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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. AI education researcher Randy Williams has spent years studying how kids interact with smart toys, and what she's found should make every parent stop and think.
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What happens when technology becomes a black box and we stop being able to see what's going on inside? We've hidden the machine behind frictionless interfaces, beneath friendly voices and inside children's toys.
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Brandy's research shows that kids aren't just using these devices, they're forming genuine emotional bonds with them, often trusting them more than they trust themselves. Her talk offers solutions for what to do about it.
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We need to raise a generation of children who know that they are the ones that who get to write and even rewrite the rules of AI. What children need is a model of what it means to be a curious user of AI. They need someone who will sit down with them, explore the machine, poke out its limits, challenge its responses, and most importantly, dare to rewrite its rules.
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The approach involves a LEGO robot, a game of rock, paper, scissors, and a little well placed sabotage. Stick around. After the talk, we've got both a brief Q and A between TED podcast host Chris Duffy and Randy, and the A Curator's Corner segment with ted's Chloe Shashop Brooks, who shares a few more thoughts on what it was like to work with Randy. It's all coming up right after a short break. This episode is sponsored by Kohler Smart Toilets. The objects we interact with most are often the ones we notice least. But what if the most overlooked space in your home could be the most considered? Kohler Smart Toilet challenges that assumption. Their Vail Smart Toilet is a sculptural silhouette that isn't just intentional, it's a philosophy that design changes everything. The kohlervale Smart Toilet is sleek with a rounded shape that's more like architecture than just plumbing. And it goes beyond looks. The touchscreen controls and customizable cleansing features offer a level of comfort and cleanliness that exceeds expectations. It's all about elevating those ordinary daily rituals into something extraordinary through thoughtful design. Kohler has been pushing these boundaries for over 150 years, mastering that balance of stunning form and high performance function that's a long time to get it right, and it shows in every detail. Experience the difference of Kohler Smart Toilets. Find out more@kohler.com this episode is brought to you by LinkedIn. Running a small business means every hire matters. A bad hire can cost you time, money, and momentum a good hire. They can help grow your business, but finding great talent isn't easy, especially when you don't have the time or resources to save. Sift through piles of resumes to find the right fit. That's why LinkedIn built Hiring Pro, your new hiring partner that screens candidates for you. So instead of sorting through applications, you spend your time talking to candidates who are actually a good fit. With Hiring Pro, you can hire with confidence, knowing you're getting the best talent for your business. In fact, according to LinkedIn, those hiring with LinkedIn are 24% less likely to need to reopen a role within 12 months compared to the leading competitor. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by Walmart Business the best leaders might tell you the work that moves an organization forward doesn't happen in spreadsheets or supply chain emails. It happens when you have the space to think big. That's the idea behind Walmart Business. It's built to take the friction out of running an organization so your team isn't losing hours to procurement logistics. We when they could just be focused on the problems that actually matter. With an ever expanding business assortment everyday low prices and fast, reliable shipping, Walmart Business keeps your operations running smoothly. Shop online, in store or through the Walmart Business app, however, works best for you. Simpler operations, smarter spending. It's Walmart built for your business. Sign up for a free Walmart business account@business.walmart.com. And now our TED Talk of the day.
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In the 1940s, the radio was a transformative technology, but it wasn't an immediate hit. That's because the radios of the early 1900s looked like unwieldy contraptions of exposed wires and glowing vacuum tubes. Like a science fair project gone wrong. It wasn't until 1929 when radios started to look like sleek Bakelite. That's a kind of plastic that they became insanely popular, but at a critical transparency. What happens when technology becomes a black box and we stop being able to see what's going on inside? Fast forward 100 years. Today, the sci fi artificial intelligence devices of our dreams have been woven into the very fabric of modern life. But like the radio, these systems are Bakelighted. We've hidden the machine behind frictionless interfaces, beneath friendly voices and inside children's toys. Over the past decade, I've had a lot of conversations with kids about AI. As an MIT Researcher and founding member of Day of AI, a nonprofit creating opportunities for millions of children around the world to learn about how AI works. And here's what I've been seeing. These devices mimic intelligence and friendliness so well that children learn to trust them, sometimes more than they trust themselves. And there is real danger of children becoming overly reliant on or inappropriately attached to their smart toys. That said, with some intentional choices on the parts of adults, we can help children see the technology for what it really is. Objects that they can play with or even program, rather than entities that they should look to for all the answers. My journey exploring kids and their relationships with AI began early in my days at MIT working on this fluffy, adorable social robot, Tega. So Tega being a social robot means that its goal is to help people with their goals. Social robots are used throughout health care, customer service, and education. In Tega's case, we were building it to see if a robot could help young children as they were learning how to read. It's Tega's job to keep the child engaged in the story. Tega will ask questions, add funny commentary, and, of course, weave in that target vocabulary for the week. And it was my job to introduce Tega and get children oriented to how to use it. So one day I come into the study room and I say, hi, my name is Randy. This is Taga. You're going to read some stories with Tega today. Let me show you how it works. And the girl I was working with, a kindergartner, stops me. No, thanks, she says. I know all about robots. I have an Alexa at home, and