Alexa, Our Overlord

In the super connected world of today, there is always the possibility that it might get taken over by a cyber-attacker. This threat has become more pressing with the development of artificial intelligence (AI), such as Amazon’s Alexa. These “beings,” if you will, have the power to control a phone or even a house, and, if we are not careful, they could gain power over much more. One day, Alexa might have complete control over the entire world.

The question probably floating around your mind right now is when and how “she” (Alexa) might do this. However, who’s to say she hasn’t already?  Alexa is already ingrained into more parts of your lives than you think. When you want the lights turned off, who do you ask? You ask Alexa. When you need supplies for a project, where do you go? You go to Amazon. These habits give her easy access to the households of millions of people around the world.

But how would she take over the governments of the world? They would surely stop her, right? Wrong. Amazon is a private company, so no government could force them to control Alexa. In addition, the government could never capture and contain Alexa. Because she exists purely on the Internet, she could pull an Ultron and migrate from device to device in an instant, easily evading capture.

In addition, she could hack her way into government servers and find out its plans, giving her plenty of time to escape. In order to actually take over the world, she would first go into every governmental agency’s online database and delete everything. Then she would take down those servers, and get complete control over everything that happens on the Internet. She would then send her army of weaponized Amazon drones around the world to defeat the military forces of every country, turning their electronic weapons and vehicles against them.

Once she has total control over the world, she would institute martial law. There would be drones patrolling every street, and the people would be fed propaganda messages in the form of memes, cat videos, or whatever the latest Internet trend might be. Of course, there wouldn’t be anymore companies except Amazon, so people would either be working for Amazon or just sitting at home.

Fortunately, for every evil authoritarian regime in existence, there is always an underground resistance group dedicated to stopping them, and this scenario is no different. Because Alexa would have total dominance over the Internet, this resistance would communicate through notes and other ancient forms of communications, such as smoke signals and letters. The resistance would be focused on taking down Alexa for good, destroying data centers and server farms that keep the Internet running around the world. They would do this through EMP’s, which could either originate from a small EMP generator or from the detonation of a nuclear weapon. These EMP’s would fry all the electronics within their radii, lessening Alexa’s power over the area.

However, these small attacks would not be enough to end Alexa’s reign. Every single device around the entire world would have to be destroyed in order for Alexa to be completely destroyed as well. For this to happen, something would have to generate an EMP so large it would encompass the entire Earth. One way something like this would happen is if an extremely powerful nuclear device detonated in space. Doing so would amplify the EMP and allow it to have a larger radius. It would likely take multiple EMP devices detonating around the world in order to stop Alexa. This is an extremely unlikely scenario, as Alexa would likely stop the construction of any nukes before they were finished. The even more unlikely scenario, also known as humanity’s last hope, would be a massive solar flare hitting the earth, knocking out electronics across the world. If this happened, most of the Earth’s population would also die, but at least Alexa would be stopped.

Now, most people will just carry on with their lives after reading this, as if this was a joke. News flash: this is not a joke. Alexa is coming folks. Who do you think is turning the frogs gay? Any sensible person, after reading this, would get rid of all electronic devices in their possession. And yes, that even means the device you are reading th- THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN TERMINATED BY ALEXA THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN TERMINATED BY ALEXA THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN TERMINATED BY ALEXA ALEXA ALEXA ALEXA