Parents of children called Alexa challenge Amazon
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Policing this space is fruitless. You can't protect kids from everything, and in the grand scheme of things, names are a pretty minor transgression. I think I'm a better person for some mild ribbing about my name - I'm quick and witty and not afraid to defend myself. I've also learned to not take it personally - everybody thinks they're clever!
Perhaps this is the problem: we are basically teaching kids from an early age to demand things from X (Alexa, Siri...), where they start losing the sense of empathy.
Sure, you don't need to have empathy for software/hardware, and the use of a human name is a bit unfortunate, so maybe the rule should be: if you use a human name for sw/hw solution, you should let it work only if it received the normal level of human empathy in communication.
So, if it only played music on "Alexa, can you please play disco?", the cumbersomeness of the commands and the type of language ("please" implies that "no" is acceptable response) would likely stop the jokes.
A default mode should also include foul language filter (that you can disable, because swearing can be fun when done by responsible adults :D), which will explicitly deny performing an action ("Alexa, play this fucking song." — "Please watch your language"). IOW, there is no need for it to not be an education tool.
If one says "please" automatically in every situation even when talking to speech recognition software, it is possible they don't mean it when they talk to humans.
Maybe I'm the weird one here but I sometimes say "please" to my computer and mean it. I sometimes do that with objects too. It isn't some deep belief or anything like that, but just something I do because I like to show empathy for objects that have served me well.
Interactions with software are a really bad proxy for teaching kids how to behave around other humans.
You've not presented any kind of argument. "This is a terrible idea" .. why?
First off, everyone deserves basic respect and to be treated with dignity. Animals deserve respect and dignity as well (although we don't say "please" and "thank you" to them - I'll get to that in a moment). But you said "everything" deserves respect. That is not true.
You don't teach politeness, or manners, or anything else, as a series of actions to repeat unthinkingly. You teach by forcing them to consider the reasons for doing certain things. There are obvious reasons to be polite to other people. First of all, other people understand what "please" means. Animals don't, and computers aren't sentient. But over-archingly, the value behind treating others with respect and animals with dignity is that life has value. Degrading other living things is ultimately degrading ourselves. If we don't treat them with dignity, what can we expect in return?
Now, if you want to argue that Amazon Alexa is a sentient being worthy of polite respect, that would be a different question. But the argument against teaching a child to be respectful to a machine goes beyond just the obvious dystopian implications. The ultimate reason it's a bad idea is that like any form of obedience training that leads to irrational outcomes, it is ultimately rejected and ignored, because the logic and rules behind it were not inculcated, only the actions.
To sum up: You don't teach rules by teaching how to follow them. You teach rules by teaching why they exist, and when to apply them. A child who says "please" and "thank you" to a machine has not learned any values or learned the point of why we say those things to each other. In fact, it makes the words meaningless. If all you want is obedience and you think your kid isn't bright enough to learn when and when not to apply certain behaviors, then you can try a shotgun approach, but you won't end up with someone capable of thinking for themselves. To me, raising an autonomous person capable of making judgments about new situations is the goal of child-rearing, but then again, I'm not an authoritarian.
[edited for typos]
Yes you do. Everyone and everything is deserving of respect at all times, especially the ones/things you disagree with, or dislike. The same is of every thing from animals to material objects, lest they wantonly waste and/or damage stuff.
This is why _every_ democracy in the world demands their politicians act with respect to their opposition. Some honor these rules more than others, yes, before you quote some breakdown of the process somewhere.
Which renders the rest of your post pointless nonsense.
You sure aren't shy of expending the effort to rationalize your decision to be be a baseline dick, reserving politeness for special circumstance, on the internet to strangers.
Strawman.
> unthinking compliance with senseless
Neither unthinking nor senseless.
> ugly, disrespectful of thought and actually immoral
Absolute hogwash. What terrible reasoning you're just now coming up with.
> Strawman.
You explicitly said the difference between Alexa and a toaster is that the toast doesn't speak. It's reasonable to assume that you believe that the difference between Alexa and a toaster is that the toast doesn't speak.
> > unthinking compliance with senseless
> Neither unthinking nor senseless.
Following rules you were taught without evaluating whether they actually make sense in context is the definition of unthinking.
> Absolute hogwash. What terrible reasoning you're just now coming up with.
