Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge
cnbc.comWhen 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 things that confound adults. Giving them access to something they do not yet have the ability to understand or discern can be both useful (learning) and dangerous and it's up to parents and other adults to make sure it's not going to kill them, yet at the same time not completely stifle learning.
I could say I eventually became a programmer because I nearly fried myself doing a test...
Around that same age I also tested whether Santa was in fact secretly my parents. I decided that Mall Santa would be the only person I told that I really wanted an RC car for Christmas, and I steadfastly refused my parents' attempts to get me to tell them what I'd asked for.
Lo and behold, Santa got me the RC car I so desperately wanted, solidifying my belief in him for a couple more years.
Turns out the real lesson, which I was too young to grasp, is that at the RC car display at Costco a 6-year-old cannot contain his obvious excitement in order to run a properly blinded experiment.
I initially thought the mall Santa snitched.
Last Christmas I got my partner a gift I happened to come across while searching for gift ideas - turned out it’s exactly what she wanted! I was confused - but it turned out I got shown the product (ad) because she had looked at it previously - lesson is shared Wi-Fi can snitch on you!
Or she's really good at faking it so you don't feel bad :)
Or really good at understanding how ad targeting works!
My daughter checked the existence of the tooth fairy by not telling us when she lost a tooth and putting it under her pillow. The pride on her face when she informed of of the results of her experiment the next morning made my heart sing.
Was your answer "I expect a full scientitic report by tomorrow."?
Hypothesis : Parents are fat liars"
Methodology : Put teeth under pillow without telling parents.
Result : Where's my money?
Analysis : The results show that the tooth fairy is fake and my parents are liars."
Conclusion : The current results tend to show that parents are liars, but we need more experiments to know the extent. To expend on the results, I should also be as evil as possible for the incoming year and verify if Santa Claus indeed does give me coal.
I never had Santa or the tooth fairy growing up, and neither do my children for the same reason. Why deceive children with something so obviously fake and not let them enjoy the story along with you?
We still talk about the tooth fairy, but there’s never been a question that it’s mom or dad (which stinks when we screw up and forget).
It seems exactly like you’re NOT letting them enjoy the story, just because you didn’t.
This seems like an easy way to rob their childhood of fun memories, interest (watch how much more they care about Christmas movies when they think it’s real),curb creativity, and produce a child who’s overly skeptical.
Kid will also probably ruin Christmas for other children/parents, garnering a reputation as a know-it-all and possibly alienating themselves socially.
For my parents, it's the social pressure caused by the fact you don't want all the other parents to be pissed at you for spoiling it for everyone.
This seems to be the most common method by which children determine that fantasy characters are in fact fantasy.
I was an ambitious optimist. I had extracted the motor out of my toy at age 5-6, and had learned to run it on batteries with some wire. Understood that one 1.5V battery made it go slow, and two made it fast. And the 9V even faster. Obviously, the wall socket would make it go even faster.
Well, besides the shock, I discovered that wire basically melts with large doses of electricity.
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.
I’ve “flown across the room” from touching a fly back transformer in a CRT. I think what really happened was I backed up trying to get away, and fell over backwards.
Now you know why they call it a flyback transformer.
See, that's believable. I came close to that as a kid by discharging the capacitors in an old-school shoe-mount camera flash. But you don't fly back from 120VAC or even 220VAC socket. My first time as a child was accidentally electrocuting myself trying to replace the flood light on the porch and it either had an obscenely oversized bulb-screw or I was trying to remove a broken bulb screw from the socket (details are hazy). I just felt my heart suddenly racing and my body throbbing/pulsing until I managed to yank my hands away.
Can happen. When I was about 4 I managed to get my finger on the contacts of the plug as I inserted it. This was an old USSR plug... I next remember being in the middle of the room. I thought one of my parents sneaked up on me an grabbed me.. but there was no-one around. I had no idea what happened and kinda just ignored it. I then got electrocuted in shop class in my teens and had the AHA moment as I understood what happened to me as a kid.
Got knocked on my tail by an electric shock as a kid--tried to extract magnets from a broken circular saw. As a precautionary measure, I had plugged it in beforehand to ensure that it really didn't work.