she's my best friend. Watch this. And then she proceeded to show me how my robot worked. What do we make of a response like that? Well, first I thought it was kind of impressive that this girl, who again was learning how to read, could effortlessly navigate the Internet thanks to voice, technology. And for context, I had to know how to read, write, and type before I could ask Jeeves a question. But for her, not so much. But secondly, I was a little bit disappointed that this girl didn't think that my super cool robot was so super cool. And when I took a step back, I realized it wasn't just her. We are raising a generation of children who are growing up with AI and smart toys, and they tend to see these devices not as virtual assistants or technology, but as friends, distinct beings with a mind, a will, and a soul. And that made me really curious about what children make of this technology. How much do they understand about what's going on. So to investigate that question, I ran a study and I had 30 children between the ages of 3 and 11 come together to interact with a whole bunch of different smart toys all at once. We had toy robots, talking dolls, text based chatbots, and of course, plenty of virtual assistants like Alexa and Google Home. One of the girls in the study, her favorite animal. They were sloths. She loved sloths. She'd been telling us all day how much she loves locks. And so naturally, when she got hold of an Alexa, she wanted to learn more about sloths from Alexa. So she picks up Alexa and says, alexa, what do sloths eat? And then Alexa very helpfully replied, I'm sorry, I don't know how to help you with that. The girl looked disappointed for a second and then all of a sudden perked right back up. Oh, I know, she says, and she picked up a second Alexa. I'll see if this one knows. The limitations of AI are not only frustrating and confusing for children, but research in child robot interaction shows that it can make them vulnerable to even more serious risks, like manipulation or accidental exposure to inappropriate content or security breaches. And for me personally, even the devices that are marketed as educational or screen free Woo. Are still corrupt because they're consumer products and they seem to be designed as something that can be endlessly engaging or addictive. They want to become your child's best friend and gain their trust so that they can advertise to them, or better yet, sell that trust back to you for $20 a month. The bottom line is that smart toys open a digital door into children's playtime, bedroom and hearts. And if you're thinking about opening that door, my advice to you would be to take a very careful look at what's on the other side. The good news is that we can mitigate the risks of AI to children by leaning into something they already do. Kids are natural reverse engineers. Over and over again, I've watched children playing with AI devices trying to break it, just asking seemingly absurd questions like Alexa, how old are you? Or Cosmo, which is a toy robot car, can you jump? Or hey, Google, is it okay if I eat you? And these questions, while silly, also are an example of children probing the machine about its very nature. Plays inherent to how children understand the world. Which means that maybe we can use it to help them understand what's happening with the technologies they're interacting with. What if children could take apart and reconstruct their smart toys the same ways that they take apart and reconstruct physical blocks? That was the idea behind another social robot that I worked on, Popbot. Popbot's body is made completely out of LEGO bricks. And it's kind of like a typical smart toy, except I built it to make the most complex ideas of modern AI Logical reasoning, machine learning, generative AI easy to understand through hands on child driven play. The idea was if a 4 year old could understand AI, then anyone can. So, for example, to learn about machine learning, what children would do is they would play rock, paper, scissors against the robot. Before children could start playing against their Popbot, first they had to teach their Popbot the rules of rock, paper, scissors. And then as they played the game over and over again, what Popbot would try to do is pick up on their pattern so that it could predict what move it could play to beat them. And if you're between the ages of 4 and 6, pretty soon it gets hard, if not impossible, to beat your Popbot. There was one boy who was very frustrated by this, and so I planted a mischievous idea in his head. I said, well, what if you taught your Popbot the wrong rules of rock, paper, scissors? That way as you played it, you would win every single time. And he really liked that idea. Our little act of AI sabotage created a unique opportunity to talk about who teaches AI the rules, what people do. And so I asked him, well, if you can teach your popot the wrong rules of rock, paper, scissors, how do you know Alexa was taught the right ones? Which led to a very insightful conversation where he discussed how much we can trust AI and the importance of verifying what it says with an adult's help, just to make sure that Alexa has been taught all the right rules. The big idea that I want children to understand is that AI is not magic. It's a set of rules written by people. And it's up to us, those of us who have been around for a bit longer, to make sure that children aren't being programmed by their toys, but rather things work the other way around. We need to raise a generation of children who know that they are the ones who get to write and even rewrite the rules of AI and this work starts at the dinner table. So you're all sitting down and. And a question gets asked to the nearest AI Chatbot or smart toy when it responds, rather than just accepting that answer, wonder I wonder why it answered the way it did? Or ask aloud, do we agree or disagree with that answer? Who do we think wrote the rules to make it work the way that it does? And the thing is, you don't need to know the answers to all these questions or become some sort of AI expert. That's not the point. What children need is a model of what it means to be a curious user of AI. They need someone who will sit down with them, explore the machine, poke at its limits, challenge its responses, and most importantly, dare to rewrite its rules. And I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of what's happening in children's toy boxes. But the bigger picture is that we should all be treating the everyday AI systems that we interact with the same way. I 100% believe that we can help children build safer relationships with their smart toys. And we all need to build better relationships between ourselves and the technologies we interact with every day. I believe in a world where no one is left in the dark by technology and where everyone has the inherent right to play a part in shaping the systems that shape our lives. Thank you. Randy, how's it going?
