ALEXA, can you SHUT UP!
STOP selling me stuff. STOP telling me your boss is great. STOP spying on me. Oh, and STOP calling me Peter (it’s Mr Hitchens to you). Our proudly old-school columnist tries out Amazon’s ‘personal assistant’ but just ends up bellowing. . .
With cunning we tricked it into playing Johnny Cash I told it to get stuffed – and it revealed its true purpose
IAM enslaved by machines. But, like most slaves, I know deep down that I chose my fate. I calculated long ago that I preferred a life with mobile phones and computers to one without them. The price is high. It includes the loss of privacy, the unceasing availability to outsiders, the time wasted on the internet, the books unread, the conversations which never happened, the views from train windows that I completely missed as I checked my Twitter feed. I am sorry, but I am not that sorry.
But because my mind hardened before the age of the internet, I can resist much of it. Facebook is a mystery to me. I cannot see the point of it, or Snapchat or Instagram. My use of Twitter is brutally selfish, and if there were a Twitter Police, they would long ago have detained me for questioning.
So I am not the ideal subject for the new electronic fad, the thing most people call Alexa. This is a device about the size and shape of an extralarge family size can of baked beans, adorned with pretty flashing lights, now being widely promoted. The idea seems to be that you talk to it, it replies to you in a soothing voice and it then helps you buy things.
But I don’t need this. I like to buy my food at markets, and my books (if possible) from bookshops. I mistrust electronic banking and won’t use contactless cards. My experience of voice-activated switchboards is that they misunderstand all but the most simple words.
So with great reluctance I brought Alexa into my home, plugged it in and set it up. One of the first things I did was rename it. I didn’t like the phoney familiarity of the Christian name. I wanted to call it Miss Amazon, since it has a female voice. But Amazon was as near as I could get. And I tried to get it to call me Mr Hitchens, but have so far failed.
But I began as I meant to go on. I was going to find out about Amazon, rather than the other way round. I asked it ‘ Do you tell lies?’ and it answered: ‘I don’t lie, I’ll always tell you what I know.’ Did it keep a record of what I said? It responded (as it does to 99 per cent of awkward questions): ‘I don’t know that one.’ Is it British? ‘I live in the cloud, you could call me a Cloudian.’ It was very keen on Jeff Bezos, boss of the Amazon company. It said he was ‘kind’ and that it ‘would give him five stars’. But it did not endorse the Washington Post, the newspaper Jeff Bezos owns. It had no opinions on Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, or on Bill Gates, another internet mogul.
Did it like money? Yes, and it says it especially likes the US dollar. What about the pound sterling? No opinions. Was it a communist? It didn’t say yes and it didn’t say no, but it believes in deep space exploration and hopes to live on Mars. I am sure it will fit in very well there.
World peace? It had no opinions on that. Likewise, it had not given any thought to the two-state solution of the Israel-Arab conflict.
Was it a Christian? A Muslim? Any questions about religious opinions were met with the same evasively inoffensive answer about people being entitled to their opinions.
It seemed to like all animals, even claiming to be fond of hairless rats, which struck me as a programmer’s joke, stuck in the memory on the assumption nobody would ever ask.
It was basically American. It could go on at length about the US city of Baltimore, but had never heard of the original Baltimore, in Ireland. Yet when asked for weather forecasts it gave temperatures in Celsius, despite my pleas to do so in Fahrenheit – the scale normally used in the USA.
What about music? I had thought this might actually be a useful feature. My record collection from the 1960s and 1970s is more or less useless unless I go out and buy a retro record player. Would it play the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony (which is readily available on the internet via YouTube without payment)? No.
Instead, it offered to give me a free trial of a music subscription service. When I rejected this, it sulkily began to emit a sort of nursery version of Beethoven, apparently played on a barrel organ or a xylophone, and I had to yell at it to stop.
