Barbie Gets a Brain

minstrelmike writes: Mattel is coming out with a Talking Barbie designed by a huge team and pre-scripted with thousands of responses controlled by an AI, with designs to be your best friend. The design team remembers the "Math is hard" debacle of the 1990s and if a girl asks if she's pretty, Barbie will respond, "Yes. And you're smart, too." If she asks if Barbie believes in God, she says a person's beliefs are personal. And suggests talking to grownups about some problems. The linked New York Times' article ("Barbie Wants to Get to Know Your Child") even discusses trying to avoid edited vids on YouTube by scripting out words such as "cockroach."

Comments

Unfortunately

[koan]

Humans still don't have a brain, who would give this to their child?

Each time, whatever someone said to Barbie would be recorded and transmitted via Wi-Fi to the computer servers of ToyTalk. Speech-recognition software would then convert the audio signal into a text file, which would be analyzed. The correct response would be chosen from thousands of lines scripted by ToyTalk and Mattel writers and pushed to Hello Barbie for playback

your childâ(TM)s voice sample and the start of a new "user profile" for a corporation.

And make believe occurs when?

[turning in circles]

It saddens me. This takes away a child's ability to put words in Barbie's mouth. It also helps parents abdicate the responsibility of answering the child's questions themselves. Why should a child turn to talking Barbie? Because, like the ipad, it keeps the parent free to ignore parenting a little bit more. Inevitable, I guess, but sad.

Re:And make believe occurs when?

[arth1]

This takes away a child's ability to put words in Barbie's mouth.

The way that kids use their fantasy less and less worries me too. We're turning them into consumers from an early age, not creators. And they don't figure out things anymore, they look them up.
They're trusting Friend Computer, and that worries me.

Re:"Yes. And you're smart, too."

[AmiMoJo]

Children don't understand the world, language, logic or the adult world. So we lie to them. We don't tell them they are kinda ugly, because unlike adults they can't handle the harsh truth. We are taking about very young kids who still play with dolls.

Similarly, we don't Trek them they are dumb. Realistically, at that age you can't really tell if they are anyway, unless they have severe learning difficulties. Some might be late bloomers, but really the biggest influence on their eventual academic performance is how much encouragement and participation in education they get at that age.