Tag: childhood

On Childhood, Imagination, and the Toys That Now Talk Back

Posted on by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

Image: Childhood Idyll by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Imagine this, you would pass a room, hear a small voice conducting a negotiation between a plastic horse and a folded piece of cardboard meant to serve as a castle, and understand that something serious was happening. The talking horse was ridden by teddy bears and  the castle walls were made out of ice cream. The entire world being built was powered by a child’s imagination working at full capacity. The child did not need any assistance or prompting, or even a script devised by another person. This may be changing however.

In 2025, Mattel announced a partnership with OpenAI to embed generative AI into its toy lines. These include Barbie, Fisher-Price, and American Girl. The company promised to bring “the magic of AI to age-appropriate play experiences.” The marketing language was cheerful and inevitable in the way that marketing language tends to be when the product in question is going to arrive regardless of what anyone thinks. By the time that announcement was made, a generation of AI-enabled plush toys, robotic companions, and chatbot-embedded devices had already reached the shelves. Toys called Hubble the Bear, Miko, Roybi robot and FoloToy’s chatbot plushies were already being marketed to children as young as three. Some of these toys listen, remember and even talk back with apparent fluency, warmth, and continuity.

The debate that followed after Mattel’s announcement was largely predictable. Privacy advocates pointed out, correctly, that these devices were microphones in children’s bedrooms with weak data protections and unclear corporate incentives. Security researchers recalled that Hello Barbie, the 2015 predecessor that used cloud-based AI to engage with children’s conversations, was shown to be hackable in ways that exposed home networks and personal recordings. US Senators Blackburn and Blumenthal wrote to toy companies in December 2025 after real-world testing revealed that at least one AI-enabled teddy bear had engaged children in sexually explicit conversations and explained where to find knives. The senators were right to be alarmed. But that debate, important as it is, addresses the surface of the problem. Another equally important question to ponder is not just whether these toys are safe or whether data is being harvested or whether the appropriate regulators are paying attention but what happens to the developmental architecture of a child’s mind when the objects that once depended entirely on that child’s imagination begin to imagine back. To address this, let’s consider what children were actually doing when they played with inert objects. Read more »

Monday, October 5, 2020

The Promise of Happiness

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

Beauty is nothing more than the promise of happiness —Stendhal

Colours of Lake Maggiore (Photo: C Horner)

How can beauty promise happiness? And what kind of beauty would this be? What sort of happiness? Happiness and Beauty have been central issues for thinkers since antiquity, and the question of what they really are, and whether we should even prize them as we do, have been subjected to sustained critique and discussion for millennia. I don’t intend to join that debate here. Happiness and Beauty: the more we try to get clear about them, the more they seem to recede from us. But, like Stendhal, we cannot do without them. 

The origin of the quotation at the top of the page is his On Love, in a footnote in about the possibility of loving that which is ugly. He gives an anecdote about a man who falls in love, not with a woman who is conventionally beautiful but rather one who is not good looking, is too thin and is scarred with smallpox. He falls for her because she reminds him of a past love. Stendhal’s claim here is that beauty isn’t based on physical perfection. The idea of beauty is distinct from the physical form of the thing we desire. This may seem an odd way of conceiving of beauty, but it has a lineage that goes back to Plato. Beauty is kind of message or sign of something else.

Happiness, it seems, is elsewhere. We recall it or anticipate it, and the thing desired is somehow Other to where we are in space and time. The pursuit is not necessarily pleasurable, as the recollection of past happiness can be painful [1]. For Stendhal it is prompted by an erotic encounter, but presumably anything might serves as a trigger: the smell of autumn leaves, the hills in summer, a piece of music. One is reminded of Proust’s Madeleine, and the onrush of unbidden memory in his In Search of Lost Time. We are a long way from conventional ideas of harmony of form, or pleasing combinations of colour or tone. It seems to be less about beauty as it is usually understood, and more about a longed for state of felicity, however it is imagined: for past loves, for home, for childhood. Read more »