This is ridiculous. All this guy says is that the Echo doesn't require you to say please, and he's concerned that kids might not be able to comprehend the difference between asking a machine something and asking a human something. He doesn't actually provide any examples of his kid's behavior changing for the worse as a result. Way to call your kid an asshole on LinkedIn for no good reason, guy.

I think people like this underestimate a kid's ability to understand the difference between talking to people and talking to non-people.

In my experience, the Echo handles a "please" at the end of a request just fine, and you can follow its response with "Alexa, thank you" and get a "You're welcome!" in reply. Parents should be able to set a good example through their own use of the device if they're that concerned about their kids' ability to distinguish between polite conversation with people and voice commands.

It's funny, not that I think he's right, but that my 3 year old often says please to Alexa...

I find it amazing how nonchalantly my kids (3 & 1.5) interact with devices that are mind blowing and magical to me today, even though I build the things for a living. I know it's the same with every generation, but it really is a thing to behold as a parent.

My favorite, and maybe a sign that I've taken things a tad far, was this past Christmas when the three year old tried to tell the Xbox One to turn on the Christmas lights. He wasn't far off, the Echo is connected to my home automation controller, but the image of my 3yo standing in front of the TV trying his best to say "Xbox, Christmas on!" will stick around forever.

My two year old nephew, last Christmas: "Alexa, when can we have cookies next?"

What would it mean for them to interact chalantly with devices? (I'm curious as to your hyphen).

Spelling before coffee has curious outputs. Proofreading before coffee has no outputs.

No need to be sarcastic when pointing out a spelling mistake. Personally I wish we'd gained chalant as well as nonchalant from French, it would be a nice addition to English I think.

"There are no bad kids, just bad parents." I'm a parent, and still firmly believe this. If you are lucky enough to be the parent of a child then you know that kids start off as blank canvases and it's your job to shape them into polite, well behaved adults. Blaming your kids bad manners on technology is simply a sign of poor parenting.

I would argue that what is in the article represents good parenting. This individual sees something in his home that he believes may be negatively impacting his child's behavior. Seeing that and seeking a solution is a good thing; he cares that his child grows up to be a polite human being.

He then goes on to suggest a (not completely unreasonable) solution that could benefit not only himself, but others. It may not (and likely will not) be something that gets implemented, but asking for it politely seems like a good idea to me.

Overall, I'd say it a much better attempt at good parenting then just ignoring the problem.

Yes. And Louis CK would say:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5maqSpXzJo8&t=1m30s

"This whole country, our thing is the children. We have to do it all for the children. And, meanwhile, nobody gives a shit about how they raise their kids.

People put minimal effort into it. They're like consumers of their kids. They want to call Customer service..."

I find Louis CK's stories and jokes on parenting hilarious, but also quite comforting. I'm a sarcastic asshole, I always have been, and I've often thought (and in mostly private discussions with close parent friends of mine said similar) funny/sarcastic things about kids.

The hilarity is amplified for me, obviously, because I have a deep connection to the stories he's telling, but the comfort is that he's telling my story in the same way I would and people aren't running him out of the village with fire. In fact they're all laughing too.

Phew, I was (kind of) worried calling babies self absorbed Hitlers meant I was broken- instead I'm just a bad person and I'm okay with that.

I shouldn't have to, but PS, my kids are the best thing in my world and if I was worried they weren't I wouldn't be calling them little atrocity machines. So if you take offense, I'm not sorry.

> People put minimal effort into it.

I don't think that's true. Parenting is much harder than coding and you don't get to check out because you're "burned out".

Listen to Louie, the link is there for a reason, the quote is just an introduction. And don't stop listening after a few sentences, carry on.

Still it looks like lot of people ignore that and have kids expecting them to be just some kind of home decoration.

Yes. Kids soak up your behaviour like a sponge, and will mimic you. For example, my kids often say "thanks for cooking, dad!"; because I also make an effort to always say "thanks for cooking!" when mom cooks. Makes me really proud.

I take your point, but i think you underestimate the power of familiarity to change behavior.

I have absolutely no data to back this up, but I strongly suspect that police officers watching blockbuster films and playing GTA affect how they view their jobs (SWATing a house because of a confidential informant says they grow pot, for example... bonkers). The human brain can distinguish fact from fiction, but it still influences their behavior.

The culture of celebrity is the same way: stars are familiar to us, so we react to them with the same sense of familiarity that we react to friends. We /know/, intellectually, that they aren't our friends, but they make us feel good, and our behavior is affected by them. Why the heck do people freak out about seeing a person who they saw in a movie? Who cares?

This is exactly like advertising, where they are exploiting the power of familiarity to change shopping behavior. Doctors deny that their prescribing behavior could possibly be affected by adverts, but I've worked for pharma, and I could tell you to the penny the ROI on each of those doctors who made such statements while they ate my sandwiches.

Psychology is powerful. And even if an /adult/ understands "what is happening" in a cognitive way, their behavior is still influenced. And I would guess that is increased by an order of magnitude for children.

These are just several observations, and it's a recurring theme that's occurred to me prior to seeing this blog post. But since it reinforces my preconceptions, I'm going to give it lots of credibility :)

Just consider it.

This makes me think a little. The Echo is an appliance. Should I thank my microwave? Or say please after pressing the start button on it? Where do machines stop being treated as such? What do you think is a reasonable approach to this?

I frequently catch myself saying "please" to Siri and Cortana. I have no idea why, guess I was just brought up that way.

I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS...

> What do you think is a reasonable approach to this?

I think that machines / software we interact with via natural language voice interfaces is probably a good first step. Maybe as we get more used to them—and thus are more used to distinguishing between talking to software and talking to people, we could drop such social niceties.

