Hey, Alexa, Siri, and Google — Are You Indoctrinating My Kids?

USA - Tech-savvy parents are using big tech’s new AI systems — Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant — as surrogate babysitters. But what happens when children start viewing these bias-ridden systems as authority figures? According to the research firm eMarketer, approximately 68 million consumers use AI assistants on their phones or voice-enabled smart speakers like the Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple’s new HomePod. They are especially popular among parents, many of whom are setting up assistants in children’s rooms.

For example, through the use of what Amazon calls “skills”, Alexa can perform the role of an entertainer that plays music and reads bedtime stories, a teacher who answers homework questions, and even a tutor that teaches children a foreign language. It may, therefore, seem like a good idea to expose children to AI technology from a young age, but it’s not yet clear how interactions with artificial intelligence can affect the ways in which children think and behave.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Dr Allison Druin, a child development expert, explained that AI-enabled digital assistants “don’t have emotional intelligence.” She pointed out that young children are naturally inclined to anthropomorphize objects by attributing human qualities to non-human objects and forming emotional connections to these entities.

Studies show that children are, just like adults, biased to learn from sources that are familiar and look and sound similar to them. This means that children are more likely to accept the information offered by a friendly digital home assistant that they “know” without questioning the answers or asking for evidence.

Unfortunately, the same large Silicon Valley companies and people who have been accused of censorship and discrimination against conservatives are developing these algorithms that answer kids’ questions about the world. In doing so, they are introducing their own ideological biases into AI systems like Alexa or Google Assistant.

When popular conservative commentator Steven Crowder posted a video of himself posing political and religious questions to Amazon’s Alexa home assistant in November 2017, many of his viewers were surprised to learn just how “helpful” Alexa tried to be — by telling him that there were more than two genders and that Jesus Christ was a fictional Biblical character.

If AI developers are mostly progressive liberals, is it a good idea to expose our children to it, and if so, how much?

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Today we find the Church of God in a “wilderness of religious confusion!”

The confusion is not merely around the Church – within the religions of the world outside – but WITHIN the very heart of The True Church itself!

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