I don't remember anything about the shock other than finding myself on the ground afterwards. It's not implausible that you might move some distance depending how your muscles react.
Never mentioned the experience to my parents, as it did not seem that could possibly lead to any further educational benefits.
> I made an involuntary "aaauugh" sound
I was shocked with 300V DC and the main thing I remember (more than the sensation itself) was emitting a high-pitched ululation that I'm in no way capable of deliberately recreating. It was foreign and alien coming from my own throat; by far the most terrifying part of the experience. But I was sitting on a stool and didn't fall off.
Also went through a pretty traumatic shock that paralyzed me temporarily and had me stuck to 2 metal objects I had grasped with my hands where I ended up closing the circuit.
I was told I screamed at the top of my lungs, to the point where people thought I was joking and started laughing.
The rest is just fun details from this particular trip in 1998 to a developing country in the Balkans: Had it not been for a gentleman who realized I was literally dying and not joking, I'd be dead. He ran toward me and with difficulty and a lot of force removed one of my hands from the metal bar (in the process breaking my wrist). I have zero recollection of screaming, but I was aware and in complete shock and I do remember some kind of yelling or asking for help.
Utter horror is what I recall, but not a ton of detail. (14 years of age, for context - am now twice that)
Your muscles can react when shocked in uncontrollable ways.
This is why if you ever touch a live wire (don't?) do it with the BACK of your fingers so that when your muscles contract, you don't grasp the wire (what happens next is left to imagination).
> You literally flew across the room?
I imagine so, in the hyperbolic sense. I've definitely seen people being "moved" by an electric shock, whether it's the shock itself or their intense reaction to it.
My wild guess is that the “fly across the room” comes from a spasm in the leg muscles, so it’s more that you involuntarily jump across the room.
I think it scared the hell out of me when it made a noise and smoked more than the jolt itself.
I'm glad I had this idea when I was into model railways as a kid
Shorting the rails did spark a bit (cool, obviously) but no muscle clamping or throwing of children!
I didn't learn from it though I guess, many years later I lightly burned a toe touching it to my PC's motherboard.. really weird feeling when your muscle does something faster and more violently than you could ever make it do on purpose! Don't work on a computer on the floor with the case off without footwear! Impressively the computer didn't suffer any ill effect, once I'd got the power back on it booted up fine
I've also given myself a dead arm trying to unscrew a fridge lightbulb.. that someone had already removed allowing my finger to pop in and complete the circuit for a moment. Whoops
Earlier in life (after model railway, before kicking motherboards) I got a school detention for joining (starting?) a wave of kids charging capacitors and throwing them to each other with a "think fast!". All fun and games till someone throws one to the teacher
I don't play with electricity much anymore, my tinkering is limited to battery powered things or less
I remember doing it with some rolled aluminium foil; but I knew that electricity could be dangerous, so I put a piece of scotch tape around the middle part by which I was holding it. So there was a nice flash and the power went off, but I felt nothing :)
I stuck a table knife into the outlet when I was little. I only did it because everyone kept telling me not to. I have this memory of it jumping out at me, I'm genuinely curious if I actually touched the hot side or it's just my imagination.
I accidentally inserted a screw driver into a switch without a cover plate, making contact between the hot and the grounding frame on the switch. I still have that screwdriver somewhere, about half the tip was melted. I don't remember getting shocked, but it blew the fuse on the circuit and scared the hell out of me.
When I was ten or so I tried shorting out a 20V barrel jack charger with a paperclip. It was not from lack of knowledge, though--I was quite familiar with Ohm's Law and just trusted that there would probably be some current limiting circuitry in there that would prevent anything too serious from happening. I guess I didn't think about the possibility of the charger being destroyed in the process at that age--it actually wasn't, but produced a nice burning smell and shower of sparks from the plug!
Your primary job is a parent is to make sure your kids don't die. The rest is kind of a wash.
FWIW, I blew up a power outlet with a paperclip when I was 17. You don't have to be a small child to be dangerously ignorant.
>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.
