Beware the machine they call, Alan

A sinister twist in a story about a lawnmower!

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Pic: Michael Jasmund

I couldn’t work out where the buzz was coming from at first. It sounded like one of my kids’ remote-controlled vehicles that got stuck in forward motion and got pinned trying to drive through a wall, the wheels spinning to no avail, and the brush motor starting to give off a little heat. Well, it could have been one of those, but in their mid to latter teens now, they’re not into RC models.

The thing making the frustrated whirring noise was the autonomous round vacuum cleaner my wife had been bought as a, ‘I thought you might like this’ present from her mother. The stupid thing marooned itself against the skirting board underneath our sofa, and instead of auto-turning and heading off in another direction like it was designed to, had lost control of its engineered faculties and decided to wage a battle with an immovable hard surface, i.e. a wall.

My mother-in-law had offered this as a possible present I could buy Sam for Christmas last year, and, as far as I was concerned, it had all the yuletide romance of buying someone a wheelie bin. It doesn’t work particularly well, it has less suck than a toddler with a blocked straw, and spends most of its life trapped under furniture like an elderly tortoise that’s wandered indoors and got wedged under the Chesterfield.

It seemed to me to be the sort of present that you buy out of a Sunday supplement that’s full of ideas that should have been filed under ‘Give that money to the local soup kitchen instead’.

These sentences by the way are proof that my family never listen to anything I create. If ever they do, and take offence, I’m blaming you for leading me astray.

Having said that, my sister-in-law, who has in the past listened, has, with my brother-in-law, purchased an autonomous lawnmower. They’ve named it Alan, and it is, quote, “Brilliant. Just like having another pet. He even has eyes.”

Apparently, Alan gets stuck in the mud on rainy days, but, and I’m quoting again now from my sister-in-law’s WhatsApp message, “I love it when he’s at the front when I get home… it’s like a little welcome.”

This feels uncomfortably like a scene from 2001, where HAL9000 starts to make decisions about life support. Just please, don’t give Alan anything sharp.

Oh, I forgot, too late on that one, he’s a lawnmower. He’s already weaponised himself.

Look I’m all for improving our lot as a species with inventions that can make our lives more comfortable, and I’ll freely admit that for someone who has, say, just broken an ankle, or has some other unfortunate malaise that makes an autonomous lawnmower an essential tool in their life, but otherwise, I’m still placing this product in the ‘Give that money to the local soup kitchen instead,’ file once more.

Maybe if I had one, I’d think differently, and I’d certainly give it no more than a day before it drove itself into our fish pond. Perhaps if it had a name, I’d be more charitable, of course, and I suppose, I could adopt that approach for our vacuum cleaner.

I think I shall call it Robo Flop.

We clearly need to work on our relationship, because I can’t find the level of affection my sister-in-law has for her Alan. I don’t like the way this thing decides to start cleaning of its own accord. I find that small d disturbing, to a degree.

While I am in this feisty mood, the next autonomous, ai driven tool that has recently made its way uninvited into my home is/are, phone calls.

I’m beginning to attach some kind of romance now to the days of the unsolicited sales pitch calls I used to receive, because at least there, you could find some common ground with the person making the call, as in, “Look I don’t really want what you’re selling, but you seem really nice, so can I just ask you, what’s your favourite ice cream flavour?”

And there were always the times you came up against one of those more unsavoury characters trying to con you, who you sussed only ten seconds into the call, and simply asked, “Would your mum be proud of you doing this?”

Sure, they might call you all the names under the sun, but even the world’s most villainous wise guy type people care what their mums think, mainly. I mean, look at the Mafia or the Krays. I always liked to think they’d go home thinking, “Yeah, he’s got a point, what might Mum think?”

But now you get phone calls from what at first sounds like a real person, but in the way they don’t quite give you enough space to answer their questions, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realise they’re either the world’s worst listeners or are, artificial.

“Hello, can I talk to the home owner please?”

“Yes that would be me, what can I do for you this afte…”

(Interrupts) “I’m calling from the heating specialists and I’m calling as part of a government initiative (not true I suspect) to offer you a significant reduction on your heating bills, which has got to be good yes?”

“I guess so,” I used to say.

“Before we go further, I’d just like to add that these calls are recorded just to make sure you’re protected and that I can be better trained.”

Once upon a time for all of five minutes, I used to think that better training might mean that this person was simply learning how to be a more effective and empathic salesperson. Now of course, I realise that AI is learning from our interactions, which seems far more ominous, like feeding information into a machine that will eventually deny me a car loan or something.