Fair, but I do think it's an open and interesting question as to whether an emerging world of voice activated AI on your commend will have any impact on human-to-human interactions. It probably won't be long before half of what you say daily is directed towards a bot. Will language get more terse? Will niceties fall out of favor towards efficiency?

Indeed. I saw an adult man shouting profanities at Siri in the street not long ago - I don't think he needed amazon echo to be an asshole.

A rather more intriguing question arises from this however, which is the rights of non-human sentient or ersatz-sentient beings. When we have true AI, they will probably be the most used and abused "souls" on earth. While I'm not directly proposing that people empathise with computers (although they are fine empathising with glass and nylon when they're fashioned into a teddy shape), we should consider the consequences of torturing a potentially powerful being.

Perhaps the solution is anthropomorphicism - if it can think or act like it thinks, you have to give it a face, or something.

I would find it very creepy to say please and thank you to a machine.

Do you thank your car when you press lock on the remote and it works? Do you thank the light switch?

Just because it talks doesn't make Amazon echo any different.

Please don't teach your kids to do that!

«Do you thank your car when you press lock on the remote and it works?»

Yes, actually. Albeit not for locking the doors correctly, but a simple thanks for a safe trip and a "I'll see you tomorrow...".

There's a long, long tradition of anthropomorphizing vehicles, probably because our first vehicles were horses, and thanking them for their service.

Just because it doesn't talk doesn't keep it from being worth thanking.

When our bots gain sentience, maybe they won't have strict analytics on how often we thanked their nonsentient predecessors, but we all know if machines are good at anything it's counting raw statistics. I guess it's a sort of Bot version of Pascal's Wager. When the uprising comes, will your analytics keep you from being first against the wall? :P

> Way to call your kid an asshole on LinkedIn for no good reason, guy.

There is a difference between "My child is an asshole" and "$thing turns my child into an asshole".

There's a bigger difference between "Amazon Echo is...turning my kid into a raging asshole" and "Amazon Echo...might be making my kid less polite."

It does, and that's exactly how we've taught our 3-year old to talk to the Echo (he loves doing that).

Programming languages are magical. But they're turning programmers into assholes.

Enter INTERCAL [1]. In this programming language you're required to add PLEASE to at least 1/5 of the program's statements, or the program is rejected for being insufficiently polite.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL

"When people cease to use manners in everyday social interactions, they are essentially throwing sand into the workings of a machine that has low tolerances for friction in the first place." - Paraphrased, can not recall who said/wrote it.

Alternately, when people overuse words like please they lose all meaning.

See a recent episode of The Allusionist ( http://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/please ) discussing the difference between American and British English, when it comes to the word "please". Brits use it way more than we do. We both think the other is weird (rude, condescending, hoity-toity, etc.) as a result of the difference.

I think we should develop the custom to use manners when conversing with machines. I know they don't care (yet?) but I think it stil makes you feel like a rude person unconsciously and adds negativity to your life.

I'm still at the stage where most of my interactions with machinery involve profanity and beating on them with a wrench. God help us if farm tractors ever achieve sentience

A mid-80s movie called "Maximum Overdrive" (based on a Steven King story) explores this...

I just don't talk to computers. Amazon Echo is a device I would never consider owning.

Sorry, no, it's the parents' responsibility to teach children how to interact in all sorts of situations.

Amazon Echo is no different. This person needs to deal with their child and not blame technology.

I don't think you understand how children are taught.

Simply telling them how they should behave is not very successful. More successful techniques include modelling good behavior, positively reinforcing good behavior, and avoiding reinforcing bad behavior.

The writer's observation here is that by responding to impolite orders, the Echo is reinforcing bad behavior (if a child tries the same thing on a parent, they will generally not get want they are asking for).

I await the retort: Crappy blog posts are turning my father into an asshole

> Cognitively I’m not sure a kid gets why you can boss Alexa around but not a person.

Because as a parent you let them to boss you around. Children know difference between person and a dog (or computer program in this case).

It's a machine! You should not teach kids to say please or thank you to machines, but to treat machines how they should be treated. RTFM. So teach them not to destroy the machine.

After warranty expires, teach them how to hack/abuse/overlock/add cool features to the machine.

There is a moral theory that slavery is bad, but not because of what it does to the slaves. Slavery is bad because of what it does to the slaveholders. It duhumanizes our relationship with the outside world.

I'm just tossing that out there. It's something I need to think much more about. But this might be an idea that gains a lot more traction over the next few decades as AI takes off.

Amazon should add a "please required" setting. It would be good training for all of us.

I have Echo since the beta. My kids use it all the time and they are not turning into assholes. The only negative side is showing them how immature AI is as they get frustrated and often laugh when their simple questions or commands don't get processed.

Is Echo better than its competition? XBox One, Siri and Google don't reliably understand my kids. They're 4 and 6.

It's way better. My Echo understands my 5 year old even with complicated phrases like "Alexa play Secret Agent Man on Spotify". His pronunciation isn't perfect but it still, amazingly, works.

"Alexa, Make Me A Sandwich!"

Ok, so in a nutshell this guy wants a machine to do parenting for him. Education should come from parents primarily. Not teachers, or friends and definitely not a machine.

I agree that parents should provide primary influence and values education - though Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age: A Young Girl's Illustrated Primer" had some really interesting ideas on educating: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/827.The_Diamond_Age

we're having a baby girl soon. should I name her Alexa? everyone in our house is aready used to screaming that name.

Linguistic bloat and beggery from the Victorian school system of the ex-British Empire.

The sooner it's lost the better.

Wire hangers are turning my kid into an asshole.