Is it just me, or is this doll creepy as hell? "Amazing Amanda", due on shelves in about a month, is an incredibly advanced robotic doll that not only talks and has facial expressions, but has voice-recognition technology, memory chips, and radio tags both in the doll and its accessories-- so that, for example, if the doll asks for a particular kind of "food" and you "feed" her the wrong piece of plastic food, she will tell you that's not what she wants.
All I can think of is the super-scary Living Doll episode from The Twilight Zone.
Talking dolls are just plain creepy. I can't pinpoint exactly why, but they are, and making the talking seem even more realistic JUST DOESN'T HELP.
Also in the article is this eye-roller:
"I think girls have more active imaginations than boys do when it comes to play," Mr. Riley noted. "If girls have a button on their doll and can feel an engine inside it, that takes away from their ability to imagine."
Nice backhanded sexism there. Why, exactly, can't girls use their imagination with robots and machines just as much as with dolls? I seem to remember me and my brothers being equally enraptured the Christmas we got the giant walking At-At with light-up "lasers".
In any case, neither talking dolls nor talking robots are toys that really promote imagination, IMO. In my crochety old-fart worldview, that honor goes to things like building blocks and their many variations like Legos, art supplies, and in particular the castoff clothes, cardboard boxes, sauce pot "drums", and other items that kids manage to find extremely creative ways to play with.
This also weirded me out:
What the doll is actually doing, Ms. Shackelford said, is "voice printing" the primary user's voice pattern. By asking a child to repeat "Amanda" several times, the doll quickly comes to recognize and store in its electronic memory that child's voice, and only that child's voice, as its "mommy." Other voices are greeted with Amanda's cautionary proclamation, "You don't sound like Mommy."
I suppose it goes without saying that it pisses me off that kids are still taught that dolls are "girl toys". What pisses me off more is that so many "girl toys" are still sexist propaganda centered on the idea that a girl's role in life is wife, mommy, and homemaker. Am I the only one who finds it disturbing that dolls like these push little girls to identify as "mommies" long before they will ever begin to make a choice about that part of their lives?
"We don't want to make kids scared of technology," said Ms. Shackelford, who says she is in her mid-60's and has no children of her own. "You have a baby doll that is supposed to make a little girl feel like the doll loves her. Girls tell dolls all the time that they love them.
"This doll," Ms. Shackelford said, "acts like she loves you."
Well, *I* just got a chill.
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