Alexa, “where are you taking us?”

 The possible impact of robotic interactions on children

Alexa first intrigued me when my four and a half year old came back home from school one day and excitedly told me that one of her classmates asked Alexa to play the song What a wonderful world and the song actually started to play on the speaker. Let’s get Alexa mama, I too could tell her to play the songs I want.

It couldn’t have got more ironical than that, I thought. There was the wonderful world that Louis Armstrong was crooning about…trees of green and skies of blue and then there was the gateway to the world – a grey cylindrical robot talking with a strange accent! What a wonderful world indeed! I spent the next two hours trying to convince a feisty argumentative kid on why we don’t have an Alexa at home and why I don’t intend getting one. I did not see that conversation we were having coming so soon, I wasn’t prepared with my arguments and nothing was working until I told her – why do you need Alexa – when you have me – tell me the songs you want and I’ll play those for you. Pretend play came to my rescue that day and I had to contend with being Alexa for sometime while the child amused herself with requests.

A year or so later, we met another mom and kid at a play date (I hate to use that phrase). Exhausted as all moms perpetually are, we thought lets distract the kids with music. We play songs, they tire themselves dancing, they sleep and we can live happily ever after. The only spanner in the works to our fairy-tale evening that day was thrown by Alexa. The kids were patient for exactly one song. Post which, one of them walked up to Alexa and asked Alexa to play the song, which she wanted to dance on. It goes without saying this wouldn’t be the song that the other child wanted. While Child 1 happily danced to her favourite tune, Child 2 stood at a corner looking a little miffed. As soon as the song finished Child 2 walked up to Alexa and demanded Alexa play her song. Alexa of course complied. But Child 1 couldn’t wait her turn and hence interrupted by asking Alexa to go back to playing her song. Child 2 who had waited patiently now was unwilling to and made an even louder request and so it continued. You get the drift. These untimely demands had to stop and the hostess-mom rightfully intervened and decided to take control of the situation. Alexa was told in a firm, loud voice to stop playing all songs.

The third scene I witnessed (and bear with me, this is the last one) was the video of a child walking up to Alexa and requesting Alexa to make animal sounds and giggling and clapping at each sound made.

I couldn’t help wonder about how all this could alter a child’s perceptions about the idea of instant gratification at such an early age. With a gadget in the house that is always available to respond, what would happen to the notion of boredom? Without much room for idle time, when and how would the child make connections in his / her brain, the connections that happen subconsciously and lead to creative sparks? What else could change?

Could this lead to children getting more demanding or feel a sense of entitlement about how quickly each request made by them would need to be responded to. Unless the child understood the difference between technology and humans and that both would need to be interacted with differently, could this behaviour with gadgets extend to the way a child would interact with his peers or parents? Google and Amazon have corrected that to an extent and with their A.I. bots now reminding children to use the magic words.

Though what would be a tough program to code would be one that involves making a judgement about when or whether to fulfil a request or delay gratification to a later date or how not to interrupt something already playing.

What about learning? Would access to these gadgets make children any smarter by giving them access to a whole lot of information?

I remember the pre-Google days, yes we did have less information available but we also read more and remembered much more as a result. The kind of learning that happens when a child is challenged and the arguments that ensue back and forth is very different from the kind of learning that happens in the instantaneous question-answer mode. Easy come; easy go I would be inclined to think. Why tax your mind to remember facts when you can ask a gadget. We have already seen some of the effects of this with our generation. How many of us remember phone numbers of more than five people? In the era of landlines when phone numbers were not easily stored in the phone memory people remembered phone numbers of almost all significant people they knew whether that number was 10 or 20 or more.

This is just the beginning. How such devices would influence an entire generation growing up with them is a question even Alexa does not have an answer to. Somethings lessons are only learnt in hindsight I guess.