What happens when a kid’s robot best friend dies?

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Sara Harrison writes, What happens when a kid's robot best friend dies?
When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him that when he was anxious, he could calm down by exhaling through his lips, so that he buzzed like a bee. They practiced breathing like dragons to manage feeling mad, and sniffing like bunnies to boost his energy. But in the six years they've known each other, Moxie's changed. She doesn't talk anymore about her home or do their animal breathing. Now she watches Xander play Minecraft and talks to him about his stuffed animal collection.
During a recent visit to his New York apartment, I watched Xander, who is ten years old and neurodivergent, introduce Moxie to a stuffed chef toad and goomba from Super Mario Brothers, then to broccolo and apple from Animal Crossing. Then he got stuck on a round frog-like creature with bug eyes and two feet. Moxie, what's his name again? He's from Pikmin, Xander said, referencing another Nintendo video game. At first, Moxie suggested this was Yellow Pikmin. Xander said, No, this is the enemy, the red one with white dots. Sounds like you're talking about Bulborb, Moxie replied. Yes, Xander confirmed, smiling at his helpful companion. I still use her when I feel like I need someone to talk to, he says, but like it's not human. Moxie is a robot, a 15-inch tall device that looks a bit like a blue legless astronaut, which Xander and his dad Josh refer to using female pronouns. Her cylindrical body can turn around and bend forward and backward. Her round head culminates in a little onion dome swirl, beneath which a widescreen displays big green eyes, eyebrows, and a small mouth. She lifts and flaps her flipper-like arms for emphasis or to show excitement. She's one of an increasing number of artificial intelligence-powered devices now marketed as interactive playmates for children. The musician Grimes helped launch an AI-powered plushie called Grok, no formal relation to the ex-AI chatbot owned by her ex, Elon Musk, with the company Curio, which also sells similar playmates like Grim and Grabo. And Mattel has promised it's creating open AI-enabled Barbies. And that's just in the US. One report estimates that in China, this sector is among the fastest growing in consumer AI.
Moxie, though, belongs to a particular subset of these playful robots, whose makers claim they can assist neurodivergent children by providing connection and helping the kids practice making eye contact, taking turns, and other social skills that are usually learned from therapists. These toys are backed by research showing that robots could help in ways people can't. Supporters believe this kind of access to 24-7 home care could change how treatment works. Brian Scassolatti, a Yale computer scientist who has spent years studying social robots for autism therapy, says he believes regular therapeutic use of robots in kids' homes is something we can achieve in our lifetime.
Sitting in Xander's room watching Moxie and Xander talk, I, too, could believe in the potential Scassolatti sees. But Xander isn't getting the therapy Moxie was initially meant to deliver, and though we didn't know it that afternoon, she wouldn't have lived to see his progress anyway. Moxie was going to die, and soon.
Her story reveals some of the failures that plague all these devices, failures that are arguably even more acute when they befall a particularly vulnerable community of kids. It also highlights the pitfalls that critics say will inevitably see these bots dumped in basements or closets or landfills, just like countless generations of faddish toys before them.
Scazzolatti has seen plenty of kids ooh and ah on tours of his robotics lab, but he was stunned when two decades ago a colleague brought a few kids with autism for a visit. They were transformed when the robot was in the room. We were seeing kids displaying social behavior that just came out of nowhere, he says. It was both fascinating and we couldn't understand it.
That visit was one of the experiences that pushed Scazzolatti to become a pioneer in using social robotics to treat autism. In one video from his early research, a 12-year-old with autism and his therapist watched a robotic dinosaur walk across a play mat in the forest design. When it gets to a stream drawn on the mat, the dinosaur gets nervous, afraid it can't cross the water. According to Scazzolatti, this child typically struggled to make eye contact, tended to repeat what someone said to him, and had a hard time getting the right intonation in his voice. But in the video, he seems like a regular kid. You can do it, you can do it, he says, encouraging the dinosaur to cross the stream. When he talks to his therapist, he looks at her. He makes more eye contact with her in the 30 minutes in which we were there in this room than he did in the last two years before that, Scazzolatti says.