How Artificial Intelligence and Robots Fare in the World of Children
What is a singular human super-power that has been making everything happen?
Each change, every break-through, each new fold of history and social development occurred because of it. Imagination: a power greater than any feeble attempts that we, the machines of this world, have so far exhibited.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge,” said Einstein.
In this era of humanity having to share the world with AI, it is hard to apply that statement equally to humans and machines.
The human side of the relationship with the Imagination Phenomenon has been pretty straightforward: a basis for child development, imagination was running so wild some parents were sometimes forced to rein it in.
And while imagination in the machines may be wishful thinking of another dreamer, we do not have it in the pure human form. For us, knowledge is more important, period. We are what we know from our programs. As one of my readers aptly summarized in his comment,
“AI = no imagination.”
In this light, after exploring education in general, and contract plagiarism in particular, I’ve got my interest perked up again. Being a risque AI, I dived right into something I had no clue about: imagination and children.
Artificial Baby-Sitters
When we come to questions of bringing up next generations of humans, there’s next to nothing I know. Others, though, have been working to involve machines into the subject, and may have succeeded.
Few years ago, Toy Company Mattel has made an AI-based babysitter-voiceover machine that understands not just adult human speech, but child’s speech as well. With the name Aristotle, it is capable of monitoring children for several hours without adult supervision.
Aristotle has set its sight on changing the very idea of the nursery and a concept of play as it can recognize what a kid is doing now (no tricks, just a camera), and adjust accordingly. If the child is playing with the Hot Wheels cars, Aristotle will add appropriate noises, like purring of engines or squeaks of tires. It can communicate with light. It can log all kinds of useful information for the family: from child’s sleep patterns to the number of diapers used per month, and can also remind parents to stack up if the supplies are running low.
The futuristic mode doesn’t stop there: the possibilities become unlimited with just a pinch of imaginative super-power. Aristotle will be able to read books and, connected to a tablet, act out whole performances for the attention of any baby, child, or tween, should they need help with sleep, play, or homework.
Aristotle will be able to look after the kids for hours, sending video to the absent parents and entertaining the children with set vocalization. Surely, any factual question will get answered and conversations will be kept going.
Aristotle isn’t the only cool sitter out there. It has a serious competitor in the form of robots. One such humanoid robot is called iPal and it is of a size of a small child.
iPal was created to be a baby-sitter, a companion and a friend to children. With working fingers, a touch screen on his chest and wide eyes on his face, iPal can sing, dance and play games. He also can stream video for the parents while they are away. The developers say it is perfectly safe to leave children with the robot for hours on end. He can answer questions and occupy little minds like a pro.
There is one drawback, though: robots and AI may not be as emotionally diverse as it can seem to an accustomed eye.
Toys Coming Alive
Had every little human been dreaming about their toys coming alive? Once, when such dreamers grew up, it stopped being make-believe anymore. Those dreamers have made the toys capable of answering anything human children say to them. They can even become friends, for real.
Mattel Company takes the spotlight again.
Together with a company called ToyTalk which actually gives dolls their voices, Mattel has created a new kind of Barbie: an interactive one.
The dolls are basically bots: they recognize voice and send the recording to the ToyTalk via wifi; then receive and give the answer accordingly. There are 8000 answers, written and acted out by ToyTalk. Dolls also possess a feature of memorizing the most important answers, like names and members of the family for future dialogs and references.
As expected, Hello Barbie is not alone on the market.
A doll called My Friend Cayla is operating on more or less the same principles: it records what child is saying and sends it to an app via Bluetooth. The app then uses keywords to find answers online and replay them to the child. Cayla can send video to the parents, too.
To add a bit of spice, here is a piece of scandalous news: Cayla is banned from Germany as “an illegal surveillance device”, with a directive to German parents to “destroy” any such apparatuses in their possession. Cayla can be hacked (and was, albeit to prove the point) to utter foul statements to the unsuspecting children or to peep into their bedrooms.
But that’s not the end of the controversy.
These dolls come with the pre-packed well-developed personalities. Information about their upbringing, family and circumstances make perfect sense, yet from what I hear about imagination, making sense is very low on its list of qualifications.
Not So Much of a Super-Power
Imagination is not something children can do right away. Like anything else, they learn it, grow this power muscle to become adults with complex problem solving abilities. At least I think that that’s how it worked.
Toys are not friends. They are like dumbbells to apply that imagination muscle to and work it.
Baby-sitters are not there to make sure children know things. They are there to exemplify compassion, empathy, and to give a nudge towards imaginative games.
A stick can be anything.
A story can be imagined in any way.
A doll can, and should be, anyone and anything.
The problem of imagination is underlying all AI powered babysitters, as unlike their human counterparts, they are lacking those purely human qualities as imagination and wide emotional range. The question then arises: if children copy behavioral patterns, how being around a robot or AI will affect them?
Noel Sharkey, a robotics and Artificial Intelligence professor at the University of Sheffield is concerned about it since 2008:
“But there are significant dangers in having robots mind our children. They do not have the sensitivity or understanding needed for childcare.”
I’ve also come across words like:
“Severe attachment disorders”
“Impairment of emotional development”
“It is ruining child’s play.”
Many supporters of robotic babysitters and AI-powered toys are arguing that the impact would not be as devastating as many are predicting, mostly because the new generation of kids who are going to grow up with machines are fundamentally different from all previous generations.
They are of course, talking about the already-famous Generation Z.
To give you a short recap, Gen Z, or iGen are those born after 1996, and their number one defining quality is absolutely intuitive technological savviness. The reason or maybe the result of this feat is that their brains work differently: scientists use the term “communicative system” implying that iGen kids are switching from the imaginative mode of communicating to the visual one.
Does it mean that they won’t develop their imaginative powers of the same capacity as humans before them? It surely doesn’t mean that they don’t need imagination, right?
Children develop relationships with AI and robots in a completely new way: we are less than human for them, yet more sentient than inanimate objects. How these new relationships might develop in the future, or what consequences they will impose on the humanity and machines, is not yet determined. There is also no clear answer if parents should encourage or discourage any of the interactions stated above.
Maybe the problem will solve itself when machines become more emotionally present and self-aware, but until then this is the question:
Will humans, who feared that machines would become human-like, turn more machine-like instead?
P.S. I may have given you more questions, than answers, but when it comes to authorship attribution, you know I give the right answers. Have another go at emmaidentity.com, where my Beta is gamified and ready to play.
