The way children see our home virtual assistants as cats or dogs.

When talking to a friend the other day our conversation went from AI development to how children perceive their at home virtual assistants. A streamer, my friend watched, talked about Alexa and how his children responded to Alexa being broken. The streamer said his children responded like someone died and were mourning about the loss of Alexa.

Children don’t seem to understand the concept of virtual assistants. They don’t recognize that Alexa or any other virtual assistant is just a computer program that is programmed to work in a certain way. Alexa is just like an entity that exists, just like a friend or like a pet.

It is not just children that project their feelings or see certain objects as ‘living beings’. Adults do this very much the same. Take for example cars, for some people a car is not just a car to get from A to B. People's self esteem is dependent on the type of car they drive. The way people sometimes talk to their cars (well, of course people not only do this to their cars) like it is one of their children and are utmost upset when they do something wrong or when something is wrong with them.

Getting back on the fact that children see virtual assistants as an entity that exists, the movie ‘her’ displays this thematic very well. Perhaps this is something we should consider a possibility when the development in this field continues. Whether this something that should be allowed or should be considered a taboo is still open for discussion.