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Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

cnbc.com

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Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#21

Post by Jeff_Brown »

coldcode wrote: post #13

When I was around 5-6 I wanted to know what would happen if I put a hairpin into a light socket. It seemed a reasonable experiment beforehand; after I picked myself up after flying across the room I learned a valuable lesson. Around the same time I tested whether Santa existed by putting out food; when no one ate it I assumed Santa was fake. Children are not very experienced at knowledge and thinking and often do thi…

You literally flew across the room? I've been shocked a fair number of times -- the worst was when as an 11 year old I felt around in a bare light socket with my finger in Kenya, where they use 240 V -- and don't recall ever feeling pushed in any particular direction.

Indeed, that Kenya experience was terrifying precisely because I was paralyzed. I made an involuntary "aaauugh" sound and shook until the lamp fell over, which was fortunately pretty fast.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#22

Post by dwringer »

lnxg33k1 wrote: post #18
tasubotadas wrote: post #5

I fail to see how is this responsibility of Alexa. It's parent's fault for letting children use devices like Alexa. Stupid chatbots will always give stupid answers.

You fail to see how this is responsibility of Alexa? Are you guys just corporate worshippers? Like are we past the point where we expect corporations to invest the time to make their products safe? I fail to see your logic and how this is a parenting issue, like do you expect parents to keep their kids in chains in glass domes? Amazon, Google, Facebook and all crap like that are selling products and apparently they a…

The article mentions the mother being there at the time to turn it into a lesson about not trusting strangers or the internet. The child was 10 years old for the incident - at that age most children have been in public school for a few years and quite possibly heard much more horrible "advice" from classmates, and have likely been unsupervised many times around electrical sockets. Hopefully their parents or guardians have educated them about the relevant topics to avoid such an injury. The default of trusting Alexa like a family friend (instead of a potentially dangerous stranger) is evidently not tenable, but I don't see how any internet "smart" device can ever be trusted to that level due to the chaotic nature of the internet (and of humans).

EDIT: I don't mean to conflate kids giving each other bad advice with an internet full of greedy and malicious actors. I just mean that children in public school are pretty likely to hear other children give them potentially lethal advice/challenges/etc. and need to be equipped with the ability to listen critically to strangers, and the ability to differentiate good ideas from dangerous ones. At least in the public schools where I grew up.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#23

Post by Jeff_Brown »

gruez wrote: post #20
coldcode wrote: post #13

When I was around 5-6 I wanted to know what would happen if I put a hairpin into a light socket. It seemed a reasonable experiment beforehand; after I picked myself up after flying across the room I learned a valuable lesson. Around the same time I tested whether Santa existed by putting out food; when no one ate it I assumed Santa was fake. Children are not very experienced at knowledge and thinking and often do thi…

>Around the same time I tested whether Santa existed by putting out food; when no one ate it I assumed Santa was fake. That doesn't seem like sound logic to me. Maybe he's just too busy to eat food that was put out at every house? You'd get pretty full by eating a cookie from every house in your neighborhood.

Easier to just inspect the chimney dust.

I wonder how many children have tried to poison Santa.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#25

Post by spcebar »

tasubotadas wrote: post #5

I fail to see how is this responsibility of Alexa. It's parent's fault for letting children use devices like Alexa. Stupid chatbots will always give stupid answers.

I fail to see how it's the car manufacturer's fault the airbags didn't go off in the crash. Parents should know cars are dangerous and shouldn't own them.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#26

Post by gruez »

omnicognate wrote: post #7
annoyingnoob wrote: post #2

Can Alexa tell the age of the person behind a voice? The internet is full of questionable things, like the penny challenge, and Alexa is just voice search. Teaching your kids to use Alexa and expecting good results is the real issue here. As a parent, this looks like a parenting problem to me.

You don't teach children to use Alexa. If Alexa is there they just talk to it. Putting a device into homes that is voice activated, unlocked and usable by anybody capable of speech carries with it some duty of care not to, you know, tell kids to play with mains power. Amazon don't disagree with this.

>Putting a device into homes that is voice activated, unlocked and usable by anybody capable of speech carries with it some duty of care not to, you know, tell kids to play with mains power.

I agree. That's why we should have mandatory faceID on smartphones/tablets/computers/books, so we can positively identify the user's age before allowing access to it. If you fail the age test, your access will be restricted to kid-friendly websites with curated content.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#27

Post by mmastrac »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #2

Can Alexa tell the age of the person behind a voice? The internet is full of questionable things, like the penny challenge, and Alexa is just voice search. Teaching your kids to use Alexa and expecting good results is the real issue here. As a parent, this looks like a parenting problem to me.

Amazon's market cap is 1.72T. If anyone can afford to push the state-of-the-art in terms of safety, they could.

They just don't care to because nobody pushes them to.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#28

Post by mayoff »

gruez wrote: post #20
coldcode wrote: post #13

When I was around 5-6 I wanted to know what would happen if I put a hairpin into a light socket. It seemed a reasonable experiment beforehand; after I picked myself up after flying across the room I learned a valuable lesson. Around the same time I tested whether Santa existed by putting out food; when no one ate it I assumed Santa was fake. Children are not very experienced at knowledge and thinking and often do thi…

>Around the same time I tested whether Santa existed by putting out food; when no one ate it I assumed Santa was fake. That doesn't seem like sound logic to me. Maybe he's just too busy to eat food that was put out at every house? You'd get pretty full by eating a cookie from every house in your neighborhood.

The 6-year-old in the story was presumably led to believe that Santa can visit every house in the world in one night. Logically, normal human limitations (like a finite capacity to eat cookies) do not apply to Santa.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#29

Post by jrmg »

Man, the number of people here arguing that parents should not let their children use Alexa, or that Amazon bears no responsibility for it presenting factually incorrect answers to questions really makes me worried about the future of our industry…

Have the people commenting used a voice assistant? There’s a very clear difference to even (or, given the weirdly unintuitive opinions here, maybe especially) a casual user between returning search results and using information gathered from them to directly answer a question.

The difference is there even when interacting with humans - it’s the difference between “I read an article about that once, let me find it so you can read it too” and “The answer to your question is X”.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#30

Post by omnicognate »

akersten wrote: post #15
AlexandrB wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you have an Alexa in your house and a child says "Hey Alexa" will Alexa ignore that by default? Aren't you just saying that it's the parent's fault for having an Alexa at all?

If this answer from a search engine was actually persuasive enough to their impressionable child that it posed a real risk to them, then it is absolutely the parent's fault for exposing said child to the literal internet before they are ready and able to determine what is good and what is not. "That cup shouldn't have let my kid drink the bleach" is not a convincing argument that the cupmaker is at fault for leaving…

So how do you propose parents prevent their children from using Alexa other than simply not having it?

Not having it is my solution, and I put a bunch of (specialised, technical) work into safely introducing my kids to the internet [1], but if that's the only safe solution Alexa should have a "not safe if you have kids" warning.

But of course it's not the only solution. Amazon just need to make sure their device doesn't tell kids to stick things in power sockets, and they don't dispute this.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29177716

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