I'm a father (and I also remember something about being a kid) and I can tell you that 4 year old kids are unbelievably egocentric. A lot of the rules adults try to impose that are perfectly reasonable to anyone with enough empathy seem completely arbitrary to a 4 year old. So, "don't yell because that distracts/bothers me" is an "arbitrary" rule coming from a "cranky" dad. "I put a script in the machine that will shut down the screen if you yell too loud" gets translated into "I don't want you to yell", which is, again, an "arbitrary" rule kids don't care about.

On the other hand, "computer doesn't like loud sounds" is a perfectly "reasonable" rule, because the computer is "in charge" of letting you play the game. You disturb the computer, the computer reacts. And you can't argue with it or try to manipulate it. Crying at it or throwing a temper tantrum won't do any good. It has no mouth, so you can't have a conversation with it. In short, you have to follow its rules.

If you want to avoid having the kids jump to the "logical" conclusion that the machine is a person, you can formulate it differently: instead of saying "the computer doesn't like loud sounds", you can say "the computer is a machine that doesn't work well when there's a lot of yelling".

Then again, someone else already pointed out that kids believe that an old, fat man can come down their chimney and leave gifts in a matter of minutes -- and do so for every kid in the freaking world -- without suffering any psychological scars from an "untruthful" method of influencing their behavior (because Santa brings gifts only to kids who are "good"), so I don't see what the big deal is with going through a short period of believing the machine is a person.

None of the above is a bad thing or an insurmountable obstacle, but there's nothing seriously wrong with making the computer take the blame either. In my opinion, it ends up teaching the kids to be considerate to others (even if it's just a computer), with less suffering all around. YMMV, etc.

People anthropomorphism objects all the time. Kids do it even more than adults. This action isn't going to cause psychological damage and, if it does, it is only because it existed already from something much more serious.

So, if a deceiver is always a deceiver, what do you do if they tell you they are a deceiver? beep boop does not compute

Stupid word games. The word "deceiver," as used by the parent commentator, is quite reasonably used to mean "one who is noticeably more likely than baseline to choose to deceive" - your example gives no trouble: you accept it at face value. Disagree for reasons, if you disagree.

Can you please tell me what your definition of "most" and "leeches" are.

I find your response stemming from a false assumption as evidence that you are spending too much of your neural network trying to deal with the deceivers in your life. Instead of having success, coming to right conclusions about things, you instead come to false conclusions, evidence of failure, can't get things right the first time. I find it disturbing and yet an addition to my understanding of how present-emotional people work. Without automations for the lower classes our society would not run as is.

When you get back into work Monday morning, you did your thing wrong, you'll have to correct that as well.

Really, you got all that because I assumed your parents lied to you about Santa Claus, just like the majority of parents in the US?

Honestly, I'd love for you to continue ranting. I'm all ears, it's a lot of fun to read. I promise I'll read it.

It's teaching the kids to be passive aggressive. Can't get what you want? Work behind the scenes to cause the people you love to do what you want. Do it to the kid, the kid does it back to you. It's not something to trifle with. You're configuring the personality of the kid with these interactions, and these choices have huge consequences about how the kid interacts with society, family and friends. There are only a couple people in the world I would trust with my life, whom I could give them power of attorney over me and I could rely on them not to loot me and leave me powerless. And that relationship is built on one of trust, one of never deceiving. The father is deceiving the kid, that trust-relationship I have may not materialize with the person who plays these mind games.

The relationship I describe is the most valuable thing on Earth, people KILL for it, literally, and I'm trying to comment here about how to get that thing, and I see these articles are pooping all over it, and I have to give my 2 cents. These ideas I have aren't silly, it's the operating principles of the most valuable thing in the world: Love and trust. The only thing worth more than money.

1. A zero tolerance policy on "lies" does have a psychological cost on both the parents and children (not just convenience) and, while it's great that has worked alright for you, that's not a proof that it can be generalized and get it working well for everyone.

Love, Pa

That would have been more awesome :)

Furthermore, on the technical side, it's not too easy to calculate some number corresponding to the perceived loudness level, especially not as some answers suggested to parse the RMS-signal number output by the command-line tools "aplay"/"arecord". You'd need at least to take the (non-linear in amplitude, dependent on frequency) weighting curves shown on the wikipedia-page for "Loudness" into account:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness

Then, you'd have to take into account how annoying a sound is, which is obviously highly dependant on the circumstances: A colleague might drive you mad with only very quiet squeeking of his chair, but a lound regularly humming machine you might be able to completely mask out mentally so that you don't even remember if it was turned on or off at some day.

Putting these technical things back to the (morally questionable) problem at hand: If you don't "punish", "educate" or "feedback" your children according to a quantity that they can actually perceive and whose magnitude they can judge, they will experience this apparatus to be highly unfair.

And, additionally, if I would put such a machinery to use, my children would with absolute certainty become masters in creating the most appallingly unpleasant and annoying sounds one can imagine that just don't reach the threshold of the machine. And they would be completely right doing so ;-).

Edit: Typos, "tools aplay/arecord".

   The idea of changing behaviour, conditioning living creatures, to obey rules enforced my machines feels very disturbing to me. 

I find myself sharing the grandparent's discomfort. I'm an avid gamer, yet sometimes, when I lie awake at night and mull over the events of the day, I find myself wondering if I've truly mastered the game or if the game has only taught me what succession of button presses and mouse movements give me the highest levels of dopamine.

I've made use of this technique on myself; I've got a concentration app that, when turned on, will make an abhorrent piercing noise if I go on Facebook/Twitter/Hackernews/ read RSS feeds / etc. It's helped me train myself to focus when I'm working.

I will grant that using this on someone else without their knowledge is more questionable, but I wanted to say that it's sometimes legitimate.

If you set that alarm, you know why and what for you are conditioning yourself, and that is even true if you know how and why someone else set it; but when it's just a faceless event that you learn to adapt to, possibly while even having a narrative about it that has nothing to do with reality, that's not just slightly different or worse, for me that's worlds apart.

I disagree, when I have kids I will tell it everything my wife tells me not to tell it, if this includes telling it Santa Clause is not real- I'm going to do it. I rather have him learn from me then some snob egotistic kid who thinks he knows the secrets of life preaching about how unfair it is that other parents are lying to his friends or another ignorant kid, who is figuring it all by himself, confusing my kid. Having a kid who is aware might pay off..or not, like someone in the top said, us without kids don't know how the robot methodology isn't going to work.

On Topic:

Putting the tv to a certain volume level and a tablet, with a voice monitoring application- if it passes a certain threshold it will change the channel to a 1 minute pre recorded message telling him not to yell, sounds more productive than a white screen and a notification for you to go to the room and explain to him why that keeps happening or sending him to the room for yelling to loud after a few warnings. We can all agree there's a certain level of yelling one can stand from kids!

Good luck staying married, with that attitude. If you don't parent as a team, you'll fail in much worse ways than doing the "wrong" thing wrt Santa.

It? Please never have kids.

In 2100 your comment will be evidence of wild anti-AI sentiments popular in our backward times.

when duke nukem forever is ported to common lisp running on the hurd

suuuuure

Edit: More seriously, trends in AI seems to be running towards statistical analysis and away from anything that might resemble actual "sentience"--even were we to define such a thing. I doubt that an overgrown Bayes engine would take offense at anything I do.

Now looking back at a machine - it has microphone, and sound card. So the input mechanism is in place, the only missing bit is the logic that determines machine's reaction to stimuli.

Without the scrip, the machine cannot be "upset by the noise", but with the script it actually can be, IMHO. So there is some grain of truth in what the guy is saying to his kids...