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Will ‘Smart Homework Lamps’ Find A Market In The U.S.?
In August, I wrote that Moxie, the “social support robot” was “straight-up one of the most dystopian things I’ve seen in my life.”
Now Moxie has some competition. An article in the Wall Street Journal reports on the latest hit product in China: a “smart homework lamp.” Although it is called a lamp, lighting is a secondary function—its primary purpose is to spy on kids to make sure they are not goofing off when they are supposed to be doing their assignments. Since this could be accomplished just as effectively by a cheap baby monitor, the smart homework lamp also features a small screen that “applies artificial intelligence to offer guidance.” For an additional fee, another human being will watch from afar and “monitor” your child for you.
The depressing part is not that such a product exists, but that this smart homework lamp is currently selling like hot cakes throughout the Middle Kingdom. ByteDance, the company that makes these “Dali” lamps, is reportedly having trouble keeping up with demand.
It is news like this that makes one pine for the halcyon days of “tiger moms.” Tiger moms may have cared way too much about their children’s learning outcomes, but at least they actually invested the time. Today’s version of the tiger mom is all too eager to outsource that important work to some incorporeal app.
Remember a year ago, when cockeyed optimists predicted that “distance learning” would increase the amount of time parents spend teaching their children? Instead, parents are jumping through hoops to have anybody other than themselves further their children’s educational futures.
As a human race, how did we let this happen? When I was a child, I cherished the work my mother put into my insatiable curiosity. Not only would she help me with my assigned homework, but she would also come up with puzzles and other extracurricular assignments to help me learn. For modern parents, that doesn’t seem to be worth their while.
The Journal article ends with a meditation on surveillance culture, gently pondering if such an internet-connected device that is continuously filming children would find as big of an audience on this side of the Pacific. Frankly put, such a discussion is naive. American parents have long allowed tech companies to do their job in loco parentis. Americans might be more likely than the Chinese to say they are fearful of surveillance, but we are talking about the same people who voluntarily give up their personal health data to the most powerful companies in the world. Just look at TikTok, ByteDance’s other great contribution to childhood life—Americans have shown zero compunction letting their adolescents film themselves in all sorts of compromising situations to feed the app’s voracious algorithm.
All this is to say, expect ByteDance’s smart homework lamp to be available (and successful) in the U.S. soon. And remember, if you can do without adding the outsider to the parental-child relationship, there is nothing stopping you from getting a $25 baby monitor today:
