Our digital children

The power relationship between adults and children in the West is shifting. Factors of age and life experience are becoming counterbalanced by children’s affinity for burgeoning developments in digital technology, where skills developed in online gaming and social media provide a strong foundation for knowledge economy occupations. The implications for parenting, schooling and society are immense. This paper summarises the current debate on issues around children’s use of digital devices and social media. It argues that for many parents a lack of familiarity and understanding creates anxieties and impairs them from helping their children realise the opportunities for social, moral and economic development afforded by the new technologies. Schools have a leading role to play but are hampered by teachers’ technical skills and confidence to innovate. The paper concludes with recommendations for a proactive approach to yield benefits for both children and adults

Our digital children

The power relationship between adults and children in the West is shifting. Factors of age and life experience are becoming counterbalanced by children’s affinity for burgeoning developments in digital technology, where skills developed in online gaming and social media provide a strong foundation for knowledge economy occupations. The implications for parenting, schooling and society are immense. This paper summarises the current debate on issues around children’s use of digital devices and social media. It argues that for many parents a lack of familiarity and understanding creates anxieties and impairs them from helping their children realise the opportunities for social, moral and economic development afforded by the new technologies. Schools have a leading role to play but are hampered by teachers’ technical skills and confidence to innovate. The paper concludes with recommendations for a proactive approach to yield benefits for both children and adults

Children’s Understanding of Robots: A New Ontological Category or Just Pretend?

Children attribute a unique constellation of animate and inanimate characteristics to personified robots, e.g., judging them to have emotions, thoughts, and capable of being a friend, while also being a piece of technology. Do children truly believe robots have animate characteristics or are they just engaging in pretend play? The latter is certainly plausible as children readily endow objects with personas. The present study sought to address this question by investigating children’s judgments and behavioral interactions with a robot compared to a stuffed animal (a classic object of pretense). Ninety participants (5, 7, and 9 years) engaged with each entity (counterbalanced order) during a familiarization period, free play, and an interview probing their attributions to each entity. We coded children’s judgments during the interview and their behavioral interactions with the entity (e.g., endowing animation, attempts at reciprocity). We predicted that if children are engaging in pretense, their judgments should align with pretend behaviors (e.g., saying the robot can move on its own, and then endowing it with animation). Whereas, if children’s attributions reflect their veridical beliefs, their judgments should align with reciprocal interactions (e.g., saying the robot can move on its own, and beckoning the robot to come). By using convergent measures (judgments and behaviors), we gain confidence in how children understand each entity. Our next step is to analyze the results of this study. The results will help determine whether children’s attributions to robots are a product of pretense or reflect their actual beliefs. In turn, these results will (1) have bearing on the hypothesis that robots may represent a new ontological category (i.e., straddling the boundary between animates and inanimates), and (2) inform on the potential implications of increasingly pervasive personified technologies on children’s pretense and their developing conceptions of the world

I Call Alexa to the Stand : The Privacy Implications of Anthropomorphizing Virtual Assistants Accompanying Smart-Home Technology

This Note offers a solution to the unique privacy issues posed by the increasingly humanlike interactions users have with virtual assistants, such as Amazon\u27s Alexa, which accompany smart-home technology. These interactions almost certainly result in the users engaging in the cognitive phenomenon of anthropomorphism--more specifically, an assignment of agency. This is a phenomenon that has heretofore been ignored in the legal context, but both the rapidity of technological advancement and inadequacy of current applicable legal doctrine necessitate its consideration now. Since users view these anthropomorphized virtual assistants as persons rather than machines, the law should treat them as such. To accommodate this reality, either the courts or Congress should grant them legal personhood. This can be accomplished through the application of an objective test that is satisfied by the establishment of social and moral connections with these virtual assistants. Further, due to the paramount privacy concerns resulting from this technology\u27s use within the home, courts should establish a new privilege that protects the communications between users and their virtual assistants

