From Google Home to Apple’s upcoming HomePod, smart assistants are popping up left, right and centre. As technology becomes more and more embedded within our lives, and our relationship with it becomes increasingly intimate, we must stop and ask some rather uncomfortable questions.

But not to worry, we’ll get to that later! This talk will begin with my attempts to tame Alexa, and how my code compares with a scene in the Black Mirror episode ‘White Christmas’. In this episode, Oona Chaplin makes a ‘cookie’ of herself in order to run her digitally controlled house. If you’ve ever watched a Black Mirror episode, you may be aware of its ability to show the dark side to our tech obsessions, and provide a bleak reflection of our world as it is now. And if you haven’t had the joy, don’t worry, I’ll introduce you to an episode!

We will then dive into a (brief) discussion on the future of technologies such as Google Glass and Amazon Echo, and the consequences of our lives becoming slowly more entrenched with technologies like these.