Letter of complaint

Dear Heather

I am writing to you to inform you that regretfully I must draw to an end your experiment to turn my home into a ‘smart’ home. I find no fault with your intentions. However, it seems that the technology is not at a sufficiently advanced state to be useful to someone like me, and this experiment should probably never have been carried out.

You will recall our first foray into this hi-tech adventure – my robotic lawnmower. Well, that didn’t last long. On its first morning out cutting the grass on my front lawn, it merrily followed the postman out of the gate and into the road, being instantaneously crushed beneath the wheels of the No 73 bus.

Your next suggestion, the robot hoover, fared no better. It consistently threw itself under my feet as I moved around my house, often cunningly circling back on its route to take me by surprise. I felt relief that day it disappeared, and yet I was unaccountably sad when I found its lifeless body in the cupboard under the stairs where it had contrived to imprison itself.

Perhaps it would be wise to gloss over the night of the ‘smart’ multi-coloured wi-fi enabled light-bulbs that took you the better part of the afternoon to set up. You left me that day with a simple ten-page instruction leaflet on how to use the ‘app’ on my smartphone. I sat in darkness until gone midnight, pressing and prodding and sliding all over the screen with my forefinger. And then I contrived to unleash an inferno of flashing coloured lights, changing and swirling, flaring and pulsing, which attracted every teenager in the neighbourhood to my door. My resulting migraine lasted three days.

You promised me that your final attempt, the innocuous-looking ball called Alexa, would indeed make my life easier and would cause me no grief. And at first all seemed fine. Alexa happily played Radio 4 or Radio 3 at my bidding, grew louder or quieter when I ordered her, and ceased playing altogether at my command.

It was only when I tried some of your other suggestions that this structured, compliant world fell apart.

First I asked Alexa to play Mahler. She responded with some Jamaican reggae music. I asked whether I should take an umbrella on my walk later and she explained all about some song called ‘Umbe-rella’. And then regularly, out of the blue, she would say: ‘You have a reminder. Do something.’

All of this was tolerable until she took to saying that she didn’t understand me when I asked her questions. She didn’t understand me. It was like having my ex-wife in the room with me once more. No, no. That could not be allowed.

So, Heather, I fear your world of technology must forever stay apart from mine.

Yours sincerely,

Isaac Turing CBE