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...
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 surveillance 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.