It's logical to test the model that was presented to him by the adults.
Easier to just inspect the chimney dust.
I wonder how many children have tried to poison Santa.
The fact that you can do even do this should highlight how bad the 110v American sockets are. With the 220V UK style socket this never results in anything happening.
It is possible although maybe not with a penny - I live in the UK and when I was 6 I performed exactly the same experiment. The only difference is I had to stick something into the top hole to wedge open the shield, before I stuck a coathanger wire across the other two (which I did while holding it with a dry cloth thankfully). This resulted (at least in my memory) in a big flash and a lot of black soot on the socket.
But for a sufficiently determined and dumb child it is still perfectly possible to ram things into the UK socket and arc it, it is just a bit more tricky.
I wholly agree with you, although I think it's worth pointing out that the specific risk here (America's dangerous socket design) is purely incidental.
The underlying problem (Amazon appears to be naively scraping information from the information and automatically applying truth judgments to it) needs to be resolved.
The latest National Electric Code requires tamper-proof receptacles practically everywhere. See: https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/13414/are-there-loca...
I guess they wouldn't entirely eliminate this specific problem -- if you were determined to get a plug in halfway and touch one end with a penny, then you could probably pull it off -- but they do make unintentional errors of this variety much less likely.
I replaced all my receptacles with TR versions when I moved in to this house. It takes an afternoon, but it's a good opportunity to make sure they're wired correctly -- you may be surprised to learn that many won't be -- and to replace old, worn-out outlets that present hazards. It's a very easy job for a homeowner, given some basic knowledge about residential wiring that's easily obtained.
The receptacle is only part of the problem.
On 220uk plugs the part of the pins that is partially exposed as you insert the plug is insulted to prevent people doing stupid things like this coin thing.
Discussed here yesterday with 520 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709369
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”.
Sure Alexa can be improved but we still need to teach our kids about safety, online, voice assistant, and otherwise. My kids want to do all kinds of things I don't let them do.
My son wanted to run around outside in freezing cold rain, in shorts with no shoes, I didn't let him but Alexa would have. I don't expect Alexa to be a parent or to supplant me as a parent.
Save a click: https://twitter.com/klivdahl/status/1475220450598924297
When I was maybe 8-9 I found a dual plug extension for the Christmas lights. It looked like two of those cheap green plugs with a little socket on the back, wired to each other. I think some people call it a widowmaker, and to this day I can't imagine why something so dangerous would have been manufactured. Anyway, I wanted to know what would happen if I plugged both plugs into the wall at the same time. I got paralyzed right there in front of mom, unable to even talk or shout, for at least 15 seconds, but it seemed like forever. It's weird because I knew to only touch insulator. I somehow fell off it and then unplugged it. I slunk away without her finding out, but my arm had a strange feeling for a while.
In theory, plugging both of them into the same circuit (such as two plugs in one receptacle) shouldn't damage anything as far as I know. Of course, it won't do anything useful, and if the plug is not polarized then there's a good chance of plugging it in backwards and shorting out the circuit.
And, as you learned then, there is a great danger of accidentally touching the live end. "Proper" use of this, if there is such a thing, would dictate plugging the load in first, then the supply, but in this case there was supply on both ends.
Do you mean one of these? https://i.imgur.com/SM60upY.jpeg
It was like that, but with light string style piggyback plugs on both ends. So the non-wall side could have been in the middle of a bunch of piggybacked plugs, but there would still be two exposed, energized prongs on whatever it was plugged into.
Suicide cables!
So I've got a new Fermi paradox solution. Once we build a large enough radio telescope we will start receiving a lot of chatter from around the universe. Buried in this will be a "high energy physics challenge" involving a powerful particle accelerator, a superconductor, and some synthetic elements with very large nuclei. After performing this challenge there will be another asteroid belt where Earth used to be, and someone somewhere will get some LULZ when they detect a certain kind of characteristic gamma ray pulse followed by silence.
Interdimensional Tik-Tok sounds interesting. I wonder how many alien civilisations are receiving our broadcasts millions of years in the future, and trying to reproduce them.