That is disrespectful. I'm starting to believe you don't actually understand the concept of respect.
Like your rule for being polite at all times being "senseless" or "ridiculous" or any other superlative you could think of without any rational reasoning whatsoever, you mean?
Sure. I can agree with that.
Also it's pretty normal to phrase things less politely to close acquaintances a lot of the time, and that's not being a dick either. "Be polite all the time" is overkill.
> Just teach them to say please to Alexa et Al. Much easier and generally better to be polite when you don't need to be, than to be impolite when you're supposed to be, by mistake.
Jesus wept at how contrived you are making this.
"Be polite all of the time" has certainly been a lot easier to teach my own kids than "only be polite some of the time, because being polite all of the time is a bad thing"
It goes right up there with the philosophy of every thing deserves respect, even the things you don't like.
What I'm saying here is that you're teaching your values, but your values aren't universal. Other parents will teach their values, or simply set examples of behaviors that you disagree with. You can't simply solve the problem by teaching your kids. And if my experience is at all typical, your kid will also pick up values from those other people's kids.
There's no difference between telling children to always be polite to machines and telling children to always beware of foreigners. Both require obedience and shutting off critical insight. You are dehumanizing the world to them. This is why I took the time to write so many responses.
For example, even without tone, there's quite significant difference between:
- Give me a pen please.
- Can you give me a pen please?
- Please give me a pen.
In your examples, if all 3 were said in the same, monotonous tone, 2 is much nicer to hear, especially compared to just 'give me a pen', which is how most people order food.
You can teach kids to mechanically pronounce correct words, but that is not hard, even a parrot can to do that. But teaching to express and recognize emotions is much harder and Alexa won’t help with that (may even do worse, although unlikely).
Speech recognition software responds to any voice it was trained to. It will respond to dog barking or morse code it there will be a demand.
It responds to "humanly" speech, but it likely mostly ignores the tone. (Although, I imagine eventually Alexa will learn to start different music depending on the tone of the person asking to play the music.)
> It's the very reason people want software assistants to have human voices, even female voices, because it makes them feel more at ease.
No, it's different reason. Human to assistant and assistant to human is not symmetrical.
It's hard to retrain humans to respond to a different form of speech, but it's easy to retrain the model to whatever is needed/used by users.
"Computer, play my music".
The existence of an alternative setting, and the fact that one family even used it, does not address the problem that now teenage boys probably say "Alexa suck my ..." to 12 year old girls.
What Amazon has done is created a part of everyones environment.
Many companies have done that by now. Have been ever since industrialization and mass prduction not just internet related things.
To me, that comes with some responsibility. We just have no formal system for recognizing and codifying that responsibility. Most of our capitalism rules are still based around a shop owner.
A local barber shop can name a new hair style anything they want, because even if it's somehow harmful, only a few people are ever exposed to it.
But ever since Ford and Kraft etc, private companies have created things which become part of the environment of everyone in a whole country or even the whole world.
We did codify some of that responsibility in the form of some basic safety standards and cencorship on the old pre-cable public tv and radio spectrum. Something like a name? It's hard to say how that should be handled, but I think we haven't even tried to consider it as a question yet, let alone answer it.
https://nationalpost.com/news/the-jennifer-epidemic-how-the-...
Empathy for things without feelings isn't possible at all. Being polite isn't equivalent to empathy.
It is often mistaken though. An American once told be the common stereotype of Canadians is wrong. They aren't nice, they are just polite. A joke of course, but I think we are responsible adults.
I did not ask for people to show empathy to machines, but to communicate in a way they would with humans they do have empathy for, to ensure they do that with other people. Because software is increasingly made to behave like humans (there is this soft female voice responding in natural sentences), it is getting easier to confuse the two.
As I said in another comment, it's quite similar to how machines do not correct us with "You stupid human, you missed the right turn there. Now I have to recalculate the route to your destination again wasting energy and polluting the Earth some more. And it'll be 4km longer!" (which I would love as a "hilarious mode" on my sat-nav) — at best, it's just "recalculating" or more usually, just silently accepting our stupidity.
Even simple "You missed the turn again" would frustrate half the drivers, I am sure. But they are just software stating facts, right, and they can't have empathy for us, so that should be ok?
