Why the Internet Does Not Replace Common Sense
Some people say that common sense isn’t so common anymore. Sometimes the Internet doesn’t seem to have much common sense, so those people might be right.
Hopefully most adults can distinguish between smart things to do and not so smart things to do, but not always.
Right after Apple and Google split over Google maps and Apple tried to create their own version of it, the maps told people to do things that they shouldn’t and the term death by GPS was coined. It is a thing and it really happened. More than once.
But kids do not have the experience, sometimes, to figure out the difference between smart and not so smart.
Enter Amazon.
According to Kristin Livdahl, a mother of a 10-year-old child and a writer, her daughter asked Alexa, a digital Amazon Echo assistant, for a challenge to do. Kristin and her daughter were doing physical challenges to warm up and her 10-year-old asked Alexa for more.
Here is what Alexa suggested:
“The challenge is simple: plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs,” Alexa said and set the timer for 20 minutes to complete the challenge.
Besides the possibility of setting the house on fire or electrocuting herself, it seems like an okay challenge – not.
Apparently Alexa stole it from an old challenge that was circulating on TikTok a while back.
Amazon told the BBC that they are fixing the problem. Good plan.
This just points out the fact that you should not trust everything you read or hear. Hopefully most adults already understand this, but given the number of adults that fall for a whole variety of scams, I am not so sure about that. More importantly, you need to train your kids not to. Kids don’t have the experience you do and kids are subject to peer pressure, among other things. Just think about what might have happened to this 10-year-old might if things went a little differently. Luckily, it did not. That doesn’t mean that next time won’t be different. Credit: Cyber News
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