No person can think so much about all their decisions to spend money.
Aw, I wish I didn’t need to budget every cent, but with the small amount of pocket change I’ve got to buy things, being careful with it becomes normal. Most of the food I buy is straight up raw vegetables, or store brand frozen/canned items (which are bought because they’re cheapest. Or is “advertisement” so broad of a term that it applies to ordinary price tags?) Clothing is whatever’s affordable, fits, and looks and feels good enough. When you’re teetering on the edge of homelessness (and have experienced it three times), survival becomes your main priority. Penny pinching is unavoidable. Frivolous spending becomes a pipe dream.
Even if ads are still sneaking info into my brain, I’m hard-pressed to think of any purchases I’ve made where brand names factor in. I’m really trying to think of something here, but even the less common things I’ve spent money on were chosen through experience (like a game I played with a friend, then decided I wanted a copy of) or research (like when I bought a solar generator last year. I’d never even heard of the company before I sought it out for myself.)
I guess a local Chinese food flyer put on a doorknob counts as advertising that works, though even then if they don’t have decent veg options and prices, it’s going to be a no-go. So sure, that’s your “gotcha.” Chinese food flyers. All the money spent on ads around the world, and the only thing I can recall purchasing based on it took some person taking a walk and hanging menus on doors.
I get it, ads are designed to manipulate, to put ideas into people’s heads as a latent reminder, like a virus waiting for the right moment to strike. Maybe some day if I actually make enough money to not have to be extraordinarily careful with it, more of them might get a chance to work. Who knows. Right now, price is the biggest pain point, overriding brand recognition. With the way things are going, I don’t expect that to change any time soon.
Perhaps the best advertisement would be if a company decided to lobby for higher wages - that’d definitely make a company name stick in my head in a positive way, and would provide me the opportunity to spend money on them, to boot!
That’s so bad for a child’s development. A computer can’t guide a kid’s hand to practice fine motor skills. It can’t impart social skills to help kids interact with each other. It can’t help kids revolve conflicts with each other, or handle behaviors that require a human touch. Imagine a couple kids fighting because they can’t share - what’s a computer gonna do? A kid can just ignore its instructions. What’s to stop a kid from physically attacking a robo-nanny or whatever fresh hell gets developed in this field?
I work with kids with difficult behaviors. There are ethical boundaries we need to be aware of. Will a robo-nanny be imparted with those rules? How accountable would it be if it did something ethically questionable? What will it be trained on - actual knowledge of children’s psychology (in which case, using a robot at all should be discounted right off, as children thrive on human interaction)? Or will it be trained on what parents/teachers have already been doing, which would inevitably result in being trained on outdated techniques that don’t follow updates in science? If a robot thinks spanking, isolation, or withholding food is okay, that’d be extremely troubling. There’s so much that could go wrong, and knowing this tech isn’t being designed with ethics in mind makes this whole endeavor terrifying.
Are parents going to be comfortable with their kids being alone in a room without an adult? A group of kids could simply band together to lock the robot in a closet or something and let chaos reign. They could figure out how to power it down, or throw things at it until it stops functioning. A kid having a tantrum can be a powerful force, potentially injuring other children in the act, and I highly doubt a robot alone could handle that situation effectively. Where I work it can take a team of adults with blocking pads, and coordination with even more adults to clear other students from the area. Sometimes those other kids are playing games and don’t want to leave, and it takes a trusted adult to convince them that yeah, no, we need to move now. Which brings us to the relationship the teachers have with the students, and how it is crucial to gaining what’s called “instructional control,” which basically means, “this kid will listen to your instructions.” Can a robot foster that? Do we want a robot to be able to foster that? I don’t like the idea of kids personifying machines to that extent, and we’re quickly learning how damaging (literally, it can cause brain damage) that can be for young minds.
I could go on and on, but suffice to say this whole topic is an ethical clusterfuck.