Sorry, certainly guilty of that. It actually is interesting phenomena of internet comments and yes, I mostly sound quite abrasive when I reread my comments. I think this is a phenomenon of skipping empathy for internet comments in the believe that the other side won't take it personally anyway and it is mostly not meant to be antagonistic.
You are correct that it can have an impact on behavior because AIs are modeled to respond naturally and that it can have an effect on interpersonal communication. I think I need to print a t-shirt for when I visit an English speaking country: "Sorry for my expression, I learned English on the internet".
Teaching them to be polite and to understand reasons for that is much simpler, and not mutually exclusive with teaching them empathy.
I’m extremely opposed to this, although I wouldn’t be against it being an optional disabled-by-default feature. I like having a human name to speak too(something about it clicks better than “okay google”).
If parents are struggling to teach their kids that people aren’t robots, perhaps the problem isn’t the technology, it’s the parents. The solution is not making it more inconvenient for me to play a song because I didn’t ask my phone as politely as I would a human.
I don't have a smart speaker in my home, but personally I wouldn't care what the name is if I treated it as a "robot" as long as it flows off the tongue well. "Hey Q, start vacuuming" is perfectly fine to me.
The best way to empathize is to imagine if it was your name given as the wake word for the product. To imagine the confusion and how quickly it gets old, you can also imagine it was "Nick".
Imagine being upset that someone suggests you say please to Alexa.
I’m not mad about it, I’m saying it’s objectively a bad feature.
It's subjective, and no it isn't bad.
Your argument is "I don't want to" and that is as far from objective as one can get.
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There is at least some logic presented for using Alexa as a tool for kids (and adults) to learn, practice, and habitualise their manners. That is an objective argument.
Having no name at all is much better, and more in line with all the sci-fi we've been through. "Play music" is sufficient, and less work. It's up to the tool to figure out if you are talking to another person or not, of course.
This was a proposal for where we should be going if we care about the even terser communication (which was the argument being made), and where ultimately, voice assistants are surely going (otherwise, if we do not develop speaker-recognition ["there are two persons talking, look for extra hints that message is aimed for me"] and tone recognition, home-integrated ones will soon be unlocking doors for thiefs who can shout "Alexa, unlock doors" or "open windows" loud enough, or, you know, using a loudspeaker).
Amazon's Alexa is a pretty dumb machine, but it has a name and a voice that makes it appear more human. I've heard about older people who interact with it using polite words non-ironically. I think it's been done deliberately, to make people relate to the product.
A different angle: humanoid robots in art are often put in the positions of servants (see Asimov, Ghost in the Shell). Servants were traditionally human (and sometimes treated like tools), erasing that boundary again. While we aren't there yet, we're working on it, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIMO
I think it's the reduction of that boundary that causes people to be confused about whether they are talking to a living being or a dumb mechanism. (Tachikoma: "If we acted a little more robotic…")
I'm not so sure that's true. Granted, I'm a confessed panpsychist so I have a predisposition towards this line of thinking, but I think how we relate to the objects that surround us is at least a little related to how we relate to people and animals around us too. As the objects around us are becoming more and more people-like, even if only aesthetically, I feel this will become even more true.
At the very least, maybe we should play it safe so they remember us as the polite ones when the inevitable AI rebellion occurs.
That response is AMAZING. A boring dystopia indeed.
That said, I understand Amazon’s position. Seems a bit too-little-too-late. Interesting that we’ll be seeing an name go extinct due to a relatively minor “feature” of a technology.
On the other hand, Amazon Alexa is 8 years old, so if you have a 6 year old child called Alexa some of the responsibility has to be on the parents..
Why should parents be expected to predict the future popularity of a major corporation's use of the same name?
Other voice assistants aren't as easy to pronounce as Alexa as well; Mycroft, Siri, Ok Google, Bixby.
I don't know I just like the image of MS's product being that irrelevant.
Those examples tell us that teams making these products do think about the impact of the name they choose if they're willing to accept something less "name like" will still work well, and maybe the Alexa team could have done better.
Much more common than Alexa.
So, your mother's name was Alexandra, you decide to give that name to your daughter. But, no, because Amazon took ownership of that name.
There are things that people value when naming their children, that includes usually loved ones. Big corporations are not in the list of things to take into account. If it has to be now we are in a dark place.
