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A startlingly unsafe assignment is issued by Amazon Alexa to a 10-year-old
Digital assistants have become an inextricable aspect of modern life. They’re pre-installed on our devices, PCs, and smart speakers, and they’re intended to improve the user experience and allow us to get things done. They aren’t intended to assist us in setting fire to our homes but try explaining that one to Amazon’s Alexa.
Kristin Livdahl posted a highly strange and risky “challenging task” to her 10-year-old child on Twitter two days ago. Livdahl and her daughter had been searching YouTube for amusing ways to stay active while locked indoors due to inclement weather. Alexa overheard her daughter asking for a new assignment and advised her to “plug in a charging cable about halfway into an electrical outlet, then place a penny to the exposed prongs.”
The challenge’s approach is based on a 2020 post on OurCommunityNow.com about the “outlet challenge,” which was popular on TikTok at the time. Due to multiple emergency responders tweeting out concerns about the risks to their neighborhoods, the hashtag #OutletChallenge was gaining steam at the time. Nobody was injured, fortunately, including Livdahl and her child. “I was right there when it happened,” she said, “and we had another good conversation about not trusting anything you hear on the internet or from Alexa. There was no attempt to try…