Like an entire planet just received the first season of Jackass and their anthropologists have had to rethink their entire concept of this distant human civilisation.
So, the celestial equivalent of "Press Alt+F4 for hacks"?
That's actually a fantastic idea for a novel or a movie (are you referencing one?)
If that's never been written before, I hope someone does.
Not exactly the same, but "The Three-Body Problem" by Cixin Liu has a plot that starts a little like this.
I still don't get why people buy this crap, it's so obviously useless and potientially harmful.
I once tried putting a plug with cut off cables into a socket, must have been around 5-6yo, it threw me quite some distance backwards and was very uncomfortable but nothing more came of it besides completely killing the urge to try again.
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.
> You don't teach children to use Alexa. If Alexa is there they just talk to it.
I'll second this. My 5 year old talks to my father's Google device when we're visiting. We never taught him to -- he just learned from grandpa.
Yes, kids learn a lot by observing others. Your 5 year did not talk to a Google device before he saw someone else do it. Kids learn just from watching you, its still teaching and learning. Saying OK Google to electronic devices is not innate in humans.
I guess "teaching" can be done passively, though I feel like the context of my comment made it clear that I meant "teach" as a purposeful action. Maybe you can read it as, "we never instructed him to", if being pedantic about the word "teach" is preventing this conversation from moving forward.
Just because they can figure out how to use it doesn't mean you don't teach them how to use it. In particular what to do with the information they get from 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.
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.
The source for the result was a page warning about a dangerous challenge that parents should watch out for.
Alexa stripped that context away completely and instead added a timer that discouraged careful consideration. This is an algorithmic failure, regardless of the age of the user. Having this sort of failure in a product that has been explicitly advertised for use by kids looks pretty bad and thus it is unsurprising how quickly amazon acknowledged the error and promised to fix it.
It might be unreasonable to expect Alexa to make the internet safe for kids, but if they want to be included in homes with children, they need to at least not directly make the internet more dangerous for children.
I expect that managing children's safety online will become a key product feature of Alexa in years to come.
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.
I personally don't want the toxic mix of Big Corp + Gov Regulations for something like a home assistant. Literal nanny state. Micromanaging is not the answer. We need Gov regulations to break up Big Tech in general.
Just throw the goddamn device out of the window. Problem solved.
How is that "literal nanny state?" We're talking about removing a home assistant's ability to tell you to do something lethally stupid. Basic consumer safety measures are a staple of a healthy society; just because a device is in your home doesn't exempt it from the government setting safety standards for it. If anything, the opposite is true.
Though on your last point we agree. Throwing the thing out the window is the best solution overall.
There are plenty of government regulations that work. Regulation doesn't preclude breaking them up, which I'm also in favour of.
Sure, I want natural gas lines leading to my apartment to be regulated. But, I see Alexa as an information source. I don't want books to be regulated just as much as I want Alexa to be regulated.
I for one wouldn't assume that "Alexa, give me a challenge to do" would be pulling from the open, uncensored internet. I would assume that Amazon had some kind of curation method that would remove the possibility of Alexa telling you to do something lethally stupid.
Further, what Alexa did is actually even worse than just reading from the open internet, because it only took the "challenge" part and stripped away the context about how dangerous it is.
This is akin to something like, "Alexa, tell me about civil rights" and it quoting Stormfront or some other hate site's take on race, without any other context about what it's reading from.
When I ask for something really general, I assume that Alexa is just a voice controlled web browser. Since Alexa is really about advertising and selling you things, I would assume that any curation is just to drive you to Amazon products. Once you get outside of products that Amazon can sell you then Alexa breaks down to a basic web search - as evidenced here.
We are calling out Alexa here but I think the same is true for other voice assistants too. Calling these products 'smart' is so wrong - there is nothing 'smart' about them. That 'smart' marketing has you and nearly everyone else assuming that they are a lot more capable and functional than they really are. Its just voice commands to drive things you would otherwise touch in some way - it has no where near human abilities.
The assistant platforms fall back on web search because they want to pretend to be omniscent. If it said in the documentation "here are the 1,602 commands explicitly supported, the data sources it pulls from, and anything else goes to an error message", it wouldn't be magical anymore.