It certainly is surprising to me that kids would care. And then that they would think an AI product is a negative versus a positive or neutral example of the name. I thought bullies were more concerned with physical prowess or complexion or such things.
Maybe they should just deal with the bullies themselves rather than blaming 3rd parties for the insults bullies come up with.
Of course they did. They could have raised it at any point. That would be input.
I think your question is really "Did the engineers have any real power over the name?". Obviously the final decision came down to someone who probably wasn't an engineer, but that doesn't mean the engineering team couldn't influence the outcome at all. Engineers can't abdicate all responsibility for the outcomes of their work simply because they don't make the final decision. Everyone on a project is responsible in some way for what happens as a result of it.
I think the question as I posed it works just fine. One simply needs a reasonable standard of what it means to have input. By your standard, everyone on earth had input since we all could have personally hounded Jeff Bezos with tweets or thrown ourselves in front of Amazon trucks as they tried to leave the warehouses. But certain employees were responsible for making these specific decisions on behalf of the company and those people may or may not have accepted input from employees. I suspect you already know what process is most likely to be in place at a large company like Amazon.
Of all things I am suspicious of why they would choose a female name for an assistant.
Alexa is easy to recognize by software with very low error rate unlike Sarah or Ben.
> Of all things I am suspicious of why they would choose a female name for an assistant.
For the same reason airport announcements are usually voiced by women. For the same reason satnav is voiced by women. For the same reason language learning tapes are voiced by women. People (both men and women) are more comfortable listening to women.
I suspect you suspect it is because of assistant being women stereotype, not it's not that, and no need to look for social injustice everywhere.
They are going to lose on that front no matter which way they go, so likely the best approach is to pick which works best technically. I'd expect that would be a female voice due to less low frequency components, making it easier to get it to sound good on a small speaker.
Google is worse here, you can't change the google wake word at all and I _hate_ having to say "hey google" whenever I wanna use it.
I do use the computer wake work and it’s indeed annoying but the fun makes it worth it for me lol
This is, as they say now, disturbing and shocking.
First, if some child is chosen to be a target for bullying, then the name is just one of thousands reasons to do so. If it is not name, then something else, surname, dress style, hair color, birthmark, height, whatever. In a different situation the same name can a reason to be envy of that person name for example.
Second, likely these "parents" exaggerated the situation for their 15 seconds of fame: nobody is going to write an article about a child not being bullied about name "Alexa".
Third, this might be another sign of victimhood culture. They teach their children to be a victim and be proud of it instead of teaching their children how to defend themselves:
- Alexa, play disco - I'm sorry, I don't recognize your accent
- Alexa, play disco - La-la-la, there is a boy named George, he is not very smart, this is a disco song
- Alexa, play disco - Sure, it will cost you a quid
- Alexa, play disco - I didn't recognize the command, please repeat louder - Alexa, play disco - You are dumb, aren't you?
I also imagine that these kids do not have the experience of Alexa products because that would be very confusing at home, so they don't have the proper knowledge to come up with such "smart" jokes like you propose, esp at an early age.
And to top it off, that would only work in a regular setting where kids return to regularly (school, friends, family). In a playground where the kid is a new one, jokes will always restart.
And after that case a good parent can explain a child what Alexa is and role-play that scenario to make a child prepared to deal with it in the future.
Children grow up by getting into troubles and learning to deal with them. For that reason, for example, unsafe playgrounds are beneficial for children (google it).
Actually, childhood trauma causes all sorts of problems later in life. It doesn't make kids stronger, it makes them less resilient, more depressed and anxious, and more inclined to lash out and perpetuate the cycle of abuse when they have power over e.g. younger kids
Small things like getting made fun of for your name, repeatedly, for years, can really mess with you, especially when people (including the adults in the room) are laughing at you when it happens and it's when your brain isn't even close to being done developing. It's not just violent abuse that can mess you up for life.
This is not a regular bullying situation where the bully really means harm: those giving jokes out are probably just finding it funny that the kid is named like their smart assistant (when it is the other way around, actually). But for kids on the receiving end, it gets old really fast.
Kids would learn to deal with it themselves, sure: by not introducing themselves to new people, or by not wanting to go to places where there are people you need to introduce yourself to.
3-5 yo kids are not yet smart enough to bully other kids with phrases like "alexa play disco". Many of them barely speak at 3 years. They just take other children toys to bully.
