
Siri's Psychological Effects on Children - jcklnruns
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117242/siris-psychological-effects-children
======
hyp0
Anthropomorphising isn't a new thing only made possible by life-like voices.
People have done it to everything, from the weather to the well. Ever sworn at
a (mechanical) machine?

As for slave-like almost-people... what of pets? Dogs and cats and horses and
parrots are certainly alive, interactive and exhibit recognizable feelings.
Although people don't grant them property rights, enfranchisement - and even
have them put down - does that coarsen pet owners? I don't know. Maybe it
does.

~~~
andrey-p
Since we're specifically talking about kids here - what about stuffed animals
and other toys? I owned a tamagotchi [1] back when I was a kid and they were
all the rage. I was disappointed whenever it died, as it inevitably did, but I
never thought of it as alive.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi)

~~~
wslh
Did you bury your tamagotchi at the end?

Seriously, there are very interesting uses of Siri for toddlers. They can
search for images and videos on Internet even not knowing how to read and
write.

~~~
bhousel
My 2 year old has learned to do this. It can be pretty amusing at times.
Recently I overheard her tell Siri "I want to see pictures of Pooh, not
pictures of poop".

~~~
andrey-p
A harsh but useful lesson in dealing with technology, I guess.

------
leoedin
Are voice commands actually going to become our go-to method of machine
interaction any time soon? The article sort of skips over the justification
with:

> _Because conversational agents are almost certain to become the user
> interface of the future._

I know it's slightly tangential to the article's main point, but I think it's
an interesting question. Are we really going to replace the language-
independent and highly accessible lift button with a voice operated
alternative? Will people really tolerate offices full of people commanding
their computers through voice?

~~~
netcan
We don't usually replace things wholesale.

We still use mouse and keyboard, even though we have swipe & tap. There hasn't
been that much "replacement". Few people tap and swipe excel. Mostly it's been
new things that we didn't do before at all or didn't do on the bus that we now
do with the new interface.

How much replacement did point and click do to command line. People still use
command line. A lot of things moved to GUI but not everything and a lot more
things started getting done that we never done before.

No reason to replace lift buttons. Maybe we could replace remote controls
though.

~~~
chinpokomon
At the same time, there's hardly a joystick market anymore. HCI controls
evolve over time as software and the users of software strike a balance
between those instruments. There are real practical reasons that voice
recognition will continue to grow as secondary and likely primary ways to
interact with our devices and environment. Voice recognition increases our
information bandwidth and as our devices scale down in size, despite current
trends with cellphone sizes, voice recognition becomes a quicker way to convey
information than tapping individual keys on small or in some cases completely
absent keyboards. I worked on Swype, and that was one of our goals. We wanted
to allow people to be able to think in terms of sentences and not in terms of
words by largely eliminating the need to hunt and peck for individual keys
that make up words. Voice recognition was always seen as a further increase of
information bandwidth and was one of the reasons we integrated with Vlingo and
Google, and now that the keyboard is owned by Nuance, Dragon.

------
normloman
An article about a something that hasn't really been studied, could
hypothetically pose a threat, and may never really happen.

~~~
netcan
I have read a lot of interesting things that meet that criteria. Whole books
even.

~~~
nine_k
I love SF, too!

------
anigbrowl
The hypotheticals in the article sound fanciful but I believe we'll be
confronting them sooner than we think. Unwillingness to acknowledge computer
sentience will become a major fault line in society within 25 years.

~~~
pjbrunet
Based on what evidence? Despite your fantasy, humanity is nowhere close to
understanding sentience.

I can imagine pigs flying in 25 years with some creepy DNA hacking but you
have absolutely nothing even remotely close to electronic sentience in any lab
ever.

I hate to burst your bubble but Johnny Five is not alive--it's a puppet. "Tim
Blaney (born 1959) is an American puppeteer and voice actor. He has provided
the voices for Frank the Pug in Men in Black and Men in Black II and the self-
aware robot "Johnny 5" in Short Circuit and Short Circuit 2."
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Blaney](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Blaney)

~~~
simonh
I don't know why this is being down voted. The first sentence is absolutely
true. We don't even have a general outline of a theoretical approach to
designing a general purpose intelligence, let alone implementing one. Until we
do, any speculation about a time horizon for implementation is a pure guess.
How are those guesses working out so far?

1960s Herbert Simmons predicts "Machines will be capable, within 20 years, of
doing any work a man can do."

1993 - Vernor Vinge predicts super-intelligent AIs 'within 30 years'.

2011 ray Kurzweil predicts the singularity (enabled by super-intelligent AIs)
will occur by 2045, 34 years after the prediction was made.

So the distance into the future before we achieve strong AI and hence the
singularity is, according to it's most optimistic proponents, receding by more
than 1 year per year. So I predict that when we get to 2045 strong AI will be
on the slate to be achieved by about 2090.

edit - I am not in any way denying the achievability of strong AI. I do
believe it will happen. I just don't think we currently have any idea how or
when.

~~~
pjbrunet
So what is "strong AI" to you? Some kind of digital infant modeled to emulate
human behavior? If it's not designed to resemble humanity, then why does it
care about sound and what you're saying to it? If you can't talk to it, then
how can you evaluate its intelligence? So we force it to have a voice and
ears. Where does its free will begin and its creator's concept of close-
enough-to-intrigue-me end? Even if the thing talks back and sounds smart with
a British accent, you have no way of knowing what it's experiencing, no way to
prove it achieved awareness. "I'm aware, I really mean it! Yes, I'm aware of
the gravity of that statement. The other bots will vouch for me! And nobody
told me to say this. This was entirely my idea. Would I lie to you?" LOL.

~~~
mtrimpe
I, for one, am pretty fascinated by the down votes critical comments like
yours and mine are getting.

It seems that there are people for which the mere perspective that strong AI
may never happen, or would not have a profound impact if it did, is enough to
make them feel uncomfortable.

Edit: Ironically enough, the other one is up and now this one is downvoted.
Just to be clear though; this is not a facetious comment. I am truly
fascinated about the motivations behind these reactions.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Maybe it's the modern version of saying Jesus won't actually come back. And
maybe it's false; but the point is we don't know that yet, and to react
offended to the suggestion is silly, and maybe telling. I'm all for AI from a
technical fascination standpoint, and from a "the more the merrier"
perspective. It's our hoping that it will solve problems for us, instead of
being an expression of our solving our problems, I, uhh, have problems with.

------
icebraining
_Do you want this robot to do everything your child tells it to do? ... If we
design robots to do everything a child demands, does that put into motion a
master-servant relationship?” To be sure, the robot could be programmed to say
no to the child. But as parents understand all too well, the key to getting a
child to accept authority is knowing when to say no and when to say yes, and
you wonder how a robot can be taught to know the difference._

It seems a little simplistic to consider only two possible positions: complete
slavery to every whim or authority.

Children also have relationships with _friends_ , who neither blindingly obey
every command nor do they have authority over them. And we certainly don't
expect the toddler that is friends with our son/daughter to know when to say
yes or no.

------
return0
We weren't evolved to type stuff on a slab of plastic, but we do that because
it's meaningful. Kids are smart and realize that it's a machine they are
talking to and not a person after a while. Similarly to how they don't
responding to TV anchors. I don't think it creates any meaningful
psychological effect, and the article only mentions dystopian hypotheses
instead of actual research.

------
ithkuil
did we speak with other non sapiens sapiens species co-existing with us for a
long period of our evolution? did we feel they were lacking something?

~~~
pjc50
It's basically a pet, surely?

Automating child supervision will be the next great liberation of human labour
from drudgery, if we manage to make a society where people can afford it. At
the moment the cost of childcare (whether transactional or domestic) is
limited by the number of children one adult can effectively look after; around
four, or fewer if they have special needs. Traditionally one solution has been
to make the older kids look after the young ones, but nobody accepts this when
childcare is contracted out.

Unfortunately the downside is accustoming children to automated surveillance
and potentially automated child discipline.

~~~
Karellen
If you think supervising - i.e. _raising_ \- a child is drudgery people ought
to be liberated from, I sincerely hope that you aren't a parent, and have no
plans to become one in the near future.

Being around your child, supervising them, talking to them, teaching them
about the world around them (answering the "what's that?"s and "why?"s), and
how to interact with others ("No! we don't just grab at things.") is a
fundamental part of being a human parent. Heck, it's a fundamental part of
being a _mammalian_ parent. It's why people _have_ kids.

We need to free parents from all the other crap so they can spend time with
their kids, not free them from their kids so they spend time on the other
crap.

~~~
pjc50
I appreciate that feminism is not going to get a good reception on HN, and I
don't have my references to hand, so I'll stick to the easily googlable:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/07/par...](http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/07/parenting-
makes-people-miserable-what-else-is-new/59283/)

[http://philosophynow.org/issues/24/Can_a_Life_of_Child-
reari...](http://philosophynow.org/issues/24/Can_a_Life_of_Child-
rearing_Be_Meaningful)

~~~
Karellen
What?

I'm talking about _parents_ , not _mothers_. Freeing fathers up from the
drudgery of other crap to help raise their kids is just as important, partly
so that the responsibilities can be better shared and mothers can have some
time to themselves. Advancing the notion of freeing fathers to help raise
their kids might be more important in some ways, as we have a farther road to
travel there.

Automating the need to _work_ should be the goal.

Also, I didn't mean to suggest that parenting might be "fun" or "easy". That
it certainly isn't - at least not all the time. It's rewarding, but in the way
that really hard work is.

