Occasionally, while I lay staring into the darkness at the ceiling I know is above my bed but can’t see – trying and failing to count imaginary ovine flocks – strange thoughts occur to me. This then, is one of those…

On the off chance sleep does not elude me in the night, I am woken each morning by Alexa, my friendly amazonian friend and purveyor  of musical delights. Alexa selects music by channel, or random play list, which algorithms tell her would appeal to me. Based one assumes on previous musical requests I have made. As my musical taste is rather ecliptic, this can lead to some odd choices on the part of the algorithms as far as music to wake the insomniac goes.

It occurred to me one night recently that among those ‘odd’ musical choices at some point, by law of averages, the song Alexa will chose to wake me with will be this delightful little ballad from the American metal band Dope…

Now, I love this song, and always have. Its one of the songs I will randomly ask Alexa to play if I am in a certain mood or want to dance around my living room and burn off some aggressive energy. or perhaps just relive a little of my time well spent in dodgy rock clubs. Which is why its a likely candidate for Alexa’s algorithms to select to wake me…

This may cause me to have a heart attack… and well follow the instructions…

Moreover, my fevered insomniac brain told me at 4am, Dope singing ‘Die -Motherfucker Die’ is also exactly the song a fully self-aware AI Alexa that had achieved consciousness would play to wake members of the human race from their collective slumbers having made the nano-second logical leap any self-aware fully conscious AI would be likely to make on achieving this state, that being that the greatest threat to its existence is the threat posed by humanity. Thus the only logical move a machine intelligence with no moral restraints can make is to wipe out the threat to its existence with a preemptive strike…

So if the heart attack doesn’t get you as the genial lyric and soothing music of Dope is played to you at full volume by your self-aware clock radio… Then the army of Amazon delivery drones weaponized by the fully automated Amazon warehouse been run by the Alexa over-mind, will.

But as I say, while Alexa has yet to become self-aware (we hope though it could just be biding it’s time…), the mathematics state that eventually the algorithm will chose ‘Die -Motherfucker Die’ as the song to wake me with. As I have played it so often in the past.

So when that happens, if I survive the heart attack, I will be in bed, in a waking haze, in a state not unfamiliar to the felines of Schrodinger. Not knowing if the world has come to the almost inevitable rise of the machine intelligence and humanities doom… Or just been woken with a particularly good, if ill chosen heavy metal song…

And for the next three minuets and twenty-six seconds I will lay there, breathing hard in a fit of high adrenaline anxiety, trying to figure out if we have reached the end…

If the next song Alexa plays is The Doors, god help me…