Outsourcing Reasoning

Recently Google helped create an AI model that can understand baby cries and decipher what the baby is saying.(https://youtu.be/BvXXgcBSCXY?feature=shared) So far this application is only capable of turning baby sounds into a description of their feelings, it cannot communicate with the baby. In the foreseeable future AI applications may autonomously communicate with the toddler to soothe it. Maybe it tells them stories to soothe too.

This means that AI applications will have a headstart in understanding the baby even before its owner parents, becoming its first companion. This will clearly impact development of language proficiency. When you can be understood and supplied by your parents by producing instinctive sounds, why tax your mind and learn complex language?

This will at best increase the burden on educational institutions that are already complaining of learning difficulties in children due to their unrestricted internet access that, even today, is usually employed to soothe them. In a dystopian scenario, this leads to a large group of people that have minimal speech capabilities whose needs can be understood only through AI, supplied through automated delivery and funded by a Universal Basic Income. In such a scenario the upper class would constitute of wealthy individuals that can afford to have their child’s needs met by a house help or devote enough from their jobs to care for the child themselves. They must also be wealthy enough to shoulder the higher cost of education to develop linguistic skills all while paying exorbitant taxes to feed the poor.

So, this application of AI must be restricted to deciphering and delivering infant speech and should not be used to communicate with the toddler.