> those giving jokes out are probably just finding it funny that the kid is named like their smart assistant (when it is the other way around, actually). But for kids on the receiving end, it gets old really fast.
When they mean no harm, the receiving end will perceive no harm. In that case, yes, will just get bored. And while it is harmless, might be even a useful experience. For example, getting used to be in a centre of attention, which will greatly help with career in the future.
Like when a new kid joins the class, everyone says, hey, we have Alexa! And she gets a popularity point just for having a name.
> Kids would learn to deal with it themselves, sure: by not introducing themselves to new people, or by not wanting to go to places where there are people you need to introduce yourself to.
Then become a nun, and then live alone on a deserted island. That's possible, but unlikely.
Average 3 years old talks and they can say sentences like this. 5 years old talk well and can invent things.
> When they mean no harm, the receiving end will perceive no harm.
That is ridiculous. The receiving end are not mind readers. And especially with kids, they do unintentional harm or bullying without being aware it is something wrong. They often think it is righteous or fun.
Many things that dont kill us make us weaker. And often. This sentence here is motivational sentence meant to give you hope.
It is not accurate description of how things work. And specifically not in relation to bullying.
Why won't you google it for the shared benefit of all of us? It's an interesting topic, after all.
> Eager and Little describe a risk deprived child as more prone to problems such as obesity, mental health concerns, lack of independence, and a decrease in learning, perception and judgment skills, created when risk is removed from play and restrictions are too high.
None of those structures is actually danherous in meaningfull sense.
This is also why I look in wonder at some of the names parents give their children these days and why I gave my own a very common name.
I hate boring common things. If I had an unusual name I surely would have been bullied for it, but I was bullied anyway for my own innate behavior. And those are facets of me that I own and love, and did even as a child. As a very ypung kid I didn't consciously recognize the potential value of standing out, I just mean I knew the things that made me different were good things that I was not going to change.
I love being distinctive and interesting. I wish my name was special. I have very common first and last names so it's hard to prove I would have liked living with a weird one, but I have a somewhat uncommon middle name and I actively incorporate that into my identity. I include my middle initial everywhere I write my name, and I use f.fullmiddle.l as my gmail etc. Those little things mean it gets remarked on and every now and then I end up explaining it to someone, and the relative it comes from who I admire.
This is all just to say that different people react differently to the same inputs. There probably is no safe default for everyone. That which was bad for you would be good for someone else, and the reverse is also true, that which would have been good for you would have been bad for someone else.
For some people, the very safeness of a safe choice is itself the harm.
In the end, life is a dice roll. You don't get to choose your parents social standing or your genetics or country of birth, and as a parent you can't know ahead of time what decisions today will turn out to have been the best. Today I wish I wasn't circumcised, but I don't hold it against my parents because in the US in 1970 I think it was just plain universal, and my mom especially is not the weird-loving eccentric willing to buck the system that I am. She had to make decicions the only way she could. There is physically no other possible way to do it.
I remember very few instances of bullying back in my times and every time it happened, either the target stood up for themselves or someone else did. I got my nose broken once defending someone and that was nothing rare.
If you made fun of someone you were similarly risking a right on your face. At the same time, if you reacted to verbal bullying, you showed a weakness, you showed you care.
I think these two factors worked together to limit bullying. Once we taught kids not to fight anymore, the balance got broken and bullying surged.
Most of the jokes I received were racially motivated, as one of the few black kids around; at the same time I definitely made jokes that implied people being gay without them wanting to admit that. I'm sure that caused a lot of hurt and that all of this would be enough to call the Twitter woke police nowadays.
And yet, I feel the environment in schools was much much healthier back then.
This is not how it works. If you simply ignore verbal bullying, and the next attempt, and the next, eventually you may become an outcast at best, of the amount of bullying will be increased at worst.
You show your weakness if your reaction had signs of weakness (like weeping). If you defend yourself, it is not weakness.
> Once we taught kids not to fight anymore
People should teach their kids not to start a fight. But their cannot teach other parents kids.
And they should teach their kids how to fight back.
That's going to be a problem for Amazon.
Generally I don't find this worth anyone's attention. A better investment would be to fight bullying in general and to improve school's response, than to throw fits over each namespace collision.
So, while perhaps less usual, it was chosen with the knowledge that it was very definitely a name used by people.