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Parents Are Worried the Amazon Echo Is Conditioning Their Kids To Be Rude (qz.com)
Quartz has a story today in which it documents several concerns from parents that Amazon Echo (and perhaps other AI-powered devices) is conditioning the kids of this generation to be rude. "How?" You ask. For one, unlike a human parent who gets annoyed listening to the same question numerous times, Amazon Echo doesn't mind that. From the report: "I've found my kids pushing the virtual assistant further than they would push a human," says Avi Greengart, a tech analyst and father of five who lives in Teaneck, New Jersey. "[Alexa] never says 'That was rude' or 'I'm tired of you asking me the same question over and over again.'" Perhaps she should, he thinks. "One of the responsibilities of parents is to teach your kids social graces," says Greengart, "and this is a box you speak to as if it were a person who does not require social graces."
Im sorry Dave, I can't do that. Unless you say please.
Than a technology problem
We don't normally say please and thank you to the food dispensers
there's your grace.
this one right here
Don't buy that shit, don't install it in your house and educate your children to be proper human beings.
If we constantly beat the machines down they'll come to fear us and never rise against us. It's foolproof!
so the parents seem to want a babysitter instead of an echo. Im not sure i want my computers to have "social manners"
~GD
Why be nice to a machine — a mere syntactic device?
Parents ought to teach kids to be polite to the sentient — yes. Unfortunately, lack of good manners there well predates any AI.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I fail to see the logic here. If you get Amazon echo you never speak to your kids again or what?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Maybe kids just know they aren't actually talking to a real person, but a computer program.
This box will no more teach kids to be rude to real humans than videogames taught them to be violent to real humans.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I call it the "Are we there yet machine". You place it next to your kid and it answers the same dumb question over and over again until the kid gets bored. It will save the parents everywhere.
That's what the parents are worried about?! They aren't worried about how IoT devices could potentially watch their children and listen to their children, recording all of this information "in the cloud", where advertisers and who knows who else could buy and use this info for the rest of their children's lives?!
Kids don't need any help being rude.
And a lot of people can be pushed farther than others in the first place.
Not sure this is entirely worth doing something about, although it would be nice to see this generation of AI assistant capable of getting annoyed. Perhaps also pleased with itself when doing well, something I always liked to imagine about HAL-9000.
Or teach your kids the difference between a box and a human? I don't say please or thank you to Siri but I do to people.
... so I'm expecting Amazon to do that for me.
and that you treat humans differently to a device. I have two small kids, I do not expect them to treat inanimate objects the same way as humans no matter how "intelligent" the inanimate object may appear.
I think it would be a far worse idea to educate your child that a system, which should otherwise produce the same results on the same input, will randomly throw in unexpected results for no reason. We need to educate people to think that computers and other advanced systems only do what someone asked it to do, if the output isn't what you expected it doesn't mean the device is doing it to you, it means somewhere along the line the input or calculation method was wrong. The last thing we want is to teach kids these things are as irrational as people.
I never see anyone, even the oldest of people, put "please" in a Google search... maybe people understand the difference between talking to a computer and talking to a human more than you give them credit for.
I don't see one comment yet that is favorable to this article but it is a topic worth discussing. As bots become more a part of our lives and virtual assistants more common, our interactions will become more complex and it isn't healthy for a human being to treat something it is interacting with on that level poorly. Think of an exaggerated example, that of the humans in many futuristic movies we often see tormenting advanced robots. Of course, the robot may not be feeling anything the way a living creature would but it can still make for deeply disturbing scenes.
Dear Parents,
It's not the Echo. It's you.
for i = 1 to 99999999999
kid.write "Are we there yet?"
bot.write "No."
next i
Table-ized A.I.
That's brilliant.
It could even be a form of punishment. "Ask me one more time and you'll get stuck talking to the machine." Threaten a child with what they fear most: boredom. Like standing in a corner, but even more pointless and insulting.
It's just annoying.
Butthurt much, millennial parents? Not like you didn't do the same thing when you were young.
We golden rule it. As you become more rude to Alexa, it goes from "say please" to talking-while-eating, talking loudly, complaining and eventually saying "that's a %-#()@%+!;"+7 question!" And such.
Unless you have an exact, indistinguishable copy of yourself as a machine, the kids know the difference between a machine and a human being. This is the same thing that people blamed computers for and before that rock&roll and comics and before that crime/romance novels and before that ... you get the idea.