Less magical might be a far better bargain for the platform brands, though. It's literally the face (err, voice) of your brand, and you're fighting a completely adversarial war here. At best, you've got unrelated external data sources that could make it say something stupid, but there's an entire spectrum of bad actors with incentivization to get Alexa/Siri/Google Assistant to say something offensive, scandalous, or hazardous.
This is the best answer and the media looks for opportunities to push an agenda. I'd rather Alexa sometimes get things wrong because it is just searching the web than to have it constantly updated with "approved" content.
Not only did Alexa retrieve the wrong content (instead of a list of challenges to do, Alexa sourced from a list of dangerous challenges you shouldn't do), Alexa then stripped off the entire context of the warning about not doing the challenge because it was dangerous, and instead added a timer.
So the issue here is less about needing to sanitize the internet for kids, and more about how AI struggles to categorize and summarize content and the dangerous effects that can have.
You overestimate what AI means in terms of marketing. If a site owner doesn't markup their site properly, then that could also be the cause of issues like this. Do you really expect Alexa to be "smart" enough to understand human logic like an actual human, or do you not see that AI can basically mean Alexa goes to the web, does a search and parses markup from a website to the best of its ability and they call it AI? Some people care about the technicalities and others just want it to work perfectly, but I think the people that care about the technicalities are more realistic than just wanting something to be the way they think it should be.
> You overestimate what AI means in terms of marketing.
Not really, you are making huge assumptions about me here. I don't expect Alexa to be smart. I do expect that if a company is going to scrape other people's content to use in their service, it behooves them to do that scraping properly and to not use automation to do it if their automation isn't up to snuff.
The right answer is that Alexa (especially in a "Kids" mode) should only pull from a white-listed, manually vetted data pool. It wouldn't find the list of dangerous challenges in the first place.
In the worst case, this means, oh no, they might need to find human moderators to approve content for the pool, or even custom create content. They can afford it.
Was there ever a lawsuit against GPS providers telling people to turn right into something like a lake? I couldn't immediately find one except a women who walked in the middle of a highway because that's what Google's route showed.
It seems like the same ruling would apply to both, which could effect consumer GPS somewhat.
Even ignoring that a driver is presumed to be more capable (licensed + an adult), driving into a lake is somewhat more obviously dangerous.
Everyone should know not to touch a live plug. But electricity is a more abstract concept and knowing whether the shock will kill you vs. merely stun is probably outside the common knowledge of most people. It's not entirely unreasonable to assume that if Amazon is telling you to touch a plug, that it's not going to horribly maim/kill you. It's dumb, but not so dumb that Amazon should escape liability for it.
Turning into an actual lake requires a special degree of inattentiveness or over-reliance on the GPS, but I'll confess to turning into a one-way in a neighborhood I was not familiar with because "the GPS made me do it." For what it's worth, the officer that pulled me over a split-second later was angry with but accepting of my explanation (one of the few times in my life that I've been pulled over but not ticketed... probably because it didn't get far enough for them to ask for my license).
ehh an adult driving a car has the reasonable expectation of making safe decisions to avoid driving into a body of water… could I blame the GPS for slamming into the car in front of me or hitting a pedestrian?
I think there’s a considerable difference from giving a child instructions to electrocute themselves… they literally don’t know better. They’re not licensed or educated.
>an adult driving a car has the reasonable expectation of making safe decisions to avoid driving into a body of water
The famous example of that happened in the middle of the night during a storm, but you can use the other common example of being told to turn the wrong way into a one way.
The two scenarios seem similar, an ai giving dangerous directions and I suspect the difference in age and experience would not effect the precedent.
sure but we’re failing if we’re teaching adults to blindly follow ai
In both situations I don't think this is "blindly following ai". If you are unfamiliar with an area, hence why you are using gps, then it is reasonable that someone does not know a street is a one way and it may not be immediately evident.
Add time of day or inclimate weather to the situation and things can get bad quickly.
