Children Talking to Little Women in Boxes

This article in the Wall Street Journal on the early childhood development impacts of digital personal assistants and smart speakers made me think of Mrs Neu. If she were early in her career at this point, she would have certainly developed a learned opinion on this topic.

Here is the article lead: 

“Par­ents, your child may have a new se­cret friend: your smart speaker.

Drawn by the de­vices’ voice-ac­ti­vated in­ter­faces and warm, play­ful tone, chil­dren as young as 1 are in­ter­act­ing with Ama­zon’s Alexa, Google’s As­sistant or Apple’s Siri long be­fore they can type or swipe, new re­search shows.

This is new ter­ri­tory for fam­i­lies. For the first time, chil­dren who are too young to dis­tin­guish fan­tasy from re­al­ity are en­gag­ing with de­vices pow­ered by ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence. Many see smart speak­ers as mag­i­cal, im­bue them with hu­man traits and boss them around like a Ma­rine drill ser­geant, ac­cord-ing to sev­eral new stud­ies in the past year.”

Apart from picking up rude habits, which is the article title’s concern, will children growing up with these devices pick up totally unexpected habits and see other skill-sets degraded? Kids growing up with smartphones don’t often have good phone conversation skills, for example, but they can text, post, and watch on a level those of us who did not grow up with them can’t match. What will kids growing up with ever smarter versions of Alexa, Siri and Hey Google be losing and gaining? What might they tell them? And since children are also listening, what will they learn from what these little women say?