From reminding potty-training toddlers to go to the loo to telling bedtime stories and being used as a “conversation partner”, voice-activated smart devices are being used to help rear children almost from the day they are born.

But the rapid rise in voice assistants, including Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple’s Siri could, researchers suggest, have a long-term impact on children’s social and cognitive development, specifically their empathy, compassion and critical thinking skills.

“The multiple impacts on children include inappropriate responses, impeding social development and hindering learning opportunities,” said Anmol Arora, co-author of an article published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.

A key concern is that children attribute human characteristics and behavior to devices that are, said Arora, “essentially a list of trained words and sounds mashed together to make a sentence.”

The children anthropomorphise and then emulate the devices, copying their failure to alter their tone,

CNN
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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday that the Biden administration “will certainly look for ways to facilitate technology services being made accessible to people in Iran” amid widespread internet outages during the nationwide unrest.

Anti-government protests have raged across Iran after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the nation’s morality police in mid-September.

Last week, the US Treasury Department issued a general license meant to allow companies to provide services for internet access to Iranians without fear of sanctions.

At a press conference Tuesday, Blinken noted that the new general license “authorizes companies to provide things like cloud services, privacy technology, security technology, hardware and software to enable the Iranians to better communicate among themselves and also with the rest of the world. ”

“Individual companies can come to us, to OFAC in this case, to determine whether their technology fits under the license,”