Tag: play

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 »

Sunday, August 18, 2024

Affective Technology, Part 3: Coherence in the Self

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by William Benzon

Ritual Play, Day of the Dead in Jersey City

In the first part of this series on Affective Technology, I talked about Poems and Stories, using Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” as one example and a passage from Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer as the other. Coleridge’s poem talks about an injured poet having to spend the afternoon alone while his friend’s take a walk through the countryside. Thought the process of actively imagining his friends enjoying themselves, the disconsolate poet pulls himself out of his funk to the point that he is able to bless them in their journey. The passage from Tom Sawyer mirrored something I did as a child when I was sent to my room as punishment for something I’d done wrong. I would imagine that my parents were lamenting my death and their imagined lamentations would enable me to feel better. The passage from Tom Sawyer was more or less like that, though a bit grander, as befits Tom’s sense of himself. Tom and his friends had run off to the river and the townspeople began searching the river for their drowned bodies. When he realized what was going on, Tom snuck into his Aunt Polly’s house at night and listened to the women commiserate over the deaths of their boys. It made him feel good. The point is a simple one: we use poems and stories to regulate our emotional life.

In the second article, Emotion Recollected in Tranquility, I introduced the concept of state-dependent memory, which holds the our memories are chemically keyed to the neurochemicals active during the experiences themselves. Thus, I suggested, “if the sexually aroused self has trouble recalling any life episodes other than those involving sexual arousal, and the vengeful self can recall only incidents of vengeance, and the thirsty self has little sense of any geography beyond that leading to water, then how can we see ourselves and our fellows whole?” Using Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, “The expense of spirit,” as an example, I went on to argue that literature, and art more generally, provides a (neurochemically) neutral ground giving us access to a full range experience. And this allows us to construct a coherent sense of self.

What happens if, however, the process of constructing a self fails? Read more »