I am never sure whether it is listening all the time or only when I say “Alexa” out loud. Here is somebody who is learning a lot more about me than the computer or smartphone. But with Alexa I realise our lives are on the verge of something massively disruptive. The big data companies are poised to play a bigger role in our lives but will we respond differently? I have mused about big data and its limited impact on my life so far. Tomorrow, from my groceries to all my merchandise will be met by Amazon. Of course, the book would have been ordered from Amazon. To a cryptic order “Read me a book” Alexa took off by reading from the first chapter of my last Kindle purchase.Īnd then it all made sense. I had no way to know whether Alexa would really place the order but I did not want to take the chance either. I lunged at the power plug and turned Alexa off with my confused son looking indignantly at me. That seemed to be just the prompt for Alexa to go into shopping mode and ask “Do you want to order….?” I was taken aback but even before I could react my son instinctively responded with a Yes rather than a No. I have no reason to doubt the Artificial Intelligence capabilities seeing what happened after my son in his faltering English muttered “story”, “book”, and something more. Amazon claims the front-end - a 250-gram disc that rests easily on the palm – and responds to the call of Alexa encapsulates a cloud-based AI service. Over the weekend, my wife’s best friend, somebody who qualifies as a gadget freak, gifted my son the Amazon Echo Dot after expressing surprise that we hadn’t heard of this gizmo. And should I be haunted by HAL and worried, or should I just surrender to the new technology? Like HAL, the supercomputer in Arthur FC Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, we have a strange new presence in our house now. But what got me worried and prompted me to take it away from him were the still-evolving capabilities of this new toy.
It was just the usual question of a child seeking a missing toy. “Where is Alexa?” The question from my four-year-old son shook me.
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