When I was growing up, there was nothing I wanted each Christmas more than a toy robot. Those were the days of TV shows like Lost in Space in which ‘Robby the Robot’ featured. Every little boy wanted a robot of his own. In would go the batteries, the thing would make some noise, walk around and eventually smash into something and probably break in the end.
Today, toys are far more sophisticated than that. Instead of pulling a cord at the back of a doll so a few stock phrases will come out, there are toys that will actually talk back to you, that is, toys with increasingly sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) installed.
A guest was on one of the radio shows the other day discussing these new AI toys and sounding a warning to parents about them for reasons to be explained below.
I looked up some of these toys. One of them I came across is called ‘Talkipal’ aimed at small children. It comes in various form, a teddy bear, for example, or a cute dog, or a cuddly kitten. The child can ask one of these toys to play it a song, and it will do that, or read a story, and it will do that. It can hold rudimentary conversations with the child.
The ad for the toy shows a child asking her mother to read her a story, but the mother is working on her laptop at home and doesn’t have the time, so she buys her daughter a Talkipal instead, and it can read her child a story. This isn’t even to suggest that the mother in the ad is being neglectful. People have to work, and if the mother wasn’t working from home, she would be in an office where the child couldn’t come up to her at all.
Direction
Nonetheless, you can see the direction of travel here, which is to provide your child with an AI companion so you can get on with whatever it is you want to do.
Parents have always done this to a certain extent, of course. It’s why children were bought toys in the first place. They would keep them entertained and out of their mother’s hair for a while. Everybody won.
But AI toys are bringing us to a different place. The ‘Talkipal’ I mentioned is pretty unsophisticated but before too long the level of sophistication of these toys will grow. It is already quite easy to find AI Apps and programmes online that can have fairly full conversations with you in conversational sounding, everyday English. They can sometimes sound exactly like human beings.
The person on the radio show was worried that one day these AI companions will become substitutes for real human companions”
Now imagine lots of children in the not-too-distant future with these things. AI works on the basis of learning what you want and like and will therefore tailor itself to the user’s needs and wishes. It will always be there, it will always be patient, and it will always sound friendly.
The person on the radio show was worried that one day these AI companions will become substitutes for real human companions. This will also happen with many adults, but it will be much worse if the same thing happens to a lot of children, because childhood is where you learn a lot of social skills. You don’t learn social skills unless you are interacting with other people a lot.
Children do this partly by interacting with their siblings. In the days when larger families were commonplace, your siblings would often knock the rough edges off you. One-child families are now becoming increasingly common, so how will this happen?
Another way to learn social skills is by going out playing with your friends. But you see fewer kids out playing on the street these days or even going into each other’s houses, except on the occasional organised playdate.
Therefore, for a lot of children, their only frequent contact with other children is school, or sport, if they play sport.
Opportunities
If children have fewer opportunities to learn the necessary social skills in life, and to develop resilience, it should not surprise us if there is a big increase in anxiety among young people, and there is. All mental health professionals, as well as schools themselves, report this.
One of the leading writers on how smart phones, and increasingly AI, are substituting for real human companionship is Jonathan Haidt.
Haidt had an article in the online magazine, Free Press, last week in which he wrote that if there is a devil, and the devil wanted to destroy the next generation, what would he do? The answer (in the voice of the devil): “I wouldn’t come with violence. I’d come with convenience. I’d keep them [the next generation] busy. Always distracted. I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly, silently. And the best part is, they’d never know it was me. They’d call it freedom.”
Haidt is absolutely insistent that schools be smart phone-free zones, and in Ireland quite a number of schools are”
Haidt, with the help of ChatGPT (an AI programme), then lists the seven things the devil would do to make his plan unfold (my paraphrasing in some cases). They are: erode attention; take away purpose and real community; flood young people with information and starve them of wisdom; replace real relationships with unreal, virtual ones; normalise hedonism and demonise discipline; undermine trust between generations; turn everything into a commodity so nothing is really valued unless it has monetary value.
He says: “Those three terms—distraction, disconnection, and the erosion of meaning—summarise the Devil’s project. In order to defend young people, we need technology in childhood to promote the opposite: focus, connection, and meaning.”
Haidt is absolutely insistent that schools be smart phone-free zones, and in Ireland quite a number of schools are.
Social media
He also says that no child should ever be given a smart phone or be allowed use social media. The old-fashioned mobile phones that allowed us only to phone and text people should be enough until they are older.
In fact, Australia has just introduced a law, which is very popular among parents, that aims to prevent anyone under 16 using social media.
Funnily enough, for all his sympathy for religion, Haidt is not actually religious himself. Therefore, he uses the word ‘devil’ as a powerful metaphor.
Life can be tough enough even when you have basic social skills, but imagine how bad it must be if you don’t?”
But he believes the devil, in this sense, is present in some of the technologies our children use, especially anything that is internet connected and leads them off down paths where they fail to develop the skills needed to get on in life. Life can be tough enough even when you have basic social skills, but imagine how bad it must be if you don’t?
