Now here’s a truly chilling story…

…and a grand plot idea for a novel.

by Rick Blechta

Many of us are using AI devices in our homes. “Oh,” you say, “I don’t have any of that stuff!”

If you own an Amazon Alexa or have an Apple product and use Siri, not to mention Google Assistant, you’ve got AI in your house. Have a smart thermostat, smart anything for that matter and you’ve got AI. Bet some of you didn’t know that.

Now here’s where it gets truly frightening. All of those devices are transmitting the data they collect to the corporations that produce them.

Don’t believe me? Read this: “Alexa has been eavesdropping on you this whole time”

Pretty frightening, isn’t it? The really scary thing to me is you can’t turn off the data collection if you want to keep using these products. Convenient how they built in that functionality, isn’t it? And we’re supposed to blindly trust these corporations. “We only use the data to improve our products, to help them learn!” Yeah, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might like to purchase. What’s to stop individual employees to overhear something valuable and then use if for nefarious purposes? This could well be the basis of “the perfect crime”. If that’s the case, it may well have taken place.

So it doesn’t take much imagination to see how all this collection of data could form the basis of a strong plot for a thriller, cozy, police procedural, whatever. This stuff is just made for crime fiction.

Okay, everyone! Scenario time. Work up an “elevator pitch” for your proposed novel and share it with us.

As for me, they can keep their smart houses. I’m perfectly happy living in a stupid one.