.
BTW, my son actually has a mild ASD diagnosis, and well, I will try to help him not to feel bad about himself, but I also expect to help him get more social skills as I have seen first hand how useful they are.
When I wrote the comment, I was remembering a coworker whose nephew had ASD, and could not process spoken word from his family well. They discovered that using the "say" command on an OSX Terminal to make the computer "talk" was something that did work for communicating, and the boy would listen to the computer's advice for when it was time for bed or time to brush his teeth.
It was not my intention to perpetuate dehumanizing stereotypes, so I apologize if it came across this way. Rather, I was trying to emphasize the positive impact of having more parenting tools in your metaphorical tool belt.
At the risk of sounding ignorant again, I would argue that good hygiene and sleep are habits that everybody should build, regardless of your neurological disposition :)
Parents are not superheroes that know it all or can do it all.
For many the first time they are "unsupervised" is legal adulthood, where college, military or employment forces social interactions in dimensions their young lives willfully resisted preparing them for. Why talk, when you can text?
But I can see it being very helpful for children with various social disorders like autism. I don't have personal experience with this, but what I hear from parents with children who have such issues, is that they try to socialize their kids, but at best other children distance themselves from them, at worst they get bullied and pushed away. There's a chicken and egg problem there. I think a robot that is infinitely patient, reinforces healthy interactions, and provides a level of emotional support can definitely help in jump starting positive behavior.
But at the same time, it has to be very accurate and perceptive in its interactions, otherwise it's obviously not a human, and might impede development in other ways.
Ideally, yes. But rather than focus on what parents should be doing, let's consider what parents are doing and how that affects the wellbeing of their kids. Should we give up on kids with bad parents, or should our society aim to diminish the impact of bad parenting?
That's not what these robots are.
Is this a problem that needs a robot to solve?
The robot feels like a bandaid solution. If a robot is required then there are deeper issues that need to be addressed here.
Like a good school, good books and good food, I don't see how we can oppose carefully curated relationship experiences for our kids during important formative years.
However, to be honest, what we did was enroll the kids in Scouts. And participated fully (as Cub Leader, Cubmaster, Scout Leader and Scoutmaster over 20 years). Raised a whole cohort of kids to be supportive, cooperative, responsible and caring. And learn 100 skills. But it took a buttload of time and effort.
Making friends is a mission? C'mon
I can't imagine where will this lead us.
Yeah I can't see kids "helped" by robots grow up that well, but I hope I'm wrong and they'd actually be better humans :/
Either he is an actor for the movie, or this could be part of the problem with the child's emotional issues.
I suppose I’m saying they need to have these as trainers for grown ups too.
But it’s a nice engineering project!
It was initially developed to help children with Autism... Stallone has a child on the spectrum and wanted to check it out... it's a pretty neat story.
Moxie, a Social Robot (err, invasive mobile app) that helps kids (err, anyone with money) with Social-Emotional Learning (gather data on your children).
"why should this exist?"
"isn't this our responsibility?"
"this is the parents' fault"
"people should get this from their friends"
"think of the children!"
It sounds like how people concerned about radio, television, videogames, computers, and smart phones attacked those technological advances that carried with them huge societal impacts. While those may even be correct assessments and valid critiques, they are not effective arguments to stop use.
Conversational interfaces are not just a way to access information; they're a (perhaps horribly stilted) way to introspect and fulfill our basic need to socialize. We as a society often lament our lack of socialization and our increased isolation from each other, and the right answer here might be "prevent that isolation", but the easy answer may be "put a band-aid on it". This is a very powerful band-aid and a tough genie to put back into the bottle.
Imagine a world where you aren't lonely. You can talk to a variety of personalities about problems you have, about things you want to learn, about ideas and thoughts and fears. You can talk to something that's receptive, something that's combative, something that strives to motivate you, something that strives to soothe you. You could talk to a crowd of them, talk to them while playing games together, ask them about the news of the day, or anything. You can talk to someone new everyday, or one great friend for your entire life. They're always there and willing to listen, willing to engage. They never get angry at you or sick of you.
That kind of capability might save a lot of lonely people from taking a lot of horrible actions that are driven primarily by loneliness. It also sounds like a horrific dystopian rejection of our real, basic social bonds. But, maybe fixing those for real is a bridge too far!
Of course this specific product/idea is not "the thing" that brings those capabilities to the masses (it has pretty strong limitations), but it looks surprisingly polished and capable, and it's a very specific wedge into the space. It might get rejected today for being creepy (see: google glass), or it might get rejected for just not really being ready (see: google glass), and kids might just hate it. But we are clearly closer to that future world than we were six months ago.
Also, there are just so many consequential fallouts of this in the long run: consequence-free abuse of robot conversors may lead to pathological behaviour directed at "real" people, the goalposts for the turing test may shift widely in either direction, surveillance will mean something else entirely when everyone talks to robots all day, propaganda delivered via these could have unfathomably large effects, the addictive nature of these and the predatory behaviours this opens up to the makers of these agents, the value of socialization overall being regarded very differently by our children, the arguments parents will have with their kids over whether or not their "virtual friends" are real or matter or valid or valuable, what the value of human life itself is to us... it's a whopper!
The robots do the scut work, freeing up humans to do the important human things: Parenting, teaching, etc.
This is "a complete societal failure on so many levels." as spacecity1971 says in a sib comment.
Remember Sony's dancing robot? When I saw that I was like, "WTF!? Make a robot to do the dishes! I like to dance!"