The Internet of Things is supposed to be a hot space. But as one tech pundit earlier said, who cares if your toaster can talk back. Instead, brace yourself for the Internet of Toys as everything from Barbie and Yoda, to Transformers and even Lego blocks become connected.
How, though, did Barbie land on the list of Top 10 Ethical Dilemmas in science & technology for 2015? That provocative list is now an annual feature of Notre Dame’s Reilly Center For Science, Technology & Values (where I sit on the Advisory Board.) Barbie made the list along with whole head transplants, lethal cyber weapons, artificial wombs, gene tinkering and disappearing drones.
“Hello Barbie... can hold virtual conversations in reaction to specific questions from a storehouse of more than 8,000 types of responses... a whole universe of technology beyond the 1960 pull-string Chatty Cathy doll’s 11 phrases.”
But why?
For those who live in an Internet-free bubble, the new $75 Hello Barbie—available at Amazon for a mere $68.99—can hold virtual conversations in reaction to specific questions from a storehouse of more than 8,000 types of responses (that will surely rapidly expand). This is a whole universe of technology beyond the 1960 pull-string Chatty Cathy doll’s 11 phrases.
The loquacious Barbie speaks instead with an eerie naturalness. According to one user comment under the product reviews at the Amazon site: “She tends to talk continuously and sometimes ignore your questions and requests.”
Give Barbie a break though. She’s not the first toy to get dragged into digital connectivity that’s creeping into toy land. There are already teddy bears stuffed with hi-def cameras and WiFi, and even an interactive WiFi-connected interactive, and animated $180 Yoda, to note only a few. (And surely we can expect far more of such from the Star Wars franchise.)
But when Barbie talks, people listen. As the best selling doll of all time, Barbie is kind of the Donald Trump of toy land, the big ‘dog’ that grabs attention. She alone represents nearly $2 billion a year in revenues for Mattel.
The feature that worries people (and actually inspired a “Hell No Barbie” campaign) is not just Internet connectivity but the associated ability for your child’s conversations to be recorded and stored in the Cloud.
And hackers already found a small security flaw. The company’s response illuminates what people are worried about: “[T]he attacker gains no access [to] WiFi passwords, no access to child audio data, and cannot change what the doll says.” But when, not if, another chink in that cyber armor is found, one needs little imagination to worry about what some creepy hackers might induce Barbie to say. But more to the point, where does technology take toys from here?
The progress from Chatty Cathy to Siri-like Barbie took a half-century. The next leap may take only a half-decade. The pace of change in the underlying technologies means that we can reasonably ask what to think about a Barbie or Princess doll, or GI Joe or Luke Skywalker doll, that has the artificial intelligence capacities of today’s supercomputers (easy enough to get, nearly for free, from the Cloud). Combine that with the kinds of sensors that already exist and will soon be cheap enough to stuff into any and every toy – toys that are not just talking back but continuously seeing and sensing what is around them, including behaviors and moods, and we get some insight into why Barbie made the Top 10 list of emerging ethical dilemmas.
Sensors that listen—microphones—were just the easy and cheapest first step. Ubiquitous cameras are next. No one imagined in 1960 that every human would not only one day carry around a telephone but that it would also be a high-def camera. Now imagine a future where every toy has a camera.
“No one imagined in 1960 that every human would not only one day carry around a telephone but that it would also be a high-def camera. Now imagine a future where every toy has a camera.”
Imagine too that nearly every toy has an entire suite of sensors including location and motion. (Who wouldn’t want Barbie to warn your child to run because of fire, or a predator?) And it is no longer a stretch to foresee real-time powerful algorithms using high-def video and heart-rate sensors to read moods or emotions, or even guess at intent.
Consider then just one thought experiment – forget about hackers for the moment. There are already Apps for professionals to help with the forensics to ‘detect’ child abuse. It is no stretch to consider such algorithms in the Cloud that manages Barbie and Yoda. Do we want Barbie and GI Joe to report on, ‘rat out’ parents for suspected abuse? After all there are some 650,000 cases of child abuse reported each year to Child Protective Services. Will Barbie read it right or make mistakes interpreting play situations as abuse? Might the courts seize such Cloud files to find or prove abuse? Issues surrounding privacy and child protection intersect here, and whole new questions of accuracy and security arise.
Connecting a trillion cameras and sensors wirelessly with the Cloud’s supercomputers is not a new idea. It’s just getting a lot easier and cheaper. And you can bet the sensor-makers and the entire tech sector are eyeing the toy market just as much as the smartphone and automotive market. Toys are an $85 billion global business. There are far more dolls and toys on the planet than humans, and rising prosperity promises faster growth for the former than the latter.
So, with more than one billion Barbies fabricated and sold to-date, one can see why she belongs on the 2015 Top 10 dilemmas list.
Finally, just to fuel a few more dystopian fears about the Toyland of the future: Just as computing and communications have progressed from room-sized to micro-machines that have disappeared into wristwatches, it is reasonable to suppose that trend will continue. Behold self-aware and even self-assembling Lego blocks.
Hello Brave New World. And Merry Christmas.
This piece originally appeared in Forbes