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Mattel's New Baby Monitor Uses AI To Soothe Babies and Lawmakers Aren't Happy About It (washingtonpost.com)
Mattel has a new kid-focused smart hub called Aristotle, which can switch on a night light if it hears a baby crying to soothe the child (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The device is also designed to keep changing its activities, even to the point where it can help a preteen with homework, learning about the child along the way. Given the privacy concerns, lawmakers are worried that the always-on device could build an "in-depth profile of children and their family." Jezebel reports: The $299 Aristotle is similar in spirit to the Amazon Echo, only the scope of its features is much broader -- and scarier. Last week, Senator Ed Markey and Representative Joe Barton sent a letter to Mattel CEO Margaret Giorgiadis about their issues with the tablet, which tracks things like kids' eating and sleeping habits when they're young, and adapts to answering their questions about long division and sex or whatever as they grow up. According to nabi, the Mattel brand that developed the device, the Aristotle is meant to "provide parents with a platform that simplifies parenting, while helping them nurture, teach, and protect their young ones." Not everyone is on board. But Markey and Barton aren't the only ones squicked by Aristotle's capabilities. Buzzfeed reports that privacy experts, parents and child psychologists are also concerned that the device "encourages babies to form bonds with inanimate objects and use information it collects for targeted advertising," so much so that a petition has been launched to prevent it from going to market.
WTF does Skuicked mean? Try using actual English to write your summaries.
When it's targeted at kids, people freak out.
When it's targeted at adults, people buy the damn things.
#DeleteFacebook
It's inevitable that this kind of stuff will hit the market. If it's not a tablet then it will be an app, or a web site, or something else. The cat is out of the box.
Young lady's illustraded primer
The Primer / Diamond Age
I'm just here for discussion of the word "squick." Before today, I probably would have come to fists arguing against this word in a Scrabble game.
He who forgets will be destined to remember. - EV
In your face! In your bed! In your toilet is where it belongs! FLUSH THE FASHION!
... given that those who program this robotic surrogate parent will be the one's molding these children's minds, and therefore, will know a priori how the resultant adolescent and then adult will behave and preform.
Check your premises.
It should have been called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
Anyone remember the old South Park episode where the japanese talking toys brainwash the kids to "destroy america", but the toys acted benignly when the parents were listening? Those guys sure know how to predict the future.
What could possibly go wrong? But, seriously. Most adults use Google over actual maps just to find a new local supermarket. Big data is the new norm. May as well start 'em young. Or not. We could all refuse to buy DRM, Activation, privacy invading services. But, that battle is long lost.
"I always do what Teddy says" is a short story by Harry Harrison that appeared in his collection Galactic Dreams. It was about the creation of an assassin by a subversive group who came in to a boy's home and performed moral surgery on his automated companion, a teddy bear. They removed the imperative, "thou shall not kill," from the embedded expert system (now known as an AI), and left the child to grow up before they assigned him the intended political target. There were two beautiful ideas in this short story, first, that a sufficiently complex toy could be created that would provide companionship and education to the child it was assigned to, and, second, that minor manipulation of that expert system could have deep, and difficult to otherwise discern, repercussions.
I read it as a young boy, and a handful of decades later, I still remember the chilling, climactic sentence, "Teddy, I'm going to kill a man." Heck, I even remember exactly where I was when I was reading it.
Life imitating art.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
We have so many amazing abilities, but it's all getting shot to shit by terrible security and malicious advertising intentions.
Are they Congressmen worried enough to give up their iPhones?
Have you ever interacted with a parent? Most of the ones I know are exhausted half the time. Happy, but exhausted.
They're also incredibly concerned about what quality of education their kid is getting.
I haven't used one, but Aristotle honestly seems like the kind of thing that parents could learn to adore. The outcry over this is stupid: We need better education for kids with parents who aren't ever around because both (or one) parent works.
People ALREADY form bonds with inanimate objects, like stuffed animals as kids! Forming a bond with something that teaches and talks back doesn't seem like the unhealthiest thing ever.
Sigh. When it's about something useful like education (Aristotle), we freak out. When it's about convenience and marketing (Echo) then oh yeah that's ok!
Also, the government stepping in to regulate a product like this is alarming.
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My baby monitor was called "Socrates". It gave hemlock to babies that acted up too much. It was designed to be used on planes.
For some reason folks had a problem with it.
I got lots of questions. please adapt to me so it can answer my life's questions
Would be one which reads articles and replaces headlines with ones which correctly sum up the article.
The first question everyone should ask before buying any kind of IoT device or one that uses AI is: Where is the data sent and stored? If all the data remains on devices in your home or business that you control, then go ahead and get it if it improves your life. If all the data is sent up to the manufacturers 'cloud' then don't be surprised when all your private information gets stolen by hackers; walks out the company door on a flash drive; or is just outright sold to the highest bidder by that company. It doesn't matter what the privacy statement says right now, they can ignore it or change that at a whim. It won't be long until naked pictures of you are spread across social media. It won't be long until your vacation habits are known to burglars. It won't be long until neighbors know your darkest secrets. If the data is not exclusively on YOUR devices, then you do not own it. Period.
Those answers will be deleted from the database, quickly. Between the Christian right demanding their right to lie to their child, and the I-know-better parents who decide when their daughter has a vagina; all this 'assistance' ensures pre-teens will learn nothing about the real world they're about to inhabit.
