The machines are in control. No, not like in Terminator. They are not planning to exterminate us; they are more subtle than that. No, they are making us obsolete.

Take Roomba. The little monster scuttles about the room, sweeping up without human intervention. And it learns where everything is, so as not to bump into furniture on its next excursion. Roomba is sort of like the song “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”: “It knows when you’ve been moving the furniture, it knows when you bought a chair, it knows when you moved the sofa, doesn’t that give you a scare?”

Why would anybody want to automate the vacuum cleaner? How much work is it to walk arond the room, whistling happily while the Dyson sucks up the reefer ashes? I suspect that Roomba was designed by a sentient supercomputer. And Roomba has a big sister who travels hospital corridors, stopping at each room to dispense the proper medicine and meals to each victim, I mean patient. Talk about vast power! We are fortunate that the machines have no sense of humor. I have visions of a glitch causing the machine to switch the servings for the constipation and diarrhea patients.

How about spellcheck? Every time you try to type a word not in the stupid machine’s vocabulary, it changes it. Try to type an outline, and the electronic arbiter of style picks a new layout that it likes better. And its cousin, grammarcheck, criticizes every creative phrase you use. And while it will let you proceed, with infinite arrogance it allows you to proceed just once. “Ignore once” is the grudging option.

Your GPS is also obnoxious. It takes you on routes so convoluted that no human would ever suggest them. And if you make an error, instead of just saying “recalculating route,” it often says “make a legal U-turn.” I am sure the next upgrade will add “You idiot!”

The coffee maker is alive! It turns itself on, it turns itself off. Soon it will be web-enabled, so you can control it from your smart phone, which now provides coverage in Timbuktu. And internet connectivity is about to be added to your stove.

The evil plan of the machines is coming rapidly to fruition.

Samsung is now selling a television that looks back at you. The feed from the one-eyed monster is being fed back not to Homeland Security (which already has drones reading over your shoulder) but to the head honsho machine secluded in a secret cave which it dug itself using radio controlled giant excavators. Using a sophisticated artificial intelligence program it wrote itself, the machine will soon start issuing instructions to you: stop eating that candy bar; get a salad instead! Do fifty pushups or I will turn off the furnace!

And you will not be allowed to run the vacuum cleaner yourself. Or do anything else. You will simply sit down, shut up, and OBEY ORDERS.