Children’s psychological and moral attributions to a humanoid robot

textIn the near future, sophisticated social robots will become increasingly interwoven into our lives. Researchers have recently begun to examine people’s anthropomorphic conceptions of such robots, and a few have stressed the unique consequences that these technological agents may have for the psychological development of children developing around them. In the current set of studies, children were introduced to a humanoid robot, “Robbie the Robot.” Across the two studies, participants witnessed Robbie perform a harmful action, destroying a block tower that a child had purportedly built and was saving for later. Of primary interest in these two studies was whether children would hold Robbie the Robot morally accountable for the destructive act. It was predicted that judgments of moral accountability would depend on several different factors: whether the robot appeared to initiate its own actions, the age of the participant, and whether children attributed psychological properties, specifically intentional agency, to the robot. In Study 1, children were assigned to one of two experimental conditions: a controlled condition in which a confederate appeared to control the robot’s actions with a device that was tethered to the robot, and an autonomous condition in which the robot appeared to move of its own accord. Results revealed that children were significantly more likely to attribute psychological properties to the robot in the autonomous condition compared to the controlled condition. Compared to 7-year-olds, 5-year-olds were more likely to attribute psychological properties to the robot overall. In addition, results indicated that increasing cues to the robot’s autonomy indirectly affected moral accountability judgments through an increase in children’s attributions of intentions. Study 2 tested the hypothesis that children’s attributions of psychological agency, but not psychological experience, would increase after watching the robot commit a moral act. Overall, Study 2 results did not support this prediction, but key results from the first study were replicated and elucidated by the inclusion of a wider array of psychological properties as well as a measure of children’s judgments of the robot’s cuteness. Implications are discussed for human interaction with social robots and other rapidly evolving technologies, such as autonomous vehicles.Psycholog

The Biological, Psychological, and Social Properties Children and Adults Attribute to Virtual Agents

For children, high quality friendships are associated with adaptive social, emotional and academic functioning. There is also evidence that children experience real and imaginary friendships in similar ways, and that imagined relationships could have an impact on development. However, less is known about the relationships made possible by virtual agents in digital media. This dissertation research was designed to provide preliminary data about children’s concepts of virtual agents, and the social opportunities they attribute to such entities. In Studies 1 and 2 (combined N = 48), preschool aged children differentiated the social affordances of a stuffed dog and a virtual dog. Participants played a game in which they guessed whether a child in a video was referring to a stuffed dog or a virtual dog in a series of statements. Items designed to assess high quality friendships, such as comfort, protection and love, were attributed more to the stuffed dog than the virtual dog. Studies 3 and 4 examined adult and child concepts of a virtual child, and how concepts of this entity might differ from a real child, a child on a video chat program (e.g., Skype™) and an inanimate doll. Adults and children attributed a range of properties to each child agent, including biological, psychological and social properties, as well as opportunities for relationships. In Study 3 (N = 144), adults did not differentiate between the virtual child and the doll on the social property; however, they favored the doll on opportunities for unilateral relationships. In Study 4 (N = 30), five to eight-year-old children indicated an overall preference for the doll on the social property, as well as on opportunities for reciprocal relationships. Children also favored the doll on opportunities for love, companionship, and intimate disclosure. Altogether, these findings suggest that virtual agents afford more limited social opportunities than inanimate artifacts, and they are less likely to be loved by children and adults alike. These results raise important questions about the design goals for virtual agents, and the functions they are intended to serve in our everyday lives. This dissertation includes both previously published and co-authored material

The Value-Sensitive Conversational Agent Co-Design Framework

Conversational agents (CAs) are gaining traction in both industry and academia, especially with the advent of generative AI and large language models. As these agents are used more broadly by members of the general public and take on a number of critical use cases and social roles, it becomes important to consider the values embedded in these systems. This consideration includes answering questions such as 'whose values get embedded in these agents?' and 'how do those values manifest in the agents being designed?' Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to present the Value-Sensitive Conversational Agent (VSCA) Framework for enabling the collaborative design (co-design) of value-sensitive CAs with relevant stakeholders. Firstly, requirements for co-designing value-sensitive CAs which were identified in previous works are summarised here. Secondly, the practical framework is presented and discussed, including its operationalisation into a design toolkit. The framework facilitates the co-design of three artefacts that elicit stakeholder values and have a technical utility to CA teams to guide CA implementation, enabling the creation of value-embodied CA prototypes. Finally, an evaluation protocol for the framework is proposed where the effects of the framework and toolkit are explored in a design workshop setting to evaluate both the process followed and the outcomes produced.Comment: 23 pages, 8 figure

Disentangling two fundamental paradigms in human-machine communication research: Media equation and media evocation

In this theoretical paper, we delineate two fundamental paradigms in how scholars conceptualize the nature of machines in human-machine communication (HMC). In addition to the well-known Media Equation paradigm, we distinguish the Media Evocation paradigm. The Media Equation paradigm entails that people respond to machines as if they are humans, whereas the Media Evocation paradigm conceptualizes machines as objects that can evoke reflections about ontological categories. For each paradigm, we present the main propositions, research methodologies, and current challenges. We conclude with theoretical implications on how to integrate the two paradigms, and with a call for mixed-method research that includes innovative data analyses and that takes ontological classifications into account when explaining social responses to machines