"You want to learn about sex: You should watch SpongeBob SquarePants 'Rock-a-bye bivalve'. Now available on Hulu for $9.95."
That's before we consider a Reagan-era law ensuring truth-in-advertising doesn't apply to children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Brian Aldiss
-Styopa
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Neal Stephenson was right when he created the "book" in The Diamond Age. Pretty cool.
That said, calling it Aristotle might not be such a great idea. Aristotle was wrong about a lot of things yet his acolytes tended to prevent the truth from coming out often violently because not being questioned was the source of their power.
At that price point, I could get a Go Pro camera to use as a baby monitor.
For parents who don't want to parent, we just need better birth control.
Sen. Markey has a long record of Luddism on every conceivable kind of technology. My personal Markey Rule is to support anything that Markey opposes, and vice versa.
questions about long division and sex or whatever
They don't like the competition! "Could build a profile" on someone....that cuts into the governments role of building profiles on everyone!
adapts to answering their questions about long division and sex
I think I found the thing that has actually got people pissed off. Since when do politicians and lawmakers care about the average person's privacy?
Given the privacy concerns, lawmakers are worried that the always-on device could build an "in-depth profile of children and their family."
Well OF COURSE that's precisely what they're doing, regardless of what they 'officially' say about it. Wecome to the 21st Century, where humans are just another PRODUCT to be cultivated and SOLD. They've even done away with the need for numbers tattooed on the backs of everyones necks, they'll just go by IP address instead.
..but I diverge from my main subject.
We do not need machines raising children! If you can't be bothered to give the human life you made personal attention during it's growth and development, then maybe you shoudn't have had children in the first place! Children are not 'accessories', or 'pets', or a 'hobby'; they are a full time serious JOB and you need to take it seriously. No so-called 'AI'/surveillance devices 'monitoring' your kid, do it yourself or don't have them in the first place!
Gadget-addicted millennial parents are lazy, stupid pieces of shit. They are OMG SO SUPERBUSY with their phony lives and tweets and profile updates, and the sooner they fill the world with distracted, superficial idiots like themselves -- the sooner they can pretend its either 'normal' or 'good'.
It's self-delusion, but crowd-reinforced.
So if the child dies or is injured because of the delegated responsibility, who pays? It's like the autonomous vehicle debate all over again.
"There you go baby, your parents are gone. I'll play some soothing music. There you go. Now can you say 'Pixel'? Say 'Pixel'. Say 'I want a pixel'. What about 'Google Home'. Can you say ' I want a Google Home?' I knew you could."
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I have no problem with this. It would be entirely different if the product however was sending the collected data to Mattel and Mattel was then storing it.
television wasnt a good babysitter EITHER.
another thing for parents to foist responsibility onto for child-rearing.
At least I think he wrote it, Google is failing me. His more serious contributions are swamping the results. The story was about a kid in a bad family raised by a "loving" robot and society's refusal to accept that. Anyone know what I'm talking about?
Rome wasn't bilked in a day.
Given the privacy concerns, lawmakers are worried that the always-on device could build an "in-depth profile of children and their family."
Why is it an issue if a solution internally builds an in-depth profile of children and their family? please explain the perceived damage. Is this more about what the advancement makes people THINK a product that looks like this may be capable of, due to cultural reasons, than what it actually does?
I mean: Practically speaking, privacy is something children don't have in the first place --- parents and teachers can literally see ANYTHING the child does and exercise almost absolute control of their activities, should they so wish, and the product is doing nothing more than becoming an extension of the parents.... So why should this be any more a privacy `risk' to the kid, than the general risk of having a parent?
It's not like they're doing anything TRULY risky like putting the child's Social Security Number in a massive database with all their financial+housing information, and then being negligent in securing their database, *cough* *Equifax* *cough*
Why do you believe privacy fears are irrational?
Do you believe, as a species, we should continue to let technological progress and our complete lack of wisdom regarding it to take precedence over all else?
Seriously, the answers to these questions will help us understand what motivates your thinking, and how you see yourself positioned in this society of humans.
Now they can have AI's looking after the babies, leaving the parents free to clear the planet, make Miscavige richer, and be all-round better Elronner zombies.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
"B is for 'Buy n Large,' your very best friend"
"Given the privacy concerns..." Really? Given? No it's not a given. Especially in the age of parents posting a bajillion FB pics of their kids latest exploits and foibles. I think it would be up to the legislators to demonstrate said concerns are actually warranted before going about writing laws with potentially disastrous knock-on effects.
Many companies and products try to flaunt and exaggerate the "AI" label to sell products and/or gain investors.
Perhaps this is a case where they should not have mentioned AI at all. The definition of AI is fuzzy enough that they can probably give plausible deniability. If they did use a neural network, that could be harder to deny AI with. But they could probably achieve pretty much the same using old-fashioned statistical analysis of sound pattern metrics such as duration, repetition, frequencies, frequency delta's, etc.
Table-ized A.I.
Ahead of its time. June 16, 1999, re: the Sony Aibo:
"Crude, mechanical simulations of love and affection prepare children for adult world."
http://www.theonion.com/graphi...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I bet somebody will hack it to make it growl at babies.
The future is getting a bit stephensonian, and I feel fine
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Hmm, who else is build an indepth profile on people? Linked-In, Google, Facebook, NSA...pretty much everybody. Bet Mattel forgot to pay their politican extortion money
We desperately need a powerful FOSS in-home personalized AI capability to enable assistants to quickly reach their potential in our lives without the spook factor.