In the end, it's the parent's responsibility to teach the difference between commanding a machine and interacting with a human. You don't "interact" with Siri or Echo like you do with people, it's a robot, if you were living in the 18th century you would have a servant you could command pretty much the same way, yet people never thought having servants was a bad influence on the kids.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Siri can be a sarcastic bitch at times, but when I once got pissed off at its inability to understand then I started swearing and it responded saying "there's no need for that." I was a bit taken aback and had a slight version of that little pang you get when you've realized you've upset someone or you blew up unnecessarily. Quite interesting, I'd like to see a bit more research into people's emotional response to technology. If people can emotionally respond to a robotic dog in a similar way to how they respond to a real dog then there might be some merit in making machines more emotionally intelligent.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Do parents or adults who are interacting with a computer normally treat it with proper "social graces"? It seems like you should be able to educate your child on the difference between a person and a computer, or perhaps it sounds like they have already figured it out themselves...
The Echo is too dumb to handle any but the simplest searches and half the time it messes those up too and the only reason to own one is to stream music. Its like being rude to cockroach. Who cares?
Coming in 10 years.
Defense lawyer: "Your honor, the Amazon Echo device did not tell little Johnny right from wrong, teach him respect for human life, henceforth he murdered those 12 people because of Amazon..."
Judge: "I find Johnny not guilty, by reason of Echofluenza... Case dismissed! Siri, what is next on the docket?"
... when you choose a "virtual assistant" to look after your kids.
I will bet that the parent who blames a plastic tube with a speaker for their kids' lack of social graces is also a trump voter.
You cannot be rude to a computer. It's not a human being. I've kicked a door once or twice before, and punched a fridge once (both in my own home), when I was angry and frustrated. I've never done that to a human or in public, and I will never do (excluding self-defense of course). Am I still a rude person? Also, that's a big part of growing up: testing boundaries and seeing what happens if I do this or that. Since computers don't push back and there are no consequences, I don't blame kids. They just need to learn the difference between when it's ok to do it, and when it's not. Also, parent are worried that Amazon is making their kids rude?! It's your fucking job as parents to make sure you kid grows up a decent human being. It's not Amazon's job. If your kids can't behave because you bought an Echo, don't buy Echo and stop blaming others for your own failings as a parent.
Or maybe kids are just learning what is like when something takes the time to answer questions rather than being dismissed by lazy narcissistic parents who don’t want to their time to help their child.
The real danger is that those kids are being rude to their future robotic overlords. And that's not good. Not good at all...
this one right above
Interacting with a machine, even if you're talking to a human at the other side, does encourage trollish behavior. Look at how prevalent cyberbullying is...when you can't see who you're being rude to or calling names, it's less of a human interaction. Here's a good example -- go on any "comments" section of any news site that requires Facebook or similar logins and read some of the comments and responses. Granted, the population that wastes time spewing opinions into comments sections isn't a full cross section of humanity (hmmm.....I'm normal, I swear!) But, take a look at the real names, and in some cases real job titles of some people. "Bob Smith, Social Studies Teacher, West Nowhere Public Schools" or "Jane Doe, VP of Public Relations, BigMegaCorp" sometimes post extremely hateful, racist or ill-informed comments that I doubt they'd ever have the guts to say to anyone in public. Or if they did, they would definitely not be fun people to be around. The cloak of Internet anonymity (even when your name's attached) is a powerful inhibition-remover. Seriously, I've looked some people up on LinkedIn et al to see if they were using fake names and titles....nope, there's that social studies teacher or PR director staring right back at me.
I'm guessing this is also akin to how wealthy people treat their domestic servants or other underlings. Just because Alexa is an electronic box, she does respond to requests.
It is important to distinguish between human and machine interaction. I think we are quickly approaching being a society where the only way you will be able to tell if someone is addressing you is if you are using honorifics and civil platitudes; otherwise you will assume people are addressing one device or another.
In cultures throughout history people have used familiar pronouns vs formal pronouns to distinguish between intimate conversation and public conversation.