I suppose, though I was thinking of the “dark storm” example… which sounds like almost literally following gps blind. That’s the situation drivers ed teaches you to pull over and wait.
Even one way… maybe you can make the case that the city isn’t labeling roads well, but when in doubt there are other cues like parked cars and the direction other road signs face. These are problems that also predate gps. If a passenger told me that it wasn't a one-way and they were wrong, it’s not the passenger’s fault when it comes to legality, it almost always falls on the operator.
Yes you are right that is literally following gps blindly, and probably people should pull over.
> Was there ever a lawsuit against GPS providers telling people to turn right into something like a lake?
I can't remember any lawsuits, but there have certainly been insurance claims rejected, appealed, and rejected again, on the basis that the policy presumes a certain level of driving with due care and attention.
No doubt the small print of policies are now festooned with text specific to trusting tech to the point of life-threatening stupidity, rather than relying on more general provision, if they didn't already have it.
> It seems like the same ruling would apply to both
The key difference in this case is that the actor is a child, and legally can't be held responsible in the same manner. So if it did apply it would be to the adult who installed the device or an adult considered responsible within the household, not the child that used the device.
Wasn't this an episode of The Office?
No way that was based on a true story.. was it?
Dunno, this was the event I remembered hearing about and it was clearly post show. https://abcnews.go.com/International/woman-drives-car-canadi...
I did this when I was 9-10 back in Chennai, India(240V LOL). I picked up my Divider from my camel Geometry box(comes with divider, compass, protractor) and shorted it right across the terminals. All I knew was I was lying 2 feet outing the relay had tripped. Got a mouthful from my parents and went on to become an EE(I still am employed as an EE to this day!). I remember the experience as if it had happened just last month. Fast forward 30 years I caught my 1 year old son trying to put his fingers into a socket. I went ahead and child proofed the entire house. Fast forward, 11 years he wants to learn to solder now. I guess its in the genes.
This just highlights that we need our agents to work for us, not for some other entity.
Previous discussion of the toot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709369
Maybe they could add a feature that disables commands from child-like voices, or let you register voice profiles to create whitelists or blacklists.
I'd love a whitelist of voices
It's been a while since I've had a gathering at my place resulting in 4 or 5 dildos ordered that need cancelling out but it is still irritating when something on TV or maybe a Twitch stream wakes the Alexa up.. especially if they've woken it up by telling their own Alexa to do something like play a song and mine joins in
I like your friends already.
When I was a kid, I did something a lot safer... I wrapped a metal paper clip around a wooden pencil with the ends pointing the same way and then stuck it in the outlet... it probably tripped the breaker but I never got shocked (while doing that). Another thing we liked to do was mix milk and pool chlorine in a plastic bottle... it makes a nice pop (can get you hurt if you don't get away fast enough though, after you put the cap back on).
To be fair, if it really was “lethal” half of eighties kids wouldn’t be alive today.
The child asked for it lol. But maybe they can evaluate safety of advise.
Children ask for (and do) all kinds of dumb things without possessing the agency necessary to evaluate the consequences. That's why our society has the concept of "child-proofing" household objects and appliances. Why would Alexa be any different?
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 are responsible for the crap their product produce and you guys are just willing to accept that
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.
Of course we all want children to be as equipped as possible "to listen critically to strangers, and ... to differentiate good ideas from dangerous ones"
THAT IN NO WAY LETS MANUFACTURERS AND SELLERS OF PRODUCTS OFF THE HOOK !!
If you want to make money selling or providing products to consumers, and especially to children, IT IS YOUR JOB #1 TO MAKE THEM INHERENTLY SAFE.
If you cannot make it inherently safe, it is not ready to sell. Period
Stop attempting to insert some defenses you think children should have against bad advice and dangerous products -- it is utterly irrelevant.
The fact that the mom was there and turned it into a learning event was PURE DUMB LUCK. They got lucky this time. They'd better damn well fix it solidly or pull the product.
The fact that this is even a question in a modern society is mind-boggling.
