How to raise kids who question AI | Randi Williams

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.
AI education researcher Randi Williams has spent years studying how kids interact with smart toys, and what she's found should make every parent stop and think.

**Randi Williams** (0:21)
What happens when technology becomes a black box, and we stop being able to see what's going on inside? We've hidden the machine behind frictionless interfaces, beneath friendly voices, and inside children's toys.

**Elise Hu** (0:36)
Randi's research shows that kids aren't just using these devices. They're forming genuine emotional bonds with them, often trusting them more than they trust themselves. Her talk offers solutions for what to do about it.

**Randi Williams** (0:49)
We need to raise a generation of children who know that they are the ones who get to write and even rewrite the rules of AI.
What children need is a model of what it means to be a curious user of AI. They need someone who will sit down with them, explore the machine, poke at its limits, challenge its responses, and most importantly, dare to rewrite its rules.

**Elise Hu** (1:12)
The approach involves a Lego robot, a game of rock, paper, scissors, and a little well-placed sabotage. Stick around after the talk. We've got both a brief Q&A between TED podcast host, Chris Duffy and Randi and a curator's corner segment with TED's Chloe Shoshop Brooks, who shares a few more thoughts on what it was like to work with Randi. It's all coming up right after a short break.
And now, our TED Talk of the day.

**Randi Williams** (1:48)
In the 1940s, the radio was a transformative technology. But it wasn't an immediate hit. That's because the radios of the early 1900s looked like unwieldy contraptions of exposed wires and glowing vacuum tubes, like a science fair project gone wrong. And it wasn't until 1929, when radio started to look like sleek bake light, that's a kind of plastic, that they became insanely popular. But at a critical cost, transparency. What happens when technology becomes a black box, and we stop being able to see what's going on inside? Fast forward 100 years. Today, the sci-fi artificial intelligence devices of our dreams have been woven into the very fabric of modern life. But like the radio, these systems are bake lighted. We've hidden the machine behind frictionless interfaces, beneath friendly voices, and inside children's toys. Over the past decade, I've had a lot of conversations with kids about AI as an MIT researcher and founding member of Day of AI, a non-profit creating opportunities for millions of children around the world to learn about how AI works. And here's what I've been seeing.
These devices may make intelligence and friendliness so well that children learn to trust them, sometimes more than they trust themselves. And there is real danger of children becoming overly reliant on or inappropriately attached to their smart toys. That said, with some intentional choices on the parts of adults, we can help children see the technology for what it really is. Objects that they can play with, or even program, rather than entities that they should look to for all the answers. My journey exploring kids and their relationships with AI began early in my days at MIT, working on this fluffy, adorable social robot, Tega.
So Tega being a social robot means that its goal is to help people with their goals. Social robots are used throughout healthcare, customer service and education. In Tega's case, we were building it to see if a robot could help young children as they were learning how to read. It's Tega's job to keep the child engaged in the story. Tega will ask questions, add funny commentary, and of course, we've in that target vocabulary for the week. And it was my job to introduce Tega and get children oriented to how to use it. So one day, I come into the study room and I say, Hi, my name is Randi. This is Tega. You're going to read some stories with Tega today. Let me show you how it works. And the girl I was working with, a kindergartner, stops me. No thanks, she says. I know all about robots. I have an Alexa at home and she's my best friend. Watch this. And then she proceeded to show me how my robot worked.
What do we make of a response like that? Well, first, I thought it was kind of impressive that this girl, who again, was learning how to read, could effortlessly navigate the Internet thanks to voice technology. And for context, I had to know how to read, write and type before I could ask Jeeves a question. But for her, not so much. But secondly, I was a little bit disappointed that this girl didn't think that my super cool robot was so super cool. And when I took a step back, I realized it wasn't just her. We are raising a generation of children who are growing up with AI and smart toys. And they tend to see these devices not as virtual assistants or technology, but as friends, distinct beings with a mind, a will, and a soul. And that made me really curious about what children make of this technology. How much do they understand about what's going on? So to investigate that question, I ran a study and I had 30 children between the ages of 3 and 11 come together to interact with a whole bunch of different smart toys all at once. We had toy robots, talking dogs, text-based chatbots and of course, plenty of virtual assistants like Alexa and Google Home. One of the girls in the study, her favorite animal, they were slots. She loves slots. She'd been telling us all day how much she loves slots. And so naturally, when she got hold of an Alexa, she wanted to learn more about slots from Alexa. So she picks up Alexa and says, Alexa, what do slots eat? And then Alexa very helpfully replied, I'm sorry, I don't know how to help you with that.