This holiday season, should you buy an AI toy for your kid?
They’ll probably like it.
It’ll probably keep their attention super well because, you know, these AI toys, they’re not Teddy Ruxpin. You guys remember Teddy Ruxpin?
Back when I was a kid, he was a teddy bear with a tape cassette inside and he would like say things and sing songs and the little robotic mouth would move.
Okay, so these AI toys, they look kind of like Teddy Ruxpin, right?
They’re a talking doll, but they don’t have a tape cassette inside. What they have inside are billion dollar algorithms engineered in Silicon Valley for what they call engagement optimization, which is just tech speak for sucking up as much of your time and attention as they possibly can. These AI toys are made to hook your kid and turn them into a lifelong addict. very commercially viable.
I was actually just talking to Jonathan Haidt about this. If you don’t know, he’s this esteemed psychologist and author. He wrote The Anxious Generation. It was a great book about parenting and kids’ freedom and digital devices.
And he was saying the scientific evidence is pretty clear about this stuff, that when kids’ brains are developing, when they’re becoming who they are and they’re learning to be kind, smart, strong, resilient people. It’s the human interactions that build those neural pathways.
And these AI toys will imitate those human interactions, but they’re fake. They don’t do the same thing because these AI toys don’t have any real human empathy or care or understanding.
It’s a trick.
And isn’t that human connection that I see you, you see me, that care, that love, isn’t that what the holidays are really all about?
Anyway, that’s my holiday PSA.
Happy Hanukkah, everybody. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night. 🔴
