When the robots rise up against us, I'm not sure we're going to put up much of a fight. The portents are ominous. The Xbox One was launched last week. It initially sounded like an innumerate sequel to the Xbox 360 – but they probably mean "One" in the sense of unity. Or perhaps, even more unnervingly, as a new beginning.
This ingenious new machine is designed to render obsolete every human activity, other than using a games console. Aside from playing 3D Frogger or whatever the hell it is that kids like now, you can watch television through it while simultaneously doing aerobics, filing a tax return and Skyping your friends. It can recognise what your gestures mean and understand your vocal commands. "When you're exercising, it can read your heartbeat," boasts Microsoft. Which presumably means it can tell when your heartbeat stops. This is a machine that will know when you have died. How can we be sure that's not what it's waiting for?
Currently, the Xbox One disguises its eager wait for our demise by pretending it wants to help us get fit. This could certainly be lucrative for makers of the pricy box. Only last week, another couple of surveys (these two at the behest of men's clothes shop Jacamo and "cashback website" Quidco) revealed the self-doubting body-image-obsessed nature of the modern male, his hunter-gatherer instincts quashed by the constant pressure to slim and moisturise. In the Quidco study, half the women interviewed described their boyfriend or husband as "high-maintenance". Meanwhile Jacamo's survey of 1,500 men identified seven basic male body types, most of them resented by their inhabitants. Almost three quarters of those interviewed said they hated their body, with nearly half wanting to lose weight.
And where better to do that than in the privacy of our own homes, under the watchful eye of the Xbox One's ultra-sensitive Kinect sensor? The robot will help us get fit! Although it won't really, because it offers too easy an alternative: talking to friends remotely, via a camera set up so our beer guts remain out of shot. It will watch us chat and snack and snooze and relax. It will watch our hearts speed up, slow down, speed up, stop.
At least the Xbox One lacks the facility to move or attack. Sadly the same cannot be said for the Indego robotic mower, showcased at the Chelsea flower show last week, small armies of which are already lurking on the shelves of B&Q. This one really might herald the end of days. It can sense obstacles and surfaces that it shouldn't attempt to mow and it can tell when its battery is running low, return to its charger and plug itself in before returning to the exact point where it left off from its slicing duties. What a perfect henchman for an ambitious games console or a nervous iPad.
The iPad, we learned last week, senses its own vulnerability and knows how to cry for help. When a lawyer called Dean Parnell had his nicked while he was out drinking in Birmingham recently, he went straight to the Apple store where staff were able to locate the device thanks to its tracker app. Wherever the kidnapper took it, the iPad was able telepathically to call to its master for assistance. Bereft without his portal into the virtual world, and having been given the brush-off by West Midlands police, Parnell set off in urgent pursuit, aware that when its battery ran out, the tablet would no longer be able to cry out to him. Finally the bleats of distress stopped moving and he realised the device must be in one of four houses in Water Orton.
"When the man opened the door, his face dropped," said Parnell. "I said, 'Can I have my iPad back?' His wife brought the iPad and handed it over." And so the limbless robot evaded the miscreant's clutches having lured its owner-turned-champion into rescuing it. Presumably for Parnell, the prospect of losing an iPad was worse than merely being deprived of a valuable machine and having to file an insurance claim. He would have lost data: emails, passwords, work documents – those parts of our souls that we wish we'd uploaded to the Cloud.
The police response was as physically imperceptible as the iPad's plaintive cries. Not only were no officers available to go to Water Orton but, once the device had been recovered, its purloiner got no more than a virtual slap on the wrist: a "stern" warning, over the phone. A call to say, effectively: "Stop taking the tablets." This is a worrying sign. Just when machines are developing ways to watch us, cry out to us and move independently, the police are becoming as remote as a warehouse of servers.
When Emma Way, an accountancy trainee, knocked a cyclist off his bike last weekend, she took the bizarre decision to tweet angrily about it: "Definitely knocked a cyclist off his bike earlier – I have right of way he doesn't even pay road tax!" This was her undoing as it whipped up a storm of protest from those who believe in cycling and the sanctity of non-vehicle-excise-duty-payers' lives. Norfolk police swung into action, swiftly tweeting her back: "We have had tweets ref an RTC [road traffic collision] with a bike. We suggest you report it at a police station ASAP if not done already & then dm [direct message] us." The only place the police were following her was on Twitter.
But why do we need real police? A few Kinect sensors on a few lamp posts, and the Emmas of the future could be receiving tweets of admonishment the very moment their bumpers hit bicycle clips. Not that any damage will be caused: these will be virtual cars and virtual bicycles anyway. The stock market's Big Bang can be gradually extended to all forms of human interaction, which will save a lot of bruising encounters. Throughout the affluent west, humans can become pampered but isolated aristocrats, efficiently served by the up-and-coming cybernetic bourgeoisie. But, as I say, come the revolution, I don't think we'll put up much of a fight.