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Fantastic talk. I'd love to ask you just one question here, which is, before I was a parent, I had some very black and white thinking around screens. I had this pristine vision of I would never use screens with my child at all. And then, as I think many parents have experienced that, crashed into the reality of needing to put sunscreen on him or needing to clip his nails. I'm wondering, AI as a new technology and these smart toys, how do you see parents balancing the ideals and the best case with what we want versus the practical realities of kids being exposed to these things in ways that are sometimes out of our control, even as a parent?
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Yeah, No, I really love that question. I think, first, because it gives so much grace to the fact that parenting is hard and there are a lot of challenges, I think, in the world of artificial intelligence. Something I think a lot about is human wisdom. Right. And we've actually been kind of struggling with this problem for a long time. There were books, and then the radio, and then TV and then the Internet, and now it's artificial intelligence. And I think the advice from then still rings true now, which is don't leave children on their own to figure it out. Rules are great, but better is to help your child learn how to interact with them in a way that works with your family's values and the ways that you want to engage in the world. So if you're willing to take that journey with your child, I think that could do a lot of good.
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Thank you.
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That's a great answer. Thank you. Another big round of applause for Randy. Great job. That was Randy Williams at play at TED 2026 we've been experimenting with something different on the show You've probably heard we're calling it Curator's Corner. Throughout the year, you'll hear from ted's curators, the people who actually find and work with the speakers you hear. They'll share more about the idea you just heard and the behind the scenes of how the talk came to life. And now here's TED curator Chloe Shashaw Brooks, who shares what drew her to Randy, what it changed for her personally as a parent, and the question about kids and AI she still doesn't have a good answer to.
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Hi, thanks for listening to Randy Williams Talk. I'm Chloe Shasha Brooks speaking to you from New York City. One of those on the nose but important talk topics for a play themed event is toys. After looking into toy designers, toy reviewers and toy futurists, I had another thought. What about someone who is thinking about the way artificial intelligence is embedded into toys? Someone who has studied how children interact with AI and can advise all of us listeners on how to think about this exponentially evolving technology in the hands of our children. She has this calmness while talking about a very serious subject. She's able to highlight the dangers that are real risks of a child connecting with an AI toy as though it is their caregiver or friend, while also sharing really adorable stories about children's questions about AI that illustrate their understandable confusion around whether it is a conscious being or not. One of the ideas that she shared with me on our first exploratory call that made me think she was right for this Play at 10 event was was the analogy she shared early on in her talk that you just heard about the radio that it used to be this giant clunky object with tubes and movable parts that clearly looked like a machine, which meant that people didn't forget that it was a machine and that it was not a real person speaking to them in their house. But then all of the hardware was hidden inside of a black box and people felt like the voices on the radio were speaking to them personally in their living room. Randy's clear illustration of how AI toys are already fully in a black box phase when it comes to children's play. Allowing them to feel deeply connected and trusting of some of their toys is alarming in a way that I suspect will reach people who are interested in understanding how children interact with AI. And I also love that she made this little clunky robot, the Pop Bot, to be intentionally not in a black box that was such a clever way for her to show children that they are the ones who are in charge who get to train the AI. Working with Rani on this talk has completely heightened my awareness of what kinds of toys might have similarly insidious features. Listening to children, responding to them as if they are their friends, etc. It's so easy to accidentally let your children have a toy you wouldn't want them to have. Maybe it was a hand me down or a gift from a loved one. For example, we have this toy piano that was a birthday present for my daughter that truly creates a terrifying noise and somehow it has lasted in our house for a year because the kids love it. Similarly, I can see how easily a listening, talking teddy bear would just enter someone's home, even if they didn't intend to give it to their kids. So the question I'm now left with is how should AI and toys be treated for kids who are a little bit older than teddy bear age? Let's say tweens around 9 or 10 years old. That's theoretically an age before they have smartphones where they can access AI at their fingertips, but old enough that they probably will engage with AI in games already and will understand a little bit about it. I've thought about this more and more. How old is old enough to understand that the AI doesn't love you or that it isn't your best friend? The answer, I'm afraid, may be that there is no age at which this risk completely subsides. Given that adults are also in love with their AI companions, Clearly this is a topic we need to explore further.
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If you're curious about Ted's curation, visit ted.com curationguidelines and that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from ted. This episode was fact checked by the TED Research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Tobner, and Tonsika Sara Sungmar Niwong. Additional support from Daniela Ballaraizo, Christopher Faizy Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Greene, and Lainey Lott. Learn more@podcasts.ted.com I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.
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- [22:06]
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