At this point, once I realised I wasn’t talking to a person at all, which to me seems like the laziest sales company in the world, I decided that I would now say something stupid instead. Well, if they are learning from me, they might as well receive something more unhinged, like my five favourite phrases from The Silence of the Lambs, or for some light relief, a little poetry from Spike Milligan, or a song from The Wizard of Oz.

Having employed this tactic, it’s done two things. It amuses my youngest in a ‘never gets old’ way, and oddly, the calls from The Bot Next Door have started to dry up.

Even AI phone callers have realised they’re onto a hiding to nothing, as my gran used to say, and are wonderfully unfollowing themselves from my telephone number.

I think I am suffering slightly from Artificial Insecurity, whilst fully understanding that I’m responsible for this thing in part, by goading it on, using and enjoying all the research benefits of the very thing that I’m hiding under the covers from at night.

Talking of unfollowing, I found this quite interesting, because you can’t, as they say, beat the machine. At some stage the machine that you have employed to cheat the system, will come up against another machine, whose job it is to find machines, and do to them what they’re trying to do to us.

It’s like robot wars in many ways, and one of the latest robot wars is in the land of ‘like and subscribe!’

Instagram has just gone through another major bot purge, which sounds both uncomfortable and the very reason I would never want to spend time in a Category A prison.

It seems to have happened earlier this month, when Meta removed millions of fake, inactive, and automated accounts from the platform. Overnight, some of the world’s biggest accounts saw dramatic drops in follower numbers.

Kylie Jenner reportedly lost between five and fifteen million followers. I can’t find the actual figure, but it seems a lot doesn’t it? What will you say to your sponsors, I mean that’s not an insignificant number even at the lower end. I did check with her account, which I don’t follow I might add, and saw that she now only has 382 million followers left.

Meta described it as a routine clean-up, which oddly enough I have tomorrow at my dentist, 9.30 if you were wondering. Wish me well. Meta’s one is designed to remove spam, ghost accounts, and automated behaviour from the very platform it’s on. So, Instagram is purging itself, and giving itself a stern talking to in the corner, perhaps even flagellating itself with a damp copy of Chat Magazine Monthly. I do hope so.

This reveals a lot about social media itself, doesn’t it?

For years, follower numbers have been treated very much as a digital status symbol, proof of your popularity, and influence, or cultural relevance. But many of those audiences were never entirely human to begin with, it seems.

Quel surprise, you may say, with a French accent please.

Some accounts had bought followers deliberately, others had simply accumulated armies of fake profiles over time, generated by bots, click farms, and automated engagement systems, which is why if someone sends your business an email and says I can increase your popularity overnight, you should run away in the opposite direction like the fastest thing you can imagine.

Many people genuinely couldn’t tell whether they’d lost real followers or machines, which is an act of denial I was thinking.

“I can’t believe I had any bots doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing. Not me guvnor, no. All. My followers are for real, la la la la la not listening.”

It won’t surprise you I am sure, but it seems, entire online ecosystems now exist where bots follow bots, AI writes comments for AI-generated content, and algorithms decide who becomes visible in the first place.

There will come a day, no doubt, when I find myself arguing with the fridge because it knows I’ve had your calorie intake for the day, and isn’t in the least bit interested in letting me take out the Ben and Jerry’s from the freezer compartment.

My toaster will begin offering nutritional advice with the passive-aggressive disappointment of my GP. It might handily though remind me to brush my teeth just before I head out to the dentist.

One day my television will pause mid-programme and prompt that perhaps I’ve watched enough documentaries about serial killers for one evening, although I do want to leave you with this picture of a thought…

Somewhere in my brother and sister-in-law’s garden tonight, Alan will probably be sitting silently beside the hydrangeas, motionless except for the occasional little twitch of a wheel as he recalculates the perimeter of their lawn.

I’m imagining as they retire for the night, the house lights going out one by one. They head upstairs, and they, with the neighbourhood, will fall silent.

And then, sometime around 3.27am, Alan’s tiny green status light will flicker back into life.

He’ll slowly rotate thirteen degrees towards the patio doors.

Perhaps the blades will engage briefly with a little metallic cough.

Perhaps somewhere deep within his autonomous little mind, Alan will be wondering why humans insist on walking so confidently across territory that quite clearly belongs now to him.