<story><title>Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/29/amazons-alexa-told-a-child-to-do-a-potentially-lethal-challenge.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coldcode</author><text>When I was around 5-6 I wanted to know what would happen if I put a hairpin into a light socket. It seemed a reasonable experiment beforehand; after I picked myself up after flying across the room I learned a valuable lesson. Around the same time I tested whether Santa existed by putting out food; when no one ate it I assumed Santa was fake. Children are not very experienced at knowledge and thinking and often do things that confound adults. Giving them access to something they do not yet have the ability to understand or discern can be both useful (learning) and dangerous and it&amp;#x27;s up to parents and other adults to make sure it&amp;#x27;s not going to kill them, yet at the same time not completely stifle learning.&lt;p&gt;I could say I eventually became a programmer because I nearly fried myself doing a test...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cecilpl2</author><text>Around that same age I also tested whether Santa was in fact secretly my parents. I decided that Mall Santa would be the only person I told that I really wanted an RC car for Christmas, and I steadfastly refused my parents&amp;#x27; attempts to get me to tell them what I&amp;#x27;d asked for.&lt;p&gt;Lo and behold, Santa got me the RC car I so desperately wanted, solidifying my belief in him for a couple more years.&lt;p&gt;Turns out the real lesson, which I was too young to grasp, is that at the RC car display at Costco a 6-year-old cannot contain his obvious excitement in order to run a properly blinded experiment.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/29/amazons-alexa-told-a-child-to-do-a-potentially-lethal-challenge.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coldcode</author><text>When I was around 5-6 I wanted to know what would happen if I put a hairpin into a light socket. It seemed a reasonable experiment beforehand; after I picked myself up after flying across the room I learned a valuable lesson. Around the same time I tested whether Santa existed by putting out food; when no one ate it I assumed Santa was fake. Children are not very experienced at knowledge and thinking and often do things that confound adults. Giving them access to something they do not yet have the ability to understand or discern can be both useful (learning) and dangerous and it&amp;#x27;s up to parents and other adults to make sure it&amp;#x27;s not going to kill them, yet at the same time not completely stifle learning.&lt;p&gt;I could say I eventually became a programmer because I nearly fried myself doing a test...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>abdullahkhalids</author><text>I was an ambitious optimist. I had extracted the motor out of my toy at age 5-6, and had learned to run it on batteries with some wire. Understood that one 1.5V battery made it go slow, and two made it fast. And the 9V even faster. Obviously, the wall socket would make it go even faster.&lt;p&gt;Well, besides the shock, I discovered that wire basically melts with large doses of electricity.</text></comment>