Child Psychotherapist
THE other day, my 14-year-old was texting a lot, and I asked to whom he was chatting.
‘Oh, no one’, he replied, raising my suspicions.
One of the stipulations of his phone was that I could check it at any time, so I asked him to show me his screen.
I realised why he was being so coy: He had been ‘chatting’ with his SnapChat AI.
‘My AI’ is a chatbot that offers personalised responses, suggestions, and assistance, giving the impression of a real person. The interaction between my son and the chatbot was benign: He was simply asking about Rocket League, a video game he plays. But it got me thinking about the subtle ways in which AI is infiltrating our lives and how conversing with a machine seems a natural aspect of my son’s life.
AI and other technologies have slipped seamlessly into our lives. While we’ve identified the risks of technology, such as cyberbullying, inappropriate content, and predatory grooming, we need to look beyond smartphones and gaming consoles as the primary access points. Other everyday portals may play a more subtle role in our children’s lives.
Parents often ask about the right age to ‘introduce a child to technology’, usually when deciding whether to allow their child to have a smartphone or online games console, such as X-Box or Nintendo Switch.
However, children are exposed to smart technology long before they have these devices. Technology has been part of their lives since they were infants, when a sensor mat in their cottracked their movements and breathing.
Almost 20% of internet users have a virtual assistant in their homes, such as Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Apple’s Siri, according to a CSO survey in 2020.
But surely these smart televisions and AI chatbots pose no threat to our children’s development? They are only machines, right? But perhaps in subtle ways, they do.
Given the proliferation of smart devices in our homes, it is critical to explore whether they impact family life and communication.
Human beings are wired to connect socially.
Interpersonal communication skills, such as eye contact, touch, and talk, developed in early childhood, are central.
It is crucial that we don’t neglect these interactions in the name of technological convenience.
Voicing a fear
In a 2022 article in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, Cambridge researcher Anmol Arora warned that voice assistants could have “multiple impacts on children, including providing inappropriate responses, impeding social development, and hindering learning opportunities”. Other researchers have suggested that these devices could have a long-term impact on children’s social and cognitive development, specifically their empathy, compassion, and critical thinking.
Child-development experts are also concerned that voice assistants can hinder children’s problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. If children are over-reliant on voice commands for simple tasks, they might struggle with more complex situations that require more independent decision-making. There are also concerns that excessive use of voice assistants may reduce children’s opportunities to engage in face-to-face interactions with peers and adults, affecting their social skills and emotional intelligence.
It’s possible, too, that voice assistants might provide inaccurate responses to children’s queries, leading to misconceptions or exposure to inappropriate content.
Do we risk becoming artificial in our human interactions? As technology becomes more ‘human’, do we become less human?
Sherry Turkle, author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, says: “What we forget when we talk to machines is what is special about being human. We forget what it means to have an authentic conversation. Machines are programmed to have conversations ‘as if’ they understood what the conversation is about. So, when we talk to them, we, too, are reduced and confined to the ‘as if’.”
New technologies allow us to “dial down” human contact, Tuckle says, and that communicating with machines has a more significant impact on children than on adults, due to their influence in the formative years of childhood.
“As adults, we can develop and change our opinions. In childhood, we establish the truth of our hearts,” she says.
AI legislation
The European Parliament passed its landmark AI Act last week. This act is expected to become law in May and will be enforced gradually over the next two years.
This legislation will not affect voice assistants and chatbots. However, it will ban specific high-level artificial-intelligence systems that infringe on people’s rights, like biometric categorisation, emotion recognition in schools or the workplace, predictive policing, or any AI that manipulates human behaviour or exploits vulnerable people.
While these events might sound like a science-fiction movie, emotional-recognition AI software is being used in many schools in Hong Kong.
It measures muscle points on students’ faces while they study and it identifies emotions, including happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, and fear. There is no suggestion that these technologies will be used here, but developments are moving at such a pace that it may be a matter of time. So, what can be done at a local level to ensure that our children, who are growing up during the AI experiment, are not missing out on important social or emotional opportunities for learning?
If the progress of AI and other smart technologies comes at the cost of learning interpersonal skills, like empathy, critical thinking, and decision-making, then families and communities need to address this deficit.
Parents also need to be aware of the effects of ‘technoference’, or the interruptions in interpersonal communication caused by the attention paid to personal technological devices.
At a recent webinar organised by the Psychological Society of Ireland, guest speaker Miriam McCaleb, a PhD candidate at the University of Canterbury, said that technoference is rife in families worldwide and threatens the interaction between parents and children. “Smartphones are brilliant for communicating around the world, but not so much for communicating around the kitchen table,” McCaleb said.
AI technologies have made our lives more convenient, but the subtle skills of human interaction should not be overlooked. While it is practical to manage our banking and utilities with apps, algorithms and bots, there will always be a need to make a phone call, and have a conversation with another human.
In the name of progress and convenience, we must ensure our children are not lagging behind in critical interpersonal skill sets. They need to be comfortable with human-to-human communication.
- Dr Colman Noctor is a child psychotherapist