Children aged 4 to 11 years say they think Alexa is smarter than Roomba but that you should be nice to both, according to developmental psychologists from Duke University.
What to Know
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A group of about 130 4- to 11-year-olds judged the smart speaker Alexa to have more humanlike thoughts and emotions than autonomous vacuum Roomba.
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In studying short videos of Alexa and Roomba in action, the children responded to Alexa’s ability to communicate verbally and seemed to give Alexa much higher marks than Roomba for the devices’ mental and emotional capabilities.
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Despite the perceived difference in intelligence, kids felt neither Roomba nor Alexa deserve to be yelled at or harmed and that they might get upset if someone was mean to them, although older children had less conviction on the matter.
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Overall, kids decided that both Alexa and Roomba probably aren’t ticklish and wouldn’t feel pain if they got pinched, suggesting they can’t feel physical sensations like people do, and they agreed it was wrong to hit or yell at the machines.
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The study shows the evolving relationship between children and technology and how adults and parents may need to set examples for their kids by being polite to Siri or its more sophisticated counterpart, ChatGPT.
This is a summary of the article, “The Minds of Machines: Children’s Beliefs About the Experiences, Thoughts, and Morals of Familiar Interactive Technologies,” published in the Journal of Developmental Psychology on April 10, 2023. The full article can be found on today.duke.edu.
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