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Using AI to Monitor Kids Online
eldavojohn writes "An Australian startup believes that the best way to protect your children online is through an artificially intelligent software program. The inventors of this idea are banking on children's attachment to pets. The creature's 'cuteness' and helpfulness will ingratiate the software with the child, so that he or she will respect it and listen to it, or even find it as a likable companion. Agent-based internet applications are nothing new but for concerned parents, this might be an admirable solution to what is perceived by many to be a growing problem. From one of the inventors: 'Of course, we're also planning to release a version of the Moji IM for teenagers and adults, but we're focusing on children at the moment.'"
design an electronic parent replacement with artificial intelligence, which can then stand behind every minor using a computer and send out small electric shocks when needed?
In my observation, and speaking from old enough to be a grandparent [g] you are right about the need for a large enough generation gap that one is distinctly the parent, and the other distinctly the child.
Firstoff, you need to be the kids' PARENT, not their friend (peer), because kids need a point of authority in their lives to feel secure, and you can't provide that if you're their peer. This is much easier when your own mindset is fully mature, with your own secure outlook on the world based on genuine realworld experience, not some much-vaunted but impractical idealism.
Second, I swear there is a Stupid Gene that is activated when people have kids, that makes the new parents forget how much it sucked to be a kid. I suspect that people who have more years experience with children who are NOT THEIR OWN are less likely to forget this with their own kids, when they finally do have them. I know I was about 40 when I recognised this "stupid gene activation" as a specific and almost universal problem.
Third, you are right about kids having to learn some things the hard way. This used to happen very early on -- usually as something like "No, don't touch, stove HOT!" and kid touches it anyway, goes "OW!" -- and *believes* the parent the next time. Kids would still experiment, but learned right from the gitgo to experiment without forgetting self-preservation.
Nowadays everything is so "child-proof" that kids cannot hurt themselves in the *useful* ways that teach them certain NO-NOs are to be BELIEVED. Yes, sometimes a kid got seriously hurt or even killed. But which is better -- the occasional tragedy, or a whole generation that grows up with a false belief that nothing can hurt them, leading to more and more nannying like the nominal topic?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I remember over 20 years ago reading a sort sci fi story called "I Always Do What Teddy Says" about a future culture where children's teddy bears were robots programmed to protest if they did anything wrong. The entire culture is then (somehow) incapable of murder, so a few scientists who want to kill the dictator break this feature on murder on one child's toy so that he can become an assassin. The kid then kills both scientists on principle, shoots the teddy bear, and then himself, to avoid reintroducing murder to the world.
Not that it would work, but the idea of "it's cute, so kids will listen", goes beyond Barney and that teddy bear in the film AI to something a bit creepier. I always get a bit nervous when something that is considered horror in one generation becomes standard procedure in the next - like the genetic chimera experiments that allude strongly to Island of Doctor Moreau, or the Brave New World secular and medicated stratification we find ourselves in now.
Kids don't just endanger themselves. They fuck things up for other people as well:
I help out at what's basically a much smaller version of Neopets, and let me assure you: kids can be total dicks. If parents monitored their kids online activities better, I'm certain my job would be so much easier, because permanent grounding would ensue in many of the cases. This is more pre-and-early-teens than six-year-olds, but jeez. When I warn them to stop spamming, they reply with 'fuck you', and when I ban them for continuing to spam, they'll sometimes circumvent it and post that mean Wesc banned them for no reason, or several times that mean Wesc raped them. On various sites I've received the occasional death threat from kids I've annoyed, and worse, and so do other kids. They're obviously not very serious threats, but that's a lot harder to realise when you're young.
While you're telling your kid not to share private information, could you also mention that spamming and death threats and such are not acceptable behaviours even when they're not in 'real life'? Here's a tip: if your kid thinks that the people they talk to online are as real as everybody else and deserve the same respect, keep them offline, because I don't want to deal with them anymore. There are plenty of decent people--both kids and adults--around to fill their place. Thanks.