I’d like to think it’s uncharacteristic, but the other day I sent a mildly disgruntled email to a colleague about an assignment. A robot living inside his computer suggested this response: “That sucks!”

He doesn’t talk like that. I don’t talk like that. But somewhere deep in the AI that Google has instructed to anticipate our email interactions, its Smart Reply feature picked up a batsqueak of whingeing. It decided that I needed sympathy. If the coronavirus has got us contemplating the end of civilisation, I could have told you right then and there that we were all doomed.

Both I and my colleague were fascinated by the email programme muscling in on our chat — it was the first time it had tried to detect or mimic emotion. And ham-fisted as that attempt at real dialogue may have been, it may not be long before Gmail is managing to echo our communication style pretty well. In my suspicious mind, it’s another shortish step to predicting and eventually replacing our interactions with a weird simulacrum of real correspondence.