Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

When I was around 5-6 I wanted to know what would happen if I put a hairpin into a light socket. It seemed a reasonable experiment beforehand; after I picked myself up after flying across the room I learned a valuable lesson. Around the same time I tested whether Santa existed by putting out food; when no one ate it I assumed Santa was fake. Children are not very experienced at knowledge and thinking and often do things that confound adults. Giving them access to something they do not yet have the ability to understand or discern can be both useful (learning) and dangerous and it&#x27;s up to parents and other adults to make sure it&#x27;s not going to kill them, yet at the same time not completely stifle learning.<p>I could say I eventually became a programmer because I nearly fried myself doing a test...

The fact that you can do even do this should highlight how bad the 110v American sockets are. With the 220V UK style socket this never results in anything happening.

Discussed here yesterday with 520 comments: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29709369" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29709369</a>

Man, the number of people here arguing that parents should not let their children use Alexa, or that Amazon bears no responsibility for it presenting factually incorrect answers to questions really makes me worried about the future of our industry…<p>Have the people commenting used a voice assistant? There’s a very clear difference to even (or, given the weirdly unintuitive opinions here, maybe especially) a casual user between returning search results and using information gathered from them to directly answer a question.<p>The difference is there even when interacting with humans - it’s the difference between “I read an article about that once, let me find it so you can read it too” and “The answer to your question is X”.

Save a click: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;klivdahl&#x2F;status&#x2F;1475220450598924297" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;klivdahl&#x2F;status&#x2F;1475220450598924297</a>

When I was maybe 8-9 I found a dual plug extension for the Christmas lights. It looked like two of those cheap green plugs with a little socket on the back, wired to each other. I think some people call it a widowmaker, and to this day I can&#x27;t imagine why something so dangerous would have been manufactured. Anyway, I wanted to know what would happen if I plugged both plugs into the wall at the same time. I got paralyzed right there in front of mom, unable to even talk or shout, for at least 15 seconds, but it seemed like forever. It&#x27;s weird because I knew to only touch insulator. I somehow fell off it and then unplugged it. I slunk away without her finding out, but my arm had a strange feeling for a while.

So I&#x27;ve got a new Fermi paradox solution. Once we build a large enough radio telescope we will start receiving a lot of chatter from around the universe. Buried in this will be a &quot;high energy physics challenge&quot; involving a powerful particle accelerator, a superconductor, and some synthetic elements with very large nuclei. After performing this challenge there will be another asteroid belt where Earth used to be, and someone somewhere will get some LULZ when they detect a certain kind of characteristic gamma ray pulse followed by silence.

I still don&#x27;t get why people buy this crap, it&#x27;s so obviously useless and potientially harmful.<p>I once tried putting a plug with cut off cables into a socket, must have been around 5-6yo, it threw me quite some distance backwards and was very uncomfortable but nothing more came of it besides completely killing the urge to try again.

Can Alexa tell the age of the person behind a voice? The internet is full of questionable things, like the penny challenge, and Alexa is just voice search. Teaching your kids to use Alexa and expecting good results is the real issue here. As a parent, this looks like a parenting problem to me.

Was there ever a lawsuit against GPS providers telling people to turn right into something like a lake? I couldn&#x27;t immediately find one except a women who walked in the middle of a highway because that&#x27;s what Google&#x27;s route showed.<p>It seems like the same ruling would apply to both, which could effect consumer GPS somewhat.

I did this when I was 9-10 back in Chennai, India(240V LOL). I picked up my Divider from my camel Geometry box(comes with divider, compass, protractor) and shorted it right across the terminals. All I knew was I was lying 2 feet outing the relay had tripped. Got a mouthful from my parents and went on to become an EE(I still am employed as an EE to this day!). I remember the experience as if it had happened just last month. Fast forward 30 years I caught my 1 year old son trying to put his fingers into a socket. I went ahead and child proofed the entire house. Fast forward, 11 years he wants to learn to solder now. I guess its in the genes.

This just highlights that we need our agents to work for us, not for some other entity.

Previous discussion of the toot: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29709369" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29709369</a>

Maybe they could add a feature that disables commands from child-like voices, or let you register voice profiles to create whitelists or blacklists.

When I was a kid, I did something a lot safer... I wrapped a metal paper clip around a wooden pencil with the ends pointing the same way and then stuck it in the outlet... it probably tripped the breaker but I never got shocked (while doing that). Another thing we liked to do was mix milk and pool chlorine in a plastic bottle... it makes a nice pop (can get you hurt if you don&#x27;t get away fast enough though, after you put the cap back on).

To be fair, if it really was “lethal” half of eighties kids wouldn’t be alive today.

The child asked for it lol. But maybe they can evaluate safety of advise.

I fail to see how is this responsibility of Alexa.<p>It&#x27;s parent&#x27;s fault for letting children use devices like Alexa. Stupid chatbots will always give stupid answers.