Washington Post: How millions of kids are being shaped by know-it-all voice assistants.

Who swapped the reality with a short story written by Isaac Asimov and when?

WaPo:

In just two years, the promise of the technology has already exceeded the marketing come-ons. The disabled are using voice assistants to control their homes, order groceries and listen to books. Caregivers to the elderly say the devices help with dementia, reminding users what day it is or when to take medicine.

For children, the potential for transformative interactions are just as dramatic — at home and in classrooms. But psychologists, technologists and linguists are only beginning to ponder the possible perils of surrounding kids with artificial intelligence, particularly as they traverse important stages of social and language development.

Now isn’t this fascinating/weird/weirdly fascinating: this is something real reporters are writing about in a real newspaper1 and real psychologists are really worried about. I don’t know which is more disconcerting: that our AI is so advanced this is now (purportedly) a real problem, or that we are talking about “artificial intelligence” like it is a real thing and we have intelligent machines amongst us even this minute, even tough beneath the surface our state-of-the-art “artificial intelligence” methodologies are still far from strong AI.

However, I’m going off a tangent here: actually, there is a particular Asimov story that I was thinking quite a bit while reading that article:

Someday by Isaac Asimov, Infinity Science Fiction Vol 1 No 4, August 1956

Okay, it’s not exactly about the same thing as the WaPo article (that would have been quite remarkable); you notice soon enough that Asimov had something different in mind than kids growing up with bad manners because Alexa can be bossed around. It also really shows that it was written in 1950s. (And also that it was written by Asimov. “Oh gee! We will now have a slightly unnatural-sounding discussion about exciting science fiction concepts our daily futuristic life and how it’s different from silly history!” I also did like the line about slide rules, because that’s surprisingly quite plausible: of course a man enamored with the past would acquire one: We call them hipsters.)

…but back on topic. There is this interesting bit:

The Bard said, “ […] The computer, each morning, would tell the boy whether it would rain that day and answer any problems he might have. It was never wrong. […]

Somehow it got stuck in my memory years ago. Contra this part of the WaPo article that reminded me of the story in the first place:

The personal yet transactional nature of the relationship is appealing to children and teenagers. Parents (including this reporter) have noticed that queries previously made to adults are shifting to assistants, particularly for homework — spelling words, simple math, historical facts. 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.

Curious, isn’t it.2

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1: In a newspaper that is coincidentally owned by Jeff Bezos. A man who got rich by selling books on a world-wide computer network and now owns a space rocket company that is building rockets that go to space.3 This is a metaphor for something but I have not the foggiest idea for what.

2: It’s also prescient in some other ways. Grammar school curriculum consisting of teaching programming to everybody, well now who would believe that.

3: Yes, rockets that then land, and then go to space again. Yes, there is two of them now.