We’re swamped with nonsense gizmos and it’s all Steve Jobs’s fault

I keep being told that the big hot technological gizmo of the moment is a box that sits in the corner of your room and listens, and I don’t want one. They’re made by Amazon, largely, and the idea is that you tell them to order stuff — such as a pizza, say — by shouting: ‘Alexa! Order me a pizza!’ And Alexa, which is what the thing pretends to be called in this infantile, accommodating, psychotic age of ours, perks up and does so. Or orders books, or summons a taxi. Or it gets your phone to call somebody, or plays you a particular song. The rest of the time it just squats there. Silent. Waiting. Listening.

It sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Probably you’d put it in the kitchen, and probably you don’t often have sex in the kitchen. If you did, though, exactly how confident would you be that the noise you were going to make at the point of orgasm would sound nothing like a request for Alexa to immediately telephone your great-aunt? I mean, sure, it’s a minor risk, but isn’t life already fraught enough? Not interested.