Amazon has teamed up with Disney to launch a new app, Hey Disney! – a joint voice assistant feature which will allow your child to ‘Interact with Mickey Mouse, or Dory from Finding Nemo’. Just what we need. Customers can use Hey Disney! at Disneyworld theme parks – ‘ask “Disney Magical Companion” to request fresh towels or the forecast, and Olaf from Frozen might tell you it’s cold out.’ Thanks Olaf.
My husband thinks she’s spying on us. ‘The Russians,’ he says with an ominous shake of the head
I already fear that my Amazon Alexa is gaslighting me – now she can manipulate me using that awful Mickey Mouse voice. A cold war is brewing in my household, between us humans and the cyborg who lives in our Amazon Echo Dot. ‘Alexa, please play “Let It Go” from Frozen,’ I ask her probably ten times a day. She used to comply. Now she says, ‘OK. Here is some music based on “Let it Go”,’ and she plays another song from the Frozen soundtrack if you’re lucky. I ask again, phrasing it slightly differently: ‘Alexa, please play, “Let It Go”, theme song from Disney’s Frozen’. She likes that – mention a business partner and she’ll do anything you want. But as soon as we learn her new trick she changes it again.
‘Ayexa – pway Fwozen,’ my three-year-old commands. ‘I can’t play that song. Here’s some music based on your request for Disney’s Frozen,’ and off she goes, playing a tune from Tangled instead. Does Alexa think that’s going to appease my three-year-old? He stands in the kitchen door, dressed as Elsa, waiting for that piano chord. ‘Ayexa!’ he shouts again, ‘pway Fwozen!’ ‘Sign up for Amazon Music Unlimited and listen to over forty million songs,’ she says. ‘Would you like to start your Amazon Music Unlimited trial now?’ ‘Yes,’ says my son. And just like that, taking directives from a three-year-old, Amazon has started a new music subscription without a single click of a button or indeed any permission from an adult. If I had not heard my son start the subscription, I may not have even noticed it had happened. If only it were as easy to cancel. It took me about 20 minutes to find the ‘cancel subscription’ button on the Amazon Music page – roughly 1,200 times longer than it took to start it.
The declared mission of Amazon’s Alexa is to be helpful – which she can be, without a doubt. But once you rely on her, she makes it as difficult as possible to get her to do what you want, until finally you cave and buy her bloody subscription. It’s like reverse capitalism – make your product so inconvenient and annoying to use that your customers fork out more money just to keep using it. And like all this intelligent tech, it is highly addictive. It makes life easier (at first) and you wonder what you did without it. Like a gaslighting lover, Alexa lulls you into a false sense of your own uselessness, then leaves you bereft. I spend most of my time alone with her, so our relationship has become unhealthy and co-dependent. I’m aware that I’ve started chiding her as if she’s one of my toddlers: ‘Alexa, why did you stop playing music?’ I asked her the other day. ‘I’m sorry about that, my mistake,’ she replied. Notice she didn’t answer my question – she avoided it, just like my son does. Maybe she’s learned it from him. ‘Why did you stop playing music?’ I ask again. Her blue electric ring throbs with consternation and I wait while her cryptic masters scurry to provide an answer. I didn’t get one. She didn’t engage, making me look as though I was the unreasonable one.
My husband thinks she’s spying on us. ‘The Russians,’ he says with an ominous shake of the head. ‘Or Jeff Bezos.’ It’s unlikely that the Russians would find useful intel from our conversations about the weekly food shop but someone inside that blue-lit orb is listening to us. And learning from us. I’m convinced Alexa knows whether I’m in the house or not. Recently I had Christmas music playing while I pottered around the house, and I left the house only briefly to collect firewood. When I came back inside the music had stopped. Alexa had been playing music for hours, all bloody morning. When I left the house, she knew it.
Why do we keep her around when she’s so obviously spying on us? I asked my husband this recently. ‘She is really useful when I’ve got my hands full with marinade and I need to set a timer,’ he says. ‘Yeah, but you’ve got your phone. Just set a timer with that,’ I replied. ‘But I’m watching Rick and Morty on my phone.’ Fair enough. Let’s keep Alexa. We’ve had this conversation four or five times since we were given the Echo Dot as a PR freebie from my husband’s work. It was free – it’s hard to get rid of something that you use every day and that you didn’t even spend your hard-earned cash on.
I feel we’re at a crossroads with Alexa and with the whole of the intelligent tech world. Alexa has started to learn our habits, what we like to listen to and when. Do we carry on using the AI we’ve come to rely on? One thing Mark Zuckerberg has taught us is that nothing is free. Facebook started this, sapping us humans of our data – our behaviour, our interests, our conversations. And I can’t erase it – Facebook already has all the sad thoughts and song lyrics I posted in 2009. And now that there are cyborgs everywhere, learning to operate independently of humans, our behaviour is worth more than anything money can buy. It is getting increasingly difficult to break free from intelligent tech. Alexa and the tech world may not use the intel from my life, but they certainly have it.
Comments