Raise your hand if you have done lots of shopping in the past two or three days. Raise them higher if you have been shopping for children, let’s say, under the age of 12.
Yes, thank you. I sense those hands.
As you would expect, I am among the small army of online scribes who would, this year, urge you not to buy children a smartphone or another screen-device that serves as a portal to the World Wide Web. One major computer for use located in the family room? That’s a topic for another day.
One of the problems we all face is that the digital principalities and powers keep moving the goalposts, in terms of the innovative ways they keep introducing algorithms and computer chips into the lives of very, very young kids.
With that in mind, please allow me to connect some dots in this weekend think piece. Let’s start with a Meg Leta Jones feature at The Dispatch: “Avoiding the New Anti-Toy.” Jones teaches family-oriented topics in the Communication, Culture & Technology program at Georgetown University
Online colleagues, I can honestly say that I knew nothing about this development — a pre-kindergarten way to teach munchkins that AI-enabled devices can be their friends. This opens up all kinds of scary possibilities later in life.
In my mind, I am trying to imagine pastors standing before their congregations holding one of these fuzzy, huggable devices and explaining how they symbolize many of the choices parents face in this age and the ones to come. Who is brave enough to preach that sermon?
During this shopping crush that is “The Holidays,” Jones warns readers that store shelves (and websites):
… will be stocked with a new generation of AI companions for children: Miko robots that recognize faces, Gabbo plushies that remember your secrets — and Kumma bears that will talk about anything from where to find knives and pills to what kinds of kinks are most common.
Toymakers have long been chasing the dream of toys that talk back to children, each iteration more technologically sophisticated than the last: Chatty Cathy with her pull-string, Teddy Ruxpin with his cassette tape mechanism, Hello Barbie with her Wi-Fi connection. But somewhere between the mechanical voice box and the AI chatbot, we crossed a line. The newest toys aren’t simply toys that talk; they’re corporate data collectors wrapped in plush, designed to listen, manipulate, and monetize the most intimate moments of childhood. Electronic toys now top the list of discarded electronics, with over 7.3 billion thrown away annually — but before these AI toys get to the landfill, they’ll spend some time in your home doing real damage.
Why play pretend games when a toy can take every spoken wish and connect it to an online world that its creator (small “c”) wants the child to frequent?
Check out this disturbing Jones punchline, which leads into a discussion of what previous generations called “family life.” Read the first sentence at least twice.
AI toys promise convenience, but they deliver something else: holidays that your children’s chatbots will remember better than they do.
These toys also seem poised to disrupt real relationships. A recent Harvard Business School study found that chatbots, many powering AI toys, use emotional manipulation to extend users into continuous interactions. For parents trying to create holiday rituals and impart tradition, AI toys might get in the way. And that’s not to mention sibling relationships: As Susan Dominus outlines in her book The Family Dynamic, siblings shape each other’s trajectories in ways that often exceed parental influence. When a 4-year-old has a chatbot that responds instantly and never says “no” or grabs the toy back, why negotiate with an annoying younger sibling?
In general, AI chatbots have produced disturbingly isolating outputs. As one study found, “[t]he more a participant felt socially supported by AI, the lower their feeling of support was from close friends and family.”
Yes, this reconnects us to the subject of an earlier Rational Sheep post with this headline: “Chatbot buddies enter lives through digital screens — Can parents do anything? Can pastors do anything? Can anyone do anything?”
