More and more, I’m starting to miss video stores. I miss the stakes of having to physically travel to a different location in order to choose a film. I miss being aggressively upsold ice cream on every visit. But most of all, I miss running the gauntlet of the video store clerks.

I miss their withering stares. I miss being made to feel that, by choosing to watch Short Circuit 2 over, say, Dersu Uzala, nine-year-old me had committed some terrible act of cultural vandalism. I miss feeling like I’m not good enough to enter such a glittering cathedral of cinema. I miss working hard to improve my taste in film, purely to receive a glimmer of approval from them in response.

With the creepy exception of Netflix outing customers who watched disproportionate viewings of A Christmas Prince, this feeling of inadequacy has been lost in the age of streaming. But that all ends now, because some genius has decided to give your Amazon Fire Stick an opinion.

Last week, Amazon’s Marc Whitten announced that he was toying with the idea of implementing a feature that would transform Alexa into a floating, intangible Blockbuster Video clerk who – in the words of Variety – “can guide your way to the most popular movies, but also opine on what you should really watch instead”.

This is fantastic news. For too long we’ve been allowed to watch whatever we want without any fear of reprisal. Our “recently watched” sub-menus have become ugly tangles of sequels and romcoms all snarled up into each other. Remember that time you watched Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 all the way through without anyone screaming at you to stop? This is the hell that the internet has created for us.

But Alexa isn’t going to stand for this any more. “Alexa, play the Minions movie,” you’ll soon say. “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” she’ll reply, before adding: “Here’s Julien Donkey-Boy instead.” “But Alexa,” you’ll reply, “my two-year-old is having a tantrum and I’m not sure an arthouse film about dead children will necessarily calm him down.” “This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it,” Alexa will bark back, before automatically playing Julien Donkey-Boy on a loop on every screen in the house. And, while at first your toddler might resist the Dogme 95 stylings of Harmony Korine or the endless footage of Evan Neumann wrestling a dustbin for no reason, eventually he will grow to appreciate it. Soon he will come to develop film-snob opinions of his own and everyone will be better off for it.

Sure, it sounds a little Black Mirror on paper, but it has to be better than Netflix’s bizarrely permissive recommendation system, where it just blithely tells you that you’re going to enjoy everything 93% regardless of whether it’s Star Trek or Word Party or a nine-hour documentary series about suicide. In a world of streaming, where everything is constantly available, a service that actively tells you off for liking bad things sounds like an increasingly sensible idea.

Obviously it has its downsides. No matter how well-honed Alexa’s recommendation algorithm is, for example, I don’t think anyone will ever fully be able to escape the creeping suspicion that it’ll automatically favour Amazon’s own productions. “I saw you enjoyed 12 Years a Slave,” Alexa will say when you ask her what to watch, “So here’s 11 consecutive hours of The Grand Tour, including the episode where Jeremy Clarkson gets his bum stuck in a hole.” If this turns out to be the case, though, it’ll be easy enough to spot; at the first hint of a suggestion that Crisis In Six Scenes is anything other than a tsunami of tatty dreck, you’ll know that the experiment was a failure and it’s time to unplug your Fire Stick, encase it in concrete and fling it in a quarry.