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Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Yeah, kids focusing too much on their robot instead of other people is one of my concerns.
A robot can teach the kid all the right things, but it will never give a kid the real social experience, which can get rough if a kid is not sufficiently exposed to it right from the start. Even now, as real human communication moves online in a large part, children grow up increasingly socially anxious and maladapted. From that position, I'm quite uncomfortable with "study from home" trends as well, as school is one of the key venues for IRL child-child interactions.
On the other hand, I wonder what would happen if all kids first developed with perfect robots and then started interacting with one another. But that's a subject for yet another unethical experiment.