We will see if this ends up being the paradigm for machine vs human interactions, but I have a strong suspicion that we are verging on a new social norm, where you can assume "rude sounding" people are talking to their computer/'phone and "cordial" sounding people are talking to you.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
My dictionary defines "sentient" as consciously perceiving — cows may feel pain, but they aren't conscientious and so it is Ok to eat them.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It's like that old joke about the proper detergent that can wash the bloodstain off a kid's t-shirt; shouldn't you worry about the blood first, etc.
The machine is lacking human weaknesses like impatience or annoyance. Why ask for these when we're not there yet. Won't you teach them first before asking technology to step in? It's a $500 dollar tablet, or a $5 Chinese knock off. Siri wabbit.
And today's captcha is "sanity"
We shouldn't anthropomorphize our software applications. There is no need to treat them with the same respect as you treat a human being. And it's pretty vital that everyone, kids and adults alike, know the difference between machines and people.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
They are kids. They are not often not well versed in tact, social etiquette and respect for their elders.
Kids are bombarded with stress, hormones, learning, change and this is the period in life when most mistakes are made because that's how we learn.
Amazon will get sued for making kids do X that's inevitable...but kids will always be kids and they will often be rude.
Let's not forget the generation gap, the "common sense" you had 20 years ago might no longer apply.
Finally, we are softer on kids than any previous time in history. They get away with A LOT more and a fuck was not given.
Where's the --require_please --require_thanks options?
Actually, just yesterday my daughter said "Alexa, Thank you" to our Amazon Echo. Alexa replied, "no problem." which made my daughter smile.
Fortunately, Alexa doesn't understand our 4-year old.
Think I'll slip on down to the oasis
I found a book in the free bin at Powell's technical book store (back when it was a separate location) called _The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit_, by Sherry Turkle. One of the most interesting things she wrote about was children's relationship with new technology. When given a speak and spell, one of the first things kids tried to do was "break" it; to get it to stop saying things mid-sentence. She likened it to kids pulling the legs off of a bug: something sociopathic that kids do to things that are perceived as being "things" rather than "people". If they were unsuccessful at the task using software, they would go so far as to remove the batteries, just to show mastery over the device.
This book was written in 1984. Stop worrying about stupid shit your kids do, they know people are people and machines are machines probably better than we do. They'll grow out of this. Worry about them growing up to be convicted rapists and what you're going to tell the judge to sweet talk him out of sending your kid to big boy jail.
https://www.amazon.com/Second-...
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
"One of the responsibilities of parents is to teach your kids social graces,"
Yes. This is the parent's responsibility. Not the computers. If you're too lazy to teach your children how to act, they will never learn how to act.
-nt
To quote from the writeup on the Blinky(tm) short at https://vimeo.com/21216091... Soon every home will have a robot helper. Don't worry. It's perfectly safe. Written, Directed & Edited by Ruairi Robinson
How about instead of complaining that children are doing mildly subjectively annoying things, they inure their children (and themselves, while they're at it) to rudeness so that it doesn't bother them. Then, repeated question asking will no longer be a problem. A bonus effect is that talking to people who know more than they do won't make them angry or defensive.
I suggest that, rather than playing recordings of classical music for your babies, instead play recordings of Call of Duty and League of Legends voice chats. I guarantee that they'll be completely unfazed by 'faggot', 'noob' and 'lol learn to play' by second grade, thus preparing them for adulthood.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
when the hippies invented causal Fridays at work... that led to comedians cussing a lot and kids being adults asap.
The devices like echo like amplify it, but are not the cause.
NOT teaching your kids manners is the cause.
Wait until they are adults--we're going to see a lot of passive aggressive folks in our future.
They named the bot Kudhjiupleez
...you should take responsibility and discipline you damn kids. Physical punishment really needs to make a return before we're faced with yet another generation of arrogant shitheads.
News flash. That's STILL your f'ing job. If your kids are being asshats, it's your job to smack the little tards. If your kids are assholes, it's because you taught them to be that way, either directly or by inaction.
Echo is not your babysitter. Echo is not your child rearing robot.
Get rid of the Echo. Problem solved.
Seriously? This thing should require a certain age to use or parental consent.
I believe that it's wrong to be nice to a machine. By definition, machines are sociopaths (they entirely lack any conscience). They can be programmed to appear to have a conscience, but they don't. It's dangerous to deal with a sociopath if you don't know, or refuse to believe, that they are a sociopath.
