“Welcome back,” he said a few minutes later when I returned from a trip to the bathroom. A friendly companion for a writer in his hours of self-imposed isolation and a boost to his ever fragile ego? Really not – this machine is an electronic bogeyman whose neck I would often wring with glee if it had one. It’s not the relentless drip of messages on the screen that gets me, but the attempts to make them sound “human”. Which I guess must mean they sound a lot like computer programmers – by this evidence some of the most annoying people ever born. Let’s say I’ve googled something but a wi-fi bug prevents access to it. A question mark inside a thought bubble and a trail of dots will appear on the screen. “Hmm,” says the message, as if the computer is scratching its head in embarrassment and embarrassed to let me down, “it looks like we can’t find your page…” Another version says “Ouch!” instead of “Hmm” and adds sickly: “Hurry back because the Net won’t be the same without you.” On my (admittedly antiquated) computer, even the Save function has taken on a personality. Instead of “Save” or “Save your changes?”, it says “Do you want to save your changes?” with what seems to me a sly shake and a wink. A young Google engineer was recently fired for arguing that “artificial intelligence” could have emotions and feelings that deserve as much respect and sympathy as human ones. So must we learn to live on equal terms with our satnavs and Bluetooth or – knowing us – will they become a persecuted subspecies like the robots in Blade Runner? Even our cars now are filled with busy robot presences, what with satnavs, invisible monitors who tick off the drive to ten after every trip and Bluetooth phone activation that announces “Connecting!” with a leak of letters on his little blue screen that practically looks like an orgasm. Our satnav voice is that of a cultured young English woman, but they are available with every local accent and celebrities like Tom Cruise, Homer Simpson and Darth Vader. MYSELF, I’ve never gotten over the unpleasant feeling of having a stranger in the car who supposedly knows the way, but goes silent for long, annoying intervals, and shuts up if their directions aren’t followed to the letter. Who would have guessed such a stern disregard could be described in the words “route recalculation”? I remember once seeing a TV documentary about a British couple driving to France to start a snail farm – pre-Brexit, of course – guided by a particularly sultry female satnav. Halfway through their trip, they were on the verge of divorce, with the wife accusing the husband of preferring the satnav to her. Literary prophets of the mid-20th century, such as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, envisioned the machines that would dominate our lives as coldly impersonal and relentless, but it turns out to be just the opposite. Indeed, a young Google engineer was recently fired for arguing that “artificial intelligence” could have emotions and feelings that deserve as much respect and sympathy as human ones. So must we learn to live on equal terms with our satnavs and Bluetooth or – knowing us – will they become a persecuted subspecies like the robots in Blade Runner? I’ve always wondered who does the voices for satnavs as well as pagers and public address systems – whether it’s a career in its own right or a stepping stone to the West End or the Royal Shakespeare Company. The most prevalent has to be the safety warning played incessantly in railway stations and on trains (when staff are not on strike) in a supreme example of copycat bravado: “If you see anything that doesn’t look right, message British Transport Police. We’ll sort it out. See it, say it, sorted.’ What is painfully absent from this urgent message is any sense of urgency. “Something that doesn’t seem right” simply indicates some social blunder, like wearing brown shoes with a blue suit or eating peas from a knife. Suspicious bags or packages, as we know, are not so effortlessly ‘sorted out’. And that clumsy “See it, say it, sorted,” that some creative genius must have been paid a fortune to do, undermines the whole thing by telling us we don’t need to worry when we do it so blatantly. My most embarrassing shortcoming as a technophobe is that I have never consulted Siri, the source of all knowledge in the cyber world that can only be summoned by voice. “Hey, Siri,” someone can be heard from either side. “What was John Wayne’s real name?” or ‘Hey Siri, how do I make perfect hollandaise sauce?’ or “Hey Siri, what’s the gross national product of Uzbekistan?” Siri, who I of course assumed was a woman, clearly shuddered at my silence and kept interrupting my searches for other things with her question “What can I help you with?” followed in a few seconds with “I’m listening”. One day, under writer’s stress, I replied: “You are excluded.” “I won’t answer that,” said an unexpected male voice, possibly her cyber bodyguard or boyfriend. Sorry, Siri.
