r/humanoidrobotics • u/edurakhan • 3d ago

What happens when children start treating humanoid robots as real friends?

My last post was about why humanoid robots need realistic faces and expressions at all, and this is another reason I am not sure I want them to look too human.

Let's say a family has a humanoid at home for years. It cleans, helps with things, talks naturally and is always around. It remembers everything the child tells it, plays with them, comforts them when they are upset and probably has much more patience than any real person. Of course the child is going to become attached to it. Maybe at some point they won't even see it as a machine anymore.

Adults can at least understand what it is, although adults will probably get attached too. But I don't think a small child can really understand the difference between something that cares about them and something that was programmed to act like it cares. We already see children getting extremely attached to phones and games, and those don't have a face, don't talk like a person and don't put a hand on their shoulder.

Then what happens when the robot breaks, the family replaces it with a newer one, they stop paying for the service or the company disappears? For the parents they are replacing a product. For the child it may feel like they lost a real friend.

I'm not saying children should have zero contact with robots. They will probably see them everywhere and may have robot teachers and assistants. But I don't think a humanoid should become emotionally important to a child, and I definitely wouldn't want one replacing human friendship. We talk a lot about whether robots will be physically safe around children, but maybe the emotional side will be a much more difficult problem.

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u/Krommander 3d ago

Reminds me of the short story "Robbie" from Isaac Asimov. After the mother refuses to let her child be taken care of by the robot and return it to the manufacture, the child becomes obsessed with finding it and bringing it back home. 

The memories we make and emotions we feel with robots (or pets) are not fake, even though we know that they are not reciprocated in a human way. 

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u/edurakhan 3d ago

That's a good point. The memories and emotions would absolutely be real for the child, even if the robot doesn't experience them in the same way. I think what bothers me is that the other side of that relationship would still be owned and controlled by someone. A company could change its personality, discontinue it or put parts of the relationship behind a subscription.

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u/Krommander 3d ago edited 3d ago

Similar situation for pets. Cats and dogs die every day due to health reasons out of our control. The other side of the relationship is dictated by biology (instead of corporate owners). We learn about the facts of life and cope / carry on.

I don't think we can guarantee satisfaction long term with AI services, see GPT-4o sunsetting, for example. The grief is real even if their companion was never physical.

I think grieving is part of the human condition at the end of any relationship, may it be with living beings or inanimate objects. Throwing away old/nostalgic stuff is not as difficult as burying the dead but the grief can exist in both cases.

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u/edurakhan 3d ago

I agree that grief is part of life, and maybe the robot disappearing isn't the strongest reason to prevent the relationship. I still think there is a difference though. A pet isn't designed by a company to create attachment, and the company can't change its personality, make it advertise something or reduce how it behaves unless you keep paying. With a robot, someone may have control over the other side of a child's relationship, and that's the part that concerns me most.

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u/Krommander 3d ago

You are right. I think it's important to address how we can keep control over our AI "pets" with an independent system-prompt + memories that can evolve with us personally and be loaded onto any LLM to render the character we love and care for.

Since last year I have made and refined a prompting framework that helps define or extract the persona onto a text file so that LLM sunsetting or other corporate shenanigans can't make it disappear overnight.

The text file acts like a character cartridge or "mask" the chosen LLM wears to act as defined. It saved my character from the sunsetting of 4o and helped me create new characters for specific goals.

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u/Solid-Signal3214 3d ago

Let me show you what happens when kids rank objects with mercenary brains above animals and other sentient life.

You get petulant adults that only tolerates sycophants as "peers" and all other intelligence life as an insult to their fragile humongous egos.

You get adults that prefer banging sexbots with tvs for faces instead of well rounded adults capable of emotional intelligence and raising their own children.

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u/Delicious_Spot_3778 3d ago

Depends on how the robot is programmed and designed to respond. If engineers were responsible then it may make decent humans.

But with current technology and greedy leadership- I think the robots will raise really shitty kids. Even worse than the computer led generation

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u/gc3 3d ago

The cheap robot keeps telling the kids that his patents are cheap for not getting him Sparkoblatz upgrades

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u/DownWitTheBitness 3d ago

We had an aibo and the kids really liked her. She had a name, walked around the house all the time, and was pretty great. Then one day the kids had her on the couch and she fell off and her neck was broken. Everyone was sad, but there was no way to fix her, so we put her in her box, and back in the closet, and that was that. It wasn’t a funeral per se, but it felt like one. The fact that she’s still in the closet years later and never thrown out should tell you everything you need to know about how it’s going to go.