Well, the danger is that more and more young people will not learn vital social skills because of an overreliance on smart phones and AI as a substitute for real human interaction. The way, says Haidt, to defeat the devil, is to unplug children from him.
Kids need real friends not Xmas AI pals
When I was growing up, there was nothing I wanted each Christmas more than a toy robot. Those were the days of TV shows like Lost in Space in which ‘Robby the Robot’ featured. Every little boy wanted a robot of his own. In would go the batteries, the thing would make some noise, walk around and eventually smash into something and probably break in the end.
Today, toys are far more sophisticated than that. Instead of pulling a cord at the back of a doll so a few stock phrases will come out, there are toys that will actually talk back to you, that is, toys with increasingly sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) installed.
A guest was on one of the radio shows the other day discussing these new AI toys and sounding a warning to parents about them for reasons to be explained below.
I looked up some of these toys. One of them I came across is called ‘Talkipal’ aimed at small children. It comes in various form, a teddy bear, for example, or a cute dog, or a cuddly kitten. The child can ask one of these toys to play it a song, and it will do that, or read a story, and it will do that. It can hold rudimentary conversations with the child.
The ad for the toy shows a child asking her mother to read her a story, but the mother is working on her laptop at home and doesn’t have the time, so she buys her daughter a Talkipal instead, and it can read her child a story. This isn’t even to suggest that the mother in the ad is being neglectful. People have to work, and if the mother wasn’t working from home, she would be in an office where the child couldn’t come up to her at all.
Direction
Nonetheless, you can see the direction of travel here, which is to provide your child with an AI companion so you can get on with whatever it is you want to do.
Parents have always done this to a certain extent, of course. It’s why children were bought toys in the first place. They would keep them entertained and out of their mother’s hair for a while. Everybody won.
But AI toys are bringing us to a different place. The ‘Talkipal’ I mentioned is pretty unsophisticated but before too long the level of sophistication of these toys will grow. It is already quite easy to find AI Apps and programmes online that can have fairly full conversations with you in conversational sounding, everyday English. They can sometimes sound exactly like human beings.
Now imagine lots of children in the not-too-distant future with these things. AI works on the basis of learning what you want and like and will therefore tailor itself to the user’s needs and wishes. It will always be there, it will always be patient, and it will always sound friendly.
The person on the radio show was worried that one day these AI companions will become substitutes for real human companions. This will also happen with many adults, but it will be much worse if the same thing happens to a lot of children, because childhood is where you learn a lot of social skills. You don’t learn social skills unless you are interacting with other people a lot.
Children do this partly by interacting with their siblings. In the days when larger families were commonplace, your siblings would often knock the rough edges off you. One-child families are now becoming increasingly common, so how will this happen?
Another way to learn social skills is by going out playing with your friends. But you see fewer kids out playing on the street these days or even going into each other’s houses, except on the occasional organised playdate.
Therefore, for a lot of children, their only frequent contact with other children is school, or sport, if they play sport.
Opportunities
If children have fewer opportunities to learn the necessary social skills in life, and to develop resilience, it should not surprise us if there is a big increase in anxiety among young people, and there is. All mental health professionals, as well as schools themselves, report this.
One of the leading writers on how smart phones, and increasingly AI, are substituting for real human companionship is Jonathan Haidt.
Haidt had an article in the online magazine, Free Press, last week in which he wrote that if there is a devil, and the devil wanted to destroy the next generation, what would he do? The answer (in the voice of the devil): “I wouldn’t come with violence. I’d come with convenience. I’d keep them [the next generation] busy. Always distracted. I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly, silently. And the best part is, they’d never know it was me. They’d call it freedom.”
Haidt, with the help of ChatGPT (an AI programme), then lists the seven things the devil would do to make his plan unfold (my paraphrasing in some cases). They are: erode attention; take away purpose and real community; flood young people with information and starve them of wisdom; replace real relationships with unreal, virtual ones; normalise hedonism and demonise discipline; undermine trust between generations; turn everything into a commodity so nothing is really valued unless it has monetary value.
He says: “Those three terms—distraction, disconnection, and the erosion of meaning—summarise the Devil’s project. In order to defend young people, we need technology in childhood to promote the opposite: focus, connection, and meaning.”
Haidt is absolutely insistent that schools be smart phone-free zones, and in Ireland quite a number of schools are.
Social media
He also says that no child should ever be given a smart phone or be allowed use social media. The old-fashioned mobile phones that allowed us only to phone and text people should be enough until they are older.
In fact, Australia has just introduced a law, which is very popular among parents, that aims to prevent anyone under 16 using social media.
Funnily enough, for all his sympathy for religion, Haidt is not actually religious himself. Therefore, he uses the word ‘devil’ as a powerful metaphor.
But he believes the devil, in this sense, is present in some of the technologies our children use, especially anything that is internet connected and leads them off down paths where they fail to develop the skills needed to get on in life. Life can be tough enough even when you have basic social skills, but imagine how bad it must be if you don’t?
Well, the danger is that more and more young people will not learn vital social skills because of an overreliance on smart phones and AI as a substitute for real human interaction. The way, says Haidt, to defeat the devil, is to unplug children from him.
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