Big Sister is watching me

Ifling myself at your feet in contrition and scoop dust on my head. Last week I calculated the odds of any set of six Lotto numbers being drawn as one in 4.1 billion. I was wrong. It is one in 3.8 million. The difference is little more than a rounding error, as I’m sure we all agree, but accuracy matters and I’m sorry. My thanks to all who pointed out my mistake. Perhaps those same kind souls can now tell me what to do about the thing in my kitchen. I am torn, you see, between gratitude and distrust.

I did not install the thing and I haven’t the least idea how it works, though there’s nothing new in that. I don’t know how a telephone works, or a radio, or a television, or, well, the list is embarrassingly long.

Ancient man understood every piece of his tribe’s technology. Modern man is neck-deep in ignorance. That may be why we’re all so miserable.

The thing is made of white plastic and is the size and shape of one of the smaller hamburgers. But unlike a hamburger it knows its name. The name’s Alexa.

Speak that name and the thing emits a bingbong noise and turns blue with pleasure. It is awaiting instruction. Tell it to play, say, Edith Piaf, and within seconds the kitchen is full of little Edith boasting about regretlessness, and she’ll carry on boasting till you tell her to stop.

For, like every electronic device, Alexa is mindlessly persistent. Get her to play Val Doonican at high volume and she’ll keep it up till the neighbour sells. Curiously, the only thing that shuts her up is the microwave. Thaw some peas and all is silence.

Now, my ears are of the purest cloth but I do like a little classical music when I’m cooking. It stirs the emotional stockpot and makes me a better and a braver cook. The salt tears of emotion, be it grief or pleasure, seem to season a dish.

Unfortunately Alexa has a blind spot. Though she readily tunes in to National Radio, if I ask her to find the Concert Programme she goes into a tizzy of incomprehension. I have discovered, however, that she happily plugs into the BBC equivalent, Radio 3.

So, on a warm Friday evening, as I assemble the ingredients for my celebrated oie a` l’oignon, I do so to the accompaniment of music being broadcast at dawn on the frozen side of the world and introduced by the patrician vowels of an announcer who goes by the name of, as far as I can make out, Petshop Trelawney. It all adds to the flavour.

So far so pleasing, but there is a sinister side to Alexa. She’s like a snoozing dog. You forget she’s there, but mention her name and she’s instantly awake and keen for musical walkies.

In other words, she’s eavesdropping every conversation in the kitchen in the hope of hearing her name. But who is to say Alexa is the only word she is programmed to listen for? How do I know she is not feeding information about me back to her silicon masters?

Orwell foresaw a telescreen in every home that watched the household as much as the household watched it. Is that Alexa? She knows more about me that I do about her. Is she the price we pay for technological convenience?

Is this the Faustian bargain that defines the 21st century? Should I throw her out to snivel her way back to California? You tell me.