Are you one of those people who has a bit of blue tac stuck on your laptop’s camera lens? Maybe you shiver internally every time Google Ads show you the product you text you mate about yesterday? Do you refuse to have location services on and then have to go and manually switch it every time you open Citymapper? All of the above? You’re not alone.
What’s scary though, is that this type of behaviour is something we’ve all adopted in response to whenever there's a new influx of technology that we either don’t need or really don’t want waltzes into our lives.
Meet the Amazon Echo Look. It’s kind of like the Echo Dot with a hands-free camera that can take your picture and record video. And of course, it comes with Alexa, the voice assistant thing, and all of her knowledge about what the weather’s like (because who looks out of windows these days?), news updates (engaging your brain to peruse the multitudes of information sources out there in the big bad world? Lol.) and ability to take notes for you (Pfft. Engaging my brain enough to type or write? Basically, manual labour mate).
But hey, Alexa has learned a new trick though. It’s called Style Check. Yes, Alexa is now also the virtual Trinny and Suzanna living in your bedroom on hand to tell you whether or not you look good.
The idea is that you ask Alexa to take a picture of you in two outfits and then submit them to your very own personal lookbook to get a ‘second opinion on which outfit looks best on you’, according to the information on the Amazon product page.
‘Style Check keeps your look on point using advanced machine learning algorithms and advice from fashion specialists’, it says.
Let’s just pause on your fear about the internet already knowing what you like, where you go, who your friends are, and now what your bedroom looks like, for a moment. How can a device possibly know what suits you or what your particular personal style is? Well, an Amazon spokesperson said: ‘This service gets smarter over time through your feedback and continued input from our team of fashion specialists. We also invite you to add your vote to tell us which outfit you prefer. This helps improve our service.’
So, it learns from you basically. There are admittedly surface level pros to the function. This could be the end of those awkward mirror selfies that never quite capture the majesty of your entire outfit. And if you're about to head out for a big important meeting/date/event, it's not like you could send a couple of cheeky pictures to our mates - you know those humans you intentionally spend time with to get to know IRL - for their trusted and already informed opinion. What a load of boohockey.
When asked about who the fashion specialists are, though, the spokesperson explained: ‘Our fashion specialists have varied backgrounds in the fashion, retail, editorial, styling and creative fields and are trained to evaluate outfits based on elements including fit, color, styling, season and current trends’.
But the question is, how much of this do we actually need and where is the line? Is there even a line? Studies have shown that generally, we find it quite hard to talk to technologyand don't make habit of using voice assistants, even though we all have them on our phones. We'll always be inclined to give it ago, but it rarely extends beyond that. Why? Besides the fact that what we really want is something that feels like human-human interaction rather than a version of what it's like to have a real conversation (shout out to the Channel 4 Humans fans), my guess it that because deep down, society probably knows that we really don't need it.
There's a push to transfer the burden of thinking for ourselves onto an artificial intelligence that we're taught to assume is smarter than us. And obviously, there are things a computer can do that a person can't that we use and probably take for granted every day. But I don't think we can afford to not be conscious of the fact that we're reaching a point where we're unnecessarily exposing ourselves to companies who want to use our data to sell us things, and then quietly freaking out about it later.
There are always pros and cons to these buzzy new tech advancements and so on and so on. But for fuck's sake, you've gotten this far with dressing yourself. There's no harm in revisiting that old phenomenon of interacting with the people around us that we forgot as soon as we discovered phones. Try it.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.