Perhaps I should have made clear that I agree Amazon has some responsibility here in what kinds of things go onto their platform, but to me it seems like a problem with no obvious solution. Particularly as we move toward more dynamic digital assistants that scrape content directly from the internet, I think we will run into more situations like this. To me it just seems like the safest course would be to treat Alexa and other digital assistants more like a courier than a family friend. Parents let deliveries into the house all the time, but shouldn't leave children alone with the delivery person. I'd expect a courier service to fire their couriers (and take appropriate legal action) if they demonstrated problematic behavior toward children on their route, just as I expect Amazon to take steps to prevent what happened here with Alexa, but I worry that the inherent potential for danger is ever present.
Nice, but how is anyone to not leave children alone with an always-on device?
The solution is simple.
If the system is not yet designed, built,& tested to a sufficiently high standard that crap like this will not happen, then you pull it from the market. Period.
It is not like this feature is critical, or even a rounding error on any Amazon data sheet. They have no right to run such an inherently dangerous POS into customers' houses.
And, perhaps vendors will decide to stop using the unfiltered cesspool of the Internet as a free data source to productize. It is a stupid short-cut.
I think trusting a device like a family friend has been an error, thinking to compare a school friend giving a bad advice to a kid to a world of corporation surrounding us with unmoderated content to fill their pockets is just laughable if it wasn't just so sad, a parent has to monitor and teach a kid how to survive, these companies need to be responsible for the content published on their platform as they have the ability to reach a huge number of people
> I think trusting a device like a family friend has been an error,
I think I was too verbose and meandering to convey it, but I agree with you on this 100%
Have you ever thought about taking responsibility yourself instead of blaming corps/gov/others?
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 your cleaning equipment in an accessible location. It's the internet, it's dangerous, teach your kids about it before it teaches them.
I am 0% concerned about hypothetical effects of search results and 100% concerned about things that are actually harming our children, like the LAPD[0].
[0]: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/28/us/lapd-teen-killed-valen...
Is this "the cup shouldn't let my kid drink the bleach?" or "interfaces engineered to be responsive to children's voices and marketed as being an authoritative source for facts probably shouldn't respond to requests for drinks recipes by parsing random websites with an algorithm so shonky it can't distinguish health warnings from recommendations?".
It's not like bleach manufacturers advise people to leave it around their household for easy access, or make special kids' editions which share many features with the adult solution including a cap designed to ensure it fits as easily in kids' hands as adults.
Yes, parents have some responsibility for actual parenting, but I don't think you can argue that an OEM going out of their way to ensure kids can use their products is entirely off the hook.
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.
It’s all about expectations. Would you be expecting Alexa to ever tell you to touch mains?
It’s unclear what prompts are answered by a set list of answers (like “tell me a joke”) and what’s scraped from the web.
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.
Both positions hold truth.
The idea that every gadget, or even most should be child-safe is silly. Alexa is an internet connect device at the end of the day and should be treated as such by parents. However, where possible companies should also try to avoid situations where they're causing unnecessary harm and if needed government should step in to regulate to protect consumers.
In this case, it seems right that people are flagging this up and are unhappy, but I do tend to agree with the sentiment that kids probably shouldn't be using Alexa anyway and that the risk here isn't really comparable to car safety where regulation absolutely makes sense.
On a personal note I honestly hate how often health and safety regulation gets in the way of what would be cool products and experiences these days, but this is the natural result of people refusing to take personal responsibility. It's likely this feature (which I'm guessing doesn't do this in 99.9% of cases) will now just be removed because it can't be implemented with 100% safety.
>>The idea that every gadget, or even most should be child-safe is silly.
NONSENSE
If any consumer product is sold into the home, there should, at least in any modern society, be a presumption that it is safe.
>>On a personal note I honestly hate how often health and safety regulation gets in the way of what would be cool products and experiences these days
So effing work harder to make it safe before you make the product, or sell it only into professional/industrial settings; in those settings, you can require specific training/certification/etc. And even in those settings they require reasonable safety devices.
The short answer is that in a modern society, you do not have a right to MAKE YOUR PROFITS by selling inherently dangerous objects to consumers.
Ordinary consumers should be able to expect that they do not need special expertise to keep from losing a limb or life.