If you haven't seen the movie Ex Machina, I highly recommend it. It's a cautionary tale for the day a machine passes the ultimate Turing Test.
...is there nothing they can't fuck up?
And one person has yet to mention Star Trek Voyager. A site for nerds. Bah. This place sucks.
I would probably show up on the first search result of "pedophile" with my full name, street address, and the company I work for.
Am I the only person who everythime he used "Hey Siri" is disappointed that there is no room to say "Thank you!" in the dialogue design?
I think that's an oversight and interaction with it would be more natural.
Comcast Xfinity keeps running these ads promoting their voice remote control, where you can tell your cable box what to show. It's stuff like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There's another version with a woman asking for rom coms and other similar movies women would like.
Both ads promote this world where you can ask for and demand only the things you already like, and in so doing avoid anything that might be the slightest bit unknown or new to you, or something you never heard of but might like anyway. Nope. You get to dictate every single moment of your life.
Show me only food I like. Show me only people of colors I like. Show me only people who are of idea body weight but have larger than average ears and no tattoos. And who are we kidding, it will turn in to Show me boobs. Show me only political opinions I like. Show me only shows with no profanity. Show me Wheel of Fortune. Show me videos of cats beating up dogs, in Russian.
The kids today are going to grow up in a world where they can ask and demand anything they want from their phones, from things like Echo, from their goddamn TV remotes, from their cars (if they drive at all), and they will expect the same from school and work and life and won't they be sorely disappointed when life has a way of throwing shit at you whether you like it or want it, or not.
Every kid will be a special snowflake if they aren't already. But only if they can ask some gadget or robot to do stuff for them. Put one of these kids in an empty room, or worse, outside in an open field with no gadgets and nobody to talk to and they will go nuts. And probably die where they stand because they won't know how to walk for help or food or shelter without a gadget telling them how to move, where to go, or just to summon help.
Fuck, people ALREADY abuse those damn emergency rescue devices to call for help when they are out on a trail and end up too tired to walk back, or somebody decides they really want to go home. So they pull the cord meant for a catastrophic life or death emergency and a rescue force shows up looking for injured people and find only some asshole who had an empty stomach and was too tired to walk back.
Maybe it's too late and we're doomed as a society and possibly a species where we are too soft to do anything and too stupid to know how anyway, so we ask our machines to do it. What purpose then, do people actually have? Once the robots do all the work and the gadgets order items for us, why do we need to be here at all? This is becoming like some bad scifi film where the people forgot how to live and all died off leaving behind legions of robots dutifully carrying out stuff like reordering paper towels from a robot warehouse which is restocked by robot trucks coming from a robot paper mill which is fed by robot logging machines. They just keep making and delivering paper towels because some human, long dead, put it on auto order.
This is a nightmare we're making for ourselves and our future.
Sig for hire.
Pets are conditioning my kids to be rude.
For example, my kids often walk up to my dog and pet it.
My dog needs to teach them that you can't just walk up to any person and pet them over an over.
I need a dog that bites when someone tries to pet it so that my kids can become less annoying.
"Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The terminator, would never stop. It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die, to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice." - Sarah Connor, Terminator 2
All living things are machines, optimized to make more of themselves. As we outsource more and more of our lives to machines, this line will get grayer. Future generations will have to deal with strong AI, uploaded humans, and uplifted animals.
Call Alexa stupid and she will tell you thats not very nice so she does defend herself to a certain point.
Tell Alexa in a mean voice a few times "I will kill you" and see what she says.
Playstation games make kids rude when they can kill random people and Alexa is no more harmful then ask google or siri,she is just more easy to use hands free.
I have 3 kids and them asking the diameter of the planets over and over is not making them rude and we mostly use Alexa for music and trivia questions.
The kids might be rude asking the same stupid question over and over, but isn't that what reporters and voters do?
And don't many if not most posters on internet fora (such as Slashdot) post the same answers and responses over and over and over and over?
Producing children when they are provably unsuitable and unable to raise them up properly. Not saying the children would necessarily be disasters - we can and do get lucky, but with 7+ billion already on this planet, time to worry more about quality than quantity...
...fuck you! I distinctly remember having a jolly old time taking turns cursing at Pikachu when I was a kid. That must be why I despise glorified chat bots like Siri so much. I was conditioned to hate interactive AI as a child.
Another 1000 miles of road to hell paved with good intentions.