One of America’s most iconic toys is about to get a lot smarter.
In the next few weeks, toy giant Mattel will release a new Barbie equipped with artificial intelligence that will help the doll get to know your child better. The “Hello Barbie”, as it’s called, will hit retail shelves next month, just in time to capitalize on a holiday toy market worth roughly $6 billion.
To design the futuristic new doll, Mattel collaborated with a San Francisco-based company called ToyTalk that specializes in integrating artificial intelligence into toys. In less than nine months, the two companies were able to develop an astonishingly sophisticated doll capable of a wide variety of interactions.
In May, New York Times contributer James Vlahos got a chance to see Hello Barbie in action during a series of product tests at Mattel’s Imagination Center in El Segundo, Calif. Here’s how he describes the doll:
“Hello Barbie is by far the most advanced to date in a new generation of A.I. toys whose makers share the aspiration of Geppetto: to persuade children that their toys are alive — or, at any rate, are something more than inanimate.”
Hello Barbie on display at the North American International Toy Fair. (Photo: AP/Mark Lennihan)
Most of Hello Barbie’s interactions are fairly light-hearted. During the test that Vlahos witnessed, for example, the doll went through a list of randomly selected jobs with her human counterpart (a young girl named Ariana), asking her whether she would be interested in trying any of them.
During another conversation, Barbie asked Ariana to help her match various ingredients with their respective dishes, like pepperoni with pizza and marshmallows with s’mores.
However, some of the interactions are apparently much more intense. Vlahos writes,
At one point, Barbie’s voice got serious. “I was wondering if I could get your advice on something,” Barbie asked. The doll explained that she and her friend Teresa had argued and weren’t speaking. “I really miss her, but I don’t know what to say to her now,” Barbie said. “What should I do?”
“Say ‘I’m sorry,'” Ariana replied.
“You’re right. I should apologize,” Barbie said. “I’m not mad anymore. I just want to be friends again.”
Some people will see the exchange above as a healthy and positive interaction, one that gives the child a chance to think about conflict resolution while helping to teach the virtue of forgiveness. But is it really healthy for children to be this emotionally invested in the fictional lives of their toys?
While the level of AI sophistication in Hello Barbie may seem far from realistic to adults, it’s important to remember that children have a tendency to let their fantasy worlds seep into the realm of reality.
“It is very hard for them to distinguish what is real from what is not real,”
educational psychology professor Doris Bergen told the Times in an interview last month.
(Photo: Angie Smith/The New York Times)
Other people worry that giving Barbie a preprogrammed personality will limit children’s abilities to exercise their imaginations. Tracy Gleason, a psychology professor who studies children’s imaginative play at Wellesley College, is one of these people:
“Imaginary companions aren’t constrained… They often do all kinds of things like switching age, gender, priorities and interests,”
Gleason told the New York Times. He added,
“She is who she is. That might be a lot of fun, but it is definitely less imaginative, child-generated and truly interactive than someone with whom you can imagine whatever you want.”
With the rise of semi-intelligent systems like Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana over the past few years, it was only a matter of time before artificial intelligence made its way into our children’s toys.
But now that it has officially arrived, we all have a question to ask ourselves: is this really a good idea? As with most unsettling new technologies, it’s likely that only time will tell.
Read the full story from The New York Times Magazine. Check out the video below to see an early prototype of Hello Barbie that was showcased back in February: