'Alexa, are you turning my kid into a jerk?'

Three years after Amazon Echo launched as a frivolous oddity, its maker now plans to put Alexa inside smart phones, refrigerators, vacuums and Ford cars. The Alexafication of all things places digital attendants everywhere at our beck and call, and those of our kids, too.

Last year, a San Francisco dad named Hunter Walk posted a blog titled, “Amazon Echo Is Magical. It’s Also Turning My Kid Into an Asshole.” Walk, a former YouTube product manager, saw in Alexa’s subservience a potential worry for parents: If a kid learned she could order Alexa around without so much as a please or thank you, why not a person?

Experts at the crossroads of pediatrics, psychology and A.I. say there’s a lot we don’t know about how virtual assistants might affect young, developing minds, but parents can take proactive steps to help children better understand and interact with humanoid helpers.

Concerns over kids’ screen time seem almost quaint in an age of screenless devices. Apple’s debut this week of its own smart speaker, the HomePod, further cemented the tech industry’s vision of virtual assistants baked into daily life. Google, Microsoft and Samsung have their own digital assistants, too.

The rapid evolution of technology these days can leave us left us feeling unbalanced, said Jenny Radesky, a University of Michigan pediatrician who studies how digital media shapes children. Artificial intelligence feels far more disruptive than did once-foreign devices like telephones or TV, she said, and the accompanying anxiety for parents can feel more acute.  

Research around how kids understand digital assistants is “so limited,” Radesky said, and none of it dives into how "alive" children perceive them to be. Studies that do exist on children and robots suggest children see them as semi-animate, she said, as objects that think and feel but don’t eat or breathe.

A kid who says something naughty to Alexa and receives positive reinforcement —perhaps laughter from an onlooker or a game response from the assistant — might repeat the same behavior in a different social context, Radesky supposed. But we just don’t yet know.

Amazon said in a statement that the Echo is designed for family use, and that “we work to ensure Alexa’s responses are appropriate for all ages.”  Alexa can respond to “Echo,” “Amazon,” or “Computer,” but not niceties like please or thank you.

“Maybe they should program Alexa to only respond to polite child voices," Radesky said. “I’m only partly joking.”

Peter Kahn, a psychologist at the University of Washington, conducted some of the research on how children perceive robots. Parents shouldn’t worry that their tyke will treat a classmate like they do Alexa, Kahn said, at least in any direct way: “It’s more complicated than that.”

As we interact with virtual assistants more and human beings less, Kahn worries the quality of our human connections will suffer. He and colleagues hypothesized that personified robots represent a new category of being, one that will grow as virtual assistants become infused with our homes, cars and accessories.

As smarter, more life-like computers become increasingly alluring, Kahn said, irreplaceable aspects of human interaction could atrophy in the process.

One solution, Kahn said, is for families with smart speakers to simply stay intentional about deepening their relationships through intentional, loving interactions. Alexa can already sing lullabies to children and read them bedtime stories. But a machine can’t know a child the way a parent does, Kahn said.

The evolution toward screenless devices — “ambient computing,” the industry calls it — may be a good thing for parents, said Jim Taylor, a psychologist who wrote Raising Generation Tech: Preparing Your Children for a Media-Fueled World. Without faces buried in screens, parents have a better chance of teaching kids what they so often miss, he said: Technology is a tool, not a toy.

Radesky, the pediatrician, co-authored the latest guidelines for media use from the American Academy of Pediatrics. They advise parents to help their children leverage technology as a tool to meet human goals, she said “rather than obsess about the way it’s affecting us.”

It’s up to adults to help children conceptualize virtual assistants in a healthy way, Radesky said, and much of that comes through modeled behavior.

Show kindness to virtual assistants in front of kids, she said. Help them think critically about the information they provide. Remind them that virtual assistants are always listening (research shows they don’t grasp this). And don’t give them the idea that an answer Siri gives is inherently more or less valuable than what they might find in a book, another person or their own reasoning.

“I am more concerned that assistants like Siri or Alexa might implicitly teach children that knowledge is quickly, easily attainable — almost commodified,” she said.

Follow Josh Hafner on Twitter: @joshhafner

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