How millions of kids are being shaped by know-it-all voice assistants
&gt; In talking that way about a device plugged into a wall, Yarmosh’s son was anthropomorphizing it — which means to “ascribe human features to something,” Alexa happily explains. Humans do this a lot, Calvert said.<p>Do humans do this a lot, or do some humans not snap out of it? I&#x27;ve been minding myself ever since my early 20s. Starting with articles like this: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arachnoid.com&#x2F;lutusp&#x2F;symbols.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arachnoid.com&#x2F;lutusp&#x2F;symbols.html</a> which I can&#x27;t thank the author enough for.<p>But there&#x27;s much more on this written during the 20th century, so to me the question is, why do people stubbornly ignore that? This expert here does it to, by just going &quot;humans do this, <i>shrug</i>&quot;. No, it&#x27;s one of the failure modes of the human mind. Humans also go on killing sprees, after all, or hack their children up and throw them in the garbage bin. You can&#x27;t usefully talk about humans by first fusing all of them into one huge blob.<p>&gt; The problem, Druin said, is that this emotional connection sets up expectations for children that devices can’t or weren’t designed to meet, causing confusion, frustration and even changes in the way kids talk or interact with adults.<p>I like how this implies that the problem isn&#x27;t worshiping the things we made as a higher power or some sort of mystery, but could be solved by those devices matching our expectations more. If &quot;humans anthropomorphize things&quot;, we obviously have to make more objects that have human features. Never mind the flip side of humans getting an increasingly object like quality. Just limit their access, and otherwise sit and wait, it&#x27;ll be fine. I mean, what&#x27;s the alternative? Just say <i>no</i> to products corporations insist on pushing?<p>&gt; Or take the weather, particularly in winter. Instead of asking Mom or Dad the temperature that day, children just go to the device, treating the answer as gospel.<p>Perfectly obedient machines, on top of that achieving compliance levels highly paid humans can&#x27;t consistently on their best days -- what&#x27;s not to love? It&#x27;s unclear though whether corporations and the military are paying any attention any of this, at all ^_^. They&#x27;d have to give us in writing that they do for us to have any further thoughts about this, certainly too critical ones.<p>&gt; Upside: No more fights over what the temperature will really be and what’s appropriate to wear. Downside: Kids will go to their parents less, with both sides losing out on timeworn interactions.<p>The what not? The downside is &quot;losing out on timeworn interactions&quot;? That&#x27;s like saying the downside of the sun exploding is having to use more electricity on street lights.<p>Here&#x27;s what you miss out on, for starters that is, or I would be doing the same: empathy, which I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised is very much linked with of growing your own person. Both abuse and extreme pampering are harmful. I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s been proven, I just know that the literature I read on that matches what I saw and experienced myself. The machines of the future will do what we tell them to, and take our abuse with a smile -- except all those instances where <i>we</i> have to do exactly what they tell us, and do without question. Then there is taking what the machine says for gospel -- certainly doubly so if it tells you anything you like to hear. Why think when you can &quot;know&quot;, right?<p>From the Third Reich to Milgram&#x27;s, this is such a huge can of worms, I can only stand in awe with how non-chalantly this bit is treated here. Missing out on timeworn interactions. I&#x27;m still reeling a bit.<p>Just one random thing because I don&#x27;t have time on the one hand, but am also not just being contrariarian, or lying when I said I spent a LOT of time reading and thinking about this shit since the 90s.. you know, since I saw a bunch of corpses being shoved into a mass grave by a caterpillar while changing channels as a kid and started to wonder wtf kind of world I&#x27;m in, and how magically people in the past were obviously wrong, but currently, everything is just a-okay.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.sagepub.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;abs&#x2F;10.1177&#x2F;0959354314542368" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.sagepub.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;abs&#x2F;10.1177&#x2F;0959354314542368</a><p>&gt; The perception of a convergence between the views of Arendt, Stanley Milgram, and certain Holocaust historians inspired the situationist argument that ordinary people become mass murderers because they find themselves in circumstances that subvert their ability to make or act upon individual moral judgments.<p>We already have this problem as as, no technology required. It&#x27;s already swept under the rug all the damn time. But using technology to amplify it so much on multiple levels, while not addressing the human problem, by constantly working around it and trying to have dysfunctional human beings be functional cogs in a system that grows for its own sake, leads predictably more war, more terrorism, more drugs, more happy slapping videos, more babies in microwaves, more everything, and more people who just can&#x27;t seem to find the connection between a leak in a boat and that boat sinking.<p>&gt; “Alexa,” they’ll say, “you’re such a butt.”<p>And some of them even might grow up calling other kids &quot;fun-sized terrorists&quot; as they have a great time blasting them with drones on command.