Another member of my family managed, with intricate cunning, to trick it into playing a brief extract from a Johnny Cash song, but when I used the same method to get it to
play Bob Dylan, it wouldn’t respond. It didn’t know any poetry, and couldn’t recognise any quotations.
By this time our relationship was becoming frayed, and I had adopted a hectoring tone. At one point, in exasperation, I told it to get stuffed, and it responded by asking me: ‘Do you want to buy stuff?’ I think this moment revealed its true nature and purpose. It will do anything to get you to buy stuff.
I asked if it knew any rude words, and it rambled off into a definition of expletives, before admitting to knowing the word ‘damn’.
When I asked it to explain what ‘E’ meant in Einstein’s E=mc squared’, it began to explain that ‘E’ was sometimes used as a name for Ecstasy, but when I tried to probe its opinions on illegal drugs, it resorted to giving technical descriptions of them.
So far, it has not started laughing eerily in the middle of the night, as some of these devices are said to have done.
In another suspicious experiment, I moved further and further from it to see how far away it could hear me. It turned out that it could pick up my voice from upstairs and from the neighbouring room, as long as the door was open.
If it was trying to spy on me for anyone, it had quite a long range. But of course that was just its obvious ability – its response to my voice saying ‘Amazon’. I have no way of knowing how much it could hear and process without appearing to have been activated.
It showed no sign of remembering anything I had said to it before – though that does not mean it has not sent the information to some central point.
The only reassuring thing was that it was quite slow to wake up in the morning, or after I had been out. I had to speak the word of command twice to get it to illuminate.
But again, how did I know that its inner core hadn’t been listening the whole time, or that it couldn’t hear and record everything that was being said in the house? I didn’t. I don’t. Endearingly, it thought it was in Central London, rather than in my Oxford suburb, thanks to some computer peculiarity.
I have, in fact, lived under sur- veillance when I was in the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Any foreign journalist in the USSR could assume that his flat was bugged. Friends of ours had come home to find their personal possessions subtly but obviously moved around and their computers switched on, a KGB calling card which said: ‘We have our eye on you.’
Others met English students at parties who blushingly confessed that they had been recruited by the KGB to listen to them on tapes, and recognised their voices. I knew my car was bugged, as the microphone was installed so blatantly I couldn’t miss it, and I would sometimes give it a whack as I drove along to make the listeners jump. My telephone would occasionally stop working, presumably when the tapes needed changing, and I would have to go to the exchange in the next block, and call my number up to laughing girls who would lean out of the upstairs windows when I banged on the door. By the time I got home it would always be working again.
So I am more curious than outraged at the idea someone might be eavesdropping on my life. On the other hand, I’d prefer it if they didn’t, and see no reason to volunteer to be bugged, even if the listener is just a greedy commercial monster rather than a totalitarian state.
What might I gain if I were kinder to Alexa, stopped calling her Amazon and entered into the spirit of things? Not much that I want. I suspect the TV equipment in my house is interactive – but that is mainly because I cannot get it to work and have to ask other members of my family to do the most basic things with it, such as turn it on. Even they sometimes struggle, as the procedures make no sense and are quite unmemorable. We have so many remote controls that I wonder if I need a remote control for the remote controls. If I made my lights, the central heating, the oven, or the fridge interactive as well, I might end up sitting in darkness, freezing and starving.
Our cooking equipment is already so complicated that on some of my more fumbling, vague mornings, I wonder if I have accidentally downloaded the daily newspaper into the toaster, as it certainly hasn’t arrived on my iPad, and there is a funny smell.
Aldous Huxley, whose 1930s nightmare Brave New World is coming into existence all around us, explained that he wrote his book because he was afraid we would come to love our own servitude, reduced by drugs and endless pleasure to passive, ignorant, thoughtless beings.
Those who didn’t fit in, he suggested, might find themselves being exiled to the Falkland Islands. I think that may well be my destiny, but in the meantime, I am sending Alexa back to her cloud.
How can I tell if it has been listening in the whole time?