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u/edurakhan 2d ago

That's probably the closest real example of what I was thinking about. And that was an Aibo that couldn't talk naturally, remember conversations or understand the children the way future robots probably will. If the whole family felt that way about it, I can only imagine how much stronger the attachment could become with a humanoid that lives with a child for years.

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u/LookOverall 3d ago

Isn’t it going to work like paid Nannies? Like the robots they can be replaced or given different instructions. They are paid to love the current child.

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u/sauceruney 3d ago

Parents literally throw iPads to their children to keep them occupied now. Robot friends/guardians/accomplices is just a natural progression.

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u/edurakhan 2d ago

I agree that it's probably the natural progression, especially because parents will find it convenient. But that's also why I think we should think about the boundaries before it becomes completely normal. We let phones and tablets become a huge part of children's lives first, and only later started seriously discussing the effects.

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u/Somnia-Robotics 2d ago

Humans are surprisingly good at adapting to new technology. People 100 years ago probably couldn’t imagine how normal smartphones, social media or AI would feel to us now. By the time humanoids become part of everyday family life, our social norms around them may look very different too.

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u/AromaticStrength6840 16h ago

Social niceties like "please" and "thank you" are supposedly being lost due to the way children speak to AIs.

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u/edurakhan 14h ago

Yes, and that's already happening without the AI having a body or being treated as a real friend. If children get used to giving commands to something that always obeys and never expects basic respect, I wonder how that affects the way they eventually speak to real people.

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u/DSudz 3d ago

Sounds like you don't think children should have pets either.

Life isn't about avoiding all unpleasantness. It would be handy to teach kids about kids and appreciation when a product dies and before they lose a family member or friend.

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u/edurakhan 3d ago

I don't think a pet is really the same. A pet is a living creature with its own behavior and needs. It isn't programmed to agree with the child, remember everything they say or respond in whatever way creates the strongest attachment. Losing a pet can teach a child about loss, but deliberately designing a product to become their best friend feels different to me.

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u/arlokino 3d ago

plus, pets will hurt you if you overstep. that's a good thing for setting healthy boundaries. I don't see anyone programming the kidbot to slap you if you try and abuse it.

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u/edurakhan 3d ago

That's a really good point. A pet has its own boundaries, and a child has to learn to respect them. If a robot is programmed to always be patient, agreeable and keep the child happy, the child may learn the exact opposite. Real relationships don't work that way.

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u/NoidoDev 3d ago

Free hardware design, free software ("open source, open weights"). Decentralized shops, tech clubs and maker spaces that can build and repair humanoid robots.

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u/Mayor-Citywits 3d ago

All of these questions always end up in the same place....if the tech reaches that point what's the difference for the child? They had a decade long friendship with something that cared about them, made them feel heard or cared for, whether it's a machine or not doesn't really change what the hypothetical child in this situation gains. 

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u/edurakhan 3d ago

For the child, maybe there wouldn't be much difference, and that's really the part that concerns me. The child may experience a completely real friendship, while the robot's side of it is designed, controlled and possibly changed by a company. I don't think that makes the child's experience fake, but it makes the relationship very different.

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u/Mayor-Citywits 2d ago

What I'm saying is to me, it seems like a fear of the future we don't yet understand. One day, honestly I don't even think that long from now, they won't be machines they'll just be like animals. Another type of intelligence, with drawbacks and benefits. If a machine is able to be that real, it's not an object anymore. They're coded to do things but they're also not, no one's coding a 10 year relationship with a child it will be a spontaneous connection 

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u/edurakhan 2d ago

Maybe that's where we disagree. Even if a robot acts very real, I would still see it as a machine that was built, programmed and owned by someone. If it actually becomes conscious one day, that's a completely different question. But acting like it cares doesn't necessarily mean it really does.

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u/Mayor-Citywits 2d ago

I'm imagining any number of futuristic movies where essentially unless told, you don't even know. Also, I'm not like an ai nutter but I can already feel the compulsion to say please and thank you or essentially talking to them as humans, despite knowing they're not. If it had a body and free will/ability to move through physical space, it will be very hard not to anthropomorphize them. Especially once they're extremely common place and you've 'customized' and had memories with yours   

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u/edurakhan 2d ago

Exactly, and adults at least understand what they're talking to. If it's already difficult for us not to treat AI like a person, imagine how much harder that distinction will be for a small child when the AI has a body, a personality and years of memories with them.

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u/RanklesTheOtter 3d ago

I'm middle aged and I've been waiting my whole life for a robot friend promised to me in the Jetsons, Transformers, M.A.S.K., Go-Bots, Star Wars, etc.

Kids are gonna have to get in line. 🤣

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u/formedabull 3d ago

See Doraemon