What will it do to kids to have digital butlers they can boss around?

Rachel Metz:

Amazon’s Alexa, my four-year-old niece Hannah Metz is an early adopter. Her family has four puck-like Amazon Echo Dot devices plugged in around her house—including one in her bedroom—that she can use to call on Alexa at any moment.

“Alexa, play ‘It’s Raining Tacos,’” she commanded on a recent sunny afternoon, and the voice-controlled helper immediately complied, blasting through its speaker a confection of a song with lines like “It’s raining tacos from out of the sky” and “Yum, yum, yum, yum, yumidy yum.”