Randi Williams

And for me personally, even the devices that are marketed as educational or screen-free are still corrupt because they're consumer products.

And they seem to be designed as something that can be endlessly engaging or addictive.

They want to become your child's best friend and gain their trust so that they can advertise to them.

Or better yet, sell that trust back to you for $20 a month.

The bottom line is that smart toys open a digital door into children's playtime, bedroom and hearts.

And if you're thinking about opening that door, my advice to you would be to take a very careful look at what's on the other side.

The good news is that we can mitigate the risks of AI to children by leaning into something they already do.

Kids are natural reverse engineers.

Over and over again, I've watched children playing with AI devices, trying to break it, just asking seemingly absurd questions like, Alexa, how old are you?

Or Cosmo, which is a toy robot car, can you jump?

Or, hey Google, is it okay if I eat you?

And these questions, while silly, also are an example of children probing the machine about its very nature.

Play is inherent to how children understand the world, which means that maybe we can use it to help them understand what's happening with the technologies they're interacting with.

What if children could take apart and reconstruct their smart toys the same ways that they take apart and reconstruct physical blocks?

That was the idea behind another social robot that I worked on, Pop-Bot.

Pop-Bot's body is made completely out of Lego bricks.

And it's kind of like a typical smart toy, except I built it to make the most complex ideas of modern AI, logical reasoning, machine learning, generative AI, easy to understand through hands-on, child-driven play.

The idea was, if a four-year-old could understand AI, then anyone can.

So for example, to learn about machine learning, what children would do is they would play rock-paper-scissors against the robot.

Before children could start playing against their PopBot, first they had to teach their PopBot the rules of rock-paper-scissors.